Philosophical Apprentice evaluates a Neo-Conservative’s fictional persona.
Headline: The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State
The Reader confronts Stephen’s History Made to Measure :
Do the people chanting “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” have any idea of the irreparable harm they’re doing to any hope of Palestinian sovereignty?
For decades, the question of a Palestinian state has come down to two dates: 1948 and 1967. Most Western supporters of Palestinian statehood have argued that the key date is the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel, faced with open threats of annihilation, took possession of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula.
According to this line of thinking, the way to peace rested on Arab diplomatic recognition of Israel in exchange for the return of these so-called occupied territories. That’s what happened between Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978, and what might have happened at Camp David in 2000 if Yasir Arafat had only accepted the offer of full statehood made to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel.
Yet there has always been a second narrative, which dates “the occupation” not to 1967 but to 1948, when Israel came into being as a sovereign state. By this argument, it isn’t just East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights that are occupied by Israel: It’s Haifa, Tel Aviv, Eilat and West Jerusalem, too. For Palestine to be “liberated,” Israel itself must end.
Starting in the 1970s, the 1948ers were known as the rejectionist front. More recently, they have become the axis of resistance. Membership includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Assad regime in Syria and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — a who’s who of designated terrorist groups and their state sponsors.
On October 7, The Zionist State was attacked by ‘the axis of resistance’ that used the most primitive equipment: the American supplied sophisticated armaments, were only used after the fact, to pummel Gaza into rubble, and to commit Genocide. Stephens as Neo-Con avoids at all costs the actual costs of battle and murder on an unprecedented scale committed by Israel. Stephens is after the real culprits:
But just as often they have done so wittingly. When Mohamed Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, N.J., said “75 years of occupation is too long” at an October rally, he was embracing the 1948 narrative. When Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan congresswoman, posted that “75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day” and declined to accept Israel as a Jewish state, she was embracing it. When Judith Butler, the Berkeley professor, told an interviewer that “the roots of the problem are in a state formation that depended on expulsions and land theft to establish its own ‘legitimacy’” and supported a binational state, she was embracing it. When the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter responded to the Oct. 7 massacres with a Facebook post claiming, “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense,” it was embracing it. When the BBC Arabic service repeatedly described ordinary Israelisas “settlers,” it was embracing it.
Mr. Stephens finds it politically convenient to post this from Susie Linfield in Quillette :
“A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” “A left that, rightly, demands absolute condemnation of white-nationalist supremacy refuses to disassociate itself from Islamist supremacy,” Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., wrote in an important recent essay in the online journal Quillette. “A left that lauds intersectionality hasn’t noticed that Hamas’s axis of support consists of Iran, famous most recently for killing hundreds of protesters demanding women’s freedom.”
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When the left embraces the zero-sum politics of Palestinian resistance, it merely encourages the zero-sum politics of hard-core Israeli settlers and their supporters.
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A third consequence is that it abandons the Palestinian people to their worst leaders.
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It’s fine for Israel’s harshest critics to ask hard questions of Israel’s leaders. But when those same critics stop asking equally hard questions of Palestinian leaders, they are not advocating a cause. They are merely submitting to a regime.
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Bret Stephens as The Voice of Reason :
The world, including Israel, has a common interest in an eventual Palestinian state that cares more about building itself up than tearing its neighbors down; that invests its energy in future prosperity, not past glory; that accepts compromise and rejects fanaticism. Since Oct. 7, the loudest professed champions of the Palestinian cause have advocated the precise opposite. It may be a recipe for smug self-satisfaction, but it’s also how to kill a Palestinian state.
Bret Stephens is a former employee of The Jerusalem Post and a Neo-Conservative.
A Zionist newspaper’s role As a voice emanating from Zion, the Post has inspired Jews and non-Jews alike across the globe, connecting them to Israel however distant they might be
Look at what my brief absence from the Political Scene has wrought, to speak in terms that echo’s, in its way, Mr. Ganesh’s self-regard:
One victim of the Covid-19 pandemic had died 500 years earlier. Raphael (1483-1520) was due to get the quincentennial treatment from some august museums. Then the doors shut. When at last his moment came, the shows were drowned out in the hubbub of a reopening world. And so a big chance was lost to arrest two centuries of reputational drift for the artist. Raphael will continue to be seen as the bronze medallist of the High Renaissance, some distance beneath Michelangelo and Leonardo, whatever his technical perfection, whatever his former standing as their equal or better.
How did his star drop? For one thing, the modern mind finds it hard to believe that so uncomplicated a lad could be so total a genius. The Raphael who comes down to us in the records is cheerful and well-adjusted, an obliging courtier, a delegator, with manners as smooth as his face and, despite being orphaned at 11, few of those Florentine neuroses. “One couldn’t write a bestseller about Rah-file,” drawled the art historian Kenneth Clark, in a dig not at the painter, but at our own demand for inner torment and outer conflict in our heroes.
Call these opening paragraphs a way of reminding the ordinary reader that his Oxbridger Education has not gone to waste? that frames his commentary on Elon Musk: The paragraphs feature Ganesh’s breezy commentaries on ‘geniuses’ that exploit his penchant for the telling observations, adapted to breakfast table reading, as a complement to morning coffee or tea. This, the kind of newspaper writing of a more sedate age of the bourgeoise press? And the leisurely breakfast of past ages? Aren’t all those strivers of the etiolated neo-liberal age already at their desks? Have I wasted The Readers Time? Here is the Ganesh ‘diagnosis’ of Musk as ‘no general-purpose sage’. Even with all it’s rhetorical embroidery.
We know that not all temperamental people are geniuses. But the idea persists that all geniuses are temperamental. And this isn’t just an academic mistake. It leads to the indulgence of bad behaviour: to the excusing of it as something world-historical individuals can’t help. Elon Musk is the ultimate living case in point. His followers, at best, brush off his odder doings and retweets as the waste products of a great mind. Worse, I think more than a few read genius into them. Had he the outward blandness of, say, Richard Branson, he’d be taken for what he is: a brilliant man in his core domains, but no general-purpose sage and quite often banal in his obiter dicta.
Mr. Ganesh’s argument, if that is what it purports to be, begins to meander as his essay begins to loose it’s argumentative velocity, yet he is most capable at writing beautiful sentences, that evolve into paragraphs. He is an accomplished rhetorical stylist, some quotation from his essay:
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Granted, the conflation of genius with unpleasantness does work in theory. To conceive of something original again and again, never mind to execute it against steep odds or social pressure, a person has to have strange patterns of thought. What are the chances that such cognitive peculiarities will generate only benign results? If you want the Pietà, put up with Michelangelo the loner and miser.
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A short list of Ganesh’s rhetorical snapshots:
Raphael, Franklin Roosevelt, Einstein, Newtonian vehemence, Shakespeare, a creative writing workshop at Dartmouth, Mozart liked a scatological joke, Steve Hilton, Dominic Cummings, Raphael, The Romantics, Freud.
A fragment of the final paragraph:
In our own century, the emergence of inner trauma as almost the mark of a civilised person. It all adds up to a mistrust of and even disdain for the cloudless temperament, the natural social being. If we fail to see genius where it exists, that’s merely sad. If we see it where it isn’t, we invite trouble.
Philosophical Apprentice
November 29, 2023:
Mr. Musk’s anodyne comments on the Genocide against the Palestinians, perpetrated by Netanyahu, betray his toxic egoism: in the guise of his status of ‘a person who matters’ as the owner/operator of twitter, who controls one of the the internets most important communication tools, worldwide. He might be judged, to speak in the patois of American Film History, as the Charles Foster Caine of the internet? Mr. Musk gets lost in the murky highfalutin framing of Mr. Ganesh, perhaps this is the point of his intervention?
The Reader need only look at the third paragraph of this, what to name it?
On November 4th The Economist was invited by the idf to accompany troops to the front line. Over the course of several hours no civilians were seen. Officers and soldiers said they had sighted only a handful since entering Gaza city on October 27th. Around three-quarters of the 1m-strong civilian population is estimated to have heeded the idf’s warnings and fled south, away from the part of the city which Israeli troops are now encircling.
Immediately following the above paragraph is this :
But for the generals preparing the battle plans, the diplomatic clock is ticking. In horrific scenes over 10,000 Palestinians have already been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas. More than 11% of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
Should this sentence fragment surprise the critical reader about the ‘journalistic integrity’ exercised by this ‘news’-magazine’ : ‘ according to the Gaza health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas’.
Next to appear in this melodrama masquerading as journalism, is Antony Blinken:
Where is The Reader ? This News-Magazine’s Household God is Walter Bagehot, that reflects the political/colonial romanticism of this ‘newsmagazine’. The critical reader’s strategy does not just suggest itself, but presents itself as a paragraph by paragraph evaluation, which attempts to separates the proffered reportage from the propaganda.?
Paragraph 6
Israeli generals still talk about waging a long campaign that will last up to a year. On November 7th Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told abc News that Israel would be in charge of Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period”. In practice, though, what Israeli officers call their “window of legitimacy” is probably far shorter. How fast that window closes will depend largely on America, which is supplying Israel with munitions, diplomatic support and an aid package worth perhaps $14bn. If Joe Biden wants the war to end, Israel will be hard-pressed to ignore him.
Paragraph 7.
Israeli generals still talk about waging a long campaign that will last up to a year. On November 7th Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told abc News that Israel would be in charge of Gaza’s security for an “indefinite period”. In practice, though, what Israeli officers call their “window of legitimacy” is probably far shorter. How fast that window closes will depend largely on America, which is supplying Israel with munitions, diplomatic support and an aid package worth perhaps $14bn. If Joe Biden wants the war to end, Israel will be hard-pressed to ignore him.
Paragraph 8.
Note: that this paragraph is devoted to ‘speculation’ not reportage.
So far, he does not. Although he now supports “humanitarian pauses” to allow more aid to enter Gaza, Mr Biden has rejected calls for an outright ceasefire. But administration officials have made clear, in a series of leaks, that they doubt Israel has a coherent exit strategy in Gaza. They complain that Mr Netanyahu is barely willing to discuss the topic, and say they want to put their concerns on the record now lest the war end badly.
Paragraph 9.
Note: This paragraph is an admixture of Reportage and Propaganda :
They also have concerns about Israeli tactics. Asked about the idf’s efforts to minimise civilian deaths, John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, practically tied himself in knots: “We have seen some indications that there are efforts being applied in certain scenarios to try to minimise [them],” he said. To think a war risks becoming a devastating quagmire but to support it nonetheless is an untenable position—especially when many American voters agree.
Paragraph 10.
Note: taking the temperature, and national political mood of Americans is not exactly propaganda, but the final sentence framed by ‘sources in Washington think’ , is its shadow.
An Associated Press poll found that 58% of Democrats think Israel’s response has gone too far and 44% think America is too supportive of it. A Quinnipiac survey of registered voters found that 51% of independents and 66% of people aged 18-34 disapprove of Mr Biden’s policy. His ratings have plummeted among Arab-American voters, which could hurt him next year in crucial swing states like Michigan. Sources in Washington think it will still be several more weeks before Mr Biden pivots to talk of a truce—but do not doubt that he will make such a shift.
Paragraph 11.
Note: more speculation about what if’s: a multi-front war, were acute in the days after Hamas’s massacre, the group’s leader, signalled in a speech,…
Arab states certainly hope so. Fears of a multi-front war, which were acute in the days after Hamas’s massacre, have eased. Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia militia, is still firing rockets daily at Israel, but Hassan Nasrallah, the group’s leader, signalled in a speech on November 3rd that he was not yet keen on all-out war. The Houthis, a Shia militant group in Yemen, have lobbed drones and missiles at Israel but are too far away to pose a strategic threat.
Paragraph 12.
Note: Speculation is now The Economist mode of argument, of a kind!
Many regional autocrats would be happy to see Israel smash Hamas. But they are also nervous that the war will mobilise their subjects, many of whom are already restive about awful economic conditions. This adds to pressure on both America, which has heard their fears for weeks now, and Israel, which is keen to preserve its recent diplomatic gains in the Arab world.
The Reader needn’t trouble herself with too much effort, to find the reason that put Cameron, into the category of ‘damaged political goods’, as The Financial Times of April 16, 2021 provides answers.
Headline: The David Cameron scandal: just how sleazy is British politics?
Sub-headline: While the UK’s record on corruption is good, many recent abuses have been hiding in plain sight
“We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.” So said David Cameron in 2010, in a speech on lobbying shortly before he became prime minister.
A decade on it has become painfully clear that the former leader did indeed know how it worked. In recent weeks Cameron has seen his reputation savaged amid details of his lobbying efforts on behalf of the financier Lex Greensill. Each day has brought new revelations about the relationship between the government and Greensill Capital, the supply chain finance company which collapsed last month.
As premier, Cameron allowed Greensill to work from Downing Street — where he styled himself a senior adviser — on a scheme of no clear value to government. Then, after leaving politics, he joined Greensill as a paid adviser and in that role lobbied ministers for the now collapsed business.
His private texts to the chancellor Rishi Sunak would have been worse had Treasury officials not ultimately rejected the appeals. Former officials have been stunned to hear that a senior civil servant in charge of government procurement was allowed to work for Greensill while still in Whitehall. Facing mounting pressure, the government said this week it would launch an inquiry into the affair.
One Tory MP publicly described Cameron’s behavior as “a tasteless, slapdash and unbecoming episode for any former prime minister”.
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The next paragraph is instructive, and in its way places Sunak’s political judgement in the present, not just in peril? Or is Cameron an expendable political actor, like Braverman?
Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, seeing a chance to tie Boris Johnson to the misconduct of his predecessor, said the scandal is “just the tip of the iceberg”. He added: “Dodgy contracts, privileged access, jobs for their mates, this is the return of Tory sleaze.”
Former Conservative prime minister David Cameron has been named foreign secretary in a shock appointment as part of the Rishi Sunak’s cabinet reshuffle.
A No 10 source said Mr Sunak had asked Ms Braverman “to leave government and she has accepted”, with Mr Cleverly moving from the Foreign Office to the Home Office.
The Conservatives said Mr Sunak is carrying out a wider reshuffle which “strengthens his team in government to deliver long-term decisions for a brighter future”.
Labour said the surprise return of Mr Cameron – who has criticised Mr Sunak the decision to scrap HS2 – made the Tory leader’s claim to be the change candidate “laughable”.
Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle expressed his frustration at Mr Cameron’s appointment – saying it was “especially important” that MPs were able to “scrutinise” the work of the Foreign Office during current international crises.
Sir Lindsay said he “looks forward” to hearing from the Sunak government how Lord Cameron – handed a life peerage – will be “properly accountable to this House”.
Lord Cameron would be able to face questions from elected MPs only when he appears before select committees. Sir Lindsay said he had asked the clerks about possible options for “enhancing scrutiny” of Lord Cameron.
Keir Starmer’s national campaign co-ordinator Pat McFadden said: “A few weeks ago Rishi Sunak said David Cameron was part of a failed status quo – now he’s bringing him back as his life raft.”
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There is so much more…
Political Cynic
Even The Economist , in the guise of the Ghost of Bagehot, finds the David Cameron’s political rehabilitation anathema.
David Cameron always looked the part. Even the most powerful man on Earth was taken aback by the ease with which the jacketless, tieless British prime minister behaved. Barack Obama, a former American president, noted that Mr Cameron “possessed an impressive command of the issues, a facility with language and the easy confidence of someone who’d never been pressed too hard by life”. Mr Cameron had the attributes to be an excellent prime minister: intelligence, diligence, a quick wit and a smooth manner. Instead, he managed to be one of the worst.
Seven years after Mr Cameron left office in 2016, in the wake of losing the Brexit referendum, the former prime minister has returned to front-line politics as foreign secretary. The decision of Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, to fire Suella Braverman, a hard-line home secretary, cleared the way. James Cleverly, a barrel-chested former reservist, was shunted to take Ms Braverman’s spot, leaving a vacancy as the country’s top diplomat. And so, on the morning of November 13th, the familiar figure of Mr Cameron wandered through the door of 10 Downing Street once again.
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Old allies have praised Mr Cameron’s sense of duty in returning to government. But he did not have to disappear from public life in the wake of Brexit. Mr Cameron once chided a prospective mp for cheekily asking whether he might be made a minister. “You will find that being a backbench Member of Parliament is the greatest honour you can have in life,” said Mr Cameron. “When I cease to be prime minister I will return with great pride to the backbenches as Member of Parliament for Witney, for the rest of my life.” In reality, Mr Cameron served for eight weeks on the backbenches before leaving. When he would have been most useful, during the years of screeching over Brexit between 2016 and 2019, Mr Cameron deserted his post. Now he is bored of private life, he has returned
Manners maketh the manderine
After the clownshow of Mr Johnson’s tenure as prime minister, Westminster wallahs project a dignified air onto Mr Cameron. Yet he embarrassed himself out of office. Practically every senior British politician attempts to fill their boots once they have left Parliament, but most do so quietly and effectively. In contrast Mr Cameron lobbied on behalf of Greensill Capital, a failed supply-chain payments company, in simpering text messages to cabinet ministers that have been made public (“I know you are manically busy—and doing a great job, by the way”).
This kind of record is clearly no obstacle to high office. Mr Cameron has returned largely because Mr Sunak is desperate. He may reassure some wavering southern Conservative voters, who provided the former prime minister’s narrow base. Mercifully, he will do less damage as foreign secretary than he did as prime minister. But the fact is that Mr Cameron maintains a good reputation in certain quarters because of how he comes across rather than what he actually did. It still helps to look the part.
Political Observer attempts to ‘read’ Gideon Rachman’s Propaganda?
Mr. Rachman begins his ‘essay’ with a Pop Song. Looking at Rachman’s bloated Cast of Characters, is more than a possible explanation, for his attempt to mimic Trollope in miniature ? A quick review is instructive? Yet like the Neo-Con, Mr. Rachman relies on the exhaustion of the both the patience, and critical faculties of his Reader, via his attempted pastiche of a Master?
fall of the Berlin wall, soundtrack for a decade, eastern Europe, Northern Ireland, Oslo accords, Israel-Palestine conflict, the age favoured peacemakers, , democrats internationalists, nationalists, warmongers, conspiracy theorists, Russia, war, Ukraine, Middle East, the Abraham peace accords, Israel, Arab states, Hamas attacks, Israeli invasion of Gaza, Middle Eastern war, a reinvigorated peace process, US, Joe Biden’s presidency, Donald Trump, the presidency in 2024, swing states, a darkening global political mood, The Gaza war, Ukraine, competition for munitions, desperately short of shells, Air defence systems, Ukraine and Israel, The west’s already weak ability, “Global South”, Russia is committing war crimes, charges of double standards, the Ukrainian war effort, The Kyiv government’s, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia, Russian forces, Ukrainian cities, A battered Ukraine, Kyiv’s western backers, Russian war machine, US Congress, Trump-supporting Republicans, Vladimir Putin, abandon Ukraine to its fate, A Trump victory, progressives and Arab-Americans, stay at home or vote for fringe candidates, if pro-Palestinian sentiment, But history abounds with absurdities, The intense global spotlight on Israel and Gaza, mass deportations…announced in Pakistan, Sudan and Nagorno-Karabakh, Other urgent problems are also in danger of being left to fester….Climate change…COP28 summit…world leaders distracted by Gaza…With America overstretched overseas and unstable at home…China may sniff an opportunity… that China is intent on displacing the US as the dominant power in the Pacific, and perhaps the world…The main focus of Xi Jinping’s ambitions is Taiwan…Biden has repeatedly pledged to defend Taiwan…security crisis in east Asia to the ones gripping Europe and the Middle East.
The end point of this ‘essay’ is that Pop Song, yet all Rachman offers is a counterfeit, of a Master of political melodrama, of another age? Have I engaged in the hyperbolic? Mr. Rachman set what passed for a ‘standard’!
The opening paragraphs of this 2086 word , what to name it?
Israeli forces are entering a hellscape of their own making. One in ten buildings in Gaza has been pulverised by Israeli aircraft and artillery. Over 8,000 Palestinians have been killed, many of them children. Shortages of fuel, clean water and food, imposed by an Israeli blockade, pose a growing threat to the lives of many thousands more.
Around the world the cry is going up for a ceasefire or for Israel to abandon its ground invasion. Hearing some Israeli politicians call for vengeance, including the discredited prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, many people conclude that Israel’s actions are disproportionate and immoral. Many of those arguing this believe in the need for a Jewish state, but fear for a Jewish state that seems to value Palestinian lives so cheaply. They worry that the slender hopes for peace in this age-old conflict will be buried under Gaza’s rubble.
Those are powerful arguments, but they lead to the wrong conclusion. Israel is inflicting terrible civilian casualties. It must minimise them and be seen to do so. Palestinians are lacking essential humanitarian supplies. Israel must let a lot more aid pass into Gaza. However, even if Israel chooses to honour these responsibilities, the only path to peace lies in dramatically reducing Hamas’s capacity to use Gaza as a source of supplies and a base for its army. Tragically, that requires war.
To grasp why, you have to understand what happened on October 7th. When Israelis talk about Hamas’s attack as an existential threat they mean it literally, not as a figure of speech. Because of pogroms and the Holocaust, Israel has a unique social contract: to create a land where Jews know they will not be killed or persecuted for being Jews. The state has long honoured that promise with a strategic doctrine that calls for deterrence, early warnings of an attack, protection on the home front and decisive Israeli victories.
Over the past two decades Israel lost sight of the fact that Palestinians deserve a state, too. Mr Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage Palestinian moderates—a cynical ploy to help him argue that Israel has no partner for peace. Instead, Palestinian suffering became something to manage, with a mix of financial inducements and deterrence, kept fresh by repeated short wars.
On October 7th Hamas destroyed all this, including Mr Netanyahu’s brittle scheme. The terrorists ripped apart Israel’s social contract by shattering the security doctrine created to defend it. Deterrence proved empty, early warning of an attack was absent, home-front protection failed and Hamas murdered 1,400 people in Israeli communities. Far from enjoying victory, Israel’s soldiers and spies were humiliated.
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The Reader can turn her attention to the final paragraphs:
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And that leads back to the condition that makes all this possible: a war to degrade Hamas enough to enable something better to take its place. How Israel fights this war matters. It must live up to its pledge to honour international law. Not only is that the right thing to do, but Israel will be able to sustain broad support over the months of fighting and find backing to foster peace when the fighting stops only if it signals that it has changed. Right now, this means letting in a lot more humanitarian aid and creating real safe zones in southern Gaza, Egypt, or—as the best talisman of its sincerity—in the Negev inside Israel.
A ceasefire is the enemy of peace, because it would allow Hamas to continue to rule over Gaza by consent or by force with most of its weapons and fighters intact. The case for humanitarian pauses is stronger, but even they involve a trade-off. Repeated pauses would increase the likelihood that Hamas survives.
Nobody can know whether peace will come to Gaza. But for the sake of Israelis and Palestinians it deserves to have the best possible chance. A ceasefire removes that chance entirely.
Because The Economist is an active partner with Western Corporate Media in producing political/moral apologetics for its members : engaging in a critique of the core arguments, reduced to their essentials… the favorite strategy of the Neo-Cons is to both exhaust the patience and critical faculties of the Reader. An act critical reductionism is an act of self-defense:
The collapse of Israel’s security doctrine has unleashed a ferocious bombardment against the people of Gaza.
Israel wants its 200,000 or so evacuees to be able to return home.
Hamas has proved that it is undeterrable.
The only way out of the cycle of violence is to destroy Hamas’s rule…
Suffocated by permanently tight Israeli security and killed as Hamas’s human shields in pre-emptive Israeli raids, Palestinians will be radicalised.
In Israel Mr Netanyahu will be forced from office because he was in power on October 7th, and because his reputation for being Israel’s staunchest defender is broken.
The Palestinians need moderate leaders with a democratic mandate. At the moment they have none.
Hence, the second condition for peace: a force to provide security in Gaza. Israel cannot supply it as an occupying power. Instead the strip needs an international coalition, possibly containing Arab countries that oppose Hamas and its backer, Iran.
And that leads back to the condition that makes all this possible: a war to degrade Hamas enough to enable something better to take its place. How Israel fights this war matters. It must live up to its pledge to honour international law.
Right now, this means letting in a lot more humanitarian aid and creating real safe zones in southern Gaza, Egypt, or—as the best talisman of its sincerity—in the Negev inside Israel.
A ceasefire is the enemy of peace, because it would allow Hamas to continue to rule over Gaza by consent or by force with most of its weapons and fighters intact.
But for the sake of Israelis and Palestinians it deserves to have the best possible chance. A ceasefire removes that chance entirely.
Around the world the cry is going up for a ceasefire or for Israel to abandon its ground invasion.
However, even if Israel chooses to honour these responsibilities, the only path to peace lies in dramatically reducing Hamas’s capacity to use Gaza as a source of supplies and a base for its army. Tragically, that requires war.
Because of pogroms and the Holocaust, Israel has a unique social contract: to create a land where Jews know they will not be killed or persecuted for being Jews. The state has long honoured that promise with a strategic doctrine that calls for deterrence, early warnings of an attack, protection on the home front and decisive Israeli victories.
Over the past two decades Israel lost sight of the fact that Palestinians deserve a state, too. Mr Netanyahu boosted Hamas to sabotage Palestinian moderates—a cynical ploy to help him argue that Israel has no partner for peace.
On October 7th Hamas destroyed all this, including Mr Netanyahu’s brittle scheme. The terrorists ripped apart Israel’s social contract by shattering the security doctrine created to defend it.
The collapse of Israel’s security doctrine has unleashed a ferocious bombardment against the people of Gaza. The reason is an attempt to restore that founding principle.
The only way out of the cycle of violence is to destroy Hamas’s rule—which means killing its senior leaders and smashing its military infrastructure.
Suffocated by permanently tight Israeli security and killed as Hamas’s human shields in pre-emptive Israeli raids, Palestinians will be radicalised.
That starts with new leadership for both sides.
The sooner he goes the better.
The Palestinians need moderate leaders with a democratic mandate.
The question is how to stop Hamas or its successor from seizing back control of Gaza before fresh leaders can emerge from fair elections.
Hence, the second condition for peace: a force to provide security in Gaza. Israel cannot supply it as an occupying power.
And that leads back to the condition that makes all this possible: a war to degrade Hamas enough to enable something better to take its place. How Israel fights this war matters.
A ceasefire is the enemy of peace, because it would allow Hamas to continue to rule over Gaza by consent or by force with most of its weapons and fighters intact. The case for humanitarian pauses is stronger, but even they involve a trade-off. Repeated pauses would increase the likelihood that Hamas survives.
A ceasefire is the enemy of peace, because it would allow Hamas to continue to rule over Gaza by consent or by force with most of its weapons and fighters intact.
Nobody can know whether peace will come to Gaza. But for the sake of Israelis and Palestinians it deserves to have the best possible chance. A ceasefire removes that chance entirely.
The New Deal once defined The Democrats, until the political toxin of The Clintons and their epigones: the embrace of the Neo-Liberal Swindle, defined this party’s Neo-Reaganism. Mr. Leonhardt writes for the New York Times, and as such the very notion of placing the blame on ‘high-brow, progressive culture warriors’ is a political convenience.
As Leonhardt tells that story, he says the Democratic Party has made a politically risky leftward turn away from blue collar voters and toward high-brow, progressive culture warriors.
The End of The Welfare State, here Researcher Scott Winship, via Politico’s Danny Vinik, answers in the affirmative, in 2016.
Did welfare reform work?
Researcher Scott Winship says yes. Twenty years after passage of Bill Clinton’s controversial anti-poverty law, his major new report challenges its critics—and says it even offers a way forward.
What might a citizen think/ponder about the Crisis of Hunger and Homelessness that afflicts this nation? The destruction of The Welfare State was the project of both the Republicans and New Democrats. David Leonhardt present to The Reader the ‘straw-man’ of ‘‘high-brow, progressive culture warriors’ as a possible reason/explanation for the New Democrats argued fixation: ‘warns Democrats are not paying close enough attention to the average American’s concerns about crime, immigration and economic progress’
David Leonhardt can’t quite confront the fact of the failure of the whole of America’s Political Class, and the Journalists, Propagandists who produce self-serving, yet fictitious narratives, that advance careers.
Old Socialist
Note: In my haste to publish, I had forgotten to add to the Crimes of The New Democrats :
Gramm-Leach-Bliley as the end of Glass-Stegall. As Glass-Stegall:
The Glass-Steagall Act, part of the Banking Act of 1933, was a landmark banking legislation that separated Wall Street from Main Street by offering protection to people who entrust their savings to commercial banks. Millions of Americans lost their jobs in the Great Depression, and one in four lost their life savings after more than 4,000 U.S. banks shut down between 1929 and 1933, leaving depositors with nearly $400 million in losses. The Glass-Steagall Act prohibited bankers from using depositors’ money to pursue high-risk investments, but the act was effectively undercut by looser restrictions in the deregulatory environment of the 1980s and 1990s.
Obama’s chicken-shit ‘lets put this all behind us’ , as a de facto pardon of Wall Street Crooks, heavy contributors to the Obama Campaign
Not to forget Obama’s Simpson-Boles ‘Austerity’ that was dead on arrival.
In Mr. Leonhardt quest to find these ‘‘high-brow, progressive culture warriors’ he can’t be referring to The Squad nor Bernie Sanders, as they all vote a straight New Democratic Party Line.
Note that Janan Ganesh is part of the Silver Fork Tradition of writers, even though that might seem an odd qualification, for a Financial Times ‘expert/technocrat’ on ‘Geopolitics’ ?
Headline: Don’t flatter the west’s enemies as an ‘axis’
Sub-headline: Democracies should tease out the contradictions between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea
First note the rhetorical diminution of ‘the west’ as if it were not an actual political thing/entity ? The first paragraphs are instructive of that stylistic approach to the Historical/Political questions of moment. For your attempt to parse this essay, think of Ganesh’s attempt, as a pastiche of the Novel, in its variousness of characters, drawn from a ‘western world’ : again the rhetorical diminution is central. I will highlight the characters as they appear – it will come easier, for the reader to catch the cadences of his methodology, eventually? it is ungainly and clumsy.
Whenever a dictator or ruling cleric attacks the honour of the western world, they are conceding a rather important point. There is something there to attack. The west is a coherent entity.
It is made up, for the most part, of Christian or post-Christian societies around the upper Atlantic. Most of them experienced, to various degrees and at different times, the Enlightenment. Each now practices some version of democratic capitalism.
If such abstract values aren’t enough as a binding agent, no matter. The west is held together with treaties and institutions, too, which predate several of the world’s nation states.Nato has been around since 1949, the European project for almost as long. Neither is just a forum for chatter: one commits its members to mutual defence, the other subjects domestic to supranational law. That is, western countries are willing to foot a bill — in membership fees, sovereign freedom and ultimately blood — for their geopolitical team. The west isn’t just broad (and getting broader, as both Nato and the EU process applications to join). It is also deep.
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Note: Character Development, in its inflated and diminutive iterations:
Its rival bloc is the first of these things, without question, but not the second. In fact, doesn’t “bloc”, or “axis”, give too much credit, too soon, to a grouping as loose and putative as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea? Since the present crisis in the Middle East began earlier this month, there has been some despair in democratic capitals about the bonhomie among these four states. So there should be. Better an excess of vigilance than an excess of nonchalance. But the west shouldn’t do its antagonists’ work for them by granting their claim to be an equal and opposite coalition.
What, after all, unites the four? The group includes secular communists and the world’s leading theocracy. The two largest members fell out with each other in the cold war. (Richard Nixon exploited, but did not invent, the Sino-Soviet split.) There are jabber-fests that bring most of the members together, such as the Brics-plus summit, but no Nato– or EU-grade institution that requires tangible sacrifices from those who belong. And what is their shared view of global economic governance? What is the “Moscow consensus”? State sovereignty, at least, used to be the one shibboleth of autocrats. Since the invasion of Ukraine, and the tolerance of it in parts of the world, does even that still hold?
Note: ‘Complacent Liberal’ makes her/his appearance, as the Ganesh antagonist, held aloft by a History Made to Measure, with an over abundance of characters.
“Just wait, complacent liberal,” I’ll be told. It takes a while for states to congeal into an axis. But consider the last two times that democracies were under existential siege from an autocratic grouping. As the years passed, it was the tensions within that camp, not the unities, that stood out. In the second world war, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn’t make it to its second anniversary. In the cold war, Mao and Khrushchev started to diverge over Marxist doctrine as soon as the 1950s. What is the most recent historical precedent for autocracies co-operating on a lasting basis? The Concert of Europe, perhaps, which kept the continent more or less at peace in the 19th century. And even that had liberal Britain as a sort of regulating half-member.
Note: has Ganesh’s pastiche of a Novel reached its end point? Ganesh resorts to the analytic, as that pastiche has lost it’s emotive power? He must now resort to actual argument? A selection of the remaining paragraphs .
Treating the west’s adversaries as a coherent bloc is not just analytically wrong. It is dangerous, to the extent that it becomes self-fulfilling.
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There is a precedent for this kind of error. A generation has passed since George W Bush set the US against the “Axis of Evil”. At the time, the moral absolutism of the word “evil” aroused most of the liberal derision.
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The mistake was of more than academic consequence. In conflating three such different entities, Bush didn’t consider that invading one might empower another.
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Note: Final paragraph of this essay reminds this Reader of Ganesh’s arrogance, as if he were of the caliber of Walter Lippmann in his prime. As his Novelization has faded from the thought of the Reader, in the blinding political light, of his carefully cadenced notion of ‘the coming years more or less writes itself’, call it Hegelian rubble?
In its broad outlines, the foreign policy of the free world over the coming years more or less writes itself. It has to be a patient game of teasing out the contradictions within the autocratic world: between theologians and commissars, between closed economies and trading ones, between rising powers and fading ones, between states with extensive contact with the west and total outcasts. Instead, we have no less a personage than Mitch McConnell describing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil”. All four nations will blush at the flattery.
Queer Atheist confronts the bourgeois political chatter!
As a regular watcher of Mr. Mercouris’ commentaries, I was not just disappointed, to hear him quote and extol Simon Schama Financial Times essay. And that for all of his insights of the past, as valuable as they are, and have been, Mr. Mercouris shares with other Technocrats an attachment to political/moral conformity. Walter Lippmann was an advocate of ‘the expert’ i.e. Technocrat, as a check of too much democracy: Its a toxic tradition and Mr. Mercouris seems to have imbibed some of this political toxin.
Note: before The Reader gets to Schama’ recitation of Jewish Victimhood tropes, there is this confounding revelation:
Headline: For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
Sub-headline: The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence east of Khan Younis, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Yousef Masoud)
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.
Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.
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Is Netanyahu complicit in the murders committed by Hamas, is how The New York Times might have phrased this, in another dimension of space/time. Reader do you have the patience for Schama’s intervention? Still riffing in that New York Times Time Dimension.
The opening paragraphs of Schama’s essay:
Confronted with enormity: murdered infants, abducted grandmothers, slaughtered villagers, lusty chants of “gas the Jews” at the Free Palestine demonstration in Sydney, mere words feel like weak carriers of so much horror and sorrow. Journalistic bloviation on the cause of this and the effect of that seems an indecency, at least until the bodies are gathered and returned to families. So context me no contexts, analyse me no analyses, suspend your partially informed diagnoses; leave off your strenuous efforts at even-handedness. Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep; say the mourners’ kaddish.
Perhaps images, then, not words? Of terrified young people who in a trice went from dancing to frantic running in a futile attempt to escape the spray of bullets; of a kibbutz dog shot as it emerged from a house (that must have helped Free Palestine); a young woman with bloody marks staining her sweatpants as she is bundled away by captors; a knife lying on a sofa in the kibbutz Be’eri, where 10 per cent of the population were killed; or visual evidence of “resistance” like the video of Mor Bayder’s murdered grandmother uploaded by her killers to Mor’s Facebook page.
Note: Schama presents himself as an honest critic ? In sum Palestinians are incapable of moral/political agency, they are victims of ‘fanatical tyrants’ as if the Nakba, and 75 years of oppression and murder by Zionist ‘fanatical tyrants’ has not taught them lessons that can’t be forgotten?
There is, rightly, sympathy too for the Palestinians of Gaza who are also victims and prisoners of Hamas and do not deserve to be punished for the wickedness perpetrated by their fanatical tyrants, nor for the delusion that the deaths of Jewish families will make Israel disappear.
Note: Here is where Schama ends his essay, with a quote from Deuteronomy, 30. 19:
But Israel will survive, revive. If only because, even in this dreadful extremity, one text from Deuteronomy, 30. 19 lies at the indefatigably beating heart of Jewish history: I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.
’I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’
Note: As a Queer I have no patience for the cobbled together Texts of the Bible, nor those who quote it as an expression of ‘Gospel’! I was exposed these ‘claims’ in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School: I’m not a child anymore!
At the Council of Hippo, held in north Africa in AD 393, a group of church leaders recognized a list of books that they believed to be scripture. Later, the Council of Carthage affirmed that decision in AD 397.
Political Cynic dissects the Political Propaganda.
Note: There is almost something Biblical about Hamas playing the role of David, and Israel playing the role of a sleeping Goliath in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Or have I broken the rules of Western Decorum?
Headline: Israel at war: an explosive moment in the Middle East
Sub-headline: After the week’s horrors, friends of the country should help it by urging restraint.
Like that other 19th Century Journalistic antique The Economist, The Financial Times, are not the last gasp of The British Empire, but are its Twin Ghosts. The first two paragraphs of this Editorial Boards Opinion:
Only in the days that followed was the true horror of last Saturday’s attack by Hamas on Israel laid bare. Women, children and elderly among the dead; 260 music festival-goers slaughtered; an 85-year-old woman among more than 100 Israelis hauled off to the cellars of Gaza. The death toll of at least 1,200 was the largest number of Jews killed in a single day since the Holocaust. The assault has been compared, in its human cost and trauma to Israel’s national psyche, to “a 9/11 and a Pearl Harbor wrapped into one”. The repercussions, after Israel on Friday gave 1.1mn Palestinians 24 hours to leave northern Gaza ahead of an expected invasion of the Hamas-ruled strip, threaten to be devastating. This is spiralling into a war whose like the Middle East has not seen for decades.
The state of Israel has the right to defend itself against a murderous assault, free its hostages and restore its people’s faith in their security. The impulse to crush Hamas and extract a price for Israelis’ suffering is powerful and comprehensible. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has nurtured an image as the guarantor of his nation’s safety, is under pressure to respond with maximum force.
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Note: If all else fails in journalism, Political Melodrama will not just suffice, but is demanded! I’ve put in bold font a selection of this journalistic hyperbole. I could only stomach the first paragraph.
Note: Paragraph 3
Yet ordering half of Gaza’s population from their homes smacks of the forced displacement Palestinians have suffered since 1948. A siege denying water, food and power to the impoverished territory — followed by a ground offensive — looks like collective punishment of civilians, who mostly have little love for Hamas, for the crimes of an extremist group. At least 1,800 Palestinians have already died in Israel’s bombardment. That Hamas trampled on the rules of war with its barbarities would not make it right for Israel to do so.
Note: The above rhetoric softens a bit and adopts a moralizing tone. should The Reader be surprised?
Let me make more selective quotations:
Note: a bit of wisdom ?
Yet among the greatest help friends of Israel can give is to warn of the perils, for itself and for the wider Middle East, of a response that causes mass civilian casualties among Palestinians.
Note: The hyperbolic self-congratulation of Anthony Blinken via the declaration of ‘We democracies’.
As Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, declared in Tel Aviv: “We democracies distinguish ourselves from terrorists by striving for a different standard, even when it’s difficult.”
Note: This reads like deliberate political naivete!
Even as it fights to root out Hamas, Israel should do all it can to follow the principles of post-second world war humanitarian law: to distinguish between combatants and civilians, minimise harm to populations, and take only militarily necessary actions. In Gaza, whose 2.3mn people, nearly half of them children, have little means of escape, that will be exceptionally hard.
Note: more key sentences:
Appearing to do otherwise would jeopardise international support and sympathy for Israel and may fuel a catastrophic regional conflict.
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Western capitals should maximise diplomatic efforts, with regional neighbours, to secure Israeli hostages’ release and ensure de-escalation. They must strive, too, to establish humanitarian corridors out of Gaza.
Note: The pressing question of the above quotation is where might those Palestinians go?
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Israel deserves the world’s sympathy.
Note: The Intractable Problem, equal to Melodrama
In a land of two peoples locked in enduring conflict, ending the cycle of violence requires finding a viable way for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side, in dignity.
Note: Final comments
Not one mention of what the Palestinians have endured since 1948? Or that Israel is the beneficiaries of The Belfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot, in sum European Colonialism. The Financial Times is sometimes proficient at writing History Made To Measure, yet here there are gaping holes, in its, for want of a better descriptor, arguments about Zionism’s prima facie virtues.
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