The flip side is my concern that a protracted siege is what’s being considered. Very little aid has gone in, and it’s very difficult to get news out of Gaza at this point, especially news untainted by Hamas. A siege inflicts tremendous suffering at low risk to IDF soldiers, and I worry that Netanyahu is happy to delay both a ground assault and humanitarian aid.
I agree with that. It seems that he is the most responsible adult in the room right now.
Here is an interesting article from the Atlantic- at least as far as they let me read-
Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.
Free archived link for that article:
Takes me to a captcha page. I did the captcha twice and all that gets me is yet another captcha.
Weird, works fine for me, in two different browsers.
Worked for me, and thanks!
I enabled java for everything visible on that page; but I think sometimes my blocker blocks something that it doesn’t give me a visible option to allow. Maybe that was the problem.
Thanks for the link - I read it with interest, and it does a good job of explaining some of the complicated history and politics involved.
I agree that it is a good article, but it clearly one sided. I’m not saying that this makes its arguments wrong, but just that it should be viewed as a promotion of the pro-Isreal (albeit anti-Netanyahu) view of the matter, rather than a balanced discussion of the issues on both sides. For example he makes no mention about Israel cutting off the water supplies to Gaza.
Also, perhaps its just my exposure to the toxic right wing American rhetoric, but his constant use of the term leftist really rankled.
Yeah, he’s clearly leaning into various rightwing-style demonization rhetoric, as in “since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect”.
I mean, never mind the selective omission of the fact that, AFAICT, almost all Western academics, students, artists and activists who support Palestinian rights have condemned these terrorist murders, even as they advocate for Palestinian rights. What’s weirder is the implication that anybody in the West who has “denied, excused or even celebrated” these terrorist murders must be an academic, student, artist or activist. Like, there can’t possibly be any pro-Palestinian business owners, scientists, gas-station attendants, accountants, or other “regular joe” types in the West who have been culpably reluctant to denounce Hamas terrorism. Nope, they’re all automatically lumped in with those classic right-wing boogeyman figures, the academic, the student, the artist and the activist.
What a strange criticism of the article. It’s not a deep dive into the situation and all the wrongs committed by either side. It is a specific rebuttal to the nonsensical “decolonization” narrative and that’s not really something that Gaza’s water supply has anything to do with?
Maybe you should stop looking for implications that aren’t there and just take the sentence at face value. Best that I could tell, at no point did he say that all academics, students, artists and activists condoned the attack, nor did he say that everyone who condoned the attack was a academics, students, artists and activists. Or do you have some sort of insight into the mind of renowned author and academic Simon Sebag Montefiore that lets you know what he “really” means?
I didn’t intend it as a criticism, just an observation. It was an article that was designed to persuade rather than one designed to inform, and there is nothing wrong with that. But its important to recognize that the article is only giving one side of the argument, and so shouldn’t be viewed on it own as the definitive answer.
The water Israel sends into Gaza and interruptions in that service caused by terrorist attacks have nothing to do with a discussion of whether Israel is a colonialist enterprise or not, though. So you haven’t actually provided any evidence that the article is “one sided”.
Neither does a lot of other stuff in the article, if it was solely devoted to the discussion of colonialism it wouldn’t even need to mention the Hamas attacks, but it devotes at least half of its content to the current situations. Which is fine even though the title and much of the article is devoted to the question of Israeli “colonialism” it is really a criticism of the “leftist” complaints about Israel and its response to the Hamas terrorist attacks. Nothing is wrong with that. All that I was saying is that it was just presenting one side of the debate, which is perfectly normal for a piece of this type that intends to persuade the audience that that side of the debate is correct. But it should be recognized that there is another point of view with arguments of its own that is not presented.
And that’s where you lose me. I disagree. This is a rebuttal to one specific anti-Israel argument - the one that claims that Israel is a colonialist regime and that decolonialization requires the Jews to be removed from Israel and sent “back” to where they came from.
It is true that this argument is typically made by the left here in the West, but it is by no means an exclusively leftist criticism - far right groups like Hamas make the same exact argument.
It is also far from the only leftist criticism of Israeli actions towards Gaza. Plenty of Israelis (including myself) criticize the government from the left. We just do it without twisting logical pretzels to try and justify applying a framework that simply doesn’t fit to a radically different situation.
Honestly, I’m not sure that literal decolonization is ever seriously called for anywhere. While there’s the #landback movement with occasional tiny successes (Eureka, CA gave back an entire island to the Wiyot tribe–but it was an abandoned, polluted shipyard), there’s nobody with even the slightest smidgen of power who seriously thinks that any colonized land is going to be handed back in toto or even in large part to the descendants of the folks who lived there prior to colonization.
If folks are really serious about decolonizing, let them start with the United States. Or, better yet, let those activists not descended from pre-colony inhabitants be the change they want to see in the world.
Decolonizing as a cultural approach makes sense. Decolonizing as a real estate approach doesn’t. When it’s called for in Israel? It is pernicious nonsense.
All I can say is that for a article that is making an argument that is independent of political status he sure uses “leftist” a lot.
So you’re saying that any criticism of the left is a priori right wing?