Tenth episode on Israel’s two wars, one vs. Hamas, one vs. Netanyahu, with independent journalist Noga Tarnopolsky (follow her on Twitter and Instagram and check out her Muck Rack profile here) (Apologize for my low lighting ,will address this for the next episode.

Even before October 7, Israel was facing a historic crisis, a self-inflicted deep wound from its own governing coalition led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, Hamas carried out the most most lethal attack against Jews since the Holocaust, killing some 1,200 Israelis who were mostly civilians and captured some 240 Israelis who Hamas took as hostages into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s reaction was to cut off nearly all supplies to the Gaza Strip, the enclave blocked and partly controlled by Israel that Hamas partly governs, and to launch the most intense military assault anywhere in decades. Noga is uniquely qualified to talk about both Israel’s domestic crisis as well as the war against Hamas, seeing each as a war yet both becoming more and more intertwined. The following is my discussion with her.

Notes

On the IDF’s killing of 3 Israeli hostages…

Some of Noga’s coverage of the war on MSNBC (examples here and here), New York Magazine (examples here and here), The Washington Post (examples here and here), and France 24, just to name a few.

Some of Noga’s work on the Israeli protest movement against Netanyahu’s parliamentary coup against Israel’s judiciary and checks and balances in Israel: Politico, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, just to name a few.

DONATE TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

Palestine Red Crescent Society is basically the Red Cross in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

IsraAID is Israel’s largest humanitarian organization.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, has provided emergency medical services for people in Gaza for many years.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the UN agency specifically tasked with helping Palestinians.  Several of its aid workers have already been killed in the current round of violence.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is one of the largest Jewish-focused philanthropic organizations in the world and is helping Israelis on the ground.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and has long-operated in Gaza.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) October 11, 2023 (slightly updated figures late afternoon)

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) The first article in a series of special reports about the 2023 Israel-Hamas-Middle East Crisis.

See related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, October 26, 2015 article Blame Bibi Netanyahu for the Violence First, Then Blame Both the Israeli and Palestinian People; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—It is utterly inevitable: in conflict and war, comparisons are made to other conflicts.  They do not always even have to be from the real world: as I have discussed, Ukrainians regularly compare Russia to Mordor and Russian forces to orcs and have also seen themselves as the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars taking on a Russia embodying the Galactic Empire (Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has even partnered with Mark Hamill—Luke Skywalker himself—to help bolster Ukraine’s drone fleet and war effort).  Some pretty bad comparisons are being made about the current fighting in Israel and Palestine with the Russia-Ukraine war; as I have noted in even the right-leaning Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post, this is kind of ridiculous, because while Ukraine and Russia is virtually a one-sided, good-versus-evil issue, the behavior and context of Israel and the Palestinians (Hamas being one of two major Palestinian political factions and not particularly popular with or representative of Palestinians) is much more complicated, and I am not alone in making this point.

The 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks against the United States analogy being made by many, many people is both good and way off.

On the scale and psychological shock for both Israelis and Americans, the analogy holds: the Hamas attack is actually far worse proportionately, given Israel’s far smaller population and the still-increasing death toll (over 1,200 for Israelis conflicting reports of around 2,700 to 3,000 wounded as I am writing this; from a U.S. population in 2001 of about 285 million, 9/11 killed 2,977 people; Israel’s population is about 9.8 million today, with 73% being Jewish; if we lost the same portion of people as Israel has back in 2001, that would have been nearly 35,00 Americans killed and close to some 78,500-87,250 wounded.  For historical comparison, the bloodiest day in American history is the battle of Antietam, during the U.S. Civil War on September 17, 1862, in which there were nearly 20,946 killed and wounded—only 3,654 of those killed—with both combatant sides being American; Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, saw 3,581 total U.S. killed and wounded, with 2,403 of those killed).

Palestinians killed in Gaza are over 1,100 and 5,300 wounded, while Israeli forces have counted roughly 1,500 attacking Hamas terrorists and fighters killed inside Israel thus far.  Between Israel and Palestine, there are roughly an equal number of Palestinians/Arabs and Jews, though about of fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians or Arabs, depending on how they identify (some with mixed feelings/loyalties and a thorny identity issue, as I have discussed recently), so there is trauma—deep, widespread trauma—being experienced now by everyone from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

But while terrorist flying large planes into major hubs and landmarks in America was novel, the idea of Hamas and other fighters or terrorists in Gaza breaking through the border barriers to strike out at Israeli forces and communities, including hunting down civilians on the streets and in their homes to target them for murder and kidnapping, is an eventuality and fear that has consumed the Israeli mindset for years.  What was novel was how “successful,” organized, large, and tactically proficient Hamas was in its effort, but that the effort would be undertaken was a given.  So the idea that this was not long-anticipated is false.  Conversely, the U.S. had key intelligence 9/11 on specific people and activities directly related to the 9/11 attacks passed up the chain in the months before 9/11, but the incompetence of the Bush Administration saw that it was not properly internalized and addressed.  Therefore, the comparison of both being major “intelligence failures” is inaccurate; this is far more applicable to Israel today.

Another dissimilarity: Israel’s conflict did not start on October 7, nor was it a cold or frozen conflict with just a few isolated flashpoints spread out over time, as was the case with the U.S. and al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11.  While the U.S. enraged many millions of Muslims and Arabs with controversial policies over decades, the U.S. was not engaged in any serious conflict directly with Al-Qaeda in the weeks and months prior to 9/11 and 9/11 was not carried out by people living in an enclave on the U.S. border with Mexico or Canada that the U.S. had been fighting and skirmishing on and off for years and in the days, weeks, and months before 9/11.  The opposite is true with Israel and the Palestinians, including Hamas in Gaza.  Especially since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist right-wing government came to power in late December 2022, there has been a cycle of escalating violence, incitement, and deliberately provocative acts back and forth between the Israeli government and Israeli Jewish settlers on one end, and Palestinian terrorist groups (namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad) and small groups of Palestinians engaging in their own acts of resistance and/or violence of their own accord on the other.  This, even before Hamas’s stunningly “successful” (but entirely predictable in the attempt) attack and going back even before the ascent of Israel’s latest government for years, there has been a back-and-forth cycle of violence, dehumanization, and recrimination, one that erupted in 2023, leading to an explosion of violence that saw this year become most violent in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2005.  And then, Hamas dramatically and historically escalated things even further just a few fays ago.

Relatively speaking, then, 9/11 could be said to be unprovoked in a recent-time sense, but it is hard to claim that this Hamas attack was unprovoked and not directly part of a hot conflict already underway in the sense that Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in increasing violence all throughout 2023 in East Jerusalem and the West Bank mostly, but also some violence in Gaza, too.  To be clear, Israel and even some of its most extremist Jewish civilians engaging in actions that are deeply provocative to Palestinians month after month (and indeed, year after year, not that Palestinians do not do the same, they often do too) does not mean that, therefore, whatever reaction that comes from the Palestinians, including Hamas, is justified.  In other words, provoked does not necessarily mean justified, and, indeed, clearly Hamas’s overall attack is not “brave” “resistance” against an enemy military force but a slaughter of non-combatants (of over 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas, only 189 thus far are IDF, 45 are Israeli police, the rest and overwhelming majority being civilians, and that does not even deal with the at least 150 hostages taken by Hamas).  Indeed, Hamas has pivoted to becoming more like ISIS than the Hamas of even a few years ago as it is now responsible for the worst single day of lethal violence targeting Jewish civilians since the Nazi-led Holocaust during World War II.  Make no mistake, what Hamas perpetrated against the civilians of southern Israel near the Gaza Strip is a terroristic genocidal act of mass-murder and ethnic cleansing, an anti-Semitic pogrom that harkens back to a much darker era of humanity: in just one kibbutz of about 1,000 people called Be’eri, at least over 100 were killed—at least 10% of the population.

Another deep issue I will mention simply for the reader to consider without discussing: the U.S. had no solid, detailed exit strategy for its military interventions in which it engaged after 9/11 and the results were mostly counterproductive and with a massive human cost and the repercussions still very much being felt.  Given Israel’s track record in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon of not really having a political strategy but only tactical responses, it is deeply unlikely that Israel has any serious, mature, or realistic plan for what to do in Gaza once this war “ends,” so, quite likely, there is another for the similarities column. 

In the end, considering 9/11 is useful both in its similarities with and in its differences from the insane, tragic death-spiral currently unfolding Israel, Gaza, and beyond in trying to understand said death-spiral.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook), September 27, 2022, the same day Real Context News surpassed three-quarters of a million all-time content views; *update 11:09 PM; adapted October 2 for Small Wars Journal as Putin’s Ukraine War Had Doomed Him; Mobilization Only Weakens Him More; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; see follow-up October 6 article This Is the Beginning of the End of the War and related September 16 article I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March; also, since the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on October 7 to Ukrainian activist Oleksandra Matviichuk and her organization the Center for Civil Liberties, listen to my April podcast with her here discussing war, Russian war crimes, human rights, and democracy in Ukraine.

SILVER SPRING—Before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s massive February 24 escalation of the war in Ukraine, few people who follow the conflict gave Ukraine much of a chance against Russia.  I myself felt Ukraine would put up quite a fight but still felt Russia would be able to take most of Ukraine, with a best-case scenario being Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would survive a Pyrrhic Russian victory in Kyiv and lead a robust insurgency that would succeed partially over time (years) with Western help.

But not even two full weeks after February 24, I was experiencing one of the most dramatic surprises of my life: during the second week of the war, it was clear to me that Russia’s leadership, government, and military were not only systemically failing in their approach to the war, but were, collectively and institutionally, incapable of any grand adjustments that would change their failure to success, that even if they adjusted their strategy, their tactics doomed them to a poor performance.

Russia and Its Military: Dysfunction Exposed Early in War Persists

Ukraine had performed as well as possible, Russia as poorly as possible in any realistic sense, and the consequences of this would only explode exponentially over time as the war would drag on.  Even less than two weeks in, it was clear:

• Russian tanks and vehicles had no defense against Javelin missiles and other Western-supplied anti-tank weapons the Ukrainians were receiving or would receive
• Russian troops were poorly supplied, without enough food, water, or fuel, with a terrible logistics system that was highly vulnerable (follow Trent Telenko on Twitter and you will understand just how bad the Russians are at logistics)
• Russian troops were poorly led, lied to by their superiors and unprepared for the resistance they encountered, their lives wasted in repeating disastrous tactics time and time again, with little proper coordination between different branches, leading to horrific casualties, while Ukrainian troops were much better led and protected by their leaders and had far higher morale
• Russian equipment was inferior, poorly maintained, and thus performed poorly at high rates
• Russian hubris led Russia to attack on many axes, spreading their troops thin, and Russian losses in the early days included some of their best troops and equipment
• Russia had virtually no international support or aid, while Ukraine has tremendous international support and aid that would only grow parallel to Russia’s isolation and depletion
• Russia could not economically withstand Western sanctions or support this war over long periods of time (unsustainable short-term measures and myopic analysis notwithstanding)

If you put these on one side of a mathematical equation and add to it Putin’s dogged determination to persist, on the other side of the equals sign, you end up with not only Ukrainians victory, but the end of Putin and his regime: Putin, proud man that he is, would be unwilling to admit defeat and would double down on failure until it brought him down, destroying most of the Russian Army in the process unless it or his people revolted against him first.

Hence, I could posit in my article for Small Wars Journal published March 8 that this war would be “the beginning of the end for Putin.”  Many analysts and pundits would be dismissive of such claims, including specifically of my own argument (among them George Beebe, an advisor to Dick Cheney when he was vice president and a former top Russia specialist at the CIA) but all of those dynamics have persisted, and indeed, increased since then, exploding (literally) in disaster after disaster for Russia.  And while I recently briefly revisited how I thought back then that Putin would doom himself with his hubris, now is a good time to do a full reexamination of that notion.

From the total collapse of Russia’s Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Sumy fronts to the sinking of the Mosvka, from Crimea becoming vulnerable to Ukrainian forces—the last two of which I predicted in April—from the counteroffensive in Kherson to the total collapse of Russia’s Kharkiv front, it has simply been one disaster after another for Russia since late March, with only minimal, gradual gains for Russia (some of which are already being reversed) alongside numerous sudden, dramatic victories for Ukraine.  In fact, the totality of the conflict since February 24 has seen Russia initially make quick but often costly gains up to the gates of Kyiv, then saw that and other fronts in north-central Ukraine to collapse suddenly with catastrophic losses beginning by the end of the fifth week of the war, and, in the nearly half-year since then, Ukraine has taken far, far more territory than what Russia has gained (and that was true even before Russia’s dramatic collapse on the Kharkiv front).

All the while, Moscow’s body count has continued to grow, astoundingly all throughout, perhaps as high as 57,000 killed and wounded*, with that number set to only increase and increase dramatically.  These dead Russians have friends and family, and it is hard to hide such death; even without official notification, official silences reveal much.  And those friends and family are growing increasingly dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, the war itself, and Putin himself; with more combat deaths comes more people with more anger.

Russia’s military is so desperate to bring in new recruits to bolster its beleaguered force that its de facto extension, the Wagner mercenary group run by Putin henchman Yevgeniy Prigozhin (known as “Putin’s chef”), is recruiting inmates from prisons, with predictably pathetic results for Russia.

Mobilizing Myopia and More of the Same (Dysfunction)

And no dysfunctional mobilization—“partial” (as just announced by Putin) or otherwise—on the part of Russia can alter these dynamics anytime soon, especially rushing to train and deploy old or untried troops still operating as part of this exceptionally ineffective system as describe above.  Protests are now erupting in reaction to Putin’s “partial” mobilization announcement (which he has already lied about), and authorities are arresting many people, some of whom they are forcing into the military; that is hardly the way to build a motivated fighting force.  As it is and as noted earlier, the Russian government has been unable to properly train, equip, supply, and lead its existing military, and there is nothing whatsoever from what we have seen thus far that should lead anyone to think it can competently so now for an additional 300,000 troops.  Thus, while there are no rational reasons to think that the troops-to-be-mobilized will perform or be treated any better that the already poorly-performing Russian military currently operating in Ukraine, we have multiple reasons to conclude rationally that they are likely to perform and be treated even worse.  And there is the further conundrum that the longer the Kremlin waits to deploy these troops-to-be-mobilized, the worse a losing situation they will be thrown into, but also that the faster they are deployed, the less-trained, less-prepared, and more poorly equipped they will be.

Part of me feels as if “partial” mobilization of Putin’s is half a public relations attempt to show that he is doing something to respond to the obvious fact that Russia is losing and he, as leader, must be seen to do something while also being half an actual attempt to actually do something that would, in theory, help the war effort, but that, in the end, it is a half-assed approach to each, a move that will fail to restore the approval and stature he has lost and is losing in the eyes of the Russian people and will not appease hardliners even as it angers nearly everyone else, a sorry measure that will not actually reverse the tide of overall failure Russia has been experiencing for almost the last six months of this seven-month war.

Because more and more, the failures outlined above are going to be obvious to all but the most credulous of Putin’s supporters and sooner rather than later (if they are not already); the rest of Russia might be going through stages of grief when it comes to their support for Putin (those that still do support him enthusiastically).  Through the acts of defiance of municipal politicians to the plea from queen of Russian pop music Alla Pugacheva, from the cracks in the normally-solid wall of Russian state television propaganda to the increasing refusal of Russian soldiers to fight in the war, it was clear earlier this month clear that Putin was losing support among the Russian people and losing it dramatically. 

Now, as hundreds of thousands of young Russian men flee their country to avoid serving in a military that will mistreat them and throw their lives away carelessly in a war they do not want to fight, Putin’s hold on power has never been weaker.  Russia’s FSB (one of the successors to the dreaded Soviet KGB) apparently counted over 260,000 men fleeing Russia from just this past Wednesday to Saturday; prices of flights out of the country are skyrocketing and flights are selling out; and traffic leaving Russia is backed up in gridlock for some ten miles on the border with Georgia, with a long line of cars also building up on Russia’s border with Mongolia and even Kazakhstan offering sanctuary to Russians fleeing Putin’s mobilization.

Mobilizing Resistance

There appears to even be something of an insurgency—or “partisan” movement—breaking out as I write this in Dagestan and perhaps elsewhere, with people resisting security forces coming to conscript men into the military and even some attacks against recruiters and recruiting centers.  Unrest, protests, and even resistance are growing particularly in regions with large non-Russian ethnic minority populations, especially Dagestan: in a sick sense, Russia is focusing disproportionately on recruiting and conscription from these communities within Russia as well as from Tatars in Russian-occupied Crimea as a way to ethnically cleanse Russia and Crimea of “undesirable” non-Russians, acts that are nothing new in the history of the Russian and Soviet Empires, as I noted some time ago.  This should not be surprising, as Putin’s ideology and system, like that of the tsardom of the Russian Empire and the worst practices of Stalin, is heavily imbued with white Slavic Russian-supremacist racism, this being a big part of the reason why Russia is by far the most violently racist country in Europe.  The disproportionate use of ethnic minorities in the military in this war is also an attempt to shield Putin’s supporters among better-off ethnic Russians in Moscow and St. Petersburg from the war’s effects. 

These dual aims expose the parasitic colonialist and imperialist nature of the Russian Federation towards its own citizens, especially in regions remote from its two aforementioned largest cities.  But these efforts come at a cost, causing unrest throughout the constituent parts of the Russian Federation, unrest that is spreading rapidly.  Even Putin’s local ally, Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, seems to be refusing to comply with the new mobilization following recent public criticism on his part of Kremlin.

*Update 11:09PM: I have been trying to wrap my head further around why the Russian mobilization is proceeding as it is, and came to an additional conclusion that also, in part, these are not only are punitive—meant to take men who would form a more liberal opposition (active protesters) and more traditional insurgents (sometimes ethnic minorities, though this is also a Russian prejudice against minorities much like the heinous “dual-loyalty” accusation anti-Semitic bigots hurl at Jews and also reminiscent of Stalinist purges of largely innocent minorities like the Crimean Tatars)—not only to see these people somewhat politically purged or ethnically cleansed, but is also preventive, to put such people under government control and take them away from their home regions where they could form the core of any rebellion or insurgency, either to overthrow Putin directly or to carry out a separatist movement on behalf of some of the largely non-Russia republics within the Russian Federation; credit to Dmitry (@wartranslated) for pointing this out. But yes, this is also Putin showing he is afraid of the people, afraid or rebellion, separatism, and being overthrown, and thinking he is somewhat preempting such movements, though, like so many of his recent decisions, its effect may have the opposite one from what he intended.

(end update)

The rapid decline of support for Putin and his war is because the social contract he made with Russians who supported him is now null and void.  “Give me your freedom, your democracy,” he winked and nodded, “and, under me, Russia will be respected and feared again, powerful at home and abroad, strong economically and stable, and reversing the collapse of the Russian Empire.”

But now, Russia is less respected than at any time in living memory.  The Potemkin Russian military has been severely degraded and roundly humiliated by the far smaller Ukraine, until recent decades a vassal of Russia’s.  States deeply under Russian influence not long ago—Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Armenia—are now distancing themselves from Moscow, defying Russian peacekeepers, or seeking American support, respectively, while other former Soviet states Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan just saw a deadly military flare-up between them.  Even though China told Russia their friendship “has no limits” early in February, the opposite is increasingly becoming the case.  And the Russian economy is already now bringing back memories of the nadirs of the Yeltsin days, with only far, far more economic pain for Russians—elites and masses—to come in the ensuing months.

These are all the things Putin essentially promised he would keep from ever happening again if Russians surrendered their freedom to him, yet here they are, happening again.  Instead of pride, now, all Russians can feel is humiliation; most of the them know this, and the whole world sees this.  And, as this has clearly been Putin’s Russia for decades, though there may be some “It’s Rasputin fault, not the tsar’s”-syndrome, most Russians will know Putin is responsible, blame him, and blame him harshly.

It is clear that the Russian military—rank-and-file and officers alike—are more aware of Putin’s failures than anyone as they wade through their own blood.  But this war is not just affecting them and regular Russians: the lifestyles of the elites—powered by luxury goods and lavish vacations—are also suffering; nobody in Russia is benefitting from this war and nobody will.  And nobody knows how bad things are going more than the very people surrounding Putin in the Kremlin, not just those closest to Putin, but the layers of bureaucracy underneath them.  When those types of mid-level government officials gave up on the Soviet system, they were happy to dismantle it from within to find some power to grasp onto amidst the system’s collapse and did not work to preserve it but to preserve themselves, one of the fatal five reasons Stephen Kotkin gives for the Soviet Union’s collapse.  Thus, the spawn of the crisis of legitimacy in Moscow that Gorbachev faced in the late 1980s and early 1990s is ready to return with a vengeance, this time targeting Putin and his regime.

Revolt, rebellion, revolution, resistance, whatever you want to call it, its smell is in the air.

See related article The Beginning of the End of Putin? Why the Russian Army May (and Should) Revolt published by Small Wars Journal March 8, 2022, which was featured on March 9 by Real Clear Defense, The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) Democracy Digest, and SOF News; also see related RCN articles excerpted and slightly adapted from that piece:

• March 9: A Look at Putin’s Disgraceful, Heartless, Barbaric Treatment of Russian Soldiers and Their Families
• March 11: On Casualties Counts in Russia’s War on Ukraine
• March 13: How Best to Penetrate Putin’s Media Iron Curtain in Russia? Dead Russian Troops
• March 19: Time for the Russian Army and Russian People to Revolt and Overthrow Putin
• September 16: I Saw This War Could Be Putin’s Undoing All the Way Back in Early March

And see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2022 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 15, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread on the Natanz attack

Minor spoilers for Clone Wars, some moderate spoilers for the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Rogue One, and Original Trilogy

SILVER SPRING—They may not center on massive battles, lightsaber duels, or major developments for the most well-known Star Wars characters, but “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace,” episodes 10 and 11 in the Third Season of Clone Wars, bear some remarkable similarities to situation the world is still trying to understand surrounding the mysterious attack against Iran’s premier nuclear research and development facility at Natanz.

Real-World Background

On early Sunday local time, the power system within the secretive, isolated, and secure nuclear facility at Natanz in Iran was “completely destroyed” in an explosion both Israeli and American intelligence officials have confirmed Israel is at least partly (perhaps and probably mostly) behind, in what may not or may yet be determined to be a cyberattack.

Iran is asserting what it sees as its right to pursue nuclear technology, and Israel is pursuing what it sees as its right of self-defense against what it sees as an existential threat: a nuclear-weapons-armed Iran. 

Iran has claimed that its intentions are purely for civilian nuclear power, an explanation Israeli dismisses as a lie, and Iran has long been hostile to Israel, with the two having engaged in proxy conflict against each other among Palestinians and, currently, in Syria and Lebanon, which both border Israel (it should also be mentioned here that it is the worse kept secret in the Middle East that Israel is the only nuclear weapons power of all the countries in that region).  Even if Iran is lying about its nuclear intentions and fully plans to develop nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that it wants them for purely defensive and deterrent reasons (every nuclear power since after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has refrained from offensive use, or any use in war, for that matter, and Iran’s enemies have openly debated military campaigns against it), yet Israel’s people and military have been targets of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the past.

Still, this concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions and ambitions is one shared by most world powers, to the degree that Iran and the five permanent-veto-wielding members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council—the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and China—as well as Germany and the European Union (EU) all signed an agreement to severely limit nuclear activity on the part of Iran in exchange for partial relief of sanctions on Iran for much of Iran’s rogue activity involving military buildups, terrorism, and interference in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East.

Israel’s political leadership under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing hawk with much in common with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership style (which I noted in detail several times) was bitterly opposed to this deal, seeking to undermine anything that could benefit Iran without a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.  Furthermore, Israel has in the past put the kibosh on hostile regional powers’ nuclear ambitions with airstrikes against then-under-construction nuclear reactors in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981 (ironically with Iran’s help) and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in 2007.  To thwart Iran’s project, Israel has carried out a series of operations—including sabotage, assassinations, and cyberattacks—against Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear personnel, Sunday’s only being the latest.  And it has long sought, and failed, to push the U.S. into militarily attacking Iran and, especially, its nuclear program.

But Israel did get both the Bush and Obama Administration’s help in carrying out Operation Olympic Games’ Stuxnet cyberwarfare attack against Natanz, an attack that took out many of Iran’s centrifuges used to enrich material needed for nuclear advancements and set back Iran’s nuclear development as much as two years, and to get both American administrations to engaged in other cyberwarfare with Iran (those wanting to know about this and cyberwarfare in general should check out Nicole Perlroth’s indispensable recent book on cyberwarfare, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends).

With its nuclear program sabotaged after Stuxnet and facing increasing economic sanctions as part of intense pressure from the international community organized and led by the Obama Administration, Iran agreed to the aforementioned nuclear deal in 2015.  But after Obama’s successor Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 (even though Iran had been in full compliance according to the most intrusive nuclear inspections in the history of such nuclear monitoring agreements, and, I would argue, foolishly withdrew, as the agreement was the only realistic, logical option), Iran has since begun activities beyond the agreement that move it closer towards (though not close to) nuclear weapons capability.  Saturday it was poised to make serious advances along this path until its Natanz facility was devastated Sunday.

Complicated Clone Wars

“OK, Brian, what the HELL does this have to do with Star Wars?” you may be asking.  By now, you’ve probably heard of, hopefully even seen, the stellar show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the final season of which dominated streaming during our pandemic summer and, as I have noted, involves some of the best Star Wars ever made including the best movies (and far better than any of the Disney Star Wars movies); if not, get to it (especially before Bad Batch premieres on May the Fourth)!

The series takes place during the Clone War(s), which begin at the end of 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and ends during 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and are mainly a series of confusing battles and campaigns between the Galactic Republic and its breakaway Separatist Alliance.  The Republic is served by a religious order known as the Jedi—including Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker—whose members operate traditionally as peacekeepers and now generals, while the Separatist Alliance in Star Wars is clearly the side of “the bad guys,” led by Count Dooku, an ex-Jedi turned Sith Lord (the Sith are the ancient enemy of the Jedi).

Dooku and key Separatist military leaders are clearly evil and clearly carry out war crimes and atrocities the Republic takes pains to avoid.  While most but hardly all of the soldiers for the Separatists are droids and, thus, not usually moral actors, it is very different for the political leaders and citizens of the planets that voted to leave the Republic and form the Separatist Alliance (a.k.a. Confederacy of Independent Systems), as noted by famous Republic Senator Padmé Amidala in Clone Wars’s “Heroes on Both Sides.”

Padmé is Naboo’s now former queen from 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is thus one of the most famous senators of the Galactic Senate (her new role after stepping down as queen).  She is also secretly married to Anakin Skywalker as of the end of Attack of the Clones, a big no-no for a Jedi and a senator.

After a debate on the war’s politics in the Senate, Anakin suggests his secret wife Padmé teach Ashoka Tano—his padawan apprentice (and now a rising superstar in the Star Wars universe)—about politics.  Anakin keeps talking, and presents a black-and-white view of the conflict with the Separatists, with which Padmé expresses disagreement and then takes Ahsoka under her wing, take up Anakin on his earlier suggestion.

Shortly after, we hear Padmé tell Ahsoka that she has friends who are Separatists, that they are not simply evil “pawns” in Dooku’s war.  She complains that she is not able to talk or meet with them because the Senate has made any formal negotiations with the Separatists illegal for fear of legitimizing their secession and cause, noting Ashoka with her clearance as a Jedi could get Padmé to neutral Mandalore, from which they could travel to Raxus to see her old mentor and current Separatist Senator Mina Bonteri.  Up for breaking the rules to help Padmé initiate peace talks, Ahsoka travels undercover with Padmé to see Bonteri on the Separatist capital of Raxus while the Separatist Senate is in session.

In a discussion with Bonteri and Padmé, Ahsoka learns that many Separatists view the Republic (and the Jedi) as the bad guys and that far from being all mindless droids or heartless killers like General Grievous and Asajj Ventress, many Separatist are real people with families who fight—and die—to defend their families and their worlds as well as their right to separate from the Republic.  Among those who died fighting Republic forces were Mina’s husband and father to their son Lux, with whom Ahsoka has humanizing exchange: he and her mom are the first Separatists besides military officers like Grievous and Ventress Ahsoka has met, she the first Jedi he has met.

When Padmé reveals there are many Republic senators eager to explore peace, despite their sharp differences of opinion, Mina decides to introduce a motion to her Separatist Senate to begin formal peace negotiations with the Republic, a motion that easily passes, Dooku himself presiding remotely over the session.

Greedy members of the Trade Federation, Banking Clan, and Techno Union are distressed by this news, as an end to the war is bad for their business interests (in which they get to play both sides off of each other [SPOILERS: as the Sith are doing]), but Dooku assures them an attack is being planned against Coruscant, the Republic’s capital world where the Senate is located, that will derail the peace process and ensure the war will continue. 

In fact, it was even in motion before the possibility of peace talks, apparently timed to ensure a vote to allow deregulation of banks so that the Republic can obtain more funding to produce and purchase more clone troopers (the bulk of the Republic’s fighting forces) would pass after the obvious outrage and bloodlust such an attack would inspire.  The special droid units that will carry out the attack have been designed to look just like the Republic cleaning droids that service one of Coruscant’s main power generators, right by the Senate.  These droids also have been given security passes that will allow them to bypass security.  All in all, it’s a pretty sophisticated plan, utilizing information obtained from the inside and obviously planned long before we find out about it.

Shortly before the deregulation vote, when Padmé tells Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, the leader of the Republic (from her planet Naboo and a senator from there before becoming Chancellor, with Padmé’s help, at the end of The Phantom Menace), that they should give the Separatist offer to engage in peace talks a serious chance, he responds by saying “I can see why you would want so badly to believe that the Separatists. desire peace…In the past whenever we’ve reached out our hands in peace, they’ve been slapped away.  Can we believe that they’re ready to sue for peace so easily?” (such is a common refrain from many in the real world arguing against peace talks or diplomacy).

In response, Padmé confides to Palpatine that she knows the offer is genuine because she “been in contact” with her “old friend” Mina Bonteri and that Bonteri is the sponsor of the proposal.  The Chancellor takes special note of remembering it was Bonteri, (SPOILER) as he is secretly Dooku’s Sith Lord master, orchestrating the war from both sides so his power can rise and the Jedi can fall both in public opinion and from their position of power in the Republic, to be cute down and wiped out (we already see the war, from Lux’s point of view, has damaged the reputation of the Jedi for many regular Separatist citizens).

Just as voting begins in light of the new Separatist peace proposal, the Separatists droids, which have been smuggled into Coruscant and the nearby power station, change form from their cleaning droid disguises to instruments of death and destruction, killing the generator workers and then turning themselves into bombs for a “suicide bombing” (as the intro the next episode calls it) that destroys the power station, plunging that sector of the capital into chaos as the power goes off for millions (maybe even billions) of people and explosions rock the area, terrifying civilians.

Sirens wail inside the Senate as eerie red emergency lighting kicks in, and it doesn’t take long for some Senators realize (or are told?) it is a Separatist attack.  Outraged, they begin calling for revenge and to pass the bill to deregulate the banks so they can pay for more clones.  Padmé pleads with her fellow senators that the peace proposal is serious, an argument not well-received by the panicked and angry Senate.  “Obviously a tactic to lower our defenses and launch this attack,” responds Palpatine’s right-hand man.

On their way out of the main Senate chamber and still bathed in the emergency lighting, Ahsoka and Padmé are approached by Anakin in the hallway, scolding them for their unsanctioned diplomacy, but Ashoka closes out the episode by admitting that while maybe she had gone too far, “I did realize something: the politics of this war and not as black and white as I once thought they were.”

The next episode, “Pursuit of Peace,” we learn that the Senate in their anger has “overwhelmingly” passed the bill to deregulate the banks so they can move forward on new loans for more clones and an intensification of the war effort, but Padmé isn’t giving up on her pursuit of peace. 

But many of her colleagues feel differently.  A Senator (a Kaminoan, the species responsible for manufacturing the clones) proposes legislation to purchase five million more clones from the Kaminoan government and to raise the funds from the Banking Clan (now free to charge exorbitant interest that would bankrupt the Republic) to make the purchase.  When Padmé states she’d rather “stop the war, not escalate it,” the Senate erupts, many calling her a traitor and a Separatist.

The Naboo senator hardly backs down: “Whoever attacked the power grid wants us to continue the fight.  It’s a calculated attempt to destroy the peace process,” she pleads earnestly to the Senate.  Almost immediately after, a message is received and played from Count Dooku, informing the Senate that an apparent Republic attack has killed Mina Bonteri and that he is formally withdrawing the peace proposal as a result.

Padmé is crushed; the Chancellor tries to contain a smile.

Leaving the Senate chamber, her ally Senator Bail Organa (later the adoptive father of Anakin’s and Padmé daughter, Leia) approaches Padmé to let her know Republic spies found out that Dooku’s people were the ones who killed her friend, Mina, making Dooku’s message pure gaslighting (SOILERS: what many viewers will know but which probably only Dooku and Palpatine will know in the Star Wars universe is that Palpatine would have been the one to pass onto Dooku that Bonteri was responsible for the peace process on the Separatist side after Padmé confided this to Palpatine and Palpatine’s telling reaction to this information, such that Palpatine clearly instructed Dooku to silence Bonteri to derail the peace process on the Separatist side).

Aside from Senators who genuinely want to increase the war effort, Bonteri’s death—though she is a Separatist—has a chilling, intimidating effect on those in the Republic Senate who are undecided or wanting to vote against the proposed legislation.  Furthermore, Dooku has hired underworld elements to intimidate (even beat) key Senators wavering or against the bill, including Organa, and to eventually try to assassinate Padmé (and let us not forget that, in our own world, former President Trump clearly tried just a few months ago to incite a violent insurrectionist mob to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he lost, members of whom wanted to assassinate Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and others).  This is a great episode where a lot of important things happen, but for our purposes we can end this review by noting Padmé, after just barely surviving an assassination attempt, ends up delivering on the Senate floor one of the best speeches of the whole series, preventing the passage of the bill that would bankrupt the Republic and escalate the war effort.  But the chance for peace has been dashed and the war will go on and on.

Real-World Debates and Another Attack on a Power System

Back to our own world.

The tactic to time an attack to derail diplomacy or undermine one or more factions, and the responses to those seeking peace that “we cannot take the other side seriously because diplomacy didn’t work last time” or that “negotiations themselves are a ploy meant to get us to let our guard down” are extremely common in real life; so is questioning the loyalty of those wanting peace, or calling them traitors who side with the enemy.

As far as the situation in the Middle East there is some important context to what very much seems to be the Israeli (or at least Israeli-led) attack on Natanz and its power station.  The day before, Iran had just introduced and announced putting into operation advanced centrifuges at Natanz.  Just a few days later would be Israel’s Independence Day.  And the week before, negotiations between the original nuclear deal signatories were beginning in Vienna.  Netanyahu has made no secret of his longstanding opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, opposition shared by most Israelis but that fails to recognize the constraints of reality.  Though it was a top priority of the Obama Administration, Netanyahu actively campaigned against it, even both challenging it in a direct address to the U.S. Congress in 2015 and claiming in 2018 to have convinced Trump to follow through on his pledged to scrap it. 

Apart from symbolically playing to a domestic audience just before Israel Independence Day and hitting Iran’s centrifuges just as Iran was celebrating their upgrades, then, there is the far more substantive timing-related goals of Netanyahu’s to derail the restart of the diplomatic process with Iran that Biden and many others hope will resurrect the nuclear deal Trump destroyed and to sabotage Iran’s program until it can be destroyed or ended.

Clearly, Netanyahu prefers confrontation and war (ideally, for him, led by the U.S.) that will rid Iran both of its nuclear program and its current regime entirely, a preference shared by his new Gulf friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been brought together through their hatred of Iran and at Trump’s encouragement; in essence, a Sunni-Shiite Cold War led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other has merged into the longstanding hostilities between Israel and Iran and the U.S. and Iran, making for some strange yet enthusiastic bedfellows.

So, much like Dooku, Netanyahu seems to have launched an attack that hit a power station that was about more about attacking a power station.  Like the attack on Coruscant, a big part of the rationale for the attack on Natanz was derailing promising diplomatic negotiations, to destroy trust between the parties, and provoke a reaction that will make good-faith negotiations much, much harder.  As in Clone Wars with the Republic, Iran sees this as a terrorist attack.  Like the Separatists and the Republic, there are complicated factions and rivalries both on and under the surface: segments allied and in relationships with or part of the parties meeting in Vienna that are not fully on board with the negotiations and want them to fail whether or not they say so publicly, and who supported an attack and will want the other side to think those with whom they are negotiating supported the attack, too.

In fact, there is vigorous debate in both America and Iran, as we saw in the Republic and Separatist Senates, about pursuing war vs. diplomacy, with moderate and liberal camps in each emphasizing diplomacy and hardliners in both camps preferring confrontation.  To some degree, the U.S. as Israel’s closest ally is tainted by this attack regardless of whether it was for or against it or took part in it or not; at the same time, those in the Iranian diplomatic delegation know that they, too, may be painted by Iran’s response if it is deemed to go “too far.”

Still, unlike with the Separatists successfully derailing peace negotiations, it is very likely the nuclear negotiations will continue (indeed, they have already resumed with Iranian officials, as of today) and that a breakthrough will be reached eventually, as, unlike the Separatists, Iran has few friends and no massive Separatist Alliance spread throughout the galaxy, let alone a Sith Lord like Dooku to lead it; Iran, thus, is in a far weaker position than the Separatists, one only further weakened now that this attack is estimated to have set Iran’s nuclear program back around nine months, undermining its position for negotiations.

As Clone Wars teaches us, things are not “always as black and white” as we think or as straightforward as they seem, Natanz being a prime example.  As in “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can often be complex and multilayered, so we should look at the Natanz attack and its motivations and surrounding issues as complex and multilayered, and avoid simplistic criticism or reductionism in most cases.  Only then can we begin to truly understand the broader strategic and tactical calculations at work in the minds of the various parties here.

Padmé, Portman, Politics, and Blowback

I would also like to note that I remember seeing this pair of episodes for the first time and realizing how perfectly these roles for Padmé would suit Natalie Portman, who played Padmé in the live-action movies (nothing against the excellent Catherine Taber, who voices her in Clone Wars).

I say this because Portman as a young Jewish, Israeli-born adult became quite a vocal defender of Israel at a time when Israel became one of the centers of world politics as the Second Intifada (the second main grassroots rebellion of Palestinians against Israeli occupation and their own ineffective leaders) raged.  And yet, in more recent years, she has not shied away from criticizing the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu for their right-wing (in her words, “racist”) policies, to the degree that she even refused to accept an the Israeli Genesis Award, often referred to as Israel’s version of the Nobel Peace Prize.  For this, an Israeli government minister said that “Natalie Portman’s actions border on anti-Semitism,” that she “played into the hands of the haters of Israel and those who aspire to destroy the State of Israel,” sounding an awful lot like Padmé’s fellow senators’ criticism of her in the “Pursuit of Peace” episode. 

The politically active and passionate Portman, then, is someone who could appreciate both sides of a conflict and would have appreciated her character’s role in these Clone Wars episodes that mirror not only the Natanz attack today but other issues that were fairly common in the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Portman’s own life perhaps influencing at least a little the showrunners’ interpretation of Padmé in Clone Wars.

(Minor SPOILERS next two paragraphs) It is also worth noting that, in the following season, we find Lux Bonteri has become radicalized after the death of his mother and seeks out an alliance with an extremist Mandalorian terrorist group—the Death Watch—to plot revenge against Dooku for ordering his mother to be murdered… kind of like happens so many times in war or counterterrorism operations, when collateral damage turns family and friends of the wounded and dead into violent extremists who support and/or join terrorist or insurgent movements all around the world.

In the following season, Lux has joined a rebel movement to overthrow a Separatist-controlled government on his homeworld of Onderon.  A key member of this rebel group is Saw Gerrera, who is radicalized further in this fight after the death of his sister, Steela, and would be instrumental in the future in helping the Rebel Alliance from the Original Trilogy get off its feet and, in particular, in the events that led to the Rebels discovering the secret weakness of the Empire’s first Death Star in Rogue One, a discovery that allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star at the end of the very first Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  The willingness of Palpatine and Dooku to use Lux’s mother and the people of Onderon as pawns in their game would end up leading, over many years, to the Sith’s undoing.

The lesson here?  It’s always worth considering the less-anticipated potential effects of any particular action.  In our present, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. may find their actions will come to haunt them in unimaginable ways for years to come if they are not careful.

Dooku Disclaimers

I want to be clear: I am not claiming the Israelis are just like the Separatists or that Netanyahu is an evil Sith Lord (nor, for that matter, am I claiming that Iran is like the Republic in any general, overall sense).  I am in no way claiming the Jewish people or Israelis are like “the bad guys” in Star Wars, just simply noting how specific plot and thematic elements from these Clone Wars episodes fit illustratively into the current events discussed (and even in Clone Wars, we can see that most of the civilian Separatists dislike the Republic, understandably, for its very real corruption on display in these episodes more than usual and that they take their ideals and independence seriously).

Count Dooku and Chancellor Palpatine could in part certainly fit the descriptions in longstanding anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories—shadowy, big-nosed, behind-the-scenes manipulators in dark robes practicing the occult and controlling financial interests—but that is not the at all the intent of George Lucas or the showrunner Dave Filoni, nor the producers, cast, and staff of Clone Wars, nor is that how we should read into any of this.  And yes, the Banking Clan is led by the Muun species that has big noses, but it’s a stretch to claim they are supposed to represent or denigrate Jewish people: they are aliens who look like… aliens. 

At a time of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, it is crucial to note that there is no serious hint at Dooku, Palpatine, or the Muuns being Jewish or that the intent of portraying the Sith Lords or Muuns in these ways is to try to equate them with or make them resemble Jews or associate their factions with the real-world Jewish state of Israel.  Anyone who really thinks this is what Star Wars is getting at simply does not understand the true spirit of Star Wars or the artists’ intent, though it’s understandable some would interpret this differently in our hyper-politicized, hyper-racialized times.  At its heart, Star Wars celebrates diversity, with waking carpets, humans of different colors and genders, and even robots coming together to fight for freedom and justice throughout the galaxy.

Yet as “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can get ugly and complicated, whether in Star Wars or our current Earth, including the attack at Natanz.  I lived for over five years in the Middle East, from 2014-2019, studied abroad there briefly in 2011, studied the region from afar for many other years.  And I can tell you that, while, yes, some things are pretty black-and-white—say, ISIS is terrible—other things are a lot more complicated.  As examples:

• Iran is seen by many as a bad-guy pariah in the region, yet the current pretty awful government only came to power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 after, and in reaction to, the U.S. and British orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup that saw a far more monarchical and repressive government put in its place, and while expanding its power through supporting various Shiite Islamic militias throughout the Middle East that many view as terrorists, it is important to remember that Iran is only serious Shiite Muslim power and that Shiite Islam has been oppressed by Sunni Muslim leaders throughout the region for centuries (Sunnis are by far the largest bloc of Muslims, Shiites being the one major minority), to the degree that, without Shiite militias and Iran’s support for them in places like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, often few if any people stick up for the rights and dignity of Shiite Muslims.
• Saudi Arabia is one of America’s oldest allies in the Middle East and supplies much of the world with oil, but has a terrible human rights record and when it comes to Islamic extremism, the Saudis are, to quote Brookings scholar William McCants from an amazing article by the amazing journalist Scott Shane, “both the arsonists and the firefighters.”
• Israel and Turkey are two other longtime regional allies of the U.S., Israel a fellow democracy and Turkey a longtime member of the de-facto-U.S.-led NATO Alliance, but both have been veering hard to the right under right-wing leaders (Turkey into dictatorship territory) and actively oppressing the region’s Palestinians and Kurds, respectively. 
• And while America promotes human rights throughout the Middle East—even saving Yazidis from Genocide in 2014 with anti-ISIS airstrikes and coordination with Kurdish forces on the ground ordered by Obama—it has often supported oppressive dictators and kings, such as Saddam Hussein when he was willing to fight Iran (until we didn’t, eventually overthrowing him in a disastrous war launched in 2003), even as it still confronts its own domestic injustices in the present. 

I could go on, but the point is, there are a lot of complicated motivations and behaviors going on, often many good and many bad acts being committed by the same leader or country, and even many of the more destabilizing and violent actors have their own very legitimate grievances while some of the actors with the best of intentions inflict incredible amounts of harm.  There is often plenty of blame to go around.  As just one example, Israel deserves a lot of the criticism directed at it, while at the same time, a lot of the criticism direct at Israel is outlandishly unfair and anti-Semitic; the context and specifics of each specific criticism need to be evaluated separately. 

This is hardly to claim that all the parties involved in this Natanz drama are morally equal or moral equivalents (far from it), but we’re not going to focus on such questions (which I have dealt with elsewhere) here; the main takeaway is that Ahsoka’s lesson from “Heroes on Both Sides” is quite applicable to our current drama.

In the end, I am simply noting the similarities in details and context between some events from two great episodes of Clone Wars and our own reality, how pondering the fictional galaxy from a long time ago and far, far away can shed light on our real world, how a Star Wars cartoon can surprisingly teach us lessons about nuclear intrigue and Middle East diplomacy in 2021 as well as about our past and even our future.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s Twitter thread on the Natanz attack and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

—George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State/Underlying Conditions,” The Atlantic, June 2020 issue preview

I met fellow American Coco Tang years ago in Amman, Jordan, while she was on a Fulbright.  When not working as a consultant, she moonlights as a medic in some of the world’s worst hotspots.  Her postings have found her supporting as a medic both Iraqi Special Forces during the battle of Mosul against ISIS and OSCE patrols in Eastern Ukraine, working in refugee camps in Syria and Bangladesh, working in a clinic in Afghanistan, treating vulnerable women in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, assessing local health in Ethiopia, and working in Sierra Leone as part of the Ebola response there.  She goes to some of the most dangerous places in the world to offer medical support, often in extreme humanitarian and medical emergencies.

And now she finds herself offering medical support in New York City during a pandemic, deployed by a medical company to the front lines in the war against COVID-19 here at home.

“When I worked in Iraq or Syria, there was an expectation of austerity. When you work in NYC, the austerity feels surreal.  Experiencing it in a place like NYC reminds me that COVID, in a lot of ways, is a great equalizer.”

That is what makes bioweapons as a weapon of war or terrorism so terrifying to powerful countries like America: it reduces the conventional operational planes in a way that is so unconventional and asymmetric that its extreme asymmetry rips the powerful far from their accustomed, advantaged positions.  

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just recently remarked that the U.S. coronavirus response makes it look like “like a third-world country.”  Tang has experienced a similar feeling in New York: “People expect pandemics to be a third-world problem. People expect problems like PPE [personal protective equipment] shortages to be a third-world problem.”  And, yet, here she was, grappling with serious equipment shortages during a pandemic here the U.S., and not in Appalachia, but in New York City, in Manhattan.  “COVID exposes that we aren’t any better than those countries we always look down on.  That at the end of the day, America is just a homeless person wearing fancy clothes.”

Tang was not even being asked about bioweapons when she made that statement, but she still nailed one of the central issues in biowarfare and unconventional warfare and how COVID-19 relates to it.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, Max Boot wrote that “all guerrilla and terrorist tactics…are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.”  Bioweapons just do this on a deeper, more frightening scale, and coronavirus is showing us that natural pandemics can have the same effect.  In many ways, our current pandemic is a preview of a major bioweapons attack, and it has exposed us as woefully unprepared, with our government having been shown to be unable to protect us, thought of by many to be the primary role of government.  It could have, but it did not.  Americans’ faith in institutions has already been crumbling for some time, and now that level of faith will be even lower.

Feeling the need to explain why she was writing her article in March for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum made her case in stark terms that reflected Tang’s imagery:

I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism.  This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

…The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.

George Packer also wrote for The Atlantic, echoing Tang, Applebaum, and Stiglitz in a pieced titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” with the lead “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”  Packer does not hold back as he opens his article’s body:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.  Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.  We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.  It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective.  The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

…With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter.

Explaining how we got to this state, Packer writes that “all the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.”  Not only are we losing this war, this war is forcing us to see our national ugliness by relentlessly shining a spotlight onto it and forcing us to look nonstop.  Packer, again, puts it eloquently: “If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half.  Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

In periods of pestilence, there is a tendency for those fault lines to be racial, ethnic, and religious, with those types of hatreds being only too eagerly released and minority groups being blamed for the outbreaks.

Just to name one foreign example for today, in Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi’s India, anti-Islamic bigotry is becoming mixed up in the country’s response to coronavirus.

If we go back in time, ignorant and/or covetous Christians in fourteenth-century Europe blamed Jews for the Black Death and massacred many thousands of them across the continent, destroying whole communities and ethnically cleansing Jews from entire regions (just in Mainz alone, over 6,000 Jews perished from a plague-inspired pogrom in 1349).  If we fast-forward to today, Jews are also being blamed in very anti-Semitic fashion by a range of extremists around the world (including in America) for unleashing coronavirus as some sort of organized plot, bringing down “God’s” vengeance in the form of the virus, or of profiting off the pandemic (or a combination of these); billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros is even frequently accused of creating the virus.

In the U.S., Asian-Americans and Asians are also being attacked—including physically—and blamed for the virus “because” of the virus’s Chinese origin, with anti-Asian hate crimes very much on the rise, yet the federal government is not being proactive in pushing back against this hate, with problematic language coming from the White House itself only adding fuel to the fire.

There is also the persistent racism and pervasive inequality that long-plagued American society, with socioeconomic status, harsher living and working conditions, and unequal access to quality healthcare experienced disproportionately by certain groups of people contributing to their having chronic health issues that make the virus more serious and more deadly for them than for members of more advantaged communities.  Inequality also makes it far harder for some disadvantaged groups to take appropriate actions to protect themselves; in the words of Charles Blow writing for The New York Times, “Staying at home is a privilege.  Social distancing is a privilege.  The people who can’t must make terrible choices: Stay home and risk starvation or go to work and risk contagion.”  Problems of race, ethnicity, and class are only made worse by coronavirus.

In particular, the inequalities that have long been inflicted upon African-Americans have been resulting in incredibly disproportionately high deaths and serious infections from COVID-19 for African-Americans.  Just in Chicago, by the end of the first week of April, African-Americans had accounted for seventy percent of COVID-19 deaths even though they just made up thirty percent of the population.  And Chicago is hardly alone, with major disparities for black Americans in terms of coronavirus being the norm across the country.

Other groups in America are also suffering disproportionately from this pandemic.  Long-neglected Native Americans are also particularly vulnerable and experiencing extremely high rates of coronavirus problems.  Latinos are also quite disproportionately affected by COVID-19.  And lower-income people of all backgrounds have relatively borne the brunt of not only the virus itself, but also the massive economic harm inflicted by the pandemic.

As Max Brooks noted in a mid-March interview, “All of these terrible, terrible trends that we’ve been sowing for so long are coming back to haunt us right at this minute.”

Our unending, longstanding American divisions—politically partisan and otherwise—are only intensified by this unconventional, asymmetric pandemic, much like the unconventional, asymmetric threats from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars and Russian election interference aggravated existing American societal fault lines.  The virus, rather than showing our ability to unite, is instead exposing—even more than recent politics—our capacity for coming apart.  For Packer,

the virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines.  The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human.  But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.

Then there is the black hole where our coordinated national response should have been.

The most extreme example of this has manifested itself in a disturbing, unprecedented, and stunning situation that just unfolded in Maryland, exemplifying a breakdown in the constitutional order and national fabric not seen since the era of desegregation.  This stunning incident hints at China’s twentieth-century warlord era, when the Qing Dynasty’s central government broke down and basically melted away in so many places to such levels that China de facto became a relatively large number of separate states run by warlords who had to step up and provide leadership in the void left by the Qing.  They also had to contend with the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists as everyone fought each other, with the Japanese Imperial Army and WWII eventually merging into the conflicts; dysfunction and chaos reigned (and incidentally, remember, this situation would eventually see the most extensive use of bioweapons in the history of warfare).  To return to the American present, in the absence of timely or coherent support from the federal government, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and his wife, Maryland First Lady Yumi Hogan—of Korean descent—negotiated with South Korea to obtain 500,000 coronavirus tests.  The process took twenty-two days and the tests were flown over from South Korea, with the Korea Air passenger plane—which would normally have landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC—being diverted to Baltimore-Washington International airport in Maryland, the first time that airline has ever flown to that the airport.  This was done purposefully to prevent the seizure of the tests by the federal government, which had earlier seized three million protective masks ordered by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker for his state, among other seizures from governors taking matters into their own hands because of the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to directly supply the states with necessary quantities of emergency supplies.  It is remarkable that states that had asked for federal aid, had their requests denied or unfulfilled, then followed the Administration’s advice to procure their own supplies then saw federal authorities seize those very supplies.  It is also worth noting that both Govs. Hogan and Baker are Republicans along with Trump, not to say that should make a difference but to point out how even fellow Republicans are unable to work with the current Administration.  Also out fear of the tests being seized at the airport, Hogan had “a large contingent” of Maryland National Guard troops and State Police sent to secure the tests and transport them to “an undisclosed location” that is purposely being kept secret from the federal government. Those tests are still being guarded by Maryland National Guard and State Police at that location to protect them from possible federal seizure, with Hogan saying the cargo “was like Fort Knox to us” since the tests were “going to save the lives of thousands of our citizens” and noting the earlier federal seizures of supplies ordered by other states.

In effect, Maryland’s sitting governor—in the same political party as the president—ran a clandestine operation to prevent life-saving equipment Maryland taxpayers had bought and paid for from falling into the clutches of the Trump Administration after that administration had failed to provide Maryland with requested aid and those coronavirus tests are still being guarded at a secret location by security forces under the command of the governor. 

In case this is not clear, that is a total breakdown of the relationship between Maryland and the federal government, with Maryland essentially rebelling against the Trump Administration’s potential designs and actual authority.  Gov. Hogan essentially became a de facto rogue governor—much like warlords in China after the Qing dynasty disintegrated and left a power vacuum of chaos in its wake—when it came to securing and protecting coronavirus tests for Marylanders.  One can only hope this is the first and last example of anything like this happening during the pandemic, but that hope is not carried with any certainty.

To add to Maryland’s woes, the state just canceled a $12.5 million order for other important emergency equipment—1.5 million protective masks and 110 ventilators—from a brand-new firm founded by two Republican political operatives.  The company was drastically overcharging for the masks and the items were supposed to ship by mid-April, but there is no indication they have shipped, and despite repeated requests from Maryland on the order status, no information on the shipping has been provided, prompting the cancellation at a time when Maryland is seeing a surge in cases and deaths.

Yes, right now, we are seeing states, the private sector, and the Executive Branch beg for, haggle, and tussle over urgently-needed PPE and other lifesaving supplies.  In other words, too much is being left to chance, the market, the whims of suppliers, and the relative means of various states even in the middle of a pandemic, with the private sector playing a mighty role, one that involves price and bidding wars.  The result of this top-down-driven logistical nightmare is that vital medical supplies and equipment are in short supply in too many places in America fighting this pandemic.  People, both patients and healthcare workers, are getting sick and dying after being in situations where they did not have what they should have had.

Even if the vaunted Defense Production Act—a Korean War-era law greatly empowering the government to direct industry in times of emergency—had been robustly and properly executed (and it still has not), a tremendous amount of the logistics would still have come down to an ad hoc approach.  And the ad hoc approach is only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about this current crisis, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  At the same time, the military does not have any recent experience managing national operations across most or all U.S. states at once (or operating withing domestic local, state, and federal legal systems) and much of the military’s operations would have to be also handled in an ad hoc way, with dozens of senior officers having to liaise with dozens of governors and far more local officials to coordinate efforts in addition to private-sector entities; they would rely heavily on their civilian counterparts, most of whom would have little or no training or understanding of how to respond to such a situation or work with military officials; one hopes coronavirus will swiftly bring about a filling-in of these gaps in expertise).  Writing for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI), Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle notes that National Guard troops have been deployed as part of coronavirus responses in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, yet the existing frameworks for Guard deployments to be robust parts of these local responses are far from ideal in this unprecedented situation.  Specifically, federalizing Guard units would be highly problematic since so many Guard personnel are much-needed local first-responders in their civilian roles.

Without proper supplies allocated, distribution networks and equipment, and the personnel to run and move under the direction of the government, as noted, individual states are having to compete in bidding wars and fights over supplies with each other, businesses, the federal government, and even foreign countries just to get desperately needed life-saving supplies.  In what Gen. Honoré called a supply chain situation that he has “never heard…before in my life [that]… look[s] like they have let the literal wolf inside the henhouse,” states are being bypassed for direct aid by the federal government for corporations to then sell to states and, overall, there is little to no oversight, no singular body distributing supplies nationally based on objective needs-based criteria (by mid-April, Montana, with few cases, was getting over $300,000 in federal aid per case, while New York, the epicenter of coronavirus in America, was just getting $12,000 per case). 

There is even at least the appearance that federal disbursement and non-disbursement is happening as a form of political favoritism, as quid pro quos.  On top of all this, the federal government’s own stockpile was nearly empty as of early April apart from federally-confiscated supplies bought and paid for (and needed) by private hospitals and state and local authorities, activity we delved into earlier with the shocking case from Maryland.  Together these factors are just further amplifying senses of desperation, helplessness, and violation of trust. 

Adding to those panicked feelings are how the White House has handled communications: as U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim writes also for MWI, all this is further exacerbated “by public communications that has been haphazard, to say the least,” and in visible ways for all to see that undermine America’s standing in the world and encourage our authoritarian adversaries.  Our own officials have even concluded that Russian intelligence is even “likely” using the pandemic to gain information on U.S. logistical weaknesses.

Sadly, we have seen with the federal response and in other responses that political leaders are free to ignore or contradict the advice of medical and intelligence experts, and suppress or remove truth-tellers from important positions, thus, simply having expert advisors does not cut it; to some degree, both voting populations and politicians will have to take seriously the need for familiarity with pandemic response; voters should be choosing those with a demonstrated and committed deference both to experts and to self-learning and voters must then hold those leaders accountable; if they do not, they will be rewarding non-seriousness with high office, encouraging other politicians to follow suit.  These are, after all, the basics of democracy, and if voters do not reward competence, seriousness, and expertise, a great many of them will, to some degree, reap what they so after failing in their role as citizens.  In this time of pandemic, for Masha Gessen, “it’s very important to continue to notice the ways in which our government is failing us, even if those ways have become familiar and exhausting.”  The hope is that this pandemic will teach voters to take their votes more seriously, as George Packer recognizes: “We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.”

Brooks agrees that, ultimately, we as citizens in a democracy are the ones who are responsible:

Everything that goes wrong in China with this virus is directly laid at the feet of Xi Jinping.  He has all the power, so he has all the responsibility.  Every death is on his hands.

But, by the same token, we are responsible for our own deaths in this country.  If we don’t like our leaders—well, then, look in the mirror; we put them there. We voted for them.  If we don’t like the way the CDC is handling this virus, well, who voted to defund the CDC?  Who didn’t listen to the cries of health professionals saying, “Wait a minute, they’re defunding the CDC!”?  We didn’t listen.  We were like, “Oh, my god.  Friends is on Netflix.  I have bingeing to do!  I have things!  There’s an app where I can put bunny ears on myself and send it out!”

In a dictatorship like China, you can blame the top.  In a democracy, in a republic, we have to blame [who we see in] the mirror.

But the main national election is still a while away as the pandemic rages.  Given the systemic failures, just allowing the military to take over the response is tempting—whether now or in the future—and while that carries with it its own issues, it is clear the current civilian structures do not have the capacity to handle this type of threat, except maybe if our leaders are extraordinary, and most of the time, that is not the quality of leadership we empower.

At the same time, coronavirus is exposing the military’s own shortcomings within itself, with Army Reserve Capt. James Long noting in another MWI piece that “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners,” is further adding to the damage being done by the virus.  And, while Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck noted in an additional MWI article that, in past major wars, large-scale epidemic response was an important part of U.S. military operations, that has not been the case for decades.  Thus, though the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed in the current crisis, we cannot expect the current military to be a replacement.  This sentiment is echoed in yet another MWI piece penned by U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor.” For him, the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.

In another piece, I will release my proposal to reform the government to put us in a far better position to deal with biodefense: the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR).  But for now, I will simply leave you with a recognition of how woefully inadequate the current structure of the government is to deal with these type of threats and how dependent the it is on having exceptional leadership that is able to quickly make all the right decisions on an ad hoc basis, an overall unlikely outcome, but also with the warning that there are far deeper societal ills that coronavirus has exposed in America that no new government department or piece of legislation can fix.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)  June 13, 2020

SILVER SPRING—“I am going to take a break from my normal approach to writing and, instead, be more free-form here.  I have documented the true horrors of racism in the U.S. (and beyond) for years, in particular the persistent, living legacy of slavery and its detestable offspring embedded throughout our system confronting African-Americans in America today, the evidence for the existence of which is not only supremely compelling but overwhelmingly incontrovertible.  Each of my past pieces just linked to are base camps in which I provide many links by far more knowledgeable and accomplished people than myself for you to explore, should you want to learn more or, absurdly, if you doubt the premise itself (and then I beseech you even more to explore those sources).

Like any horror, whether terrorism, murder, sexual assault, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, etc., not all racism and not all racists are equal.  There is a spectrum, then, and the more we familiarize ourselves with it, the more we can deal with these elements in a divide-and-conquer strategy for success, whether smashing their grip on political and legal power wherever they hold any of it or peeling off some of the less nefarious on the lower-end of the spectrum into the arms of the enlightened (or “woke,” if you must).”

I categorized ten distinct stages as the best representation of the range of white racism in America, but there is certainly room for sub-categories that can exist in between and I view this as a 1.0, with future revisions a possibility.  Elements from lower tiers can be in upper tiers (e.g., I’m sure 6 applies to most in 1-5).  Also, to be clear for those who would derail this based on semantics, we are using the commonly-understood definition in which the term racism also includes discriminating against ethnicities, not just “races” (yes, sadly, I’ve heard racists tell me that that bigotry against Latinos, Arabs, Indians, Jews, etc. does not count as being “racist” because those groups aren’t races…).

So, without further ado, here are the ten main types of white racists in America, starting with the most racist:

1.) You wear a hood/swastika, burn crosses, march with tiki torches, openly say screw X group of people based on skin color/race/ethnicity, or wish you could do these things even if you’re not open about it.  Preserving the racial purity and racial hierarchy of the United States by excluding or kicking out non-whites and fighting against assertive minority-rights movements is of the utmost importance to you.  Under such thinking, whites can be viewed as “superior,” or “supremacist,” relative to most or all other races/non-white ethnicities.  You subscribe to a mini-renaissance of junk pseudoscience about how Africans and others are actually genetically inferior in terms of intelligence, and your subscription to these ideas without spending the necessary energy finding the plenty of evidence showing how this is quite easily debunked is as much proof of your racism as the other stuff.

2.) You do not openly express hate for X groups or profess fidelity to a white “superiority” over X groups, but as a white person, you express “white pride” and feel whites need to unite to stand up for each other: this makes you a “white nationalist.”  A lot of “all lives matter” people fall into this category, seeing assertion of black and other identities as a threat to them personally and to “their” fellow whites.  Politics for you is often about preserving the political power of “your” group and preserving “American culture,” by which you mean “white culture.”  You consciously believe in blocking access to power akin to your group’s own for these other groups and freely admit, at least to yourself, that you want to see whites’ privileged position in the American societal hierarchy preserved.  While not subscribing to ideas of white genetic, innate superiority, you likely subscribe to ideas of white cultural superiority and want to fight to preserve “white culture.”

(HISTORY LESSON: There’s no “black” ethnic group in Africa.  American slavers took people mostly from West Africa—a region consisting of numerous ethnic groups with distinct languages, histories, cultures, and traditions—and bred them like horses and livestock for centuries, forming them into one group that became African-American, mixing all kinds of African ethnicities into a new one that could not be distinguished by separate African ethnicities or points of origin easily and became a new, man-made ethnicity, kind of a form of a “genteel” Southern antebellum forced genetic engineering…  So African-American as a label, though artificially created by the slave trade, is still like Italian-American, Irish-American, Salvadoran-American, or Chinese-American as opposed to being analogous to white Americans.  “White-American” as an ethnicity is not actually thing, it’s a broader category; comparing it to African-American is comparing apples and oranges, like comparing Canada to Asia.  If you’re not identifying yourself in this sense mainly as your “ancestors’ countries of origins-American” but are self-selecting white as your identity, that’s not an ethnic group and it’s absurd, and if you feel the need to do that in response to African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and others asserting their identities, you’re revealing a racist mentality.  It’s like the “Confederate” rebel monuments that were put up not in the 1860s and 1870s but mainly from 1890-1940 to assert Jim Crow inequality, in response to anti-lynching efforts, and as a slap in the face of the budding Civil Rights movement.  White pride is, thusly, basically a racist way to push back against people of color asserting their rights/identities but without explicitly aligning with the terrorist Ku Klux Klan or other explicitly Nazi or fascist hate groups.)

3.) You keep your moderately racist misgivings to yourself and do not feel yourself a “white pride” person, perhaps even feel guilty about some of your views/status, but more quietly support, with a wink and a nod, structures and politicians that will keep white privilege alive.  You know you are doing this and it’s a conscious choice because you feel it’s “your country” or whatever, that “your people” built this country, not “those people.”  Rather than consciously feeling a general unified “white culture” chauvinism, you see certain black and brown cultures as inferior and ascribe African-Americans to such an inferior category.

4.) You deny racism against African-Americans and others is a thing and claim that there are no institutional barriers or systemic racism for blacks or other non-whites in America, that these issues are “made up” by Democrats to artificially “divide” people, (as if the realities of racism don’t do this already).  You may even believe the insanity that racism against whites is as bad as or worse than racism against blacks.  All this takes an insane amount of willful ignorance, ignoring mountains of data and history and a refusal to understand how history affects the present to the relative benefit of white Americans compared with African-Americans.

5.) You actually acknowledge racism is a real thing, but subscribe to the cultural inferiority/superiority chauvinism against blacks and others described earlier.  You justify racism as not only natural, but acceptable because you think those other groups face challenges primarily because they make poor decisions as a group and that they are often deservedly targeted by police as a group (though maybe sometimes unfairly as individuals) as a result, and are discriminated against, mainly because of this.  Thus, in your view, housing discrimination is just a way for better, harder-working Americans to keep their neighborhoods safe and nice and discrimination in education and employment exists because “certain” groups of people just don’t have the same motivation and work ethic as white in general do (these people will often also point to the high standardized test scores of some Asian groups to “prove” this assertion).  Police and criminal justice issues disproportionately affect blacks, you feel, because “they commit most of the crime.”  You make these arguments while willfully ignoring other factors for no good reason and mistaking symptoms for the disease.  When there is an individual case of a questionable or even clearly wrong police killing, you (nearly) always defend the police and blame the victim.

(Not at all coincidentally, many of these people are also quite within the realm of being racist against Jews [here being considered as the ethnic-group, bound by blood and genes, as opposed to the religion which could include recent converts and older convert communities].  Much in the same way these whites view blacks as inherently inferior based on junk pseudo-science or culturally inferior based on junk cultural understandings, the same whites often subscribe to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes about Jews and their nefarious “plots” to do whatever, including, most recently, that Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros is behind the black lives matter protests and the rioting and vandalism they incorrectly see as one and the same.  And let’s remember the that those tiki-torch-bearing little Nazi marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 were chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  The overlap with anti-black and anti-immigrant sentiment is real, with anti-Semitism in the modern sense often definitely a form of racism.)

6.) You don’t feel the need to assert whiteness, deny racism exists, or subscribe to ideas of cultural inferiority/superiority, but you did and will proudly vote Trump and claim little or nothing Trump does is racist or has anything to do with racism (most of the above categories would claim this, too, but alongside one or more of the other ideas you do not embrace).  You feel that most or all accusations of Trump’s racism are just liberal or media smears.  This takes a stunning amount of willful ignorance or deliberate not caring enough about the concerns of so many Americans that would you even try to learn about the terrible racism of Trump and Trumpism or the serious threat that he and it present to people different from yourself and the damage this does at home and even abroad.

7.) You admit that there is systemic racism but go out of your way to minimize or at least lessen its effects (again, a lot of willful ignorance is required) and feel that African-Americans in particular need to just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” like other immigrant groups.  You deny the important legacy of slavery or minimize or lessen it since “that was a long time” ago. 

You fail to ask why African-Americans (that is, slave-descent) struggle far more than actual voluntary immigrants from Africa or black immigrants from other regions, again conspicuously avoiding the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.

8.) You say you support equal rights and fighting racism and, though you normally vote Republican, did not because Trump’s racism and other things about him bothered you so much, but have still voted Republican most of the time and may still after Trump, willfully ignorant and blinding yourself to the way the Republican Party has, for decades, been the party of racists and racism (though not in recent decades as explicitly as in the Trump era), all this in spite of clear, easily available evidence to the contrary.  You may have milder versions of the views held by the previous type (7), and feel that Trump is mainly the problem and that the Republican Party is mainly “fine” on racial issues without Trump.  It takes the blatant racism of Trump to partly open your eyes, but they are not nearly open enough.  A lesser version of this person (say, an 8.5) might be a swing “independent” voter who goes back and forth and votes Democratic sometimes but does not see or mostly misses the damage the Republicans have done on race in a very similar way to an 8.0).

9.) You consider yourself a solid liberal and normally vote for Democrats as part of what you feel is an obligation to fight racism, yet you regularly exhibit racist behavior or views (beyond “microaggressions”) without realizing it, though in mostly mild and subtle ways, not in more extreme ways except perhaps very rarely.  You likely have a few close friends of color and simply are not aware of how your views, comments, or behavior—often subconscious, a result or your upbringing, or simply a result of not having been exposed to the views of people of color in an intense way—are legitimately offensive and should be adjusted.  Though you occasionally do catch yourself or realize some of what you say, do, and feel is not appropriate (maybe realizing it’s racism or maybe not), you generally miss the patterns that at least make you fairly consistently a milder racist. No, voting for Obama once or even twice does no mean you are immune to being somewhat racist.

10.) You’re at least partly down with the causes of fighting racism and inequality and all but engage in some legitimately offensive “microaggressive” acts or statements unintentionally (mostly out of unfamiliarity) or have certain views or gut reactions to people who different.  You subscribe to misinformation about these groups without really bothering to look into them; you find yourself prejudging or avoiding certain people from certain racial/ethnic background without giving them a good individual shake (but let’s be honest, most people of most races and ethnicities everywhere around the world and certainly most Americans fall under this very human category).

*****

We should separate here people who fall on this spectrum and those who do not but may occasionally engage in acts that can be defined as racist, if out of ignorance, fear, convenience, or to play for some advantage.  They do not harbor racist views in general but once in a while consciously seek to practice or benefit from what has often been termed “white privilege” (though, considering the large numbers of poor whites in this country and how the best thing would be for poor whites and poor blacks to unite, during a conversation with a friend I came to the conclusion that the term “white advantage” might be a better term and might rub the literally dirt-poor whites of Appalachia a bit less offensively), undoubtedly a very real and pervasive concept regardless of how it is labeled.  Just as overall good people can do bad things and overall bad people can still do good things (Hitler really loved his dog, or whatever), so I believe that non-racists can commit some racist acts, though once they become something less than rare, we’re veering into a pattern and thus onto the above-discussed spectrum.  Discussing how generally non-racist people can still commit racist acts could be a whole conversation and exploration on its own, which we will not delve into here.

A whole further discussion still could be had on the silence and non-activism of non-racist whites being a huge part of the problem, and Dr. King has the ultimate word on that, from thoughts composed in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell in 1963:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

All members of the majority have a duty to stick up for the abused minority, and I have yet to see a better expression of this sentiment than that given in a speech given by Abraham Lincoln in 1858:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!

For now, I will leave Lincoln with the last word on that.  I will keep my focus in this piece to the above spectrum I devised that involves how people think, feel, and believe in ways that subscribe in the mind and heart to racism, including a willful, irrational denial or exclusion of information that would force them to reckon with their beliefs and acknowledge other factors as the primary drivers of racial inequality instead of the ones they incorrectly choose to inflate.  Understanding the different ways and different degrees people think in terms of and subscribe to racism in their minds and hearts, their consciousnesses and worldviews, is crucial, and I feel confident in the above spectrum as a way to be able to do this and its rough accuracy.

One would hope that, over time, more and more of the people in the lowest rungs of this racism spectrum can be pulled out of it and into the light (I prefer “enlightened” as a term, harkening back to the Enlightenment—the grand intellectual revolutionary movement that helped birth our nation—over the Millennialspeak “woke”), and, indeed, such gradual realignment and enlightenment over time has been the story of slow—sometimes excruciatingly slow—progress for our nation on race from even our colonial era.  And this story has, though sometimes suffering setbacks, reverses, and a few dark ages, been one overall a gradually improving arc rising towards justice and equality.

Yet unquestioningly, our present Trumpian era is undoubtedly one of those moments when the upward arc is being pulled down, and there is never a guarantee that that curve (not to be confused with the coronavirus curve) will eventually resume an upward trajectory.  The most immediate question for now is “How much lower will the arc curve down and when will we (or even will we) see the arc move back up?”

There are reasons to be cautiously hopeful that the current “black lives matter” moment after the killing of George Floyd by police—a moment that seems to have exploded into a fierce global movement—may really be something special, may really bring about change.  We are already seeing a spate of much needed local-level reforms enacted that is quite encouraging, but only time will tell if the systemic change we need in this country—not just in some localities and states, nor only in structures, laws, and institutions, but in our hearts and minds—is really upon us or, if, as in so many other similar situations before, public outrage and demands for change will be thwarted by the system itself, with public attention and efforts eventually waning and moving onto some other new or old distraction.

In the end, far fuller justice and a forceful, rapid upward shift in the arc will only materialize with serious movement of people down and off the spectrum I delineated above.  We should think of racism, then, not as a black-and-white thing or a box checked as a “yes” or a “no,” but as my wide spectrum that invites differing approaches and solutions for individuals depending on where they are on it in order to make those deeply necessary spectrum-shifts far more likely, far more soon, and far more powerful.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 7, 2019 (sad update March 8, see end of piece); reprinted in part by Al Bawaba March 10

AP

AMMAN — Sometimes commentary about Minnesota freshman Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar reveals more about the biases of the people commenting than anything about Omar.  She is much like her freshman sister-in-arms Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (dubbed AOC), with her every move receiving a highly disproportionate amount of attention, and we could say that, after Ocasio-Cortez and perhaps Speaker Nancy Pelosi, she has become the most polarizing figure on the left, at least in Congress.

I have read people of color, women, Muslims, and others tweeting that they are sick of criticism of Omar because, they say and/or clearly imply, she is only criticized because she is black and/or a woman and/or Muslim, not addressing—or even dismissing—the idea that her statements are problematic.  I’ve seen plenty of extreme, overblown criticism, too, with people deriding her as anti-Semitic or worse just for questioning U.S. policy towards Israel, just for criticizing Israeli policy, for wearing hijab in Congress, and even for what color hijab she is wearing (apparently, black cloth is terrorist-y).

The Need for More Productive Criticism

The one other Muslim in Congress, another freshman named Rashida Tlaib, took advantage of a teachable moment during the Michael Cohen hearing with the head of the conservative extremist Freedom Caucus, Representative Mark Meadows.  She criticized what she saw as a racist act when he produced a black woman who worked for Trump to stand behind him as proof that Trump could not be racist, and a fierce exchange ensued.  Tlaib was careful not to call him a racist during the hearing but stood by her comment that the act of producing a human black prop was racist.  The next day, Meadows and Tlaib “hugged it out” on the House floor. 

Critics of Omar should learn from Tlaib that we can decry her use of certain phrases that are clearly anti-Semitic but still overall give her the benefit of the doubt.  She has earned this, as, rather than remain defiant, she has eloquently expressed remorse and understanding for the pain she caused and has offered multiple apologies.

The Need for More Productive Understanding

Some of her defenders are correct in that being a Muslim black woman wearing hijab, Omar will be the target of criticism from some quarters no matter what, but it’s when she talks about Israel specifically that she has been getting into trouble, and the way in which she has talked about Israel has broadened the quarters from which criticism has been directed at her from extremists to the sane and fair-minded.

I grew up in Connecticut in a town with a large Jewish population.  Some of my earliest memories in school are from show-and-tell when some of the Jewish kids would talk about their grandparents escaping Nazi death camps—or dying in them—during the Holocaust.  In my English classes, a lot of the books we read through grade school were about the Jewish experience: Anne Frank’s diary, Number the Stars, The Chosen, etc.  Given what I learned growing up, as an adult I am uncomfortable even using the phrase “the Jews” in conversation or writing. 

My point is that being “woke” and aware about the specifics of anti-Semitism and its long, very-largely-Christian history (even in the U.S. ) was not something I learned by instinct.  Omar, on the other hands, grew up in Somalia until she was eight, fleeing war there in 1991 to refugee camps in Kenya, where she stayed until she came to the U.S. at age 12. When she came of age, Americans sympathized overwhelmingly more with Israelis than Palestinians (and still do, even if to a lesser extent), and, understandably, her heart was with Palestinians, with her fellow Muslims, at a time when few were speaking up on their behalf. 

The point here is that Omar is not from an environment and background like mine were one could expect her to be aware of the intricacies of anti-Semitic rhetoric or to make anti-Semitism one of her main causes.  At the same time, as a U.S. Congresswoman who plans to speak about both bigotry and Israel often, she needs to close her gaps in her understanding of anti-Semitism and adjust her rhetoric as soon as possible, or else see her platform, credibility, and ability to advance her causes severely diminished.  To her credit, she has repeatedly expressed a strong willingness to do this.

Omar also hails from the “progressive” wing of liberals in America, and they often have far too simplistic a view of how politics works.  From Bernie Sanders to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, these types tend to explain everything in terms of powerful interest groups corrupting politicians and media with money: the people would be united in supporting democratic socialism/”progressivism,” the Green New Deal, and Medicare for All (among other lofty ideas) if only, in their view, the special interests buying owning Congress and the press were held in check.  If you look at Sanders’s constant smearing attacks in 2016 against Clinton and how she was supposedly paid for and bought and controlled by special interest money along with most of the Democratic and Republican Parties, suddenly Omar’s quips about Israel buying and selling the American Congress makes a lot more sense in that context. 

The problem with that über-progressive/democratic socialist worldview is that it is rarely that simple on the scale they imply, and there are many other factors besides money at work with groups like ones as diverse as Congress.  This also goes for Jews and those who lobby to support Israel (most of the latter of whom in America are actually Evangelical Christians).  So part of the inaccuracy of some of Omar’s statements may well be at least partly explained by this oversimplistic worldview of how money controls politics, of black-and-white monolithic corrupting blocs, as opposed to traditional Western anti-Semitism about Jews, money, and control.

The Need for More Productive Engagement: A Way Forward

In the end, those who demand understanding from Omar about their outrage at her comments would do well to understand why she would, it seems, use these anti-Semitic tropes without being aware of their being dangerous or tropes, and her very appropriate apologies are solid evidence that she was not using them from a position of hate.  They would do well to not insist that her questioning the U.S.-Israel relationship or Israeli policy is “unacceptable” and instead offer respectful counterpoints to her critiques even while coming down hard on her clumsy and apparently clueless rhetoric.

For Omar’s part, she has made it clear she has made mistakes, want to do better, to hear people out and engage them (which she has done repeatedly) while still standing strong on her policy positions, which is a markedly different approach from President Trump and many Republicans who have been caught in similar situations, and for all her flaws, for this, Rep. Omar should be respected and held as an example of how to learn from mistakes so long as she follows through on her promises to do better. 

In a larger sense, defenders of Israel should call out criticism of Israel that is rooted in, or overtly, anti-Semitic while still making it clear that criticism of Israel in-and-of-itself is not inherently anti-Semitic, while critics of Israel should acquaint themselves with the long history of anti-Semitic tropes and rhetoric and take extra care and be extra cautious to make sure none of their criticisms even suggest the appearance—let alone partake in the serious trafficking—of anti-Semitism.  For an issue that is so deeply controversial, these would be minimum requirements in order to have a productive debate, and this goes for having that debate anywhere, not just America (I live in the Middle East, have for five years, and have spoken with many Arabs and Jews in Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, and I can tell you that a strong majority of people on either side who live here use incredibly insensitive language when talking about the other side that would make Omar’s comments seem mild in contrast).

Especially with a clear historical link between words and violence, especially as growing extremist elements of an increasingly intolerant white American majority continue to become increasingly anti-Muslim and, over the last few years, have displayed a shocking rise in anti-Semitism (concurrent with similar rises elsewhere), disagreements over Israel need not make Rep. Omar and the American Jewish community—itself increasingly critical of Israeli policy and U.S. support for it—enemies.  Yes, Omar needs to do better, and if she can purge her rhetoric of anti-Semitic tropes and take pains to distinguish her criticism from those tropes, and if some of Omar’s Jewish and other critics can stop labeling all her criticism of both Israel and U.S. support for Israel as anti-Semitic and take her at her word that she wants to do better, they will find there are a great many issues on which they can be natural and productive allies.

UPDATE: March 8, 2019: Just hours after Omar, along with nearly the entire House (except for about two-dozen Republicans, including Steve King, who voted present), admirably voted for a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacism, and bigotry and racism in other forms and in general, she retweeted a vicious attack on Meghan McCain that also attacked McCain’s recently departed father, the late Senator John McCain, in a very distorted way, from Intercept far-left journalist Mehdi Hasan. Hasan’s tweet crudely attacked Meghan and her father after she cried and expressed clearly heartfelt worry on The View about the rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S. and what Omar’s recent remarks represent to her and millions of other Americans: he claimed her emotions were fake and then attacked her father for past (later-transcended) hostile feelings and words for his former Vietnamese tormentors and captors, claimed and and took a comment of his about Iran out of context, and (fairly) blame him for elevating the odious precursor to Donald Trump, Sarah Palin; none of these things had anything to do with Meghan’s views expressed on The View.

Now, I wish that McCain could have shown the same emotion for other forms of bigotry that have been omnipresent of late, and I don’t think she is hard enough on Republicans overall for their lack of action on racism, but that doesn’t invalidate her points or make me question the sincerity of them or her emotions. For Omar to retweet this horrible, unfair attack (the retweet is still up half a day later) after all that had just transpired in the preceding hours, days, and weeks, is really beyond me. I still think Pelosi’s understanding of Millennial quick Twitter-fingers and activist passions is the best explanation. but this retweet makes me have doubts for the first time and makes it harder for all but her most hardcore defenders to continue to defend her after we just asked those who harbor doubts about her or are more hostile towards her to be patient, to appreciate that she comes from a different background and is learning (as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes mentioned), that she can and and will do better, when just after it seemed she had weathered the worst of this scandal, she instead does worse and undermined herself and her defenders. I still count myself among these defenders and stand by my above arguments and analysis, and still ask others for patience, but this retweet undermines all of that and empowers Trump, republicans, Islamophobes, and other bigots; she need to take down the Hasan retweet, start a public dialogue with McCain, and do everything she can to think more carefully before she tweets and speaks and avoid anything like this in the future. If she does not, she will undermine herself, the left, and the noble causes for which she fights (including holding Israel accountable), and it will become far more difficult, if not impossible, for non-extremists to defend her. See me related Twitter thread here.

Retweeting that Hasan tweet was wrong, beneath a U.S. Congresswoman and especially a Democrat so passionate about bigotry who has suffered so much form it, and a huge step back for Omar. Please, Representative Omar, do better!! We’re counting on and rooting for you!

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 11, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 11th, 2017

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AMMAN — More often than not, the situation whenever the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are involved in discussing their near-identity-defining, almost sickly-beloved conflict rapidly becomes a contest to see who can deny reality the most vehemently. In this conflict, you learn quickly that if one side has a choice between quietly enjoying some advantage or rising opportunity on one side and rubbing it in the faces of their rivals at the cost of sabotaging their own blessing on the other, the latter is almost always the choice; this makes you realize that spite, as much as anything else, is a motivating factor among too many in this struggle.

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Typical Tribal Conflict… BUT GOD!

As a student, you read about this conflict and it fascinates you; as someone who has the opportunity to talk to the parties and live among them over an extended period of time, it depresses you and tires you out, even if you don’t have a vested interest in one side or another. You form a deeper respect for the suffering of both sides, even as you become exasperated by their stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge valid points made by the other side in a cycle of dehumanization that helps to explain the deadly and nasty nature of this conflict.

After enough time, you become good at asking people questions and getting them to talk, but this also results in your being accustomed to being usually disappointed in their answers. Occasionally, you hear voices of reason, then become even more depressed as you realize these are the minorities, often represented at pathetically low levels in the halls of political power, even when democratically elected.

Frequently, the more religious the individual, the less compromising they are in their views. And I have found that such people rarely consider things from the other perspective.

Should Jewish babies being born now in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa suffer because of the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers? No more than Palestinian babies born in Jerusalem or Ramallah or Hebron should suffer for the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers. And if your answer to those questions involves you saying that yes, innocent children being born in situations totally beyond their control do indeed deserve to suffer under occupation, legal inequality, or the constant threat or “retributive” violence and you somehow justify this response by citing your God or His holy texts, then your God is not worthy of worship and esteem but should instead be cast off into the obscurity and irreverence that has been the fate of most of the capricious and cruel deities of millennia past.

I confess I am not among those who would describe themselves as the faithful, and it is with increasingly robust pride that I describe myself as such in the face of more and more encounters with otherwise kind and generous souls who, when animated by discussion of this or that holy place they are told is to be their rightful inheritance by some ancient book of yesteryear, can and do find specific verses from said text that they claim (and they are hardly alone) justify some sort of violence to either take back what is “theirs” or prevent sharing sovereignty over what they now control.

God “gave” you this land? Funny, why don’t you control it now, then? Is it not His will that you lost it? Why not reserve your hostility for the God that allowed this to happen, rather than the people who are now in possession of what is supposedly “yours,” for are not those people instruments of His Will? Or are you claiming that these people are somehow successfully opposing the Will of God and that your all-powerful God needs you, a band of lowly primates, to somehow aid him in seeing His Will through? Or do you who now possess such holy places look at the mass of outside-your-tribe humanity that surrounds you and are also laying claim to said holy places believe that your God put these people here for you to displace, keep out, or even kill in large numbers just to maintain exclusive sovereignty? Am I to respect a God that is so tribal that He favors your possession and not sharing such sacred holy sites, that this God truly cares whether you or some other primates that are nearly identical in blood and DNA control some speck of a vast planet that is merely a piece of dust in the wider universe?

The truth of the matter is that there is no respectably serious answer that can be provided by any of the faithful who believe in divinely sanctioned violence to either maintain or retake such and such location. Believe me, I’ve tried to find one by personally asking many on both sides of this conflict, and the range and originality of the answers such a crowd can give you are narrow and hackneyed in the extreme.

It was extremely unfair to the Jews when the Romans slaughtered and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs in the first and second centuries C.E. amid vigorous Jewish revolts, and it was also extremely unfair to the Arabs who would become known as Palestinians the way first Ottoman Turkish and then British European colonial overlords oppressed them and also allowed the long-exiled Jews to return to their ancient homeland in a manner that did not consider asking or consulting those local Arabs how they felt about the matter and then, in the case of the British, wearily presented it as a fait accompli to the United Nations in 1947-1949. Wars were fought and won and lost, and, as is so often the case with such things, there is no full rewind button, try though many may to find it or claim they have.

It is also worth asking: by what right did the ancient Jews (at least in the Biblical telling) massacre and/or displace those who were in what is now Israel/Palestine when they arrived thousands of years ago? By what right did the seventh-century Arab conquerors take the land from the East Roman (Byzantine) Greco-Romans? The same questions about taking land can be asked of many others, including the Romans, Ottomans, Turks, British, and those who would become Israelis; the answer is the same for each of them: they and/or their leaders wanted to and they had the power to do so.

The biggest myth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is some sort of difficult to understand Gordian knot, singular among world conflicts in its uniqueness and intensity, inscrutable to all but those most studied in it or closest to it.

The reality is that the conflict is remarkably banal: two tribes want the same land and contest sites that are particularly holy to them. You know, like what happened many thousands of times in recorded history and innumerable times from prehistory when we were barely more than upright primates.

Perhaps most obnoxiously, both Israelis and Palestinians often speak as if they are the only people to have been in a predicament like theirs. While many people around the world are stuck in conflicts and occupations the world has long forgotten—Tibetans under the Chinese, Kashmiris, the long-suffering people of Somalia, Hutus in Central Africa, and today’s ignored Yemenis—it seems even the slightest provocation involving anything Palestinian-Israeli generates front page news, drowning out other, more intense conflicts that have killed and displaced far more people in recent decades.

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Jerusalem Is NOT the Center of the World

Before Trump delivered his ill-advised speech on Jerusalem, it finally seemed as if things had hit a critical mass of a point where the world might finally start paying attention to Yemen in the wake of the death of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president turned rebel leader. Before that event threatened to further destabilize an already incredibly unstable situation, Yemen was suffering from the worst cholera outbreak in modern human history, a man-made one wrought by Saudi incompetence and global indifference, with about one million cases and getting worse, and was also facing a food crisis that has put Yemen on the brink of the worst famine in the world in decades, with some seven million people at risk. It was thought that Saleh’s death might bring some much-needed attention to the neglected conflict, but two days later, Trump gave his speech on Jerusalem, and now Yemen’s war is at most an afterthought (if that) in much of the Arab/Muslim world and in global headlines, just as it has been for most of the war’s duration. In Jordan, where I reside, I haven’t seen a single mention of Yemen recently in social media among any of my regional contacts except from those who are Yemeni.

There is only so much oxygen to be shared among major stories during any given news cycle, and the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean coast know as Israel/Palestine consumes far more than its fair share of what is available. I was chatting with one Palestinian-Jordanian friend recently and complained about the disproportionate attention the subject got, but in her mind it was totally justified: “Jerusalem is very important to Muslims,” she said. “So a place is more important than millions who are on the brink of starvation in Yemen?” I asked? “Yes, of course!” she replied. I would cite here a piece I wrote a while back about how, on balance, religion intensifies conflict, not de-escalates it; religion may or may not “poison everything,” to cite Christopher Hitchens, but it more often than not certainly poisons conflicts, and quite irrationally so.

I will not excuse the many and severe misdeeds of Israel when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians under its control (and I have written about them extensively before, though that is not to suggest that Palestinians are blameless, either), but especially when it comes to white Europeans (and especially those from countries with backgrounds of strong anti-Semitism and fascist governments and/or fascistic leanings), one really does have to wonder why—when surrounded by conflicts in which human rights are being abused, from Western Sahara to northern Cyprus to Belarus to Crimea to Darfur to Syria to the Kurds to the Uighurs to the Rohingya to North Korea—so many of these Europeans are so virulently, almost obsessively focused on the misdeeds of Israel when it comes to human rights violations; some won’t even mention the word Israel, as if it’s a dirty word, and a good number come at their own expense to protest or document abuses in Palestinian communities.  After nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism dominating Europe, perhaps the idea—after a mere few decades of progress (and well under a century since the Holocaust was hardly a just a German, but a collective European crime)—that some level of residual anti-Semitism is a factor in current European views on Israel and Israelis, and the intensity and frequency of criticism of them, is hardly unreasonable.

America, of course, is more complicated: it has the largest Jewish population in the world (even including Israel) and a far larger population of extreme white Christian Evangelicals who literally believe that the Jews must control all of the Biblical “Holy Land” in order for Jesus to return, prejudicing them wholly against the Palestinians in favor of Israeli Jews, even more so than American Jews. And among major powers, it is the nation most supportive of Israel, one of only a few nations around the world that don’t view Israel negatively.

I’ve seen a number of Europeans express solidarity with the Palestinians by posting a Facebook profile photo frame showing the Dome of the Rock and with Arabic stating “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine,” almost as if to also deny that it is Israel’s capital. Is it so awful to post that Jerusalem is the capital of BOTH Israel AND Palestine? Few people I talked to here in Jordan wanted to admit that Israel has any claim to Jerusalem (Jordan controlled East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel drove the Jordanians out), still fewer that it could or should be Israel’s capital. While more Israeli Jews had mixed views when I’ve spoken with them in the past, the ones that felt Jerusalem could be divided and shared were generally a minority of disillusioned hippies not well-represented in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; those who were more mainstream politically—and therefore more empowered—were far less keen on the idea of a shared Jerusalem, let alone Palestine as a state.

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The Reality of Jerusalem

The obvious (if painful for some) reality is that Israel has controlled much of Jerusalem since 1948 and all of it since 1967, something which ISIS (of all groups) surprisingly and ironically pointed out after Trump’s speech. This reality means that, for all intents and purposes, Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel’s state (a state recognized today by 158 nations, the vast majority of the world) since 1948, officially so in Israel’s view though unofficially so to the rest of the world. Because of the sensitive nature of the unresolved status of Jerusalem between two parties in conflict, the United States and the rest of the world have avoided recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s (or Palestine’s) capital. Yes, it practically is Israel’s capital, and everybody knows it, but Trump’s public acceptance of it violated basic principles of neutrality, and even while changing virtually nothing on the ground, it enraged millions of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

If the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims were smart, they would abstain from any sort of violent reaction to a speech that changes nothing on the ground for anyone except people who work at or need the U.S. Embassy as it moves from one city to another. They could unite on a focused, organized plan to engage the world community now that sympathy is more intensely with them after Trump’s incompetent oration needlessly kicked a hornet’s nest. In fact, Trump’s address needlessly weakened U.S. standing and credibility on this issue, enough that it might even be possible for the Palestinians to achieve some results even if they bypass America.

Yet instead, mass protests and beginnings of violence are the response. Young men rush towards nervous Israeli and sometimes trigger-happy troops, throwing rocks. The only tangible result of such acts will be destruction, injury, and death, and fatalities have already occurred. Not a wise move at all or one that will accomplish anything or have any effect on the status of Jerusalem or how Trump feels about his decision. Such acts are the surest way to lose a moral high ground that has been handed to them on a silver platter by President Trump and may prevent more positive measures that would help advance the Palestinian cause on the part of the rest of the international community. The protesters’ chants offer no hint that they could share Jerusalem or historic Palestine with Israel. 

As for Israel, having received a major boost and gift from America, it would be in a perfect position to reach out to Palestinians with a real offer of compromise, buttressed from a newly stronger position after action by their closest ally. Instead, per usual, Israel seems content to play their hand to their maximum advantage and to the Palestinians’ maximum disadvantage, as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments are wont to do.

Too many on both sides talk as if the city will be their exclusive sovereign domain. Jerusalem is the de facto practical capital for Israel while simultaneously being the symbolic capital of Palestine in the heart of virtually every Palestinian. It is also the emotional heart and soul of Israel for most Israelis and a practical capital for Palestinians, more of whom live there than in any Palestinian city except for Gaza City and with Jerusalem as the heart of Palestinian spiritual life. Too many on both sides want to deny these realities, living in a fantasy world where such practical, emotional, and spiritual concerns can be ignored in pursuit of total victory. Trump’s blunder is an opportunity for both sides to move closer to compromise, but, as can be expected in this conflict, it has only hardened positions and made compromise that much harder. Sure, blame Trump, but Israelis and Palestinians are reacting in just the ways that can compound Trump’s folly, rather than mitigate it.

The Arab and Jewish residents of Jerusalem, while hardly brothers, demonstrate a functional coexistence to any who visit, as they have for me repeatedly. If only a clear majority of Palestinians and Israelis could build on this spirit, rather than once again throw practicality to the wind, one could begin to feel hope. Trump’s stupidity should not be an excuse for stupidity from either Israelis or Palestinians, yet these types of conflicts often fall into predictable, repetitive, unproductive patterns, and that, sadly, is the case here with Jerusalem, the shared capital of Israel and Palestine, whether officially recognized as such or not.

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© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article by same author: Victory in Alabama May Run Through Jerusalem: Moore Likely at Heart of Trump Decision

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 8/9, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 8th/9th, 2016

Aaron Bernstein/Reuters

AMMAN — I must confess, in a race full of unprecedented behavior, I was still shocked that a distant second place candidate in the Republican presidential nomination race—one who was mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from the primary/caucus process, from winning the nomination on the first ballot at the Republican National Convention—would name a running-mate for the vice president slot with about one-third of the time still left in the contest and months before the convention, long before anyone else had ever done so during our modern nomination process.

Then again, since the chutzpah of both Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina knows no bounds, I really should not have been surprised that either Cruz named Fiorina as his “running mate” even though he is not even close to being his party’s candidate, and that she, of all people, would accept.

Pride As a Vice

This amazing duo lasted one week—just one week exactly—before Cruz gave up his quest for the presidency.  After just seven days of existence, the Cruz-Fiorina ticket was no more, and Fiorina now has the record for the shortest vice presidential candidacy in U.S. history.

It is worth examining this exceptional piece of desperation political theater because it is truly a singularity in terms of its sheer absurdity and inanity.

Short-lived though the ticket was may be, the two are truly perfect for each other: along with Donald Trump, they are by far the most shameless, dishonest self-promoters of this election cycle.  In case you might be under the incorrect assumption that they are not the most shameless self-promoters out of over twenty candidates  in both parties (apart from Trump), a brief education is in order below.

Lyin’ Ted

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

First up: Ted Cruz.

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of Trump and I view his candidacy as a historically dangerous one for democracy and for Western civilization, but his “Lyin’ Ted” nickname for Cruz he came up with is about as spot-on as you can get when it comes to that man, because he lies constantly and plays dirty and deceitful politics on the campaign trail.  Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact has been checking statements by Cruz since 2012, and, as of today, nearly two-thirds (64%) of his statements that it checked were categorized as mostly false (31%) or worse: false (27%), (liar liar) “pants on fire”-false (6%); only 22% were rated positively: true (6%) or mostly true (16%).  His record ranks among the worst of all the candidates for this election, with only Dr. Ben Carson and Donald Trump having a higher portion of mostly-false statements or worse.

This is a man whom the recently-former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner just referred to as “Lucifer in the flesh,” and Boehner noted in same statement that he has “never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in…[his] life.”  Reflecting Boehner’s words, it is even a widely understood piece of political insider wisdom that Ted Cruz is the most hated man in the Washington, DC political establishment (especially in the Senate), an establishment he is extremely hostile to but is also, nevertheless, something of a member of since he is one of only 100 sitting U.S. Senators; he turns on friends, he turns on his own Republican Party, he feeds off and uses skillfully delivered and amplified misinformation in the way a Sith Lord feeds off anger, all in a quest for personal power for Ted Cruz, regardless of who or what he damages in pursuit of this power.  In fact, it all seems to actually be part of his plan, because he has always worn the hatred of those he deems “The Establishment” as a badge of honor, and has sold this as a badge of honor—even as part of his campaign platform—quite successfully to his supporters.

This is a man who led his followers to believe that he could use a government shutdown he personally orchestrated to (ostensibly) attempt to force a repeal of Obamacare, though this ignored basic constitutional and political realities, of which Senator Cruz is supposedly an expert.  No, the real reason he engaged in such a stunt—complete with reading Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” in the Senate while on the taxpayer’s dime, all while blithely missing the irony in doing so—was for one reason and one reason only: to promote himself.  And in this, he wildly succeeded, even as he alienated himself even more so among his Congressional colleagues and caused a damaging government shutdown that risked the United States Government defaulting on its debts, damaged his political party’s brand, cost hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors (about 850,000 people) days to weeks of pay, and caused harmful economic spillover effects to the tune of $24 billion nationally and 0.6% in national GDP growth, economic effects felt especially in Washington, DC, Virginia, and Maryland.  Moreover, this shutdown occurred even as, embarrassingly, the Syrian government was able to fully operate in the regions of Syria it controlled in the midst of a full-scale civil war.  Yes, all these were acceptable casualties in Cruz’s quest to elevate himself to maximize his exposure and thus his chances for his presidential bid.  If there is any doubt as to how calculated all this was, consider that Cruz was the first major candidate in either party to officially announce his candidacy in a field that would swell to over twenty individuals.  He had clearly been planning for some time, and he would hardly have been unaware of the fact that the government shutdown is that for which he is most known by the American public; he sure isn’t known for his record as a legislator in the Senate, where he by far makes more noise than actually engaging in the normal tasks of being a U.S. Senator.

This is a man who has engaged in the ultimate deception on one of his signature issues: Cruz constructed what is possibly the most masterful lie in the history of American politics on immigration policy, positioning himself exquisitely carefully to be able to play both sides of the issue depending on which way the political winds blew in what may very well be the most planned (and one of the longest-running) series of political lies in American campaign history.  That he did lie many, many times and manipulate over an extended period of time on this issue is not in doubt and has been meticulously documented by William Saletan at Slate.

Then there is the infamous episode I wrote about some time ago, where Cruz was booed off the stage at an even highlighting the plight of Middle Eastern Christians.  Most of them are Arab, and Ted Cruz chose to open his remarks by insisting that Middle Eastern Christians first and foremost need to stick up for the Israeli state, even as it illegally occupies millions of Arab Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, and denies them basic human rights.  Middle Eastern Christians living under forces hostile to Israel—including ISIS—would be risking their very lives speaking out in favor of Israel.  This does not mean that Cruz does not have a point in the sense that as a minority in a region that generally treats minorities awfully, Christians there have a plight in common with Jews in a general historical sense, and that many anti-Israeli forces go way too far and veer into anti-Semitism, but this is not the main issue facing Christians in the Middle East at a forum dedicated to their suffering, not that of Israeli Jews and Cruz’s approach was certainly not appropriate, especially leading off with that, at that particular event.  Encouraging what he encouraged was not a way to help persecuted Middle Eastern Christians, and was, in fact, asking them to needlessly expose themselves to danger, up to and including death.

Ted Cruz is not stupid.  Ted Cruz knows this.  Ted Cruz didn’t care about Middle Eastern Christians. Ted Cruz knew that much of the Republican evangelical base is fervently pro-Israel to the point of being apologists for Israel’s (self-)destructive and illegal nearly-half-century occupation of Palestinian territory.  Ted Cruz knew he was doing this was elevate himself in the eyes of the very people in America whose votes he needed to win in order to win his party’s nomination for the presidency.  Ted Cruz was perfectly willing to use Middle Eastern Christians as a prop to help himself.

This is a man who routinely engages in dangerous demagoguery when it comes to issues related to terrorism, Muslims (including Muslims-Americans), and Islam, in a dangerous way that preys on fears and creates more division, suspicion, mistrust, and hostility than is necessary, but this has been largely overlooked to a degree because of the Trump phenomenon.   Yet from to ISIS to Palestinians, from San Bernardino to the Iran nuclear deal (which Cruz has outrageously claimed makes “the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism”), Cruz has played a game of risky rhetorical hyperbole that deals in misleading demonization of vulnerable minorities to win political chips in order to elevate himself politically.

The lies and deceptions and destructive, selfish behavior do not begin or end here, but they are major points of a highlight reel.

This is the real Ted Cruz.

Failed Fiorina

Getty Images

Now, to pivot to Mrs. Fiorina.  Perhaps you are thinking she is better, but they are actually a match made in heaven (or hell, if you’re in Boehner’s camp).

Out of the political contenders this election cycle, only Dr. Carson, Trump, and Cruz have worse records on PolitiFact than Fiorina.  For Fiorina, 55% of her reviewed statements were at least mostly false (23%) or worse: false (23%), (liar liar) “pants on fire”-false (9%); only 28% were rated at least mostly true (14%) or true (14%).  Math might have eliminated them from getting a majority of delegates from the voting contests, but it sure makes them close in terms of lying.

In fact, as I have noted before, most of the two pillars that are together the entire premise of her presidential campaign (all of one and part of another) are based on falsehoods. 

For one thing, she has the gall to run on her record as a corporate executive at Lucent and as the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company at Hewlett Packard (HP), but she was instrumental in destroying both companies, facts which do not stop her from spinning her record to absurd lengths to shamefully duck from her clear responsibility in both historic business collapses.  As I wrote of her time at Lucent, she was either too stupid to know what was going on, which is unforgivable, or complicit in illegal and/or highly risky, highly-irresponsible business practices, which would be highly unethical and immoral.  The implosion of a company ensued, costing over 100,000 people their jobs, but Carly managed to use the deceptively ostensibly false posted “success” to land her the top job at HP, leaving just before Lucent came tumbling down.  With HP, she was actually in charge and helped to severely weaken the company from the most powerful position within it, for which she was fired after destroying much of the company’s value and shedding thousands of jobs.  She has been noted as one of the worst CEOs in modern history repeatedly.  And in each case, she made sure that her harmful business activities would be rewarded to the tunes of many millions of dollars, even as the companies she guided lost many millions of dollars in business and value.  One thing (perhaps the only thing) she excelled at during her time at both Lucent and HP was self-promotion.

The other pillar of her campaign is that she is a female secretary-to-CEO success story, but this is only partially true: yes, she achieved historic success as a woman, but only worked as a secretary while she was attending college and law school, dropping out of the latter.  When she later went to business school and earned her MBA, she began right after graduation at AT&T (later her section became Lucent) on a fast-track executive-level path to senior management.  That is a pretty normal narrative—to work while in school in temporary administrative positions to help cover expenses/tuition while after you earn your degree you hardly start at the bottom—and is hardly the direct path from secretary to CEO that she misleadingly makes it out to be.

No wonder when Carly Fiorina ran for a U.S. Senate seat in California on the basis of her deplorable business record that voters there resoundingly rejected her.

But if having her campaign’s premises be less than truthful isn’t enough for you to put her in league with Cruz, like Cruz, she has had some of the most spectacular lies of this campaign season and has refused to back down from them despite being repeatedly confronted with overwhelming evidence that he claims have been false.  I am talking especially about her despicable falsehoods she has repeatedly perpetuated regarding the women’s healthcare advocate and provider Planned Parenthood, whereby Fiorina claimed that Planned Parenthood was, in her words, utilizing “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain” in video she had seen with her own eyes (so she claimed), that Planned Parenthood sells dead baby organs for profit to some kind of baby organ trafficking network.  In reality, no such video exists actually linking Planned Parenthood to any such activity, she grossly mischaracterizes the video in question that according to all expert review does not seem to either be of an abortion or at a Planned Parenthood clinic, and there is zero evidence Planned Parenthood engages in the trade of fetal organs/tissue; in fact, a grand jury convened to consider charges against Planned Parenthood for illegal activity only found the activists targeting Planned Parenthood worthy of criminal investigations, not Planned Parenthood itself).

She has also levied vicious, quite mean-spirited, and grossly unfair attacks against Hillary Clinton, perhaps thinking that because she is a woman she could get away with such abuse more easily than if she were a man.  In fact, apart from spinning her own business record and lying about Planned Parenthood, aside from a few debates where she “shone” by delivering one-liners with a degree of competence, and other than mixing it up with Donald Trump, hyperbolically attacking Clinton is what most characterized her short-lived presidential campaign.

This campaign did not last more than the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, where she finished in 7th place in both states with less than 2% and a little over 4% of the of the vote, respectively.

This is just a brief taste of the major highlights of the real Fiorina, but one that still gives you the real flavor.

Perfect for Each Other, Perfectly Unfit for Office

Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

So, when you thinks about it, if Ted Cruz, who was just mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from voting contests, still fully intended to find a way to get party elites to hand him the nomination in a sheer disregard for the will of the primary/caucus participants, the idea that he would pick someone who came in 7th in two contests and then dropped out actually makes sense in Ted’s World.  And if Carly Fiorina was going be willing to try to use her historically bad record as a top business executive as a reason for voters to consider her to be a U.S. Senator or the Republican Party’s nominee for the presidency, then why not use her historically bad record as a political candidate for the Senate and the presidency as a reason for voters to consider her to be the Republican nominee for vice president on a ticket that would be inherently undemocratic in nature and a longshot (even at a contested convention, as I wrote earlier)? 

(On a quick aside, Marco Rubio, apparently, rejected such the same request from Cruz that Fiorina did not reject)

As with his behavior concerning the shutdown, Cruz was thinking about what was good for Ted Cruz, first and foremost; and it is telling that another person who thinks like he does—primarily about herself—would accept the offer to be the vice presidential nominee on an almost certainly doomed ticket, months before any ticket had ever been formed since the modern primary/caucus system was instituted.  The last time a move even remotely like this happened? Reagan’s failed, desperate attempt to edge out Gerald Ford in 1976 when he named a running mate at the end of July, three weeks before 1976 Republican convention (and three months later than Cruz, who made his move three months before this year’s convention!).  Reagan, though, unlike Cruz, was not mathematically eliminated from winning a majority of delegates from voting contests when he made his announcement.  Still, Reagan’s selfish gamble against an incumbent president when Ford was heavily favored helped to weaken Ford and hand the presidency over to Jimmy Carter and the Democratic Party.

Gary Settle/The New York Times

We don’t know who will win the White House in November, but we do know that both Cruz and Fiorina have developed a megalomaniacal, delusional sense of self-importance and a massively inflated views of their own records that, time and time again, has allowed them in their minds to put themselves ahead of the organizations for which they are ostensibly fighting.  If not mathematically, we must hope that morally and ethically this eliminates them forever from consideration for high national office, especially, but not limited to, the presidency. 

Again, I am not at all a fan of Trump, but at least Trump has a record of a moderately successful businessman (if hardly a perfect one) and of getting deals done and earning the respect of many of his colleagues; Cruz is hated in the Senate (fellow Republican Senator and former presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham said that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you,” and only 4 out of 53 fellow Republican senators have endorsed Cruz, 2 of them doing so very unenthusiastically), and Fiorina was fired as CEO of HP, with both Cruz and Fiorina having terrible records in their highest professional capacities as noted earlier. 

Having seemingly settled on Trump, the Republican Party and its voters deserve little credit for anything these days, and yet, at least in picking Trump, they can arguably said to not have picked the very worst out of seventeen candidates (even if he is still pretty awful); at least they had the sense to pick neither Cruz nor Fiorina, who have the dubious distinctions of being two of the only candidates that can be said to be worse than Donald Trump.

Goodbye Ted and Carly (For Now)

AP

Unfortunately, the shamelessness and egomaniacal delusion displayed by both Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina means we would only be unbelievably fortunate for this failed ticket to be their political obituaries; no, their incredible narcissism that flies in the face of their terrible records is a strong indicator that we have, unfortunately, not seen the curtain call of their political theatrics in pursuit of offices for which they are most assuredly unfit.  And at least in that regard, they are in good company with many of their Republican colleagues, Trump included.

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 29, 2016 

By Brian E.Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 29th, 2016

REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

AMMAN — Terrorism is one of these words behind which the intended use most often carries a hope that those hearing or reading it will instinctively shudder and recoil.  Like all such charged words—racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, genocide—the gravity attached to them has an inverse correlation with higher frequency, more careless usage; such words retain their power and effectiveness if and when they are specifically applied selectively to instances that match a relatively clear definition and/or scope of activity; overuse cheapens and diminishes their power.  That is not to say that such terms do not sometimes deserve reconsideration, reappraisal; sometimes it is necessary to update and expand our understandings of such delicate terms.  At the same time, a vocal minority that simply wants to apply the labels because they just really don’t like something or someone—calling drones strikes terrorism and the equivalent of ISIS attacks, calling almost all Donald Trump supporters racists, calling almost all Republicans sexist, calling all critics of Israeli government policy anti-Semitic, calling Israeli actions towards Palestinians genocide—must be called out for what they are: partisans trying to hijack one awful thing to make something else they don’t like be condemned at a higher level.  Thus, when dealing with these terms, it is important that the conversation around them attempts to forge a degree of clarity.  If such efforts are not undertaken or fail, it is harmful to the ability to unite and fight actions that clearly fall under the appropriate use of these terms, and terrorism is no exception.  As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in 2002, “If any of the terms in our new lexicon has undergone a process of diminishing returns, it is the word “terrorism.””

What’s in a Name?

Violence is part of humanity, even from our earliest days; it was in nature and part of primates’ existence before they even evolved into humans; therefore, the violence of humanity predates humanity.  One thing that is certain about human-on-human violence is that the parties on the receiving end will always protest, and quite often, it is normal for the aggrieved parties to cry “terrorism” when they receive such violence.  Even if the aggrieved party is justly angry and justly thinks the violence in unjustly meted out, the label terrorism may not be appropriate.  Every person has the right to defend him or herself and every government has the right to defend its people and territory and to use violence to both stop active aggression and prevent aggression where there is a clear and present danger, even to the point of striking outside its borders.  A U.S. drone that kills either 1.) a group of active militants and several bystanding civilians or 2.) kills civilians by honestly mistaking them for militants cannot be equated with a group of militants that deliberately target and kill civilians as an end target.  At the same time, if locals use guerilla tactics against U.S. military forces stationed abroad in, say, Iraq, simply giving them the same label as militants who are killing civilians in markets or houses of worship is also inaccurate.  Labeling all of these perpetrators terrorists and acts terrorism is not only inaccurate, but counterproductive to the point of making the term meaningless, subject to the whims and partisan beliefs of whomever wants to appropriate the term to denigrate, rightfully or wrongfully, anyone with whom he or she disagrees.  To go back to Hitchens, “we need a more exhaustive and exclusive and discriminating definition of it, or recognition of it.”  For him:

“It’s glib and evasive to say that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” because the “freedom fighters” are usually quite willing to kill their “own” civilians as well. But then, so are states… All parties to all wars will at some time employ terrorizing methods. But then everybody except a pacifist would be a potential supporter of terrorism. And if everything is terror, then nothing is—which would mean we had lost an important word of condemnation.” 

For most people, there is “a simpler – and perhaps more honest – definition: terrorism is violence committed by those we disapprove of,” to quote Brian Whitaker in a Guardian piece.

All Terrorists & All Violence Are Not Created Equal

Charles Tilly/Sociological Theory

Hitchens, a lifelong socialist with a soft spot for revolutionaries and rebels—from Iraqi Kurds to Leon Trotsky—would never equate the IRA or Hamas with ISIS or al-Qaeda.  For him the test is the realistically possible and rationality: do these militants ask for something that a rational person could live with and willingly accept—an independent state, an end to military occupation, an end to institutionalized discrimination—or do they seek that which a rational person could not willingly accept: mass oppression, mass murder, forced religious conversion, to go centuries back in time? In Hitchens’ mind, true “Terrorism, then, is the tactic of demanding the impossible, and demanding it at gunpoint;” he therefore writes: “Enfolded in any definition of “terrorism,” it seems to me, there should be a clear finding of fundamental irrationality.”  For Hitchens, “What this means in practice is the corollary impossibility of any compromise with” groups that practice terrorism in this purer sense.

The distinction Hitchens is making is that the label both of people as terrorists and actions as terrorism is more aptly reserved both for people who, and actions that, seek to impose a system of terror, rather than be applied to those who simply employ certain violent tactics for understandable, rational, and even laudable goals.  In other words, whether one is fighting for liberation and freedom as an end or for an end of imposing a murderous regime that butchers its own people and destroys freedom matters far more than the means employed in such fights (though they matter too).  For Hitchens, often those terrorist groups concerned with more noble ends are far more discriminate and measured in their means than those groups for whom brutality is the ultimate temporal end, and while in any conflict, destruction is a necessary evil of means, its scale and especially whether the destruction of lives and freedom is the end itself in a temporal sense are what matters most.

In a video discussion of WWII, Hitchens, along with Victor Davis Hanson, noted that while both the Axis and the Allies engaged in deliberate terror air bombings of civilian populations, and that such actions are hardly simply easily summed up as excusable under the circumstances, what Western Allied powers did with enemy civilian populations under their control—took care of them and spread stable, democratic government—compared to what Axis powers did to enemy civilian population under their control—systematic murder and enslavement and the propagation of totalitarian systems—is the primary distinction which by far matters the most even if does not come close to fully absolving the West for its conduct in terror bombings such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.  War brings out excess and the worst in humanity by its very nature, but even if both sides commit similar and comparable excesses at times, scale and what ends inspired those excesses to be committed in the first place are not things that can be forgotten and certainly expose any argument attempting to equate the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes with the U.S. and UK governments.

There is a limit for Hitchens to those whom we can define as rational, as “some definitions cannot be stretched beyond a certain point, and the death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook. One has to say sternly: If you wish martyrdom, we are here to help—within reason.”

Hitchens makes a passionate case for primarily using the terms terrorist and terrorism to refer not merely to tactics but end goals, and his argument is not without its strong points.  But for now and for some time policymakers and international affairs experts have loosely agreed on a broader definition (if not all its specifics) that is still both useful and far less narrow than less useful definitions.

Mainstream Views on What Is Terrorism

Joao Silva/The New York Times

Contrary to the more mainstream understanding of terrorism today, the ancient Greeks actually conceived of terrorism as a form of government (terrorcracy or tromokratos), much like democracy, monarchy, aristocracy, and so forth, in which terror was the main way the state functioned and kept law and order.  The word “terrorism” first really appears in 1795 in French (“terrorisme”) to describe Jacobin rule of France during the French Revolution, so its original use was describing government rule through terror.  It is only in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century when “terrorist” as a term is used to describe attacks on the government by the UK and Russia, respectively.  Thus, Hitchens’ approach is interesting in that his preference is for the term to be applied to non-state groups that seek to embody terror and make it an end in the way of the Jacobin regime. 

Like Hitchens, who saw a major aspect of terrorism as being an absence of reason, terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman also discusses a useful definition of terrorism that involves defining what it is not.  Where Hitchens pushes a definition that involves the absence of reason, Hoffman tries to define terrorism by going through the types of violence that it is not and showing that terrorism fills that gap.  For Hoffman, this leaves us approaching a definition that is “the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change.” One Israeli definition is basically the same, but narrows the terrorists’ targets to “civilian targets.”  Similarly, even as the term remains challenging to define, consensus within many varying international legal definitions of terrorism involve “common core elements” that at least include violence against civilians as part of a campaign to intimidate or coerce populations and/or governments, an understanding that most major mainstream analyses seem to have confirmed, even if there is significant disagreement over additional acts as to how they are—or are not—terrorism where and when government and/or military targets can be included.

Counterterrorism Must Necessarily Be Complex & Nuanced

Additionally, while few would disagree that terrorism is a tactic that states are capable of utilizing directly (“state terrorism”) either on their own people or on others, terrorism, when used as a word by itself, generally refers to non-state actors, though state sponsorship is not ruled out.  That is not to say the “state terrorism” is a better phenomenon, more legitimate or respectable, than non-state terrorism, and there is an interesting philosophical debate as to how the word terrorism should be used and to what, in its purest sense, it should refer to, but that is not the focus of the policy maker; for policymakers and the elected officials we choose, “state terrorism,” as with all actions coming directly from state structures, can often be dealt with fairly conventionally on a macro-level through the interstate international relations system.  Those carrying out those acts of terrorism, except, generally, at the lowest level, are generally protected by a state or states; to deal with them, states must be dealt with.  State-sponsored terrorism requires a more hybrid response, as a state can be pressured to reduce or stop its support for such terrorism through traditional means, but to whatever the degree the terrorist group receiving sponsorship is an independent actor it will likely have to be dealt with using more traditional counterterrorism means, which is the type of response that governs non-state terrorist acts.  Compared to non-state terrorism, state-terrorism is relatively easy to manage: a single state government, even if not wholly united, is far easier to deal with than a non-state actor because the points of possible engagement and leverage are limited and generally well-understood.  Negotiating and interacting with terrorist groups that are not part of a state structure is far more challenging precisely because such groups are not constrained by the rules of the international state system; if a faction of a state government breaks off and does not honor an international agreement, that state’s government can still be held responsible, and it can even be supported to give it the ability to reign in its recalcitrant faction.  But non-state, independent terrorist groups, whose organizations are often opaque, diffuse, and decentralized, where there is no steady or reliable point of contact or central authority and where there can sometimes be little or no desire for negotiation on the side of the terrorist organization (especially over long-term conflict resolution as opposed to, say, a cease fire or prisoner exchange), require a very different set of nontraditional approaches and means for the policymaker to deal with them; this evolving, non-traditional set of tools is what is most is most often understood to fall under the term “counterterrorism,” which itself can have much overlap with the toolbox of “counterinsurgency (COIN),” as terrorism as a tactic can be used as part of war or when there is no war, falling under the watchful eyes of both civilian and military sentinels, sometimes at different times and/or under different jurisdictions, other times simultaneously.  Not every militant attack in time of war, rebellion, or insurgency is necessarily considered terrorism though some are, depending on the definition, but generally every militant attack that is not of a traditional criminal nature and that is outside of a war/rebellion/insurgency setting is considered terrorism.

Such distinctions may seem moot, but they are from it, as are the distinctions Hitchens makes between terrorists that are rational (those who can be accommodated by reasonable and just means) and those who are irrational (those for whom there is no reasonable or just accommodation possible).  Smart, effective counterterrorism approaches will make such distinctions a core driver and a core base of such policy.  Such approaches were exactly how Gens. Petraeus and Chiarelli went after the problem of violence in Iraq, and in a short period of time, they had brought groups that had been using terrorism against U.S. forces and the Iraqi government over to fighting on behalf of U.S. forces and the Iraqi government against other, more extreme terrorists like al-Qaeda in Iraq (ISIS’s precursor), and Iraq was soon on the path to dramatically decreased levels of violence, levels that were the lowest since the war began.  The recent rise of ISIS is hardly an indictment on this strategy, as, in the end, violence in Iraq only rose in 2013 in response to the terrible sectarian policies of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and spillover from the Syrian Civil War, over a year after the last U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq late in 2011.  If anything, these events show how closely related the incidence of terrorism is to oppression, politics, and policy, and how variable it is in relation to changes in all of these.

Republicans/Conservatives Often Fail to Grasp Counterterrorism Basics

But too many conservatives and Republicans don’t even seem to acknowledge such realities.  In fact, for a problem that requires a decidedly nuanced approach, their prescriptions tend to lack nuance altogether.

To be fair, a good number of leading Republicans are careful to acknowledge that Islam as a whole is not the problem, and that ISIS does not reflect Islamic values in a generally, mass-practiced sense, that the West is not in a titanic civilizational struggle with the Islamic world: Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, Lindsey Graham, and a number of others. 

But many—far too many—do not, including Trump and Ted Cruz, two of the last three remaining candidates for the Republican nomination; Dr. Ben Carson, the last of the candidates to drop out before Marco Rubio, also fell into this trap.  And they and those who think like them are the ascending, dominant voices in the Republican Party today.  Too many Republicans and conservatives want to lump all terrorists into the irrational, terror-as-an-end categorization; the only solution is eradication and marginalization.  When Republicans talks about terrorism, they never shy away from linking it with Islam (and the vast majority of Republicans are in favor of at least temporarily banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., à la Trump); they prefer to talk about a broad, civilizational clash à la Samuel Huntington; for them, it is a war of America standing up for Western, Judeo-Christian values against a foe that represents Eastern, Islamic values that are the antithesis of everything for which the U.S. stands.  These people tend to inflate the conflict, describe it in grandiose terms, and push for extreme, counterproductive policies.  In this vein, Republicans tend to ascribe blind hatred of the West, freedom, and Christianity as the main motives of terrorists.  You almost never hear them talk about imperialism, colonialism, mass poverty, a lack of dignity and opportunity, and the oppression of U.S.-backed regimes as root causes and motivators for terrorism even though they clearly often are.  They tend to dismiss the reality that as awful as terrorists generally are, they also often have very legitimate grievances that need to be addressed; rather, for many Republicans, all terrorists are the same purely evil people with purely evil motives that must be utterly shunned and destroyed.

This mindset in part explains why they are so against diplomacy with Iran, the main sponsor of increasingly-less-terroristic Hezbollah, and so for confrontation and non-engagement.  As I have taken time to point out before, such approaches tend to bolster both the stature and number of extremists, including both extremist politicians and extremist violent groups, including terrorists.  Just recently, moderates in Iran trounced hard-line conservatives in elections mere months after the West’s nuclear deal with Iran.  Predictably, Republicans did not alter their illogical, near-universal, near-total opposition to the deal, even as the deal is clearly showing tangible, positive results on a significant scale. 

The idea of one policy for both ISIS and Hamas, and for all terrorist groups—failing to use the political carrot to moderate the behavior of more rationally-disposed terrorists like the latter in favor of pushing for an all-out confrontation is a policy that will fail to defuse conflict when there are serious chances to do so and will, instead, inflate it, causing more death and destruction in both the short and long-term and making long-term settlement or resolution of the relevant conflicts far more unlikely—is not an idea that advances the interests of the U.S. or makes it safer.  The one-size-fits-all approach that Republicans generally favor flies in the face of decades of conflict studies analyses and research, and in the face of history itself. 

Even recent history reinforces these truths: the importance of the example of the IRA/Sinn Féin in Ireland and its long, violent struggle with the British government cannot be overstated (including the example of conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s failed hard-line policies in Northern Ireland), even as it is clear groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are hardly carbon copies.  Still, both Hamas and Hezbollah, like the IRA/Sinn Féin before them, have seen a dramatic moderation of their terrorist activities since their very bloody inceptions.  Successful policy over time will be one that makes distinctions and harnesses and encourages these moderating trends, rather than pushes them in the opposite direction and paints with a broad brush, as both the recent Israeli government missteps and missed opportunities leading to the summer 2014 Gaza conflict and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s misleading attempts to equate Hamas and ISIS illustrate.  Part of the same conflict, Fatah/the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operated very much as a terrorist organization in past; since the early 1990s, and most especially after the death of Arafat, the terror role has diminished—now arguably ceased—to the degree that now it is far more common for Fatah/the PLO to be accused of inciting terror, of being complicit with terror, or of not preventing terror rather than committing terror, even by Israel, its archfoe.  As messy as these conflicts have been and often still are, the trends with these particular groups are undeniably reassuring and moving in the direction of less violence compared to recent decades.

In short, a successful counterterrorism strategy will make important distinctions between terrorist groups of different types, rather than lump them all together, allowing for the possibility of long-term negotiation and settlement with some terrorists even as others prove unwilling to consider diplomacy; if anything, there is even the possibility of causing divides within terrorist organizations between those who want to pursue engagement and those who prefer conflict, internal division that would almost always be beneficial to the opponents of such terrorist groups.

A Discerning Definition of Terrorism Helps Us All

In the end, terrorism will be difficult to define with an extremely high degree of specificity, and that task may even be, and is likely, impossible.  However, a vague yet still useful and usable definition beyond people labeling whatever violence they don’t like as terrorism and its perpetrators as terrorists is quite possible by looking at what clearly is not terrorism and what clearly is terrorism, even if there will undoubtedly be some gray areas.  Terror is undeniably part of terrorism, but any good military will try to scare its opponents into submission, either by the ferocity of its attacks or by the overwhelming relative power of its military might.  Since we have a lexicon which describes both acceptable and unacceptable military action under international law, and since “war crimes” and “war criminal” carry stigmas comparable to the labels “terrorist” and “terrorism,” it is both unhelpful and unproductive to try to blur this distinction. 

This goes for multiple sides in this discussion: Palestinians targeting Israel military targets with violence on their own legally recognized territory are more properly thought of as rebels and insurgents than terrorists, and labeling excessive Israeli military actions against Palestinians as terrorism serves no purpose when war crime vocabulary is already clear and well-defined.  The attempts by Israelis to enlarge the definition of terrorism to cover any and all violence directed at Israeli targets, whether civilian or military, is no more accurate or helpful than Palestinians trying to label all Israeli military activity, even when justified, as either war crimes or terrorism.  Such use of such terms only encourages eye rolls and a boy-who-cried-wolf-likelihood to ignore future accusations using these terms.  We could say the same for situations with American occupation forces currently in Afghanistan and formerly in Iraq, and to the U.S. government’s credit, it has increasingly become more circumspect in applying the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist,” recognizing that some local fighters are actually more aptly called insurgents.  Middle-Eastern locals and governments who are often understandably unhappy with U.S. drone policy, likewise, should rethink their application of the term “terrorism” to U.S. drone strikes, as the main use of them is to kill specific suspected militants that have either carried out or assisted or are preparing to carry out or assist violent attacks against civilians and/or U.S. or allies troops.  Civilians are not the intended targets of drone strikes even if they are killed, and the main purpose of drone strikes is not to intimidate the general population or governments of these locations where the strikes occur.  Errant strikes that kill mostly or only civilians are, of course, to be deplored, and more care needs to be taken to avoid such mistakes, but they are in no way moral equivalents to suicide bombers killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians in mosques and markets, and, as in other cases, simply throwing the words terrorism and terrorist back at the U.S. government because the victims are understandably unhappy with the results is not a blueprint for a useful definition of such terms but is very much a blueprint for a meaningless, subjective term to be used to describe any type of violence, justified or unjustified, of which one party or another does not approve. 

Intentional killing of civilians in and of itself and the desire for such intentional killing to force a change in policy/politics through its intimidating and terrorizing effects is a terrible thing; the ability to loudly and clearly label such acts terrorism enhances the ability to fight these acts and further stigmatize those who carry them out and their supporters; unproductively broadening the scope of these terms cheapens their use and the ability to single out such acts.  If every airstrike, drone strike, and militant attack on government and military installations is labelled terrorism, their perpetrators terrorists, then pretty much all political violence, even including just war and self-defense, can be labeled terrorism and the social, legal, political, and security tools needed to reign in the most heinous types of violence that target those most defenseless of all—non-combatant civilians—are weakened, leaving those most vulnerable of all people with even fewer defenses than before. 

It is in trying to be more reserved and circumspect with labeling certain things terrorism that we can empower those who fight against such violence and better protect the civilian populations that nearly always bear the brunt of it.  That is not to diminish or excuse war crimes and improper use of force by state militaries, Western or otherwise, but such misdeeds are better labeled using more traditional means, in part because more well-established, traditional tools of state-to-state interaction, international organizations, and international law already exist to deal with such excesses.  Casually labeling war crimes terrorism and war-criminals terrorists, in addition, can in turn have the effect of also diminishing the power of and seriousness of the war-crimes and terrorists labels. 

In the end, a more careful definition and more careful approach to terrorism will save more lives and weaken terrorists further than more careless, less nuanced approaches, which may actually empower terrorists and make us less secure.  In an age of hypersensitivity that is further amplified by global social media, language carries an additional weight when dealing with such weighty subjects.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 14, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 14th, 2015

Avishag Shaar Yashuv/Flash90 

TEL AVIV — As I was reading about and watching the unfolding massive terrorist attacks in Paris, and as I rushed to churn out an article about my initial thoughts, initial feelings, initial responses, there was a large degree of desensitization going on inside me of I worked.  But towards the end, when I could turn more of my brain away from the task at hand and I was just proofing and posting, my emotions started to rear their suppressed heads.  There was a lot of negative stuff, to be sure.  But there were some positive thoughts: looking at the enormous support for France from across the world, seeing the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building light up the Manhattan skyline in the tricolors of the French flag, I was reminded of the outpouring of sympathy and love and shared grief that France, and the world, showed the United States after the 9/11 attacks.  It was nice to see the favor returned by many Americans, nice to see most of the world stand up yet again to reject terror and murder. 

Then I thought about where I was at that moment, in Tel Aviv, part of a trip I am taking through Israel.  I thought, too, of past terrorist attacks in this very city where I was now and in other parts of Israel.  I thought about how much I love Israel and the Israeli people, even though I am extremely critical of their government’s policies towards the Palestinians, whom I also love.  I felt a moment of solidarity with Israelis even though these were attacks that happened in France. 

And then, something of an epiphany hit me: New York, Mumbai, London, Madrid, Ankara, Paris twice in one year now… when these spectacular attacks happened, there was outpouring of international sympathy, of support, of solidarity and love.  But when I thought of Israel, it dawned on me: when Israelis suffer terror attacks, they must often be asking “Where is the love?,” because there are very few marches or protests in the Western or wider world for Israeli Jews when they are attacked, not many that aren’t organized by local Jews or that don’t happen in America.  After a long night of writing, I woke and and shared my feelings with my delightful Israeli Couchsurfing host; as I looked into her eyes, I had to fight back tears as I realized how truly alone she and others must feel.  I told her how sad and sorry I felt that Israelis were so alone when it came to their suffering, and she—a very liberal Israeli who is against the occupation—told me that I was right, that they do feel alone, that she was sad about it, too.

When Israeli security forces and sometimes even Israel civilians, usually settlers, commit attacks that are either clearly excessive in terms of government action or even are terrorism in their own right when talking about Israeli Jewish civilians attacking Palestinian Arabs, the world, social media, the publics of many nations rightly protest, and protest robustly.  In Europe, where there are more Muslims now than previously, the protests are increasingly large and vocal.  This reaction is understandable and fitting and proper.

What is not fitting and proper is the general silence from the people of the world when Israeli civilians are targeted, attacked, wounded, and killed.  Yes, world government leaders tend to read statements of solidarity and support for Israel, and in the U.S. in particular, there are plenty of public shows of support.  But throughout most of the rest of the world, in Muslim nations and in Europe and in other places, there is at best a muted response when Israeli civilians are targeted in terrorist attacks.  Yes, these attacks are often very small in scale, and are not on the scale seen in Paris last night.  But they still happen, and with far more regularity than these other massive international attacks.

Now, I am not a fan of Netanyahu, but he has a point; when discussing the fact that the Iranian regime regularly makes incendiary statements against Israel (and there can be a discussion about how serious this rhetoric is and what exactly it means), he noted the “utter” and “deafening silence” that these threats were met with by the world community; he then stared down the members of the UN General Assembly silently for forty-five-seconds to drive this point home.

Well, that’s how Israelis feel, even many liberal Israelis, when it comes to terrorism: they are alone, they have little or no support, and even when it is Israeli civilians being killed, the focus is still on criticizing Israel.

Now, let me be clear: Israel has a pathological need to constantly be the victim, and though there are notable and sizable exceptions, Israelis tend to see pretty much anything they do to the Palestinians as justified and necessary, and many of these people feel the Palestinians as a whole deserve their lot and this treatment.  I’m not here to make excuses for Israeli policy, the nearly-fifty-year occupation that has led to systematic abuses and degredations of millions of Palestinians, the settlements, the emerging apartheid-like system in the West Bank, the siege of Gaza, and the discrimination of Israeli citizens of Arab Palestinian descent; no one should.  All of these things are factors which help to explain Palestinian terrorism and violence against Israelis.  They must be understood and acknowledged, and it is good to protest against and condemn all of it.

But—and this is key—these cannot be cited as an excuses or justificationsfor Palestinian violence against civilians.  And when Israeli civilians are maimed, wounded, and injured by Palestinians, I’m not saying that these topics are inappropriate to discuss.  But when Israeli civilians are attacked, that must be condemned first and loudest; the crowd that condemns (and rightly so) the Israeli occupation loudly and without qualification must also be able and needs to condemn violence against Israeli civilians without qualification.  And, frankly, the occupation is an ongoing, long-term thing.  When Israeli civilians are targeted, the proper focus is on the civilian victims; that day is theirs, and the occupation will still be there to be a major focus another day.

The world is asking—and must continue to ask—much from Israel.  The occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza are intolerable and must end.  But the world that asks much from Israel would do much to realize they make Israel less receptive when it does not stand against the murder of Israeli civilians with the same passion and vehemence as it stands against Israel’s occupation and other wrongs committed against Palestinians.  When Israelis feel alone, that their suffering is not acknowledged, that their lives and their dead matter not to major world populations, especially a Europe that perpetrated the Holocaust against them, when the very powers that claim they will help protect Israel and stand for its interests in any major peace agreement with the Palestinians and other Arabs show little regard for Israeli life, it makes Israelis want to withdraw from the world, a world they see as hating them and wishing them harm, a world that stays silent when civilian men, women, and children are terrorized, maimed and murdered.  It makes them have no faith in any idea of an international order and to feel alone, isolated, unloved, hated, and insecure.  The more powerful sides in conflicts often only willingly make peace from positions of strength; by making Israel feel insecure when it comes to terrorism committed against Israeli civilians, the chances of peace, which includes a measure of justice for Palestinians, fade.

We saw the world stand up against terror in reaction to the barbaric attacks in Paris yesterday; let’s also stand up for terror against Israeli civilians.  Standing up for Israeli human life does not mean you condone the occupation or the many abuses of the Israeli state, does not betray any solidarity with Palestinians; and much more so than anything France has done in regard to ISIS and the conflict against ISIS, the up-close-and-personal-decades-long-oppression of Palestinians by Israel is clearly a major driver in the violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  But unless Israelis are shown more love and support from the global community, especially from Europe but also from Muslim lands and their many Muslim inhabitants, unless people stop being silent or outright justifying attacks against Israeli civilians, Israel will never feel secure enough to take the very real risks necessary for a just and lasting peace.  And regardless of your thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli civilians that are victims of terror deserve your sympathy as much as any civilian victims of terror, and standing up against their murder is always the right thing to do. 

Some would say that the Israeli public are not “innocent,” and that because they empower leaders like Netanyahu, it is fair to judge them.  This is not an unreasonable position; but it is one thing to judge voters for bad politics, and another to say that their bad politics justifies a death warrant at the hands of terrorists; I shudder to think what would happen to many Americans, Russians, and others if our voting records made us fair targets for murder and terrorism.

Next time Israeli civilians are murdered in a terrorist attack—and it makes me sad say that there will 100% be a next time—condemn the attacks in a way that remembers who the victims at that specific moment are in a way that does not make Israel or Israelis immediately responsible for the attack, and that does not try to warp the victimhood of the recently murdered into some kind of red carpet for someone else’s victimhood.  When Palestinians are killed wrongly by Israelis, they don’t deserve to simply be dismissed as inevitable casualties of the response to Palestinian terrorism; when Israeli civilians are killed by Palestinian terrorism, they don’t deserve to written off simply as an inevitable consequence of the Israeli occupation; all these people are people, not ends to prove a political point. 

If you stood up for the French against terrorism, if you stand up for the Palestinians against occupation, be sure to stand up for Israelis against terrorism.  No one wins when Israelis mourning civilians murdered by terrorists stand alone; rather, we all lose.

Reuters

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 12, 2015

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 12, 2015 and republished on MoviePilot on February 13, 2016

al-Furqan Media/Islamic State

AMMAN — There are some who would argue here in America and in other places that the greatest calamity of our time*—the metastacizing vortex of the Syrian Civil War and all its accompanying metastacizing side effects—is not “our” problem and does not really affect “us.” To them I would say, on several important levels, that they could not be more wrong.

Apart from the appalling destruction of human lives and cultural heritageon top of mass displacement contributing to make current population of globally displaced reach a scale not seen since WWII, and perhaps, even, taking all those into account, the most terrifying thing about this sad, sorry, tragedy is how absolutely quickly and nearly completely an entire (relatively) modern state and society has collapsed into pre-Taliban Afghanistan and Congolese-like (dare I say even Dark Age-like?) near-total anarchy and chaos of the most virulent and violent kind. Even in the worst days of the U.S. occupation in Iraq in 2006, when the U.S. barely managed to keep a lid on a semblance of order and Iraq teetered on the edge of chaos and civil war, the lid may have been popping and jumping, but it never flew completely off and out of sight; and after those dark days, the U.S. began to greatly turn things around. Well, with Syria, today, the lid has been blown off and it has been long-gone for some time now, and this is beyond debate. It happened so quickly that the world has been caught flat-footed and ill-prepared, content to play with Syria as chess game board and making things worse not only for Syrians but for the entire global community at worst and a few doing something to try to help but doing far too little, too late at best. In the middle, most nations do nothing.

Yet we all need to be concerned about how quickly a sophisticated, fairly modern, secular-oriented state like Syria devolved into the worst of religious extremist fanaticism and violent, murderous cruelty, of rampant anarchy and callous calculated mass-murder. Any country can produce a mass-murder or a tyrant, a Hitler if you will. And it should be remembered that before and during the Nazi era, Germany represented the peak of civilization, culture, learning, science, etc. That did not stop it from unleashing the greatest orgy of bloodletting in the history of the world for such a short period of time from carrying out and engaging in the most systematic and organized genocide in world history; only the Mongols may be comparable. No matter how great or powerful or advanced our culture may be, we must all recognize we may all, as nations, possibly produce a Hitler. Or, in this case, a Bashar al-Assad (to be fair not nearly as rotten an apple as Hitler). But it is easy to place all the blame on a leader, and harder (but more important) to confront the most troubling traits of an entire society; thus, the more important lesson here is that we may each, as a society, become Nazi Germany, or, in this case, Syria (again, not equating the two here, just making a point).

In 2015, Nazi Germany is something of a fading memory, a near-mythical tale few can say they experienced or observed contemporarily, whether up close or from afar. Syria is the greatest calamity to unfold in our current era,*and even in just the few years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the peak of violence there, the tremendous growth of immediate and stream-of-consciousness social media, mobile technology, broadband internet access, and interconnectedness means that the average citizen in the world, if they choose, can experience the conflict in Syria today in an up-close and personal way as no one in the world not directly in or near a conflict could have ever experienced conflict in the past. It is therefore an unprecedented teachable moment on several levels.

Syria is like a Gollum to our Frodo for all you Lord of the Rings fans. Gollum had the One Ring for 500 years and, as the prologue states, “it poisoned his mind” (an understatement). At first glance, Gollum looks utterly alien, evil, contemptible, deserving of being struck down, cast off, or forgotten. But as Gandalf explains and Frodo comes to learn, Gollum was a distorted mirror image of Frodo himself and of Hobbits general, as he was once a Hobbit named Sméagol. Especially after Frodo has been the bearer of the Ring for some time, he comes to understand the burden the Ring had been for Sméagol over the half-millennium it had taken a hold of him and turned him into Gollum; Frodo, begins to suffer as a Ring-bearer just as Gollum has, and even begins to speak and act more like Gollum as his quest goes on. In subtle ways in the books, Frodo begins to root for Gollum, hoping to redeem him back to Sméagol, because Gollum’s ability to be redeemed and overcome the evil of the One Ring is a reflection of Frodo’s own ability to do the same. In the movies, this is made more explicit with a sharp exchange between Sam and Frodo about the Ring and Gollum, in which Frodo snaps at Sam “You have no idea what it did to him, what it’s still doing to him. I want to help him Sam…Because I have to believe he can come back.” For us, we have to believe Syria and Syrians are redeemable and worth fighting for, because any nation is, frighteningly, capable of a similar descent; whether we like it or not, Syria is a distorted reflection of our own nations.

New Line

Perhaps you scoff at such a notion. “Our people, our culture, our nation, our system, our values, are better than them and theirs,” you say. “It couldn’t happen here.” Well, even in American history, there are frightening examples of similar breakdowns of society into murderous anarchy. During the Civil War, large portions of the South and Border States were engulfed in bloody, chaotic, anarchic, vengeful violence, where government authority evaporated and life was a series of bloody confrontations between deserting troops, roving guerilla bands, civilians divided over their loyalty to the Union, slaves and ex-slaves, and rebels who fought against the Confederate government; untold thousands were killed in remote parts with no witnesses to record the events; nobody and no one was safe from robbery, banditry, rape, and murder. From the Civil War through the 1960s, America experienced numerous race and labor riots, some of which were quelled with military force. The “Wild West” was somewhat anarchic for decades and was only stabilized with a heavy price in blood. In more recent living memory, riots in Los Angeles in 1992 were the largest in America in decades; much more recently, Hurricane Katrina brought one of the great American cities to its knees as New Orleans became a hotbed of death, violence, anarchy, looting, crime, and public mismanagement. And just last summer, Ferguson, Missouri, saw the worst riots in America since the aforementioned L.A. riots. Many white Americans would dismiss in a racist way the last few examples as black people just being black people; certainly white America would not behave in such a way today, they think.

Wrong. At most, our culture, system, values, etc. buy us time, certainly less than we would like to believe and certainly not enough to prevent a societal collapse under the most severely pressing circumstances.

Three television shows illustrate this vividly, each presenting a vision of America (or at least a slice of America) coming apart and being reduced to primal anarchy: Fear the Walking Dead, The Walking Dead, and HBO’s The Leftovers. (BEWARE SPOILERS, if you have seen one show but no other, just skip the relevant section; for those willing to have a bit of the story ruined but not the major parts, I have divided the spoilers into stages).

Fear the Walking Dead (SPOILERS)

Fear the Walking Dead is AMC’s new prequel of sorts for its megahit The Walking Dead. In The Walking Dead, the main character wakes up in a hospital weeks after the zombie apocalypse has begun. In contrast its mother show, Fear the Walking Dead starts us right in the middle of normal life in Los Angeles, before the outbreak and before society collapses. In just six episodes, we see a fairly normal group of people experience an utter breakdown of pretty much everything. It starts with isolated cases, and the riotous L.A. denizens are apt to see police brutality against regular citizens rather than law enforcement trying to contain a zombie outbreak: they riot en masse and draw the authorities’ attention from dealing with what they don’t yet know is a zombie outbreak. Such conditions only the enable the infection so spread even more in the ensuing chaos. Police and medical workers, on the front lines of dealing with people who are dead and then almost immediately “turn” into zombie, become particularly susceptible. Police stations, we must assume, and hospitals, we see, are turned into new front lines against the zombie infection. Many people try to leave town as disorder spreads, but the congested L.A. traffic only makes them sitting targets for zombies, as whole highways filled with abandoned cars imply in later scenes. The power stops working. 

Then the military shows up an is able to secure a small neighborhood here and there (lucky for the main characters), but most of the city of L.A. is abandoned; whole neighborhoods burn down, skyscrapers smolder, the streets and houses are empty and deserted save for small pockets, the lights are off. The military is there, ostensibly to protect the few secure zones they are able to create, but no one is there to protect the people from the abuses of a military that is almost as freaked out as the civilians. Outside of the protected pockets, there are signs that point to the military simply killing civilians left behind, possibly out of worries about infection. The sick and non-cooperative are forcefully taken away from their families and moved to detention centers. At this point, there is no law, only a new order coming at the expense of all freedom and backed by the butt of a rife. 

(BIG SPOILERS AHEAD). One of the characters in the show, we learn, was a security official and a torturer for the regime in El Salvador. He quickly feels the need to use his skills from the past, and, because it may benefit her son who has been detained, a single mother who is one of the main characters spend little more than a few seconds with her qualms and quickly accepts the use of torture with no apparent sense of guilt or shame and with no look back, unlike her boyfriend. Yet in the final episode, the boyfriend, composed until this point, comes undone and nearly beats to death the same man whose torture he was against, leaving him in a state where he may well die. The same man takes it upon himself, out of necessity, to shoot his ex-wife in the head with her full consent because she has been bitten by a zombie and knows that she will soon become one. The detained son escapes with a new friend but they decide to do nothing to help anyone else to limit their own risk; the main characters, when they decide to leave town just before the military arrives, decline to warn their neighbors of the impending disaster (not many people know what’s going on at that point); when they figure out that the military is weak and will soon abandon them completely, they decline to warn their neighbors yet again. It is likely that they have known these people for some time, but in a matter of days, those bonds come to mean nothing. Society is no more. The main characters even unleash a zombie horde on the detention camp entrance to serve as a distraction so they can rescue their own loved ones, totally willing to place all the guards and all the civilian detainees at risk.

(Exiting major spoilers) Throughout the entire show the authorities are more of less clueless, one or more steps behind and impending disaster they are ill-prepared or incapable of handling, and rather than coming together, people become more selfish and tribal, less concerned about helping others, more willing to place others at risk or leave them vulnerable, with naked self-interest dominating. The government, at least where we see it, completely abandons people and evaporates. All of downtown L.A. is a virtually empty ruin, a wasteland, by the last episode. The collapse of an entire city, one of the world’s largest, happens in a matter of days, as does the collapse of the moral fabric of society. Survival is the new central value, and sacrificing even longtime neighbors for self-preservation becomes the norm.

The Walking Dead (SPOILERS through season five)

AMC

The Walking Dead, the sixth season of which is just premiered, begins way past the initial devolution of its sister series, and takes us to some truly terrifying depths of cruelty and horror that unfortunately mirror all too much our own reality of anarchic war zones. By the time the show starts, society and government are already long gone. Most people are dead or are, literally, walking dead (zombies), and most survivors are now in small nomadic gangs whose numbers are constantly being whittled down not just by zombies, but by the aggressions and machinations of other bands of survivors. The words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides come to mind here: “…right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” And the weak sure do suffer, killed off by either zombies or stronger groups of survivors. Killing, pillaging, even rape (though this is more implied) seem commonplace, as the most cruel and brutal seem to survive at the expense of others; the more brutal, in fact, the better. Small communities seem to survive or be established here and there, but are run by the most brutal regimes as the sadistic Governor’s Woodbury, the deceptive, cannibalistic Terminus, and the Atlanta hospital all show us. The three communities exemplify murderous tyranny, ruthless deception, and the strong taking advantage of the weak, respectively. In the case of Terminus—without a doubt the most brutal of the three—we learn that prior to becoming what they became, they themselves suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of others. As Israeli historian Benny Morris in his landmark history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict quotes W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” in the book’s preface: “I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn,/ That to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.”

A dominant theme quickly emerges: the real challenge is not overcoming the zombies, but fellow human beings. 

In general, good men who try to show mercy often die because of it. Major characters die saving other people, and eventually some of these other people die too, showing a heartbreaking waste of life and that even the bravest sacrifices often turn out to be in vain. The show’s main character—and a major hero—ends up favoring execution as his preferred method for dealing with enemies as the seasons move forward, with him internalizing some very harsh lessons form earlier. Even young characters (and I mean young) exhibit sadistic and murderous tendencies, with one little girl even being put down like an animal after she kills an even younger little girl, an irredeemable product of her environment. “Good” guys sometimes kill first, ask questions later (or don’t ask), and the ability to resist having the environment completely dehumanize you is a constant theme and challenge of later seasons. Small acts of kindness and mercy are often rewarded only with death and despair. Sometimes the best mercy is killing someone to avoid a more painful death. Friends kill friends, lovers kill lovers, children kill parents, often out of kindness. Some of the drama comes as you really wonder whether some characters have lost their humanity, and if or how they can regain some shred of it.

(BIGGER SPOILERS COMING) In the fifth season, the band of survivors we’ve been following have absorbed some new people into their group over the seasons, and come across Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington, DC, suburb that was able to seal much of itself off from the horrors of the outside. Yet in being sealed off and incredibly fortunate, they are incredibly weak and ill prepared. We see how our main hero and character—truly a good man who has just been molded and shaped by his circumstances—becomes a little drunk on the power he realizes that his much stronger group can exert over them. Not without good reason, he plans to overthrow the current leaders and to take over and kill anyone who resists. It does not come to this, but in the end Alexandria’s leader and its people realize that they are weak and ill-prepared and allow the main character to take over peacefully, but not without having him quickly murder a problem member of their community with no hesitation. 

(Exiting major spoiler zone) The lesson they learn and that all the survivors seem to learn is that brutality is absolutely essential for survival; the question is, how brutal do you need to be and how brutal is too far and all-consuming? There is no easy or clear answer. What is clear is that the best of the survivors who have the most of their humanity intact have been able to survive by being able to become coldly, animalistically brutal in an instant and sometimes have to go “too far” just to survive in the jungle of the world in which they live. The softer, kinder ones in the group are usually the ones who die. And even as brutal as they become, the depravity, cruelty, and brutality of many of their opponents is so spectacular that there are clear moral distinctions even when all the people in question are incredibly brutal. Without the protections of society, no social contract to reign in our worst tendencies, brutality becomes absolutely necessary. Sometimes there is no “good” choice, only a less awful or even a totally unclear choice. The series makes this quite clear, and a popular game based on the series by Telltale Games that presents the player with truly heart-wrenching and gruesome personal choices similar to those in the show makes this even more clear.

The Leftovers (SPOILERS THROUGH SEASON 1)

HBO

HBO’s The Leftovers, the second season of which just started, was an emotional tour de force unlike anything I have seen on television before. As the show opens, we see a small upstate New York town and witness the moment when some people just disappear. Into thin air. No explanation, just fear, panic, terror. We then fast forward to three years later, to the same town, and learn via background news casts that four years ago, 2% of the world’s population just vanished. All types of people: good, bad, rich, poor, black, white, atheists, Christians, Muslims, Asians, Africans, all over the world, in every country. As the entire world tries to come to grips with this mystery, the families and friends of those who vanished—the vanished being referred to as “The Departed”—struggle to go on with their lives, to feel life, to find meaning. (SUPER SPOILER SECTION: if you haven’t seen the show, stop here) These people—called “Legacies”—are most poignantly represented by one particular character, who lost her husband and two young children to the Sudden Departure. She still lovingly buys them groceries each week, as if they were still there. She has taken a job helping provide benefits to other Legacies as a case officer/interviewer for the U.S. Department of Sudden Departure. You might think that this job brings her a sense of purpose and closure, but it entails her interviewing Legacies with a long list a very unpleasant and intrusive questions that leave her and her interviewees emotionally drained at best.  Just to feel alive, just to feel anything, she regularly hires hookers to shoot her with a gun while she dons a bulletproof vest. She is miserable, and drowning in her grief. And she is not alone. 

People want answers from above, but none come. So people creates answers on their own: numerous cults have sprung up; they are all over the news, causing violence and chaos. One cult involves a man who is something of a prophet, and fills his well-armed and well-guarded compound with his favorite delicacy: young Asian women. Another cult is setting up shop in the upstate New York town that is the center of the series; it calls itself the Guilty Remnant; its members all wear all white, refuse to talk, all constantly smoke, and they each have assignments to follow and tail specific people in the town. No one know much of anything about them, especially since they do not speak, which only makes the more frustrating to deal with.

In the shows first episode, the town is gearing up for a parade to honor the “Heroes” (the Departed). At the end of the parade, there is ceremony where a sculpture is unveiled showing a mother and a baby that is being pulled up and away from the mother. The woman who lost her husband and two kids is the keynote speaker, lamenting her loss and wishing to have them back, even if for a moment, and not even one of the better moments: she’d happily take a moment when they were all together and sick, miserable. Suddenly, the Guilty Remnant approaches from a distance, and holds up signs spelling out “STOP WASTING YOUR BREATH.” The people of the town, sad and mourning the Departed, march up to confront them. As usual, the Guilty Remnant says nothing, provoking even more anger, which spills over into violence and a riot.

Throughout the series, the Guilty Remnant continually adds new members from the town, and seek to harass people at their most vulnerable. They even buy up a Church in the center of town and convert it to one of their outposts. They break into the houses of the Legacies and steal photographs of the Departed. With these photos and through meticulous research, they find details about these people. Eventually, they secretly order incredibly lifelike dolls (an industry has popped up manufacturing scale lifelike replicas of people to cater to some of the more bizarre Legacies) in the likenesses of The Departed. After a series of building confrontations and growing hostility, they break into and place these dolls in the homes of the Legacies, dressed up as if they were still alive in the spots where they were when they disappeared. I am tearing up just now as I remember the look on the woman’s face who lost her husband and two children, a look of sheer, consuming, and raw pain, of primal anguish, silent as the sound is muted but accompanied by a soaring soundtrack. There is much more of a primal nature to come.

HBO

See, these Legacies are pretty much miserable people, drowning in depression, grief, loneliness, unanswered questions, loss. They have tried mightily to solider on. The non-Legacy, “normal” people are not doing much better. They have all had to put up with a provocative, cruel, stubborn cult in the form of the Guilty Remnant who try as hard as they possibly can to make it as hard as possible for these people to move on with their lives. The placing of the replicas of Legacies’ loved ones in their homes for them to shockingly wake up to generates a timeless and primal reaction, and it is terrifying. In a small American town not far from New York City, scenes of apocalyptic destruction erupt: the whole town, especially the Legacies, is outraged at the guilty remnant. All manner of people, even young people and even the elderly, take to the streets in an orgy of violence, bloodletting, and destruction; the town’s police force simply stands by and even the mayor just stands by, helpless, as young, old, men, women, strong, weak, all attack the guilty remnant, beating them, shooting them, destroying their compound, setting it on fire, dragging the cultists away to be tortured and murdered. Fires, gunshots, screams, blood, fill the air and background; a primal, cave-man-like hatred consumes normal people of the town; they become beasts of vengeance and nothing more. Just hours before, the town was a common, if affluent, modern American town; one act, albeit one that was a culmination of a series of acts, destroyed modern civilization and returned the town to the dark ages and prehistoric times of unthinking hatred and unrestrained brutality. This occurs in episode ten, after we have had nine episodes—nine hours—of getting acquainted with this town, its people. To see it all come crashing down, to see an entire community embrace their worst tendencies and opt for murder and mayhem in an instant, is a terrifying sight to behold, presented to us with a lyrical poetic quality that in unnerving to your very core. 

It left me shaken and rattled; it may be hard to imagine 2% of the world disappearing, but for the rest of mostly ten hours, it was very easy to accept the grief and pain and hurt and loss of these finely acted characters as real, and to accept the Guilty Remnant cult as real and their actions as real. And it was very easy to accept the primal, brutal, and violent reaction as also being real, authentic, and, perhaps most frighteningly of all, understandable. You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

 You wonder how you would have been able to stop yourself from participating in the orgy of violence and destruction, and there is no easy answer. You fall into the trap of rationalizing brutality that is not even in self-defense; you come face-to-face with the beast within. The bottom line: under the right conditions—conditions that are real and possible—this can happen anywhere.

And that is terrifying.

*****

All of this is important when considering Syria, and when considering ourselves. Fear the Walking Dead shows us how quickly society can collapse and how quickly we can embrace depravities like torture as a necessity. The Walking Dead shows us how terribly far gone we can go away from society, and how brutality is both a necessity and a demon with which we must wrestle, needing to embrace it in order to survive but needing to check it to retain our sense of, and belonging to, humanity. The Leftovers, too, show us how rapidly society can crumble, but shows us this in a place that looks and feels very much like our world, New York suburbia, even, and absent zombies. When the power and police are gone, we resort to tribalism and bare survival. When we resort to tribalism and bare survival, we can go to frightening depths of brutality and depravity. Some rebels in Syria are brutal mainly out of necessity, like our heroes who mostly, but not always, walk the line well. Some rebel groups in Syria are just simply brutal strongmen like the Governor or the police of the hospital, trying to carve out their own little fiefdoms where they rule as kings and bring some semblance of order to a chaotic world but an order that is to their benefit at the expense of others. Other are far more gone, groups such as ISIS, not that different from the people of Terminus (and, it is hinted, the Wolves group we will encounter in in force in this new season); their embrace of brutality as a means for survival is at the full cost of their humanity. With enough provocation, any community or people can turn into animals, predatory, heartless, unfeeling when it comes to “others.” 

This tendency is, perhaps, our greatest enemy, even as it is a strength in terms of survival. When it comes to Syria, just like Frodo, we must believe Gollum can come back, and we must try to help; the effort, the trying, is more important than the outcome, for, as Iain Pears writes in The Dream of Scipio, one of my favorite books:

“How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?”

To simply abandon Syria and watch it burn is condone the destruction of society and civilization, and to invite a similar response were that to happen elsewhere or even in our own backyard. For, as Pears also writes:

“Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.”

*****

Perhaps most terrifying of all, the collapse of Syria is in part engineered by collective human civilization: the internet, the weapons, the logistics, the ideologies and religions and sects and geopolitical rivalries involved, all are major contributors to this conflict, all products of millennia of civilization and development. Syria’s ruin is therefore our ruin, Syria’s victims our victims, Syria’s plight our plight. The world’s inability or unwillingness to stop the greatest calamity of our age* is also a reflection of the weaknesses of our civilization, weaknesses that must be addressed in order to prevent something even worse and on a larger scale in the future.

Towards the end of his book, Pears has one of his main characters describe the Holocaust he realizes is unfolding in the middle of WWII:

“When I was at Verdun [the WWI battle]… I saw things which were more appalling than you can imagine. I saw civilization coming apart at the seams. As it weakened, people felt free to act as they pleased, and did so, which weakened it still more. And I decided then it was the most important thing, that it had to survive and be protected. Without that tissue of beliefs and habits we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.

…I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. They are our greatest achievement. They are building a monument which will never be dismantled, even when they are swept away. They are teaching us a lesson which will echo for hundreds of years… The Nazis are… holding up a mirror and saying, ‘Look at what we have all achieved.’…

What they’re doing goes far beyond the war. Something unparalleled in human history. The ultimate achievement of civilization. Just think about it. How do you annihilate so many people? You need contributions from so many quarters. Scientists to prove Jews are inferior; theologians to provide the moral tone. Industrialists to build the trains and the camps. Technicians to design the guns. Administrators to solve the vast problems of identifying and moving so many people. Writers and artists to make sure nobody notices or cares. Hundreds of years spent honing skills and developing techniques have been necessary before such a thing can even be imagined, let alone put into effect. And now is the moment. Now is the time for all the skills of civilization to be put to use.

Can you imagine a greater, a more enduring achievement? This will last forever, and cannot be undone. Whatever benefits we bring to mankind in the future, we killed the Jews. No matter how great the advances of medicine, we killed them. However high our achievements may soar, however perfect we become, this is what is at our heart. We killed them all; not by accident, or in a fit of passion. We did it deliberately, and after centuries of preparation.

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it’s not true.”

*****

In the end, the world has enabled such a rapid destruction of almost an entire society in Syria, and the world allows it to continue, perpetuates it. That is hardly to suggest equally diffused global responsibility.

But if the global community cannot save Syria, will it ever be able to save itself when confronted with far greater crises in the future? It would be terrible to try to save Syria and fail, but it would be more terrible to not even try to save it and just watch it burn, consuming all inside and around in a fiery vortex of death and destruction, fed by the oxygen of nihilism and selfishness. The shows I discussed demonstrate how easily and deeply this can happen, show in great detail the dynamics of radicalization and how they can spread and corrupt all whom they touch, sparing no one, just as is happening in Syria, and show us how such shocking dynamics and sudden collapses can happen anytime, anywhere, to anyone.

There are no easy answers. All I know is that Syria is a test of our current human civilization, and whether it is the mass beheadings, the thousands of sex slaves, the religious extremism, the masses of displaced, or the petty rivalries involved, we—our world, our civilization—are failing this test.

*****

 (*To those of you who would argue that the 2003-2011 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq is the greatest calamity of our era, I would argue America’s 2003 Iraq invasion comes in second, and if you think that the situation in Iraq at the time of the Syrian Arab Spring uprising and the ensuing civil war contributed greatly to those events in destabilizing Syria you would be wrong, and it is most certainly the other way around, thatSyria destabilized Iraq, for, with the sacking of Rumsfeld and the implementation of new strategy led by Secretary Gates and General Petraeus starting in 2007, tremendous improvements in security and competence were made,so that from 2008 to 2012—the last year being a full year after a full U.S. withdrawal—the levels of violence were the lowest since the start of the conflict not including the initial invasion itself, particularly from 2010-2012.  Furthermore, throughout the entirety of the U.S. occupation, there was no major spillover from Iraq other than some refugees, whose numbers pale in comparison to both the current absolute number and especially the proportions of Syrian refugees, and the refugee populations today in Jordan and Lebanon especially are already having a much larger deleterious effect on those countries than the situation with refugees in almost nine years of U.S. operations in Iraq did with any of its neighbors. Certainly, nothing like the 2014 ISIS march into Iraq from Syria and its civil war occurred during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in regards to any of its neighbors. I have here linked to several articles I authored detailing these facts for those who wish to read more or doubt what I have written here)

See related articles by same author:

Putin’s Reckless Syria Escalation Makes Russia, Russians, Target of Global Jihad (Again)

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy II: Syria’s Civil War

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 16, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 16th, 2015

Republished by Movie Pilot

SPOILERS for the first five seasons, including the season 5 finale, but NOT for season 6

Varys: You have many admirable qualities- self-pity is not one of them. Any fool with a bit of luck can find himself born into power, but earning it for yourself? That takes work.

Tyrion Lannister: I’m not well-suited for work –

Varys: I think you are. You have your father’s instincts for politics- and you have compassion.

Tyrion Lannister: Compassion? Yes. I killed my lover with my bare hands, I shot my own father with a crossbow!

Varys: I never said you were perfect.

AMMAN — Game of Thrones, the award-winning hit HBO series that keeps setting new internet piracy records, is an incredibly unique show for many reasons. And though it has dragons and magic and frozen zombies, one of the reasons it is so unique is that it dares to tell us harsh, uncomfortable lessons about the very real world in which we live. Below, ten of the most important and salient will be discussed.

1.) A revolution, a campaign, and winning a war are all far easier than actually governing

“King Robert was strong; he won the rebellion and crushed the Targaryen dynasty. And he attended three Small Council meetings in seventeen years of ruling, and he spent his time whoring, hunting and drinking until the last two killed him. So, we have…a man who thinks winning and ruling are the same thing.” —Tywin Lannister

_____

“Killing and politics aren’t always the same thing! When I served as Hand of the King, I did quite well with the latter, considering the King in question preferred torturing animals to leading his people. I could do an even better job… advising a ruler worth the name, if that is indeed what you are.” —Tyrion Lannister to Daenerys Targaryen

_____

Hizdahr zo Loraq: Politics is the art of compromise, Your Grace.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m not a politician. I’m a queen.

Hizdahr zo Loraq : Forgive me. You’re right, of course. Still, it’s easier to rule happy subjects than angry ones.

Those who are good at climbing the path (or ladder, if you will) to power often find that exercising power or holding onto their new seat of power is far more challenging than the climbing process that got them there in the first place. In the same vein, often the skillset that allows one to ascend to power is not the same skillset that allows one to hold onto power and/or effectively govern. From Robert Baratheon to Daenerys Targaryen, we’ve see powerful characters stumble and struggle to maintain control and to rule the lands they have conquered (and for Jon snow, how many days did he last as the Lord Commander?). An army and dragons can’t govern. Robert’s hold on the Seven Kingdoms was short-lived, and Daenerys’ ability to govern her eastern cities seems precarious at best.  Let’s replace dragons with fighter jets and we can see the same basic experience for the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan recently. We can also see echoes of Mohammed Morsi in Egypt and both Barack Obama (he is better at campaigning than governing) and Nelson Mandela (legendary as a non-violent civil rights leader and revolutionary, not-so-great as South Africa’s President once in power). Americans were fortunate that their revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers could both lead a revolution and lead a government exceptionally well. France’s Revolutionary leaders during the French Revolution fell far short of the American mark when it came to governing. This show reminds us starkly the difference between getting power and using it well.

2.) Bad and good can and do coexist, even within the same person, policy, or country

Tyrion Lannister: So here we sit, two terrible children of two terrible fathers.

Daenerys Targaryen: I’m terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: I’ve heard stories.

Daenerys Targaryen: Why did you travel to the other side of the world to meet someone terrible?

Tyrion Lannister: To see if you were the right kind of terrible.

Daenerys Targaryen: Which kind is that?

Tyrion Lannister: The kind that prevents your people from being even more so.

_____

“You were a hero, and a smuggler. A good act does not wash out the bad. Nor a bad the good.” — Stannis Baratheon to Ser Davos Seaworth

_____

Melisandre: Are you a good man, Ser Davos Seaworth?

Ser Davos Seaworth: I’d say my parts are mixed, my lady, good and bad.

Melisandre: If half an onion is black with rot, it’s a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.

When it comes to Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark, two of the show’s most beloved characters, most people are ready to sing their praises. And yet, when Tyrion had a chance to escape he murdered both his former lover and his father without needing to do so to escape. Arya herself seems driven by revenge and little else, and was content to let The Hound—the closest thing she’s had to a friend for a long while—die a slow and painful death. At the same time, we have Jamie Lannister—poster child for incest and attempted child murder (remember Bran?)—making us swoon by helping Brienne of Tarth, sticking up for his incest-love-child Myrcella, and standing up to both his father and Cersei on behalf of Tyrion. Sandor Clegane has many awful deeds on his resume, including murdering the butcher’s boy who was friends with Arya—yet he also saved Loras Tyrell from his own brother, Gregor Clegane, when Gregor (The Mountain) was being a sore loser in a jousting tournament, and Sandor also showed more kindness to both Arya and Sansa than arguable anyone else in recent memory except for maybefaceless-man Jaqen. Who here didn’t feel sympathy for The Hound when Arya just left him to suffer? Who didn’t come away from that scene feeling at least a little different about Arya? Then we have Stannis, touchingly showing Jon Snow respect and giving him a lot of leeway even as he sacrificed his own daughter to fire and a stake and murdered his own brother. Even Catelyn Stark killed an innocent girl who was Walder Frey’s ill-treated wife as her last act just before she herself was killed. Perhaps the most conflicted character still alive is Theon Greyjoy, now the shadow of a human being known as Reek. Even one of the Sand girls, who had poisoned Bronn and who was ready to murder a young Myrcella just because she was a Lannister, was willing to save Bronn with an antidote to that poison and didn’t mind showing a man who was down and in jail her lovely breasts as a pick me up.

One of the things that makes Game of Thrones so unique is its complex portrayal of characters as something more than simply “bad” or “good,” to which so many other shows and movies tend to reduce things. Human beings seem to always have had a tendency to lionize or demonize their heroes and villains in an oversimplified way that bears little resemblance to reality. Robert E. Lee is revered by most white American Southerners as some sort of saint, even as he fought to destroy much of what was the United States and the Constitution in favor of preserving aa society based on race-based chattel slavery. Russians today seem to revere Putin. Ronald Reagan is practically deified as a saint even though his record as president is highly questionable and often shameful. Richard Nixon is demonized even as he made peace with China, created the E.P.A., and ended the Vietnam War (though clearly not in the best way possible), hardly an all-bad legacy and full of significant, commendable achievements. George W. Bush may have objectively had one of the worst presidencies in American history, but he did more than any other president (including Obama) to combat AIDS, spending billions of dollars and saving millions of lives. Billions worship Jesus of Nazareth without really factually knowing much of anything about him, and billions others revere the Prophet Mohammad even though they factually know very little about him. The United States often tries to do good, but does more bad in the process. The NSA spying program helps to keep Americans safe but also violates their privacy. Even Pope John Paull II—literally a saint—had a pretty bad record on the child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. Perhaps it is in our DNA, but it makes us poor judges of character more often than not and blinds us to the very real truth when we try to make so many public figures into either heroes or villains. We can love or revile characters for certain reasons, and then feel the opposite about the same characters for other reasons. And that’s ok. It’s better than reducing people to simply “good” or “bad.”

In particular for policymakers, this can help people in power to realize that making deals with people who can actually make a positive difference should not be based simply on whether or not they are thought of as “good” or “bad.”

3.) Sexual violence against women is pervasive and often there is no justice for either the victims or the perpetrators

“And to my son, the stallion who will mount the world, I will also pledge a gift. I will give him the iron chair that his mother’s father sat upon. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, will do this. I will take my Khalasar west to where the world ends and ride wooden horses across the black salt water as no Khal has done before! I will kill the men in iron suits and tear down their stone houses! I will rape their women, take their children as slaves and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak! This, I vow, I, Drogo, son of Bharbo. I swear before the Mother of Mountains as the stars look down in witness! As the stars look down in witness!”­ —Khal Drogo, translated from Dothraki

_____

“Have you ever seen a war in which innocents didn’t die by the thousands? I was in King’s Landing after the sack, Khaleesi. You know what I saw? Butchery. Babies, children, old men, more women raped than you can count. There’s a beast in every man, and it stirs when you put a sword in his hand.” —Ser Jorah Mormont

_____

“Elia Martell. I killed her children, then I raped her…then I smashed her head in, like this! ” —Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane

I will simply link to feminist writer Amanda Marcotte’s brilliant and very true MUST READ article shooting down all of the specious arguments about why Sansa’s rape scene and others in Game of Thrones are somehow “wrong,” should be done “differently,” or are “sexist” and “misogynistic.” Does anyone think that Steven Spielberg is an anti-Semite because he showed Jews being killed in the Holocaust in Schindler’s List? Today, even in 2015, sexual violence is pervasive all over the world, and even often in the most progressive and modern societies, from the U.S. to Sweden (Stieg Larsson, anyone?) Only about 5% of cases are even ever reported to authorities, which means that for 95% of women even in the modern world, justice for the raped and the rapists almost never happens. Yet people get furious with Game of Thrones because it displays a medieval world (where rape was pretty much institutionalized and far more widespread than it is today) that shows us just that. Whether with Sansa or Wildling women, the show should make us damn uncomfortable with rape, and it does.

If you want a rape story with a happy ending, watch an network TV movie-of-the-week or Lifetime. If you want to be taught an adult lesson about the real state and results of sexual violence in the real world, and walk away with the obvious truth that rape is a mostly unpunished crime suffered by unknown and silent victims, internalize that, be far more outraged about rape that you would with a misleading happy ending complete with justice and healing, and use that outrage to both care and do even more about rape in society, then watch the show. If you want to childishly be coddled and made to “feel good” that rape, actually, isn’t a silent, hidden, mass horror, don’t watch the show. But don’t pathetically try to claim the showrunners or George R. R. Martin are misogynistic, patriarchal, bad people who are encouraging rape simply by portraying it realistically and who have failed in their “duty” to give us stories that reinforce and reward our smug, modern sense of self-righteousness that cries “BAD” whenever things turn out in a way we don’t like. I’m all about women’s empowerment, but the ever-present public talk of women’s empowerment has led too many to believe that this empowerment is a common reality in many places and instances where it is not. A huge portion of the women on earth—perhaps a majority—are not “empowered” and are at risk of abuse committed with impunity, including rape; that’s the unfortunate reality. All (the mostly unknown and unheard) victims of rape are lucky that a show is as brave and bold as this one to make people realize just how terrible and pervasive rape, with its near total lack of justice for its victims, truly is.

4.) The noble path does not necessarily lead to success and the good guys often don’t win

“Poor Ned Stark- brave man, terrible judgement.” —Jamie Lannister

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“I’m not Ned Stark, I understand the way this game is played.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.” —Ramsay Snow

There is perhaps no other show on television that reminds us as starkly that the good guys don’t always win and following moral and ethical principles does not guarantee success; heck, in real life it often maybe even usually does not. It began with Ned Stark losing his head. And it has hardly ended there, as any fan of the show or books can tell you. Among the ranks of the powerful, there are more Joffreys than Neds. George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns used some pretty dirty and shameful tricks to falsely smear two decorated war veterans—John McCain and John Kerry—and we all remember who won those contests. It is easy to lose track of how many crimes Silvio Berlusconi, longtime Prime Minister of Italy, has been accused of over the years. We have many states ruled by murderous dictators, from Bashar al-Assad in Syria to Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Putin and the Koch Brothers have immense wealth and power, and can hardly be considered nice guys. Many of the brave people who stand up to these people and challenge them simply lose. Other times, they don’t simply lose, they lose their lives as well (see, quite recently, Boris Nemtsov). Or see Benjamin Netanyahu winning re-election in Israel through race-baiting. Or Hamas winning an election, period. It is useful to remember that, more often than not, this is the way the world works. Ned and Robb Stark, after all, were naïve to proceed as they did and it cost them their lives.

5.) The most horrible acts are often done for the most predictable reasons

“Just how safe do you think Myrcella is if the city falls? Do you want to see her raped and butchered like the Targaryen children?! Make no mistake, they will mount her pretty little head on a spike right beside yours.” —Tyrion Lannister to his sister Cersei, mother or Myrcella

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Petyr Baelish: Tell me, Ser Loras., what do you desire, most in this world?

Loras Tyrell: Revenge.

Petyr Baelish: I have always found that to be the purest of motivations.

We often hear the term “senseless horror.” But, quite disturbingly, horror often has a purpose behind it that is fairly banal and predictable, even as it is still often inexcusable. Stannis sacrificed his own daughter to be burned to death, but it was almost boringly easy to explain why: he wants to be king, the one thing which defines him more than other aspect of his character. Joffrey has a bunch of babies killed, simply and predictably because he doesn’t want any competition. Jamie Lannister almost murders little Bran Stark, simply because he doesn’t want his incestuous secret to get out and also to protect his love: his sister. Daenerys reopens the fighting pits to keep the peace and lets her dragons burn a man alive to make an example. Lord Bolton wipes out most of the Starks and their supporters at Robb Stark’s wedding because he wants to be warden of the North. And Theon betrays the Starks to win the affection and respect of his father (which he didn’t).

Likewise, the U.S. firebombed Tokyo and nuclear-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in large part because it hoped these acts would end WWII faster and to intimidate a muscular Soviet Union. The U.S. much more recently invaded Iraq because it hoped it could bring democratic reform to the Middle East through invasion and occupation in order to reduce the root causes of terrorism and help stabilize a region ripe with fossil fuels. Israel invades and occupies the Palestinians for close to fifty years now mainly because it is afraid for its own survival. Terrorists often use terror because they are weak, oppressed, and have no hope of fighting a conventional military force. ISIS kills dissenters so it can maintain its grip on power more easily. Even the Rwandan Genocide was carried out mainly by one group (Hutu) against another (Tutsi) that was oppressing it, and then a reverse countergenocide was launched in revenge. One can hope that because of the sheer predictability of these crimes, they might at some point become easier to anticipate and prevent, especially for policymakers.

6.) Even in a brutal world, random acts of kindness are powerful

“I’ll stand for the dwarf.” —Bronn, volunteering to fight for Tyrion as his champion

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“Leave him be!” —Sandor “The Hound” Clegane as he rushes to defend Loras Tyrell against his brother, The Mountain

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“I will be your champion. ” —Oberyn Martell to Tyrion Lannister

Even in as brutal and cruel a world as that of Game of Thrones, there are still random acts of kindness that can surprise even the most cynical. Perhaps the biggest was when Bronn offered to fight for Tyrion at the Eyrie in front of crazy Lysa. Just a few episodes ago, a big hulking beast a fighter, who had no relationship with Tyrion, cut Tyrion free from his shackles so he could join Jorah in the arena and make his case to Daenerys. I already mentioned Bronn’s new love interest saving him from poison, and then there’s Jamie risking his neck to help out Brienne. The Hound saves Sansa and Loras as I’ve also discussed. Ser Davos sticks up for Robert Baratheon’s bastard after Melisandre sets her sights on him, and Sam goes way out of his way to help the wilding girl Gilly and her baby. Robb stark shows mercy to Osha the wildling who almost captured Bran, then she ends up helping to save Bran and Rickon Stark and is still looking after Rickon. And Tyrion goes out of his way to treat Sansa with kindness, passing on sex with her even though, within Westeros, he was well within his rights to insist, as we can tell from the distasteful bedding ceremony. All of these acts of kindness either do or presumably have big consequences for the show, too, and the characters receiving them (many of whom would have died without the help). The big exception, of course, is Oberyn Martell fighting for Tyrion as his Champion in Tyrion’s (second) trial by combat, since Oberyn loses, dies, and then Tyrion is found guilty.

The real world is also full of random kindness, of the type that’s sometimes just enough to not lose hope. As Gandalf says in The Hobbit, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.”

Then again, sometimes good deeds don’t go unpunished. Ned Stark thought he would give Cersei the courtesy of a heads-up that he had figured out Joffrey was an incest-bastard borne of her and Jamie. Lot of good that did him… Similarly, the U.S. had little to gain in Somalia helping hundreds of thousands fend off starvation and ended up with the Black Hawk Down episode, dead Americans, and an Osama bin Laden emboldened by the American withdrawal…

7.) Religion is dangerous

“Trial by combat: deciding a man’s guilt or innocence in the eyes of the Gods, by having two other men hack each other to pieces. Tells you something about the Gods.” —Tyrion Lannister

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“We all must choose, man or woman, young or old, lord or peasant, our choices are the same. We choose light or we choose darkness. We choose good or we choose evil. We choose the true god or the false.” —Melisandre

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“Death by fire is the purest death.” —Melisandre

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“Belief is so often the death of reason. ” —Qyburn

The world of Game of Thrones may be fictional, but it is deadly accurate at showing how dangerous and even deadly religion can be. The Lord of Light priests/priestesses, especially the vampy Melisandre, are clearly fanatics willing to do anything to further their agenda. Getting a major character like Stannis to sacrifice his own daughter by burning her alive was just the latest of her outrages and atrocities. Stannis quite literally played with religious fire, and now he and his wife and daughter are dead. With Melisandre, we see when a cause and religion are united, there are no more rules of decency for the fundamentalists and fanatics. And face-changing Jaqen and whatever sort of Many-Faced-God temple-cult he has brought Arya into seem to employ magic and death and assassination in equal measure. Not to be outdone cult-wise, Jonathan Pryce’s Sparrows—more or less the Taliban of Westeros—are about to turn King’s Landing into the 1990s Kabul of the Seven Kingdoms. They already seem all too happy to murder people who are gay (good luck Loras!), among other fanaticisms. Religious-backed or religion-associated violence are omnipresent not just throughout human history, but in the present day as well, and studies show that religion tends to amplify cruelty and violence in conflict, rather than the reverse, a point I have made before. Groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, the (Christian) Lord’s Resistance Army, Srebrenica, both Buddhists and Hindus killing Muslims in South(east) Asia, and, not too long ago, the (Christian) Ku Klux Klan, the IRA/UDF and Catholics and Protestants killing each other in Ireland, and Europe’s pogroms against Jews (just to name a few examples!) are all indicative of this trend. 

Politicians too often simply focus on religion’s positives and blame its negatives on outside forces, but this is specious reasoning at best. The better leaders will be able to recognize the perils and pitfalls of religion and the faithful and be able to guard against them. Cersei Lannister unleashed a demon with her supporting Jonathan Pryce’s High Sparrow, not wholly unlike the U.S. when it supported mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Fiction that inspires fanatics can be dangerous in both the fictitious and real worlds, it would seem, and the more rational would do best to try to wield and engage such forces cautiously, if at all. Better to avoid playing with fire. The U.S. did not, and 9/11 was one of the long-term results, while Cersei suffered her own personal 9/11 as a result of her poor decisions with that naked walk of shame she had to endure. Thus, the problems with religion in Game of Thrones mirror the problems with religion in our own world.

8.) Trust, loyalty, and friendship are possibly the most prized commodities and they are also among the rarest, while backstabbing and secret agreements are much more common

“Backstabbing doesn’t prepare you for a fight and that’s all the realm is now: backstabbing and scheming and arse-licking and money-grubbing. Sometimes I don’t know what holds it together.” — King Robert Baratheon

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“People work together, when it suits ’em. They’re loyal when it suits ’em. They love each other when it suits ’em- and they kill each other, when it suits ’em.” —Orell (the Wildling)

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“Yes, Ned Stark had many admirers- and how many of them stepped forward when the executioner came for his head?” — Olenna Tyrell

It’s rare, but friendship still shines in Game of Thrones. Tyrion and Varys, unlikely duo that they are, seem to have really bonded on that ship even more than before. Sam and Jon of the Night’s Watch are also quite the bromance, and even Sam and Maester Aemon Targaryen were getting quite close before Aemon died with same at his side. Podrick is touchingly loyal to both Tyrion and Brienne. King Robert and Ned Stark had a touching friendship, too, so much so that Ned Stark was almost the only person Robert Baratheon thought he could trust towards the end. Hodor’s undying loyalty to the stark children is also touching (kind of like a mentally challenged Samwise Gamgee à la Frodo in The Lord of the Rings). Ser Davos gets an honorable mention for his deep loyalty to Stannis, though the loyalty is not returned and Stannis seems to be pretty unworthy of Davos’ fidelity, who even lost his son at Blackwater Bay fighting for Stannis. Perhaps more interesting is the bond he developed with Stannis’s daughter, Shireen.

Note how short the above the list is… There are far more betrayals in the show and if I listed them here I’d be giving a summary of the whole series. I think anyone reading this already realizes the value of friends and allies in the real world because how many of us really have many especially close friends, but Game of Thrones can be a good reminder. In international relations and politics, true friends and allies are also incredibly rare. The “special relationship” between the U.S. and UK is a very rare example of steadfast allies staying together over time, for example. Japan and the U.S.are another good example. Most alliances, however, are borne out of convenience and last only briefly (think USSR and Nazi Germany, then USSR and the Allies in the same war!). This is true in politics too, as we can see politically how many Democrats were afraid to even be associated with Obama in the midterm elections of 2014 (to their detriment), even though Obama was a big part of the reason why many of them previously won in tight races. There is often a negative price to pay for staying loyal. It is hard to tell which city has more backstabbing: King’s Landing or Washington, DC. For non U.S.-readers, I am sure you can pick up your local paper and read similar stories of backstabbing about your own country’s politics. Political and geopolitical winds can shift faster than the power rankings for the houses of Westeros. In the real world, “Red Wedding” Bolton-Lannister style backstabbings are more common than true friendship, sadly. Now, with the Season 5 finale, we can also add Jon Snow’s backstabbing (to his face) at the hands of his own brothers of the Night’s Watch. The policymaker who is on his guard but also values true friends and alliances will be the one to listen to, then, in the end.

9.) The rich and powerful generally do not care about the masses and treat them as their playthings

Tyrion Lannister: Listen to me, Queen Regent, you’re losing the people. Do you hear me?!

Cersei Lannister: The people? You think I care?!

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Olenna Tyrell: If it’s equality you want, so be it. When House Tyrell stops sending our crops to the capital, everyone here will starve. And I’ll make sure the hungry know who’s to blame.

High Sparrow: Have you ever sowed the field, Lady Olenna? Have you ever reaped the grain? Has anyone in House Tyrell? A lifetime of wealth and power has left you blind in one eye. You are the few, we are the many. (Walks away slowly and then turns back) And when the many stop fearing the few… (Exits)

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“The powerful have always preyed on the powerless- that’s how they became powerful in the first place. ” —Tyrion Lannister

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“The lion does not concern himself with the opinions of the sheep.” —Tywin Lannister

You don’t need to read Marx or agree with communism to know that the rich and powerful ruling classes care for little more than themselves (and if you don’t agree with this statement, there is a really good chance that you are rich or powerful and in the ruling class). This goes for most of human history and continues quite powerfully today. And there are even academic studies that prove those on top are more selfish and have less empathy in their bones. There are so many examples of this in Game of Thrones, the way each House and wannabe ruler is so willing to spend human lives to get what they want. Even Daenerys, who exhibits some concern for her new subjects, also expects them to serve her and die for her claim to a distant throne in a land almost none of them have ever seen. Mance Rayder cared for his people. And Mance Rayder is dead. Tyrion and Jon Snow (and the many departed Starks) seem be the only characters in positions of power who routinely try to look out for those less powerful than them. A lot of good it did Jon Snow, as this very compassion is what incited a rebellion of his own Night’s Watch brothers when they killed him at the end of season 5. But almost all the powerful leaders in Westeros seem to only think of their people as objects, breaking Kant’s rule to always treat people as ends themselves, not means to an end. That is still sadly how the world works most of the time, even today. Syria (and now Yemen) and its people have become one giant chessboard, it people all pawns in a deadly game of international rivalries. CEOs make billions and treat their many workers as poorly as they can get away with. The list goes on and on, but the point is, there are very few powerful people who really fight for the masses, and Game of Thrones does a great job reminding us of this.

10.) Preparation and organization are key

“Winter is coming.” —House Words of House Stark

Last, but not least, the show emphasizes that preparation is key. Daenerys has been prepping for her invasion of Westeros for five seasons now (but did not plan her occupations of Mereen and Yunkai well, and thus had revolts in both). Both Tyrion’s preparation for the Battle of the Blackwater and Jon Snow’s preparation for the Wildling assault on The Wall allowed each to save the day. Robb Stark was great at winning battles but Tywin outmatched him by planning for a long game and even turned the Starks’ bannermen Boltons over to his side, defeating his enemy with secret diplomacy. We see preparation paying large dividends. Likewise, in the real world, this also is very true. Barack Obama won reelection in 2012 with a meticulously planned political campaign. But the same man just recently failed to plan for, anticipate, or engage opposition enough for his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, and the deal was voted down by the House as a result. The American occupation of Japan after WWII was planned well and far in advance, while the more recent occupation of Iraq was clearly not; the many and telling differences in results are clear. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israelis are famously well-prepared and organized, and have been for the entire conflict, compared to their famously disorganized Palestinian and Arab rivals. That is a big part of the reason why today there is a full and functional Israeli state, while the same can hardly be said of a Palestinian state, sadly. Game of Thrones mirrors our real world well in showing how serious preparation can really pay off, a lesson policymakers should never forget.

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In conclusion, we can see that the world of Game of Thrones is very harsh and brutal indeed. It is perhaps the most important thing about this work of fiction that is able to so powerfully remind us of how brutal and harsh our own world still is, and to stimulate discussion about these truths and how to address them, both in popular fictional culture and in terms of what we do in the real world.

See related article: Game of Thrones and the Gift of Empathy

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 18, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg, February 18th, 2015 (updated/expanded February 19th; *UPDATE 9/28/2024 to explicitly name the Dahiya/Dahya/Dahia Doctrine)

This article was republished by Ammon News.

The following is also largely excerpted and adapted from an earlier article I wrote this summer, Part II of The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, itself part of a larger article that is available as an eBook format at Barnes & Noble,Amazon, or as an ePub file.

When I was writing earlier about the conflict this past summer in Gaza between the Israeli government and Hamas, I noted that intent is one of the three main criteria by which a party’s violence in a conflict should be judged, the other two being types of tactics used and their immediate likely effects and, most importantly, the actual effects of the violence.

Intent is something that can be multifaceted. A party to a conflict can have stated intents, which may or may not be true, and unstated intents, which sometimes can be pretty apparent, but other times can be pretty mystifying at best. Here, one must distinguish between a party deliberately and indiscriminately targeting civilians for death, and one that does not target civilians for death as an end-target unto themselves. Keep in mind that this intent is a separate criterion from looking at the actual casualties caused by the violence.

In terms of intent regarding their respective acts of violence, I looked at both Hamas’ intent and the Israeli government’s. Hamas had two main categories of violent acts in this conflict: the rocket attacks, for which “all Israelis” were declared legitimate targets and which were intended to kill civilians, and engaging the Israeli military in and around Gaza, which targeted the Israeli military and can be viewed as self-defense. Israel’s attacks, in contrast, are part of a general, longstanding policy that “is not intended to maximize civilian casualties. Yet it does intentionally target civilians: it is intended to produce maximal civilian distress, while avoiding mass civilian casualties [author Roi Maor’s emphasis],” which, though leading at times to high civilian casualties, is meant to act as a deterrent, hitting civilian areas that are used as military bases and trying to make civilians think twice about supporting or allowing militant activity in their neighborhood, or to get them to pressure their government and/or militants to abandon hostilities; conversely, the militants/government may also think twice about engaging in violence if the likely response will be massive harm inflicted upon their own civilian charges, for whom they are supposed to be fighting in the first place (*UPDATE 9/28/2014: this is the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, or Dahya or Dahia). Still, while not targeting civilians specifically for death as a policy, the IDF has displayed a callous attitude towards Palestinian civilians, and one of the IDF’s ethics code authors asserting that only the safety of its personnel should affect tactics and that no additional risks to its own personnel should be accepted by the IDF to prevent civilian casualties is something that at the very least should be debated vigorously, as such a philosophy seemingly contributed to the high levels of civilian casualties in Operation Cast Lead, taking place just before Obama took office. Furthermore, the IDF’s own investigations into abuses or questionable actions are not regarded as serious. One non-military panel found that the IDF was not even following its own procedures regarding civilians.

As it is, there is considerable and ongoing debate involving a wide variety of views regarding tactics and noncombatants since this is a grey area of international law. Here are some of Israel’s official rules regarding combat and civilians. Thomas Smith, writing in 2008, noted that U.S. tactics earlier in the Iraq War were killing higher levels of civilians and alienating Iraqis, mentioning that U.S. consultation with the IDF (as reported late in December 2003 by Dexter Filkins, Julian Borger, and Seymour Hersh) may have been a factor that actually brought about a deterioration of both tactics and the relationship between Americans and Iraqis, or, as he termed it, brought about the “Palestinianization” of Iraq. He also noted that Gen. Peter Chiarelli’s installment as a major commander beginning in January 2006 and, in January 2007, the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as overall commander in Iraq led to a distinctly different approach that took far more care to prioritize Iraqi civilians’ needs and safety and produced some better results. It was Petraeus who had been responsible for revising, improving, and co-authoring the U.S. Army’s own counterinsurgency manual [2014 edition here] at the time, wisely writing in one heading “The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is” and also writing that “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.” Currently, the U.S. Army’s own manual from 2012 on Civilian Casualty Mitigationpainstakingly and correctly notes that

Short-term thinking must be avoided because it is likely to lead to behavior that will generate widespread resentment and lead to a more insecure operational area in the future. Over time, units focused entirely on their own protection are likely to adopt a pattern of maneuvering aggressively, firing weapons indiscriminately, threatening civilians, and causing unnecessary CIVCASs [civilian casualties]

and that “Aggressive measures to protect the force in the short term can place units at greater risk in the future if resulting CIVCAS incidents alienate the population.” Not so much out of a moral principle, then, but out of consideration for the prospects of the Army’s own long-term success and safety and American national interests, it seems the U.S. military’s doctrine would allow exposing soldiers to more risk in the short term to better protect civilians because high civilian casualties over the medium and long-term can make an operating environment even more dangerous for the Army if a population grows increasingly hostile and/or becomes more inclined to support the enemy because of such civilian casualties. Essentially, it means that one must, at least to a degree, think strategically even when acting tactically. This is a wise policy, and, as it seems there is not this level of strategic consideration in Israel’s official military literature in terms of its tactics, Israel would do well to consider adopting a similar approach, not only for the sake of Palestinians and other Arabs that Israel could be fighting again in the future, but for the sake of the safety of Israeli military personnel in the long-run and for the sake of Israeli national interests. Thus, Israeli doctrine differs considerably from American doctrine, and, in fact, it is often counterproductive to Israel’s long-term interests and actually prevents it from making strategic gains or resolving conflicts, causing Israel to suffer from the“institutionalization of temporary solutions.” It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need to make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking. Rather than the other way around, then, it would seem that Israel could learn a lot from America’s recent evolution of its military thinking and practice.

It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking.

Col. Tony Pfaff, while recognizing and embracing the utilitarian arguments, argues that there are also ethical and moral responsibilities not to transfer an excessive and high amount of risk to noncombatants and to pursue alternatives to options that would do so, since soldiers essentially exercise sovereignty over where they operate, sovereignty that makes them partly responsible for area civilians. For him, the challenge is one of balancing risk between the soldiers themselves and noncombatants, not a transfer of the maximum possible to one party or the other; with this, I would agree.

Another part of the intent behind the choice of Israel’s tactics is very political, so force is applied in a very Clausewitzian way for Israel here: the father of Israel’s military doctrine (termed Low Intensity Conflict) for most of the last few decades made it clear that this doctrine was designed “To undermine the adversary’s determination and to lead to the adversary’s abandoning his objectives, through a cumulative process of inflicting physical, economic, and psychological damage, and to lead the adversary to realize that his own armed engagement is hopeless.” Thus, force is directed at the population as a whole not in order to kill them but with the intent to make them submit to Israeli political designs over time through attrition. This strategy actually reveals an unwillingness to compromise or even attempt a political settlement, and helps to explain why Israeli political leaders like Sharon, Netanyahu, Lieberman, and others have actively tried to undermine the peace process. It is also worth noting that if this approach fails to break the enemy into submission it will only serve to increase violence and prolong the conflict.

As one paper states, “Israel’s general strategic goal has always been that of maintaining the status quo by deterring major attacks against it.” This in and of itself is essentially a strategy that lacks strategy, or a strategy that is a prescription for a merely tactical approach. A cynicism bound both by almost two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust mindset is hardly a way of thinking that is likely to lead to a brighter future. That Israel’s leaders may be resigned to an inevitability of the status quo is both a failure of imagination and a danger to the future of Israel. It was David Ben-Gurion himself, the founder of Israel and its longtime leader, who said that “the most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security;” and it was a Palestinian journalist who said that “the legal father of the suicide bomber is the Israeli checkpoint, whilst his mother is the house demolition.”

We can see that, where America’s change of tactics in Iraq brought Iraqi Sunnis who had been formerly hostile to U.S. forces into the U.S. fold as effective allies in the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia that contributed to a major improvement in security there, conversely, (virtually?) no Palestinian would think of voluntarily cooperating with the their decades-long-occupiers, the Israelis. Though, unfortunately, as I’ve previously noted, Iraqi’s recently ousted ex-Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki wasted and destroyed these security gains through his disastrously sectarian policies, this sad fact does not erase the very real gains of American-led COIN operations in Iraq before America formally withdrew its forces form there.

Finally, a cautionary note: as is always possible, there may be differences between official doctrine and practice.

It is sad that Israel’s philosophy is one which intends to bring about political submission of the civilian population, and to cause them “maximal civilian distress” as part of this process until that submission occurs. The U.S. found out, for all the world (including Israel) to see, during the Vietnam war that causing civilians distress and being less than discriminating is a recipe for failure, for disaster, for driving civilians into the arms of the enemy, and for increasing the risk to and casualties among your own troops. Sad, too, that, while not going anywhere near as far as it did in Vietnam, America still used tactics that were too heavy-handed early in the Iraq War that alienated many Iraqis and turned them against U.S. forces. These tactics were ineffective and counterproductive, and were inspired in part by Israel’s own tactics, which are also ineffective and counterproductive. That American leadership recognized this and changed course after only a few years in Iraq is a telling positive about America’s ability to adapt and learn from its mistakes, while Israel’s leadership doubling down on not taking into account civilians as part of a dynamic and long-term operating environment is a telling characteristic of its leadership’s failed approach, counterproductive mentality, and seeming inability to see the bigger picture, to the detriment of both Arabs involved in Israel’s military space of operations and Israelis themselves.

As Petraeus and other Americans realized, the civilian is both the ultimate means and ultimate end in counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, not simply a potential enemy to be intimidated and beaten into submission, as Israelis think.

UPDATE July 17th, 2016: Sadly, these dynamics outlined here can be seen to a degree in America’s recent police shootings in Dallas and today’s in Baton Rouge, as well as shootings of black Americans by police. Does America have a fringe black “intifada” on its hands as a result of unaddressed police brutality?

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Both sides deserve a lot of blame, but the contributions of Israel’s structural violence should not be eclipsed by Hamas’ physical violence, or, (almost) everything you need to know about Gaza in one article.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 28, 2014

By Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) July 28, 2014. See related May 14, 2021 article on the 2021 fighting: Death, Stupidity; Rinse, Repeat: What Is New, What Is Old in Latest Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy  

Available in eBook format:

Available at Barnes & Noble or Amazon or in ePub format 

This article was majorly updated several times from July 29th-August 5th, with minor edits made the following week. It was originally published as one single article but due to technical issues on LinkedIn’s end I was forced to break it apart into three part parts. Here are the LinkedIn links for Part II and Part III.

“Yes, indeed, the gods do not give everything to the same man. You know how win a battle, Hannibal; you do not know how to use the victory!”—Maharbal to Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, 216 BCE, as quoted by Livy, From the Founding of the City 22.51

I.) Introduction: Setting the Discussion

If you read any kind of an opinion piece or analysis that does not blame both Israel’s government and Hamas (note I did not say equally, we will get to assigning proportions for the blame later) for this unfolding, obscene fiasco, you should make a mental note to not take that author’s analysis or commentary seriously. Cheerleaders and myopia have been making this conflict worse, not better, for years. If an article does not present this as ugly vs. less ugly, it is way off. There are few heroes, just a decent number of well-intentioned people without the power to be heroes and plenty of villains with power. Spectating in this conflict is like being at a soccer/football match where no one ever scores, there are lots of dramatic arguments and pushing and shoving, lots of diving and faking injuries, lots of yellow and red cards given, and you are stuck in an endless progression of overtimes with no penalty shootouts (think Uruguay vs. Italy, with more biting and fewer goals). Or, the conflict resembles a comic-book, movie, or TV show that features bad guys vs. bad guys and no good guy is in sight. It is deeply depressing and incredibly infuriating for anyone who cares even a little about the Palestinian or the Israeli people, least of all because large segments of both Israelis and Palestinians, like their many of respective leadership, are not helping themselves in the long-run and are even encouraging violence or behavior that would make things far worse, not better. And in the end, little to nothing will change, each side repeating the same deadly mistakes it made the last time this happened with the same foreseeable, tragic consequences, with the same predictable, avoidable, and in-vain-deaths as the only real “achievement” for either side. And in a matter of months or a few years, this sordid Greek tragedy will be put on ghastly display yet again for an encore performance, with the parties to the conflict more or less doing their best to ensure that the show will go on between now and then that and that we can safely expect a similar curtain call.

Part of the Story Can Be Worse than None of It

The problem with a lot of conflicts, and this one is no exception, is that people will tune in at any given moment, unaware of the events which led to one thing or another, and begin to pass judgment based on the most salient events, identifying causes as symptoms or symptoms as causes. I am not speaking of necessarily going back to the very beginning of a conflict; sometimes conflicts span generations, and the sins of one set of opposing fathers cannot fully absolve the sins of an opposing set of sons. Despite the common forgetting of it, a simple truth is that many people are to a high degree independent actors possessing agency; individual leaders matter, but so do their people. And more on this agency later, in my conclusion. But, to return to time, it is common and somewhat understandable for people to forget or muddle the prime roots of a conflict, which can go back to before they were born. What is also common but less understandable is to forget the context of recent months, weeks, years. And with this latest round of hackneyed, near-pointless hostilities between Israelis and Palestinian—namely, between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, but also between both Jewish and Arab terrorists/militants/vigilantes—it is clear that many people, including those in the media and positions of power, are reaching understandings of these events which miss a lot of the context from even just the past few weeks, understandings that misinform about and confuse an already quite convoluted situation. And a lot of this has to do with the news sources from which people are getting their information about this conflict.

Quality of, and Amount of Quality, Israel-Palestine Coverage Improving, but a Lot Is Still Not Good Enough, Lacks Context

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of a scarcity of silver linings is that the U.S. news media has gotten much better at covering this conflict since the beginning of the Second Intifada. I would say that, among the best newspapers and magazines (online and print), the quality of coverage has actually grown quite dramatically. Even television news, which is behind, has gotten much better. Whereas before it is fairly obvious that there was a pervasive bias in favor of Israel—Israeli deaths would be featured on front pages, Palestinian deaths buried behind them—now outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, and CNN all avoid painting the conflict as one-sided and regularly highlight the suffering of Palestinians as major showpieces and regularly show Israel’s policies to be what they are: deeply flawed, often brutal, often illegal, and amounting to the collective punishment of millions of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem (but policies that at least in part stem from a deep insecurity, a stifling paranoia, and a state-perpetuated sense of victimhood among Israelis, parts of which stem from a unique culture of persecution and near-extermination, parts of which stem from recent history, some parts of each more legitimate than others for explaining current behavior and mentalities). Today, individual Palestinians who have been deeply wronged or attacked by the occupation, Israeli security forces, the Israeli government, or Israeli settlers are given ample coverage, something that was not common before the Second Intifada. The New York Times was even recently accused of having a pro-Palestinian bias by TheNew York Observer, and such accusations are hardly limited to just the Times or only come from the Observer. Still, much of the television coverage, as with so many other issues covered on television, falls short not from an inherent agenda or a blatant bias so much as it falls short because of attempts to try to appear objective by creating false equivalency after false equivalency, trying to present most things as a 50-50 problem when it comes to assigning blame and giving equal airtime to arguments of unequal quality.

The brutality and sheer disproportionality of Prime Minister/General Ariel Sharon’s response to the Second Intifada, of Israel’s 2006 invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, and of 2008-2009’s Operation Cast Lead have made it easier for news professionals from a country inclined to support Israel to become more reluctant to feel that such support is justified and to increasingly question Israel’s actions. Of course it is easy (and appropriate) in the case of Hamas to revile those who would use rockets to indiscriminately and deliberately target civilians, who would send suicide bombers to civilian buses and discos to kill commuters and young adults, and to revile the tactic of suicide bombing itself (for years only on Hamas’s shelf and not in its active repertoire, but now apparently back on the table as of a this month, according, at least, to the IDF); that Israel does not unquestionably have the moral high ground over such an opponent is not so much a measure of any sort of anti-Semitism (which is in decline in some but not all places) as it is a measure of how awful its own policies—policies carried out over decades, not just years or months—actually are. In addition, if there are extremely few positive things to come out of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, one positive thing is that I think over the course of that long war, our experience working with so many Iraqi Arabs as allies (even if some just temporarily) and spending so many years hoping for Iraqis’ success in rebuilding their society (hopes that were dashed, creating even more sympathy in at least some Americans) made Americans care more about Arabs and their perspectives as individual human beings than they did before. And the coverage today reflects this. In addition, reporting in the age of Twitter and Facebook makes the both anchors and their reports “more visceral, more emotional;” now when a war happens, the casualties are shown in graphic detail in almost real-time, making for more powerful public reactions and raising the component of public relations as an aspect in modern warfare to new heights.

Those who allege some sort of deliberate Zionist-American skewing of the coverage would at least have been right to question the balance of the coverage roughly a decade ago; but today, Chomskyesque denunciations of such a massive, deliberate agenda today are more evidence of the myopia, blinding cynicism, selective intake, and oversimplified world view of those espousing them. Apart from entities like Fox News, of course. There are some quality, serious reporters who actually attempt objectivity working for Fox; but in general, Fox can be dismissed as “so fantastically terrible, so obviously low-rent,” that when we discuss the general quality of the American news media, we can simply remove Fox as an outlier to get more a more accurate idea of how mainstream journalism is trending. Or, we can grade the media with a curve with Fox in mind. All this is to say that I am pleased that there are a good number of quality journalists who write a good number of quality articles for a good number of quality news outlets, articles that are pretty objective when it comes to this conflict and that any American with at least internet access can easily find in major publications with a minimal amount of effort (this may partly help to explain why today’s young American Jews feel increasingly less attached to Israel, its politics, and its policies, and are against the occupation and Israel’s way of dealing with Palestinians).

Still, there are too many pieces that lack context and balance, and especially that explain how both the longer-term context and all the recent events leading up to this hot-phase of the conflict tie into what we are seeing on television and reading in the paper or online. So below is my attempt to cover that gap regarding Israel and Gaza. First we’ll examine the longer-term context in these next sections, then the shorter-term context much later.

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II.) Longer-Term Context

A Brief Survey of Israel’s Abusive Love-Affair with Gaza

A Young Israel not yet even twenty years old, prior to the June 1967 Six-Day War, felt a sense of dread and doom about the impending war with its neighbors. This fact only made its stunning victory all the more miraculous in the eyes of Israelis. It was celebrated with a near messianic fervor, and many Israelis, even those not particularly religiously inclined, saw the hand of Yahweh and of destiny playing a role in their victory. A level of hubrisemerged within Israel that enabled it to believe it could occupy the West Bank and Gaza with its many Palestinian Arabs, and not just occupy, but occupy indefinitely and aggressively colonize and settle both lands with many thousands and thousands of Jews, all the while continuing to deny basic freedoms to the Palestinians, governed through the military boots of Israel’s army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). And not only was the hubris so high that Israelis believed they could do all this, they believed they could do all this indefinitely with no actual long-term plan for what to do with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, people for whom Israel was now fully legally responsible since the moment it took the territories from Jordan and Egypt, respectively.

This is not only stunning in hindsight, but in real-time as well. It is perfectly understandable that Israel felt it needed to hold onto these territories as some sort of security barriers between a hostile Jordan and a hostile Egypt. But peace was reached with Egypt in 1979, and with Jordan in 1994 (let us also remind the reader here that Israel never lost a war to either of these countries). Thus, the main legitimate rationale for holding onto Gaza disappeared in 1979, and for the West Bank in 1994. Yet Israel still continued to occupy, colonize, and settle Gaza for more than a quarter-century after making peace with Egypt, and today, twenty years after reaching peace with Jordan, Israeli is still engaging in its colonialist settling and occupation of the West Bank. And while at first this was not government policy, but fervent individuals settling the land on their own, eventually both of Israel’s main political parties, Labor and Likud (though Likud more so), wouldsupport, protect, add to, and expand the settlement enterprise, so that, twenty years after the 1993 start of the Oslo “peace” process, Israeli’s population in the territories it had occupied by force in 1967 had more than doubled to well over half a million settlers.

One can argue, in a chicken-vs.-egg debate, whether the political forces behind Palestinians’ violence or the political forces behind Israel’s settlement movement and the occupation were the primary instigators of the current cycle of violence, but today the obvious truth is that these forces reinforce and perpetuate each other. I would suggest that, since there was no mass, popular violence or violent resistance for the first twenty years of the Israeli occupation and that the Palestinians were frustrated and stymied in their attempts to non-violently achieve rights and freedom, and that mass violence and resistance began after twenty years of oppression, those twenty years of oppression had an awful lot to do with why there was eventually a tremendous amount of violence from Palestinians. As Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote in his landmark Righteous Victims, after the 1967 war,

Israeli thinking was to some degree governed by the notion that the Arabs of the territories, starved of land and resources (primarily water), and denied the possibility of industrial development, would gradually drift away. Though never clearly enunciated, this was the government’s aim—especially after 1977. And, indeed, over the decades, a steady trickle of West Bank and Gaza Arabs left their homes to find an easier life abroad… (339)

Extreme forms of censorship and political repression were common, as were military courts that usually only acted to further Israeli interests, often brutally; “[t]here was a clear lesson for the inhabitants of the territories and the Palestinian diaspora in these events: Israel intended to stay in the West Bank, and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed. The only real option was armed struggle” (341). For Morris,

[t]he war and its aftermath of occupation, repression, and expansionism swiftly reignited the tinder of Palestinian nationalism, propelling thousands of young men, especially from among the dispossessed and hopeless of the refugee camps in East Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, into the burgeoning resistance organizations. At the same time, much as the Zionist enterprise had helped trigger early Palestinian nationalism, so the daily contact and friction with Israel and the Israeli authorities inside the territories now reawakened it. (343)

The settlement movement really picked up steam in the 1980s, with Ariel Sharon becoming its father and patron from within the government. Morris writes that “[b]y 1987 the 2,500 Israeli settlers in the [Gaza] Strip—or 0.4 percent of the territory’s total population—had control over some 28 percent of its state lands” and dominated the use of Gaza’s water resources (565). Through the First Intifada, Oslo, and the Second Intifada, hostility with the local Palestinians grew, as did Gaza’s settler population.

As Oslo petered off into a mere piece of paper in the face of a degenerating reality, deliberate sabotage by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the settlers, Hamas, and other militant groups, and reluctance to compromise by many other major players, hope was injected into the process again by Ehud Barak’s defeat of Netanyahu in 1999 elections, culminating in the Clinton-Administration-sponsored Camp David Summit in 2000 (a myth regarding which has sprung up in the U.S. and among supporters of Israel that Yasir Arafat blindly walked away from a “generous” Israeli offer, when the reality was actually far more complicated) and even more so during the less-publicized Taba Summit of January 2001. Taba was put on hold for upcoming Israeli elections, in a climate of increasing unrest over the Second Intifada, which Ariel Sharon had helped to spark in September of 2000 with a very provocative, armed-guard-filled-visit to the Temple Mount, home to Islam’s holy Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, in East Jerusalem’s Old City. Barak would fall, Sharon replacing him, and he was not as keen to negotiate.

Over 8,000 Jewish settlers lived in Gaza in 2005, surrounded by over 1.3 million Palestinians. Sharon—now Israel’s Prime Minister—decided to make a huge change to this situation after crushing the Palestinians’ Second Intifada uprising, realizing the madness of having to have thousands of IDF troops protect some 8,000 Israelis living among over a million hostile Arabs in a tiny piece of land with limited resources was not in Israel’s interests. Sharon was already laying the groundwork for an Israeli withdrawal and an evacuation of the settlements in Gaza even as Arafat’s health was deteriorating in 2004.

Fast forward to 2005: Yasir Arafat had only died (possibly from poisoning) the previous year after decades of leading his people. After Oslo began in 1993, Arafat was no longer the exiled swashbuckling terrorist; he was now partially in charge of territory and population, and it would be clear that he was more suited to the role of freedom fighter than that of governor. Under Arafat’s leadership, and with sheer complicity on the part of Israel and U.S., Arafat bled the Palestinian economy dry through a combination of corruption, incompetence, and nepotism, severely retarding the process of building a Palestinian state; under Arafat, Palestinians stayed weak and divided, not that Israel minded this at all.

In the first half of 2005, Hamas was already starting to best Fatah in local Gazan elections, as Sharon proceeded with his preparations for his already announced unilateral disengagement from Gaza by aggressively going after militants/terrorists in Gaza. Throughout this period, Sharon stressed the unilateral aspect of his plan; this was going to be an “explicitly unilateral” Israeli choice, not a victory for the Palestinian resistance, and he did not want to cooperate with and thereby legitimize Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected to succeed Arafat as President of the Palestinian Authority(the sort-of government of the Palestinians established by the Oslo process), run by Arafat’s and Abbas’s political party, Fatah. Sharon liked the Palestinians nice and weak, fighting among themselves as they were at the time. But by undermining Abbas and shunning serious cooperation and coordination, despite U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s pleas for Sharon to work with Abbas, Sharon paved the way, along with Fatah’s corruption, for the rise of Hamas. Thus, Sharon went forward with his plan more-or-less unilaterally, leaving Abbas stranded and Hamas claiming victory as the resistance. For Sharon, this was not about continuing the peace process or empowering the Palestinians; in fact, it was about the opposite: it was about stopping the peace process. According to a top Sharon advisor, who at the time was tasked with running the disengagement from Gaza, it was designed to “prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state…[and to supply] the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” It was also designed to help Israel keep most of its larger settlements in the West Bank. Just before the plan was implemented, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quit his post in Sharon’s Cabinet in protest of the disengagement, instead wanting to retain control of Gaza and maintain its Jewish settlements.

After the Divorce, Still Plenty of Action in the Israel/Gaza Relationship

Just days after the Gaza pullout was completed, Israel began expanding a buffer zone it had been creating in Gazan territory, warning Gazans that if they approached it they would be shot. Even before the pullout it was clear to some that this growing buffer zone was being put in place, in part, to serve as a mechanism of control and not just defense. Israel also severely limited what goods and supplies could enter into and out of Gaza, and began closing Gaza’s entry and exit points. Violence also resumed between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza within a few weeks of the pullout. In an attempt to clamp down on militants and reduce violence between Israel and Gaza, the PA’s Fatah tried to suppress armed actions from Hamas and other militant groups, setting off clashes between Palestinians.

January 2006 began with chaos and would provide several tremendous shocks for the region: early in the month, Ariel Sharon suffered from a massive, incapacitating stroke, from which he would never wake, and was succeeded by Ehud Olmert, while near the end of the month, Hamas won Palestine’s parliamentary elections, earning a 72-seat-majority, while Fatah only won 45 out of the 132 seats. The elections were considered free and fair overall by international observers, although the U.S. quietly attempted to aid the PA, run by Fatah, with several programs to boost its image before the election; while technically not helping a political party per se, the aid was definitely intended to counter Hamas. Hamas, very new to politics, caught many—including Rice and Bush—off-guard with its victory. The vote was not so much a vote by the Palestinians for Islamic governance so much as it was a vote against Fatah’s endemic and systemic corruption and its inability to provide a semblance of law and order (something Bill Clinton understood, too; so do not let anyone tell you that the people of Gaza voted for “terror” or “terrorism” or to “destroy Israel”). Mahmoud Abbas would remain president, but Hamas would run the government. In response, the US and EU essentially boycotted Hamas and the government, withholding aid and support. Almost immediately, violence broke out between Hamas and Fatah.

The Gaza from which Israel “withdrew” was devastated after Arafat’s plundering and Sharon’s smashing. The Brilliant Bush White House Team thought the best thing for Gaza after all these horrors was to have elections, when the most obvious and really only choices were the perpetually corrupt and parasitic Fatah, bereft of their charismatic Arafat to give them any real appeal, and the militant terrorist resistance movement Hamas, which had been providing many social services, like education and health care, that Fatah had failed to provide. A college student with a few classes of background on Israel and the Palestinians could have guessed that Hamas would have won and Fatah would have fallen in the absence of any time to develop political parties, any serious rebuilding, and any serious cooperation or concessions from the Israelis to give the people of Gaza a sense of normality and to help rehabilitate Fatah, but not the blindly, naively optimistic U.S. Secretary of State and her President. So it was that Condoleezza Rice—Soviet specialist extraordinaire—and George W. Bush—a specialist in nothing related to foreign policy—thought the best thing for Gaza immediately after nearly forty years of occupation, colonization, and corruption was elections. Commenting on the Administration’s failure, Rice noted, in a gross understatement, that “It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.” Yes, it did. Perhaps even more disturbing was when she said “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing. ” Perhaps not surprising that she literally did not know one single person who had a clue about the Palestinian people’s mood and views on their leaders since the Bush Administration was characterized by an almost limitless hubris coupled with a startling ability to be so dead wrong about so many of its assumptions underlying its major policies; this is certainly one of the best examples of the Bush team’srampant myopia.

Furthermore, in February, before Hamas’s government was even sworn in, the U.S. hosted Israeli and PA Fatah officials for a meeting that focused on ways to isolate and weaken Hamas. In particular, Israel and the U.S. had an ongoing discussion about developing a policy of tightening the noose around Gaza and more or less sealing it off, severely limiting what could come in or out in the hopes that the suffering of Gazans would turn them against Hamas and amounting to what could only be called a strategy of collective punishment. A semi-secret plan was adopted on February 18th by Israel and the US to go through with these and other measures designed to weaken Hamas and the soon-to-be-Hamas-run-PA (such as preventing the PA from collecting its tax revenue and denying Gaza the ability to construct a seaport) unless Hamas renounced violence and recognized Israel’s right to exist (Hamas refused). Hypocritically, it would seem, Rice publicly called for the opening of Gaza in July, even as the administration of which she was a primary part had been privately seeking the opposite for months. The U.S. would even try to get a nervous Abbas to dissolve the government and call for new elections, Rice pushing for this to happen in a matter of weeks.

Shortly after Hamas had assumed power, the UN began warning of shortages of essential, basic items, including food, as the de-facto blockade of Gaza expanded when Israel closed more crossings and intensified the sealing-off of Gaza. These conditions in Gaza persist today, with various loosenings and tightenings of certain aspects here and there, in what amounts to a form of low-level siege warfare and a blockade (an act of war under international law) of dubious legality. Israel maintains that it needs to have this blockade to prevent Hamas from acquiring weapons, but there are clearly many aspects of the blockade that are just punitive in nature, with many goods that are banned that have nothing to do with weapons. These measures even included severe limits on fishermen in terms of where they can fish, with the Israel Navy firing on fisherman if they go past what Israel has decreed are the limits for Gazan fisherman. Soon after these policies were put into place, Hamas ran out of money and could not even pay the salaries of government workers, and Gaza was in dire straits (Iran, though, would step in and fund Hamas eventually). The main US-EU-UN-Russian joint envoy to the Israelis and Palestinians even resigned in protest over this policy of cutting off and strangulating Gaza.

Late in June, in response to increased military attacks by Israel, Hamas and its allies attacked IDF troops, killing two and capturing one named Gilad Shalit. Israel’s response to this almost boggles the mind for its sheer disproportionality: before the end of the month, Israel launched a massive operation to rescue Shalit and hit Hamas, with extensive use of artillery and air-strikes, but also explicitly sough to punish the people of Gaza, blowing up Gaza’s only power station and flying jets directly over houses and apartments at low altitude to use sonic booms as a punitive tactic to frighten the population. The operation killed hundreds of Palestinians before it ended in November, and during the operation Hamas and Fatah personnel ended up fighting and killing each other. Also during this operation, Israel would simultaneously become embroiled in an invasion of Lebanon (also quite disproportionate, which would kill over 1,000 Lebanese civilians) in response to an attack that saw two Israeli soldiers captured and seven killed, similar to the attack in which Shalit was captured.

The U.S. Plays at Having a Coup Against Hamas

Having insistently pushed for the Palestinians to hold elections, then making a decision to boycott and undermine the winner of those elections when they did not like the result, Bush and Rice were now basically trying to support, arm, and train an armed force to overthrow the party that had won the very elections on which they had insisted.

That December the U.S. began redirecting the aid it had withheld from Hamas towards building up Abbas’s security personnel in the hopes that they would take on Hamas. What would follow is astounding. Having insistently pushed for the Palestinians to hold elections, then making a decision to boycott and undermine the winner of those elections when they did not like the result, Bush and Rice were now basically trying to support, arm, and train an armed force to overthrow the party that had won the very elections on which they had insisted. Incredulously, Rice, ever suffering from “grand illusions” and trapped in viewing almost everything through the experience of the Cold War, defended her push for elections several years after the failure of them was obvious. This is even more unbelievable when you consider that Bush and Rice did not put their money where their mouths were and do much of anything substantive, save for giving speeches, to try and pressure Sharon to work with Abbas and shore up him and his Fatah party with some progress towards a Palestinian state for them to show their people; Rice even ignored the advice of her deputy to try just this (but we saw before that Sharon was not really committed to a Palestinian state anyway). Both and Rice and Bush were also told that Fatah was not ready for elections, with Israel and the then-Fatah-run-PA recommending delaying the elections, but their advice was ignored.

This new secret plan of the Bush Administration’s was about as successful as all of its others for Israel and the Palestinians, as the newly-U.S.-backed Fatah forces “provoke[d] a Palestinian civil war” and “inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.” Hamas may not have been planning to seize Gaza, but maybe felt compelled to do because of Fatah’s aggression. One unnamed Pentagon source recalled that “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ” The Second Intifada had left Fatah’s security services degraded and nearly destroyed, and thus very vulnerable. As Hamas escalated its violence against Fatah, Fatah began trying to intimidate Hamas’ security forces through kidnappings and torture, hoping this would deter Hamas from action against it in its current vulnerable position. As 2006 drew to a close, the killing and torture going on between the two Palestinian factions was increasing, and early into 2007 there was on-again, off-again, hostilities between them, turning Gaza into a war zone. Israel also resumed strikes in Gaza in response to Palestinian rocket attacks. That December, weapons and ammunition from Egypt began being delivered to Fatah’s security services as part of the overall U.S. plan which would go through a number of other Arab states, a plan which aroused a lot of dissent from the ranks of the Bush Administration officials tasked with implementing it. Some of these Arab states sensed that the U.S. was hesitant about this, and did not follow through fully with their commitments, so the program was under-resourced from the start.

Then things escalated severely between Hamas and Fatah in February, 2007. Abbas was fearing a civil war and so caved into pressure from Saudi Arabia’s king to form a unity government with Hamas, against express U.S. desires to avoid doing this; in return, the Saudis would bankroll the PA, now to be run by both factions. Rice was furious, and intense American pressure was applied for Abbas to have a plan to scrap the unity government—even if he could not do so legally—if Hamas did not accept the conditions previously laid out by the U.S. to renounce violence and recognize Israel. Together, with Jordan, Egypt, and Abbas’s men, the U.S. came up with a detailed security plan for improving, training, and equipping existing PA Fatah-led security units and creating several new ones, increasing the overall number of armed forces by about 25 percent, all to the tune of $1.27 billion over five years. Plus, the Palestinians would be made to look as if all this was their plan, the U.S. staying in the background.

One unnamed Pentagon source recalled that “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

But the plan was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper at the end of April, and for Hamas it was clear what was going on: the U.S., Abbas, and neighboring regimes were trying to overthrow Hamas even though it had won the election. Violence broke out again between Fatah and Hamas, and the unity deal collapsed. A new unit of 500 Fatah security troops, fresh from training in Egypt with shiny new weapons and uniforms, raised a lot of eyebrows when they arrived, especially Hamas’ and the Western press corps’. Hamas fighters attacked the new Fatah troops, but they were repulsed. Feeling threatened, Hamas went all out in its attacks that May. When June 7 saw an Israeli paper leak that there was a request for Israel to approve the largest weapons shipment from Egypt so far–including armored vehicles, rockets, grenades, and millions of bullets—Hamas held nothing back. Even though they had won the elections, their own government was not only refusing to give Hamas control of the Palestinian security services, it was using them to try to overthrow Hamas itself.

Hamas’s people insist that without this U.S.-Fatah attempt to overthrow them, they would not have carried out their own sort-of-coup in June (it’s hard to call it a coup when they were the ones who were legitimately elected; in the words of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former primary Middle East advisor David Wurmser, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”). Fatah wasn’t even fully behind its party’s war against Hamas, as the decisions regarding this were largely coming from one longtime Fatah security chief, Muhammad Dahlan, whom Bush referred to as “our guy.” Israeli military intelligence was of the opinion that Fatah’s position in Gaza was “desperate.” So it was no surprise to Israel’s intelligence services that in just five days, Hamas’s own fighters had routed Fatah’s security people who were challenging them, chasing many of the survivors down and executing them, taking over all of Fatah’s buildings in Gaza (including Abbas’s Gaza residence), and destroying much of Dahlan’s home. Hamas even secured most of Fatah’s weapons and supplies in Gaza, including a lot of the weapons with which U.S. had been hoping to arm Fatah. The peace process was dealt a severe blow, and unlike Fatah, Hamas would allow frequent barrages of rocket fire to be unleashed at Israel, though it also would have periods of many months where it would refrain from doing so and would try to stop other militant groups from unleashing volleys. “[T]he Bush [A]dministration blundered at every turn in its dealings with the Palestinians,” and “was utterly incompetent at foreign policy;” the failure of Bush and Rice was complete and total.

For its part, and in typically short-sighted fashion, Israel apparently at this time looked forward to a Hamas takeover of Gaza; leaked diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks stated that Israel “would be “happy” if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state,” at least according to its military intelligence chief at the time. Israel, then, did not seem to be behaving as a good faith partner in the peace process.

Some Fatah people could not believe how stupidly the Bush-Rice plan was executed, to the degree that they believe those two deliberately set the plan up to fail and wanted Hamas to be in power. People that suffer from our failures often think this way, not realizing that incompetence is not uncommon in American foreign policy, and find it hard to believe the U.S. could be so stupid. Enter Bush and Rice…

For its part, and in typically short-sighted fashion, Israel apparently at this time looked forward to a Hamas takeover of Gaza; leaked diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks stated Israel “would be “happy” if Hamas took over Gaza because the IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state,” at least according to its military intelligence chief at the time.

Death and Stalemate, Rinse and Repeat

In response to Hamas’ taking control of Gaza, Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza even further, which created severe shortages of essential goods and food. In order to alleviate the suffering of Gazans, Hamas offered to turn Gaza’s crossings over to Abbas or any international body, just not Israel; both Abbas and Israel rejected the offer, and Israel increased and maintained military pressure on Hamas throughout 2007, even allowing Fatah gunmen into Gaza to take on Hamas and generate opposition. Israel also began using electricity cuts as punishment and curtailed imports into Gaza to just “the minimum amount of food and medicines necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis” and further increased “the near-total closure” of Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of Gazans having little or no access to safe drinking-water or running water. This siege of Gaza was strengthened ever further in 2008, and Israel then also brought in bulldozers to extend its buffer zone in Gaza. Violence continued until June 2008 saw the beginning of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which began with a rocky start but then held steady for some months, though Israel chose not to respond with any significant extended lifting or moderating of its siege of Gaza. Hamas used this time to violently repress Fatah activists in Gaza. Israel would dramatically break the cease-fire with a major incursion into Gaza in November and the siege was tightened even further when Hamas retaliated, with the result being that “Gaza’s humanitarian conditions reached a tipping point.” UNRWA even had to stop food distribution for half of all Gazans, a first in sixty years of operation. Israel even prevented the delivery of children’s vaccines, and the PA prevented the transfer of medical supplies from the West Bank. Later in November, the IDF completely sealed off Gaza. Hamas halted almost all attacks for a week, after which a trickle of emergency supplies were allowed into Gaza. But Israel was already planning a major offensive operation for Gaza. December saw more escalation, and the cease-fire reached in June, set to expire on December 19, was not renewed. Yet while Israel was building up support for a major military operation, Hamas then reached out to offer another cease-fire agreement in exchange for a major reduction in the intensity of Gaza’s siege, but Israel rejected this offer and instead went ahead with Operation Cast Lead, the largest single military operation against Palestinians since 1948. It lasted less than a month but killed well over a 1,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, while Israel’s losses were ten soldiers and three civilians. A controversial, major UN report on the fighting, known as the Goldstone Report and released in the fall of 2009 (which was over a year later sort ofpartly retracted by one of its four authors under questionable and odd circumstances; its other three authors stood by the original report and rejected the retraction), found ample evidence that both sides had committed serious war crimes during the operation and had, at times, an utter disregard for the lives of civilians, accusations repeated by other organizations as well. In any event, Israel had failed to destroy or dislodge Hamas or even weaken Hamas’ hold on Gaza, while Israel’s and the IDF’s image was deeply tarnished. Conversely, sympathy for Gazans and Hamasonly grew among the Palestinian population in Israel and the West Bank as a result of Cast Lead, actually empowering Hamas and increasing its legitimacy.

Sympathy for Gazans and Hamas only grew among the Palestinian population in Israel and the West Bank as a result of Cast Lead, actually empowering Hamas and increasing its legitimacy.

Before Cast Lead, Abbas and Olmert were perhaps closer than any other two Israeli and Palestinian leaders ever were to reaching a comprehensivepeace deal. But Olmert ended up announcing his future resignation because of a corruption scandal, making himself something of a lame-duck, and then launched Cast Lead, derailing the process. After months of stalemate, Benjamin Netanyahu, who seems to not even seriously believe in the “Two-State Solution,” took over as Israel’s prime minister in a remarkable comeback at the end of March, 2009, by forming a coalition with an extremist right-wing party and giving the post of foreign minister to its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, and by eventually winning over other parties after this move. Netanyahu is still Israel’s leader today.

As for the rift between Fatah and Hamas, there were several attempts to reconcile, but even when an attempt began in a promising way, it would eventually stall. However, in perhaps the most hopeful attempt yet, a unity agreement was reached in April, but that will be discussed later.

After the intense violence of Cast Lead, things remained at a low level of violence for the next several years, but peaked again in the fall of 2012 with predictably banal results. 2013 was the quietest year in terms of violence between Israelis and Palestinians since before the Second Intifada. And yet, no major easing of the siege of Gaza occurred on Israel’s end despite what can only be termed Hamas’ best year in terms of its behavior towards Israel. Escalation of violence began again just this spring…

No major easing of the siege of Gaza occurred on Israel’s end despite what can only be termed Hamas’ best year in terms of its behavior towards Israel.

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Below is what was Part II

III.) The Current Violence

A Principled Assessment of the Violence of the Parties in this Current Round of Fighting

A more than 600 to 1 ratio, which may only become even more imbalanced as the fighting continues, between the deaths from the response to the rockets and the deaths from the rockets themselves, means that this response failed to pass the proportionality test a long time ago.

As I write this, the over 2,900 rockets fired from the Gaza strip have managed to kill only three civilians and wound roughly two dozen, while Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” in Gaza has killed over 1,800 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and wounded over 9,000. This is a stunning, and stunningly obscene, disparity: over a 600 to 1 kill ratio between the intervention in response to the rockets and the rockets themselves. Amid the lively (to say the least) debate on this conflict, there are several key points to be made here. 1.) Israel most definitely has the right to defend itself. No country would ever tolerate rocket fire from across its border without some sort of a response. However, 2.) such a response needs to beproportional to the threat, and Israel’s actions certainly raise “the question of proportionality,” as former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright said on Wednesday. In addition to the human losses, the invasion of Gaza has apparently “completely destroyed”over 5,200 buildings and caused $4 billion in damage, or almost three times Gaza’s GDP. A response is in danger of becoming an illegitimate, disproportionate response and an act of aggression in and of itself if it is taken too far. And a more than 600 to 1 ratio, which may become even more imbalanced as the fighting continues, between the deaths from the response to the rockets and the deaths from the rockets themselves, means that this response failed to pass the proportionality test a long time ago. If one kid in a playground punches another in the stomach a few times, the other kid cannot punch the initial aggressor kid twenty times in the head, then break his arms and legs and claim he is only acting in “self-defense” and is justified because the initial aggressor did not fully stop all resistance. So 3.) once it becomes clear that aggression on the part of the responder has passed any sense of proportionality, the initial aggressor, too, has a right to defend himself, especially in his own territory, as do others affected by the reactive aggression. In this case, one should distinguish between casualties caused by Hamas’ and others’ rockets, fired wholly indiscriminately, and Hamas’ and others’ attacks on Israeli troops assaulting Gaza or massing outside Gaza to do just that. Over sixty IDF soldiers have been killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza, over 320 wounded, but those casualties are hard to argue against being at least partly defensive in nature. In fact, it is likely that many non-Hamas local Gazans would take up arms against IDF incursions, defending their very homes from aggression, as opposed to the idea of large numbers of “normal” Gazans undertaking the firing of rockets into Israel. However, this should most certainly not be used to justify the targeting of civilians or to claim that there are no “innocent civilians” in Gaza.

Also, when assessing any form of violence in a conflict, 4.) three main criteria must be examined.

a.) Intent is certainly one of these, and is something that can be multifaceted. A party to a conflict can have stated intents, which may or may not be true, and unstated intents, which sometimes can be pretty apparent, but other times can be pretty mystifying at best. Here, one must distinguish between a party deliberately and indiscriminately targeting civilians for death, and one that does not target civilians for death as an end-target unto themselves. Keep in mind that this intent is a separate criterion from looking at the actual casualties caused by the violence, and that that will be given attention below. In terms of intent regarding their respective acts of violence, Hamas has two main categories of violent acts in this conflict: the rocket attacks, which are intended to kill civilians, and engaging the Israeli military in and around Gaza, which target the Israeli military and can be viewed as self-defense. Israel’s attacks, in contrast, are part of a general, longstanding policy that “is not intended to maximize civilian casualties. Yet it does intentionally target civilians: it is intended to produce maximal civilian distress, while avoiding mass civilian casualties [author Roi Maor’s emphasis],” which, though leading at times to high civilian casualties, is meant to act as a deterrent, hitting civilian areas that are used as military bases and trying to make civilians think twice about supporting or allowing militant activity in their neighborhood, or to get them to pressure their government and/or militants to abandon hostilities; conversely, the militants/government may also think twice about engaging in violence if the likely response will be massive harm inflicted upon their own civilian charges. Still, while not targeting civilians specifically for death as a policy, the IDF has displayed a callous attitude towards Palestinian civilians, and one of the IDF’s ethics code authors asserting that only the safety of its personnel should affect tactics and that no additional risks to its own personnel should be accepted by the IDF to prevent civilian casualties is something that at the very least should be debated vigorously, as such a philosophy seemingly contributed to the high levels of civilian casualties in Cast Lead.* Furthermore, the IDF’s own investigations into abuses or questionable actions are not regarded as serious. One non-military panel found that the IDF was not even following its own procedures regarding civilians.

*(A digression on doctrine is useful here: as it is, there is considerable  and ongoing debate involving a wide variety of views regarding tactics and noncombatants since this is a grey area of international law. Here are some of Israel’s official rules regarding combat and civilians. Thomas Smith, writing in 2008, noted that U.S. tactics earlier in the Iraq War were killing higher levels of civilians and alienating Iraqis, mentioning that U.S. consultation with the IDF (as reported late in December 2003 by Dexter Filkins, Julian Borger, and Seymour Hersh) may have been a factor that actually brought about a deterioration of both tactics and the relationship between Americans and Iraqis, or, as he termed it, brought about the “Palestinianization” of Iraq. He also noted that Gen. Peter Chiarelli’s installment as a major commander beginning in January 2006 and, in January 2007, the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as overall commander in Iraq led to a distinctly different approach that took far more care to prioritize Iraqi civilians’ needs and safety and produced some better results. It was Petraeus who had been responsible for revising, improving, and co-authoring the U.S. Army’s own counterinsurgency manual [2014 edition here] at the time, wisely writing in one heading “The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is” and also writing that “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.” Currently, the U.S. Army’s own manual from 2012 on Civilian Casualty Mitigation painstakingly and correctly notes that

Short-term thinking must be avoided because it is likely to lead to behavior that will generate widespread resentment and lead to a more insecure operational area in the future. Over time, units focused entirely on their own protection are likely to adopt a pattern of maneuvering aggressively, firing weapons indiscriminately, threatening civilians, and causing unnecessary CIVCASs [civilian casualties]

and that “Aggressive measures to protect the force in the short term can place units at greater risk in the future if resulting CIVCAS incidents alienate the population.” Not so much out of a moral principle, then, but out of consideration for the prospects of the Army’s own long-term success and safety and American national interests, it seems the U.S. military’s doctrine would allow exposing soldiers to more risk in the short term to better protect civilians because high civilian casualties over the medium and long-term can make an operating environment even more dangerous for the Army if a population grows increasingly hostile and/or becomes more inclined to support the enemy because of such civilian casualties. Essentially, it means that one must, at least to a degree, think strategically even when acting tactically. This is a wise policy, and, as it seems there is not this level of strategic consideration in Israel’s official military literature in terms of its tactics, Israel would do well to consider adopting a similar approach, not only for the sake of Palestinians and other Arabs that Israel could be fighting again in the future, but for the sake of the safety of Israeli military personnel in the long-run and for the sake of Israeli national interests. Thus, Israeli doctrine differs considerably from American doctrine, and, in fact, it is often counterproductive to Israel’s long-term interests and actually prevents it from making strategic gains or resolving conflicts, causing Israel to suffer from the “institutionalization of temporary solutions.” It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking. Rather than the other way around, then, it would seem that Israel could learn a lot from America’s recent evolution of its military thinking and practice. Col. Tony Pfaff, while recognizing and embracing the utilitarian arguments, argues that there are also ethical and moral responsibilities not to transfer an excessive and high amount of risk to noncombatants and to pursue alternatives to options that would do so, since soldiers essentially exercise sovereignty over where they operate, sovereignty that makes them partly responsible for area civilians. For him, the challenge is one of balancing risk between the soldiers themselves and noncombatants, not a transfer of the maximum possible to one party or the other; with this, I would agree. Finally, a cautionary note: as is always possible, there may be differences between official doctrine and practice [This digression later became the basis for a future article]. Now, back to the criteria of assessing violence in a conflict…)

It is a telling flaw of Israeli thinking that the U.S. military was able to see many of its mistakes relating to civilians and adjust its tactics and strategy after only a few years of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan while Israel has been occupying Palestinians for almost fifty years and has been unable to see the need make similar adjustments to its tactics or strategic thinking.

Another part of the intent behind the choice of Israel’s tactics is very political, so force is applied in a very Clausewitzian way for Israel here: the father of Israel’s military doctrine (termed Low Intensity Conflict) for most of the last few decades made it clear that this doctrine was designed “To undermine the adversary’s determination and to lead to the adversary’s abandoning his objectives, through a cumulative process of inflicting physical, economic, and psychological damage, and to lead the adversary to realize that his own armed engagement is hopeless.” Thus, force is directed at the population as a whole not in order to kill them but with the intent to make them submit to Israeli political designs over time through attrition. This strategy actually reveals an unwillingness to compromise or even attempt a political settlement, and helps to explain why Israeli political leaders like Sharon, Netanyahu, Lieberman, and others have actively tried to undermine the peace process. It is also worth noting that if this approach fails to break the enemy into submission it will only serve to increase violence and prolong the conflict.

The second main criterion for assessing violence in conflicts is b.) assessing the types of tactics used and their immediate likely effects. Regardless of what actual final outcomes occur, certain tactics are much likelier to kill more innocent people (say, firing artillery or using gunboats to shell an area, which are very imprecise tactics), while other are much more likely to spare lives (e.g., using smaller, precision weapons, or sending in disciplined ground troops as opposed to aerial bombardment). And likely, all of these tactics are being used at different times, which can make an assessment complicated: the use of precision weapons in one instance does not “cancel” out the use of artillery in another, or vice versa, when talking about a densely populated civilian area. All tactics must be factored into a final analysis, and the fog of war often makes it difficult to know which commanders are closely following guidelines that try to minimize civilian suffering and casualties, and which are doing so only loosely or not at all. If a military claims that certain rules are the norm, but it turns out they are not followed, those unsanctioned actions are still the responsibility of the military and the government in question. The fact that such regulations exist matters little if they are not seriously enforced. As with many things in life, then, here the rulebook matters much less than the actual practice.

Save the complaints because it just makes you look bad when you say “Awwww, but the terrorists are making it harder for us to avoid killing civilians.” Tough.

Israel likes to complain that it is not fair that Hamas does things like store weapons and ammunition in schools or among civilians, and that Israel ends up being blamed for the civilian casualties. To me, it is ridiculous on one level for Israel to complain about this (Netanyahu just the other day said that “All civilian casualties are unintended by us, but intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can…it’s gruesome…They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead the better.”) because in asymmetric warfare, each sidehas advantages and disadvantages specific to their positions of power or lack thereof. The more powerful party has fun things like tanks and jets and the Iron Dome, but has to play by the rules of war and just deal with the fact that the other side probably will not play by those rules, factoring this reality into how it approaches the conflict and still taking great care to minimize civilian casualties in spite of the enemy’s foul play; the weaker party lacks big weapons but can get away more with breaking the rules and endangering civilians because that is just how asymmetric warfare works and has always worked. If the tradeoff for having tanks and jets is that you have avoid some things that make military sense because your enemy, say, stores weapons in an orphanage for disabled children, well, that’s still not a bad deal and it still gives your side a huge advantage over your weaker enemy. So save the complaints because it just makes you look bad when you say “Awwww, but the terrorists are making it harderfor us to avoid killing civilians.” Tough.

William Saletan, writing for Slate, has written a number of very thoughtful and serious pieces examining this very issue of tactics as currently being employed by Israel’s military in Gaza and by Hamas. Saletan points out in a piece written early on in this round of hostilities that, on the one level, the tactics used by Israel show that, at least in a significant proportion of their strikes, Israel is actually undertaking serious efforts to avoid high levels of civilian casualties, especially compared with Hamas (and lest you think he is “pro-Israel,” his previous piece condemned Israel’s collective punishment of, well, all Palestinians). In certain situations, Israel attempts to warn civilians of impending/imminent attacks through text messages, leaflets, and very small “roof-knocking” bombs intended to warn/scare off residents, especially when targeting the homes of terrorists or militants. Yet Saletan also notes that the targeting of civilian homes, whether the homes of terrorists or not, is questionable. The warnings have been confirmed by Hamas and Gazans. Hamas, in contrast, fires rockets indiscriminately into Israel, declaring that “all Israelis” are fair game; they are deliberately targeting civilians for the sake of targeting civilians and killing them.

Hamas, in contrast to Israel, fires rockets indiscriminately into Israel, declaring that “all Israelis” are fair game; they are deliberately targeting civilians for the sake of targeting civilians and killing them.

However, other civilians say they received no warning before their houses were hit. In a subsequent piece, Saletan goes deeper: he mentions that there questions about how consistent Israel is with this policy since there are clearly times when there have been no warnings. There are also issues of timing: some warnings come five minutes or less before the attack, and some targets clearly had no military value, such as a beachside café that was showing World Cup matches or a beach where only children were playing. The latter attack was carried out with shells from an Israeli gunboat, which are not exactly precision weapons. Vice News, in a video entitled “Nowhere Safe in Gaza,” shows, starting at about the 10-minute mark, that even an area right near a hotel specifically designated as a safe zone and where many journalists were staying was not off limits. The only power plant for the more than 1.8 million people who live in the Gaza Strip has also been targeted. The plant had already been hit and was operating at a severely reduced capacity, and this latest strike has completely knocked it out. This has “threatened to turn the deprivations in Gaza into a humanitarian crisis. The facility powers water and sewage systems as well as hospitals, and it had been Gaza’s main source of electricity in recent days after eight of 10 lines that run from Israel were damaged,” and, indeed, conditions have become even more awful than normal for the residents of Gaza. Then there is this video that shows a sniper killing a wounded civilian. Hospitals, mosques, and schools have also been repeatedly hit, though it is not always clear if the fire comes from Israel or misfired Hamas rockets; the latest Israeli fatal shelling of a school sheltering civilians was a location UNRWA had notified the IDF about a full 33 times, and even the U.S. said it was “appalled” by this “disgraceful” attack on the part of Israel. In one attack, it seems Israel killed twenty-five people to target one militant, hitting a house filled with his family during a Ramadan iftar, the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. Another strike on a full apartment building—possibly the deadliest single Israeli strike in Gaza many years—killed thirty-five people at home with their families, , and wounded another twenty-seven people. Other similar strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties are not uncommon. Fred Kaplan sarcastically quipped “Who knew there were 1,500 militarily legitimate targets in that tiny, impoverished strip of land?” when Israel had hit that many targets at the time he was writing; up through today, Israel has hit nearly 3,300 targets in Gaza. Multiple reports on multiple days further note extensive use of artillery, very imprecise as far as weapons go, and apparently the IDF is using flechette ammunition in some of these artillery strikes, ammunition designed to increase, not decrease, casualties. And it is also using area artillery bombardment in Gaza as “an attempt to encourage the population’s evacuation,” a tactic which seem extremely likely to cause heavy civilian casualties; in this situation, Israel’s military is firing an imprecise weapon into an area where it knows civilians still are present not to target combatants but in order to induce an exodus. Here, whether the intent is to kill or not seems moot because civilians arebeing deliberately targeted by artillery and will die as a result anyway. Human Rights Watch likens Israel’s artillery use to Hamas’s firing of rockets in terms of its fairly “indiscriminate” nature. Clearly, then, there are issues of targeting and tactics, even if in some instances Israel is taking, to use Saletan’s phrase, “exemplary” measures to avoid killing civilians, for in others it is clearly not and the balance is not in Israel’s favor. In the attacks overall, the UN says roughly 75 percent of the deaths have been civilian.

UNRWA has said that nearly 260,000 Gazans (over 14 percent of all Gazans) who have fled their homes are sheltered in over 90 of their schools, and, overall, about one-quarter of Gaza’s population has been displaced by the fighting. Israel’s creation of a buffer zone from which it is driving out the population has, in fact, become so extreme that it now encompasses a full 44 percent of the Gaza Strip.

There is also the issue of forced migration and the displaced. Before its ground invasion, Israel ordered over 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate from parts of the densely populated Gaza Strip. The UN agency that helps Palestinians, UNRWA, has said that over 260,000 Gazans (over 14 percent of all Gazans) who have fled their homes are sheltered in over 90 of their schools, and, overall, over one-quarter of Gaza’s entire population has been displaced by the fighting and over 10,000 houses destroyed. There is a sad irony in Israel ordering evacuation, because it is mainly Israel that forcibly keeps almost all Gazans in Gaza, which is very small; Israel keeps most of the crossings closed to travel most of the time, with Egypt keeping its single crossing closed most of the time as well. This, in effect, makes Gaza, even in the eyes of some Israeli Jews, a giant prison. And people are fleeing one location only to come under attack in another. They ask “Where are we supposed to go?” A headline from the parody news site The Onion is, sadly, almost totally accurate: “Israel: Palestinians Given Ample Time To Evacuate To Nearby Bombing Sites.” Israel’s creation of a buffer zone from which it is driving out the population has, in fact, become so extreme that it now encompasses a full 44 percent of the Gaza Strip. This means that the population is becoming even more concentrated as people are herded into less space, increasing the risk for even more casualties during hostilities.

Then there is the issue of human shields: Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields, but it is actually a complicated situation. Some people are voluntarily acting as human shields, something that has been an issue before. There is no evidence yet of Hamas forcing people into harm’s way, which is the legal international law definition of a human shield, but Hamas has encouraged Gazans to ignore Israel’s warnings about imminent strikes and it regularly operates in crowded civilian areas; in addition, in this latest round of fighting found Hamas has been found storing rockets in UNRWA schools three separate times, and the group also operates in or around mosques and hospitals. So while Hamas is not helping and its actions certainly place civilians at higher risk, not less, it is not accurate to say that Hamas is forcing people to be human shields against their will. Israel is not an angel when it comes to this subject either, as it has also used Palestinian civilians as human shields, forcing them into dangerous situations like walking immediately in advance of IDF troops in while they are advancing in combat zones and/or while they are clearing houses and examining potential booby traps, and this was a policy set at the highest levels of the IDF; Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered this tactic to be stopped, but there is evidence that Israel has continued the practice anyway.

Another tactical aspect which must be considered is how both are going about the business of cease-fires on behalf of civilians. Some cease-fires have been agreed to, but over the weekend each side rejected a cease-fire offer from the other. Hamas even offered a 10-year truce earlier in the conflict in exchange for an opening of the Gaza border crossings to more goods and services, international supervision of Gaza’s sea traffic to replace the Israeli Navy, and the re-release of prisoners who were just re-arrested but had been freed in a deal reached in 2011, whereby Hamas freed Gilad Shalit, captured in 2006, in exchange for Israel freeing over 1,000 Palestinians prisoners. Hamas’ offer seemed a decent one, at least worth exploring, but Israel did not take it seriously. Now Hamas, feeling an existential threat from this invasion, is insisting any longer-term cease-fire include ending/easing trade/travel restrictions and economic and infrastructure investment for Gaza; this, too, is hardly unreasonable, but is not being considered by Israel, which says it wants to downgrade Hamas’s military capabilities even further. In fact, 86.5 percent of Israelis just surveyed said they opposed a cease-fire. So the chorus of condemnation abroad is matched inversely by overwhelming Israeli public support at home; thus, on his domestic front, Netanyahu even has free reign to expand the operation. But while bombs are falling and people are dying, you take whatever ceasefire you can get. For Hamas, active hostilities is not the time to gain political points when you are in the far weaker position; the actual cease-fire is a great time to discuss any and all these issues.

Netanyahu places any and all the blame for any civilian casualties squarely on the shoulders of Hamas, which is irresponsible with the lives of Gazans. But this is nonsense, because bad behavior on the part of Hamas does not mean that Israel “is free of moral responsibilities”(or legal responsibilities, for that matter) for the consequences of its choices. Either way, both sides are clearly “deeply negligent in their responsibilities to avoid causing Palestinian civilian casualties,” the misdeeds of one side cannot justify the misdeeds of the other, and the UN is, appropriately, going to investigate both Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

Either way, both sides are clearly “deeply negligent in their responsibilities to avoid causing Palestinian civilian casualties,” the misdeeds of one side cannot justify the misdeeds of the other, and the UN is, appropriately, going to investigate both Israel and Hamas for war crimes.

Whatever precautions Israel does take—and Israel does deserve credit for the use of these tactics when they are actually used, as well as for the intent behind them—the frequent use of tactics that are extremely likely to cause many civilian casualties more than outweighs such precautions in an overall assessment. To be sure, many more would die without these precautionary practices intended to spare civilian life, but the massive numbers of casualties the less discriminate tactics inflict are, ultimately, the defining feature if only by virtue of the large number of civilian casualties; thus, Israel’s efforts to spare civilians overall “are failing.” If Israel wants to be viewed differently, it should increase use of the precautionary tactics and decrease the use of, say, mass artillery bombardments. Such is the nature of war that if twenty military units exercise exemplary restraint but a single artillery unit kills hundreds in minutes, the attention and weight go to the artillery unit. And a military and government are not judged by their individual parts, but how they operate as a whole. This is not to suggest Israel should take any of these tactics completely off the table, but perhaps the best thing Israel could do militarily to both reduce civilian casualties and improve its own image is to be more discriminating and selective with what weapons it uses when, where,and how often. Not every operation requires ground troops and tanks  and helicopters and  jets and drones and artillery and naval gunboats. If just one of these is used poorly, the entire operation is threatened with being characterized by such use. In particular, the frequent use of artillery and naval gunboats in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, especially when all those other weapons and options are available, seems particularly gratuitous, callous, and careless. It seems there is actually considerable variation in the quality, cohesion, and structure of the IDF, which is at least one plausible and partial explanation for some of these problems with inconsistent performances and contradictory tactics and approaches.

Israel could be more discriminating and selective with what weapons it uses when, where, and how often. Not every operation requires ground troops and tanks and helicopters and jets and drones and artillery  and naval gunboats. If just one of these is used poorly, the entire operation is threatened with being characterized by such use.

However, when assessing violence in a conflict, as important as intent and tactics are, in the end c.) the most important criterion is what are theactual effects of the violence irrespective of intent and tactics, for even with the best of intent and a discriminating approach to tactics, it is the effects the violence in the real world which will have the most lasting impact. So even if the intent is noble and the best possible tactics are chosen, failure and chaos are always possible, and, in the end, the results are what will be primarily judged, not intent or tactics. That is why the use of force by a powerful military is a decision that carries so much weight and should not be undertaken other than as a near-last or last resort. The actual effects must especially be measured against the level and nature of what the violence is in response to, as well. In looking at the effects of any particular action, operation, campaign, or war, there are further subdivisions that must be considered, and for each, one must ask what are going to be the shorter term effects, and, more importantly, what are going to be the longer term effects?

Keeping this in mind, i.) one must ask what are the likely shorter and longer-term political ramifications of these violent acts, for, as von Clausewitz famously put it, “War is the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means,” and (less famously) is “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Fred Kaplan summed up Israel’s operation nicely when wrote for Slate that “Israeli ground troops are moving into Gaza. From a purely tactical and short-term view, it makes sense. From a strategic and medium-to-long-term view, it’s crazy.” The subtitle of his article states (correctly) that “The Israeli government has lost the ability to think strategically.” In fact, as we discussed earlier, one can say that it generally has not had or even attempted to exercise that ability much in the last few decades. Regarding Israel’s military operation, Kaplan asks “what’s the point?”

Fred Kaplan summed up Israel’s operation nicely when wrote for Slate that “Israeli ground troops are moving into Gaza. From a purely tactical and short-term view, it makes sense. From a strategic and medium-to-long-term view, it’s crazy.” Kaplan asks “what’s the point?”

Specifically, Israel wants to weaken Hamas (what Israel refers to as “mowing the grass” so it does not become overgrown, Hamas being “the grass,” Israel’s attacks being the “mowing”), and, in general, it wants to be safer and more secure. That much is obvious. That is what is so vexing, “because in the medium-to-long-term-view,” this operation will have the opposite effect, even though, for now, it is clearly devastating Hamas and making Israel safer (for now) on the Gaza front, where there will almost certainly be fewer rocket attacks and fewer rockets to fire, as well as far fewer tunnelsfrom which Hamas can operate. But the real questions revolve around the longer-term effects.

In the longer term, in many ways, this will end up being a repeat of Lebanon in 2006 (and in the 1980s for that matter) where Israel won the battles but created far worse problems for itself over the longer-term. The Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the thousands of Lebanese civilians who died during Israel’s siege of Beirut, generated a tremendous amount of support for the Palestinians and Lebanese in the 1980s, and Israel was seen as “the bad guy,” even earning condemnation from U.S. President Ronald Reagan (Israel did such a bad job in Beirut that an international peacekeeping force that included American troops was brought in, but was short-lived, especially after suicide truck bombings of a barracks killed 241 American and 58 French servicemen). And, in the process of invading Lebanon, Israel helped to birth terrorist Hezbollah. Israel’s attempt to cripple Hezbollah in 2006 through an(other) invasion of Lebanon, even for all the casualties inflicted against, it, only saw the world focus more on the many civilian casualties and saw Hezbollah’s stature and power grow. Today, Hezbollah, far from isolated, is a major partner in the governing coalition of Lebanon’s parliament, and in many ways this is because of the 2006 Israeli invasion. Fast forward to today and Gaza, and a similar outcome to the two Lebanon wars—Israel loses the public relations war, and its very target in the conflict becomes far more empowered in the long-run—seems quite possible. Israel needs to consider that if its long-term goal is to weaken Hamas, it seems to already have failed in that regard. As an aptly titled piece suggests, with military force, “you can’t kill Hamas, you can only make it stronger,” because ultimately, dealing with Hamas will require a political solution. It is very possible to destroy a military unit, but Hamas is a committed movement(those tend to be harder to destroy) that is “capable of taking a punch.” Before this latest round of fighting, Hamas was weak and unpopular among Palestinians and isolated, even after reaching a unity deal with Fatah’s and Mahmoud Abbas’ PA, which it did so after a seven-year dispute out of a position of weakness. It had recently lost the support of its three most powerful foreign sponsors: Iran and Syria because it had voiced support for the “the will of the Syrian people,” and Egypt because the pro-Hamas Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi is long-overthrown (his Muslim Brotherhood is at once cousin/brother/father to Hamas) and the secular generals who don’t like Islamist movements are firmly back in charge under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. And, in general, the regional Arab governments have tacitly supported Israel with their lack of support for the embattled Hamas. But now, thanks to Israel’s attack, coupled with Israel’s refusal to throw Abbas and the PA any kind of a substantive bone, Hamas is now seeing a surge in support, and even in the West Bank, Fatah’s apparent stronghold. In fact, Israel is actually helping Hamas with its approach to the Palestinians. And, inversely, Abbas’s and Fatah’s support is apparently shrinking because of their inability to reap any rewards from the non-violent, negotiation-oriented approach with Israel, even creating sharp division within the upper echelons of Fatah. Abbas himself is being criticized for cooperating closely with Israel and getting “nothing” from Israel in return.

As an aptly titled piece suggests, with military force, “you can’t kill Hamas, you can only make it stronger,” because ultimately, dealing with Hamas will require a political solution.

Israel’s government’s lack of commitment to a serious peace process in which Israel actually makes major concessions to Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian people as a whole (and, as we have seen, the Gaza pullout was not such a concession) has created a political calculus in some Palestinians who, having seen the non-violent, cooperative faction Fatah get “nothing” from Israel, embrace violence in the style of Hamas as the only alternative available to them. More so than any single factor, Israel’s unwillingness to reward Abbas and Fatah for cooperation and nonviolence since Abbas first came to power in 2005, or even to reward Hamas for its reigning in other militant factions and practicing and contributing to a level of nonviolence in 2013 and early 2014 that was unparalleled since the year 2000, has created the situation on the ground today where non-violent Abbas is weak and losing support and Hamas is growing in power and gaining support as it pursues violence. If Israel stupidly continues to not reward non-violence and thus encourages violence, it will have to look in the mirror when it wants to point fingers. Whatever Israel does militarily, it is its political choices more than anything else that will affect Palestinians’ willingness to engage in violence. The idea that “most Palestinians” only want to kill “Jews” because they hate them is utter-self-serving-nonsense that justifies Israeli militarism, political cowardice, and a policy aimed at preserving the status quo and nothing more. To be fair, given Jews’ uniquely tragic history and the rhetoric coming from Palestinian extremists, it is understandable that Israeli leaders are reluctant to take risks, however measured, but that is the job of leaders: to take measured risks that are in in the long-term interests of their people even when the easy and popular choices lead in different directions.

More so than any single factor, Israel’s unwillingness to reward Abbas and Fatah for cooperation and nonviolence since Abbas first came to power in 2005, or even to reward Hamas for its reigning in other militant factions and practicing and contributing to a level of nonviolence in 2013 and early 2014 that was unparalleled since the year 2000, has created the situation on the ground today where non-violent Abbas is weak and losing support and Hamas is growing in power and gaining support as it pursues violence…Whatever Israel does militarily, it is its political choices more than anything else that will affect Palestinians’ willingness to engage in violence.

But, for the sake of argument, let us say that it is likely and realistically possible that Israel could destroy Hamas or weaken it to the point of its toppling or irrelevance: again, the issue of myopia rears its familiar head because one has to wonder if Israel has seriously given any thought as to what could realistically replace Hamas. The fact of the matter is there are groups in Gaza far worse than Hamas, and apparently now some of themare establishing ties to ISIS, or The Islamic State (of Iraq and al-Sham/Syria/The Levant), now wreaking havoc in Iraq and Syria. These groups in Gaza are more hardline and have been criticizing Hamas for being too “moderate.” Hamas also faces the regular challenge of preventing these groups from launching their own attacks against Israel even when Hamas is able to secure cease-fires; Islamic Jihad, just to name one of these groups, has been able to derail cease-fires between Hamas and Israel before. Ironically, Hamas even fears some of these groups could muscle them out of power in Gaza, just like it was able to do to Fatah in 2007. As a result, Hamas is often cracking down on these groups and arresting their members, while, conversely, these groups are often protesting against Hamas. And some of them are gaining public support at the expense of Hamas. Needlessly to say, the rivalries between Hamas and these groupscan be intense and sometimes violent. And if Israel weakens Hamas too much, it is conceivable that one of these more violent, more extreme groups could take over Gaza or even roll out the red carpet for ISIS.

But there are other factors to consider. In this situation, what can make this an even more dangerous fiasco for Israel is that West Banker Palestinians are protesting (rioting?) in large numbers, and there has been a very unusual amount of unrest and street violence from the normally quiet Palestinian-Israelis/Israeli-Arabs (one-fifth of Israel’s citizens) as tensions have been mounting slowly over a number of issues, from Israeli shootings and killings of teenage protesters during demonstrations on this May’s “Nabka Day” (“Day of Catastrophe”, or, for Israelis, their Independence Day), to Israel’s questionable, massive crackdown in the West Bank that involved the arrests of hundreds of Palestinians, arrests that were themselves a provocation, though they were (nominally) in response to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. In a purely tactical situation, Israel may deal Hamas a lot of physical damage, but Israel may also face the prospects of increased violence from Palestinian-Israelis/Arab-Israelis and from West Bank Palestinians, a risk which increases every day that its incursion into Gaza continues. And even if this does not happen now, the current operation may make that more likely in the future, with a “Third Intifada” just waiting to erupt (even as I have been writing this article, and I began this article early last week, Hamas has called for a “Third Intifada,”and protests and violence and killing are spreading to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which is exactly what I predicted Hamas would probably try to do and what would transpire in the West Bank and East Jerusalem). The uproar from Israel’s own Palestinian Arab citizens is perhaps the most troubling issue that Israel now must confront. And it raises the question: how effectively could Israel face unrest and even resistance from 20 percent of its own citizens, West Bankers, and Gazans all at the same time? Whatever the answer to that question, one thing is certain: Israel’s actions in Gaza will not only make things more difficult with Gaza, but also with the West Bank and inside Israel itself.

Another thing which Israel needs to consider is that this operation in Gaza will already further erode support for Israel globally, even among its strongest and probably only ally in which the population still supports Israel over the Palestinians. I am, of course, talking about, the United States. Incredibly lopsided operations like this one, the nature of social media and how it is affecting coverage of this conflict, changing  demographic trends in America, and an American news media that is increasingly less pro-Israel have all been combining to weaken formerly unwavering U.S. support for Israel, especially among young Americans, who actually blame Israel more for the violence and have more sympathy for the Palestinians than Israelis. Support is even weakening, quite surprisingly, among American Jews. Yes, Jews! Also, no longer can Israel just assume strong bipartisan support from both Republicans and Democrats; there are signsthat Israel is beginning to lose the Democratic Party as well. As mentioned earlier, young Jews are especially liberal, and are drifting away from an Israeli occupation that is inherently undemocratic and from an Israeli society that has been catering to right-wingers and lurching to the right, politically speaking, for years. Additionally, in Israel, “few Israeli journalists have cultivated Palestinian sources because there is amazingly little interest among the Israeli public in understanding Palestinian affairs.” These trends are complemented by an increasing isolation of Israelis and Palestinians from each other, not just physically (in no small part thanks to Israel’s massive separation barrier in the West Bank, which dwarfs the Berlin Wall) but in terms of even exposing themselves to each other’s narratives and media exposure as well (not dissimilar to the type of partisan media self-cocooning that is occurring in America today). So Israel not only is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, it is also isolating itself from Palestinians, and not just with its massive wall. Further military action with no serious, concurrent effort on the political front will only make Israel even more isolated and could empower a growing boycott movement (BDS) that is targeting Israel, exposing Israel over time to crippling sanctions from the EU, seriously considering such action if Israel does not begin working seriously with Palestinian leadership, and from other major world powers.

Israel not only is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, it is also isolating itself from Palestinians.

As far political results of Hamas’s actions, the likely shorter-term consequences are apparent already: Israel will be even less likely to award Gaza or Hamas any concessions as a result of violence. In the longer term, each new round of fighting makes it less likely that any serious peace deal will be reached. Yet what should be clear from some of the preceding paragraphs is that, politically, anyway, Hamas could be able to make up some of its losses for being perceived as “too moderate” by its rival Islamist movements in Gaza and having been unable to deliver any relief from Israel’s blockade, since Hamas now at least seems to be putting up a decent fight, inflicting notable losses on the IDF. It seems possible that Hamas could benefit in the longer-term either by gaining support for having put up such a good fight against the Israelis and/or by leveraging the international outcry against Israel’s invasion to get Western and regional powers to push Israel harder to loosen its blockade of Gaza. Conversely, it is also quite possible that the Gazan people might be so angry at Hamas after all the death and destruction that if there is not some sort of material gain for them in terms of a relief of the blockade, and if all that Gazans will get out of Hamas’ rocket fire is just death and destruction at the hands of Israel, Hamas could find itself in serious trouble with Gazans (and as mentioned already, this is not necessarily going to mean a better replacement). Abbas echoed the concern about the pointlessness of Hamas’ rocket fire when he rhetorically asked in a TV interview “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” In another appearance, he pleaded: “We are the losing side, and every minute there are more and more unnecessary deaths. … I don’t like trading in Palestinian blood.”

Naturally, the ii.) other question one must ask is what are the shorter and longer-term tangible/material consequences, as in people and property. Right now, as already mentioned, the short term consequences are a tremendous amount of death and destruction meted out by Israel, and a dramatically smaller amount of death and destruction meted out by Hamas, except IDF casualties are significant by its sensitive standards. In the longer-term, the actions of each are likely to increase violence, death, and destruction in general on the part of the other, though, of course, the rockets of Hamas are unlikely to become dramatically more effective anytime soon, and thus the balance of the violence, death, and destruction suffered will be on the Palestinian side, delivered by Israel’s military.

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Below is what was Part III

IV.) Shorter-Term Context

How/Why Did This Latest Round of Fighting Start?(or, What Was Going on Just Before All This Happened?)

Now that we have assessed the violence, one of last things we need to do before making any kind of final judgment is to look at just how and why this latest round of violence started.

As noted earlier, 2013 was a record year for peace and quiet (always a relative thing in this conflict) in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank as far as violence. There were a few minor incidents which broke the calm in the first few months of 2014, but nothing major; calm was still the norm. The “peace” process negotiations between the Netanyahu-led Israeli government and Abbas’s PA—a process pushed on the reluctant parties by an invigorated and hopeful U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in July 2013 after a nearly three year hiatus—were at this point on life support and “going nowhere,” to use the words of The Economist. The talks were agreed to under a general framework negotiated by Kerry in which the Palestinians would refrain from joining specific UN bodies, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), from which they could legally challenge Israeli actions and initiate investigations of war crimes. Abbas, in defiance of Israeli and U.S. wishes, had pressed for a vote in the UN General Assembly late in November 2012 to upgrade Palestine’s status at the UN from non-member “Observer Entity” to non-member “Observer State”—a status shared with the Vatican/Holy See and Kosovo—and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor, 138-9 with 41 abstentions; Abbas’s move was met with condemnation and punitive moves by Israel, which were added to the U.S. Congress’ withholding of funding for Palestinians even before the vote; this move enabled the Palestinians to have the option join the ICC and other bodies, but they held off because of a combination of threats and pressure from the U.S./Israel and also to use the potential moves as leverage against Israel. In terms of Kerry’s framework for jump-starting the talks in July 2013, in exchange for the Palestinians not joining these UN bodies, Israel would release some Palestinians prisoners (but the details over how many and when were vague and became disputed).

After many months, little progress had been made and the talks were at an impasse in March 2014; Abbas wanted the last of the prisoners released as a condition for extending talks, while Netanyahu wanted Abbas to extend talks in return for Netanyahu considering to putting their release to a difficult, uncertain Cabinet vote. Behind it all, the U.S. was exerting a lot of pressure on the parties, particularly on Netanyahu. During this impasse, tensions were further heightened by an IDF raid in the West Bank that killed three Palestinians and wounded at least seven more. Netanyahu wanted to delay the scheduled March 29 release of the final batch of Palestinian prisoners in part because a miscommunication between him and Kerry led him to have a different understanding of what was supposed to happen and when (although now that we know Israeli intelligence was spying on Kerry’s phone calls, there are questions as to how genuine Netanyahu’s confusion really was); Abbas threatened to resume his efforts to join the UN institutions if the prisoners were not voted to be released by 7 PM on April 1. He waited and was told that the Israeli Cabinet would vote before noon that day. Yet that morning, Israel’s Housing Minister, Uri Ariel, who is deeply opposed to the negotiations and to a Palestinian state and eagerly seeks to plant more Jewish settlers in the West Bank, approved over 700 new Jewish settlement housing units to be constructed in East Jerusalem—occupied in 1967 illegally by Israel and regarded by Palestinians as their hopeful future capital—in what was seen as a deliberate move to sabotage negotiations. Noon passed, and so did 7; finally, just before 8, Abbas gave up and moved forward with the process to join the UN bodies. There was a chance to delay the paperwork after more assurances about the prisoner release, assurances that had been given before, if Abbas would agree to nine more months of talks, but the previous nine months had gotten the Palestinians nowhere while Israel kept building settlements, and, at that point, and under pressure from others in his Cabinet who also felt Israel was not serious and that negotiations would go nowhere (not an unjustified feeling, given Netanyahu’s history of obstructionism and delaying tactics), Abbas went forward with part of his “Plan B” and submitted his paperwork to the UN.

Kerry seemed to place the majority of the blame for the failure of the peace talks on Israel as well. And most importantly, this view is apparently shared by President Obama and the White House, too, though publicly, the President places blame on both sides more-or-less evenly.

Tzipi Livni (the only person in the current Israeli government with any power who could even remotely be termed a “dove”), who led the negotiations for Israel (but was kept on a tight leash by Netanyahu), blamed Uri Ariel and Israel’s settlements for the collapse in the talks; indeed, throughout 2013, when Palestinians were exhibiting good behavior, the rate of new settlement construction in the West Bank more than doubled from the rate of 2012, increasing 123 percent. Martin Indyk, the U.S. special envoy to both the Israelis and the Palestinians during the peace process, publicly tried to lay the blame evenly, but reading between the lines and in more off-the-cuff and private remarks, he too seems to place the blame more on Israel and its settlement expansion. He also noted that the Israeli announcements of more settlement construction with the release of each batch of prisoners made it seem as if Abbas was trading land for prisoners, severely undermining him among Palestinians and infuriating Abbas. Other officials echoed that the primary blame belonged with Israel and the settlements on the condition of anonymity. Even more importantly, Kerry seemed to place the majority of the blame for the failure of the peace talks on Israel as well. And most importantly, this view is apparently shared by President Obama and the White House, too, though publicly, the President places blame on both sides more-or-less evenly. At the very least, the continued settlement announcements and building on land that was supposed be part of a future Palestinians state all throughout the negotiations made Abbas feel that Netanyahu was not a serious partner for peace.

A growing power imbalance between the parties left unaddressed by the United States—either by putting real, substantive pressure on Israel to seriously accommodate Palestinians or by significantly empowering Palestinian leadership—made an agreement even more unlikely and elusive throughout the whole process. Additionally, there were severe issues of trust between both sides, and even personally between Abbas and Netanyahu, which also hurt the process. And since each side fears the influence and rise of the other side’s extremists, this trust deficit is worsened by the fact that Hamas’ official charter calls for the destruction of Israel, by the fact that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel as a state, and by the fact that multiple senior Israeli officials, including members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, publicly stated that they are against the establishment of a Palestinians state, some even calling for the annexationof the West Bank or an increase in the level of military occupation there. There is even serious doubt as to Netanyahu’s commitment to the concept of a Palestinian state, even more so after some very recent comments(remember, he had played lip service to Oslo while deliberately undermining that peace process, too, in the 1990s). As one prominent Israeli was quoted as saying by The New Republic:

“I see it from a mathematical point of view,” said Avi Dichter, the former chief of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. “The American effort will always be multiplied by the amount of trust between the two leaders. So if Kerry’s pressure represents the number five, and then Obama’s help brings the American effort to ten, it really doesn’t matter. You’re still multiplying it by zero. The final result will always be zero.”

Furthermore, both Abbas and Netanyahu were under serious pressure from their respective political rights—Abbas had already lost Gaza to Hamas and was even vulnerable in the West Bank, while Netanyahu’s last stint as Prime Minister ended precisely because right-wing parties left his coalition over the peace process.

Still, negotiations about extending the seemingly-doomed negotiationscontinued. Meanwhile, the Palestinians’ “Plan B” had a second element: reconciling with Hamas. On April 23, Abbas shocked both Israel and the U.S. by announcing a unity deal with Hamas, hoping to end their roughly seven-year dispute, a move that generated considerable debate and was no small task to bring to fruition in light of the bitterness and bloodshed that had characterized their dispute. In response, Israel ended negotiations with Abbas and the PA the next day. The unwillingness of Hamas to recognize Israel is matched by Israel’s unwillingness to negotiate directly with Hamas. By May, it was clear that the peace process had failed and, at least for now, was dead. Still, it has been pointed out that the unity deal was nothing that should have immediately sent Israel into committing rash actions; after all, neither Fatah nor the Hamas would be running the interim government before a new slate of elections, scheduled as part of the deal; rather, independents and technocrats would form the government and would have to be approved by both factions. In other words, no Hamas members would be part of the new government, but that did not matter to Israel. Former former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said he thought that Netanyahu was “making a very serious mistake. When Hamas in effect accepted the notion of participation in the Palestinian leadership, it in effect acknowledged the determination of that leadership to seek a peaceful solution…with Israel. That was a real option. They should have persisted in that.” The odds, then, did not look bad that the unity government would be a partner that was able to work with Israel, yet Israel did not even consider that as an option, let alone try.

In mid-May, another incident occurred that only further inflamed Palestinians: Israeli security forces shot and killed two Palestinian teenage protesters during lightly violent demonstrations on Israel’s Independence Day, or “Nabka Day” (“Day of Catastrophe”), as Palestinians see it. Video from surveillance footage subsequently released by human rights activists did not corroborate Israel’s version of events, and the two boys were shown being shot in the back while walking away from the disturbances, which had by then quieted down and were not violent. A key witness to the incident subsequently reported that he was detained, harassed, and threatened by Israeli security personnel, who were angry with him, he said, for sharing his version of events with the public. Thus far, one soldier has been suspended for the shooting, but nothing else has yet come out of the investigation. Human Rights Watch called the incident a “war crime.”

Even though the new government seemed to address core Israeli concerns by recognizing Israel, renouncing violence, and excluding Hamas from the Cabinet, Israel condemned the U.S.’s willingness to work with it in extremely strong, bitter language that was highly unusual for its relationship with America, saying that “American naivety has broken all records.”

Though the biggest story in May was Pope Francis’ visit to the West Bank and Israel, that same month, Abbas finalized his plans for a new, non-partisan, technocratic, and temporary unity government, which would run the PA for roughly six-months until elections could be held. At the beginning of June, Abbas swore in the new government; several ministers were absent because Israel would not let them travel from Gaza, even though they were not members of Hamas. In response the swearing in of the new government, Netanyahu proclaimed that “Today, Abu Mazen [Abbas’s nickname] said yes to terrorism and no to peace.” But this seemed to be a gross mischaracterization. The U.S., unlike Israel, realized that its previous condemnation of the unity deal had been premature, recognizing that the fact that Hamas would not actually be running the new government was a window of opportunity, especially since the new government was committed to non-violence and recognition of Israel. Thus, the U.S. (as well as the EU) made clear its willingness to work with the new government. Yet even though the new government seemed to address core Israeli concerns by recognizing Israel, renouncing violence, and excluding Hamas from the Cabinet, Israel condemned the U.S.’s willingness to work with it in extremely strong, bitter language that was highly unusual for its relationship with America, saying that “American naivety has broken all records.” Israel also said that it would consider the new government responsible for any attacks coming out of the West Bank or Gaza.

So when three Israeli teens from West Bank Israeli settler communities–Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—disappeared and were feared to have been kidnapped on the night of June 12th, Netanyahu immediately criticized Abbas and the new technocratic government, saying that Abbas was responsible for the safety of the teens and telling Kerry that “This is the result of bringing a terrorist organization into the government.” This disappearance and probable kidnapping of the three teenagers was not treated as a criminal investigation; instead, the response was a massive military operation of the IDF in the West Bank, the largest IDF operation there since the Second Intifada. The focus of the heaviest IDF activity was Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city and home to over 250,000 Palestinians, as well as its surroundings, with the IDF increasing checkpoints, limiting entry into and exit from the city, and engaging in house-to-house searches. Within a few days, Netanyahu had put the blame squarely on Hamas, but also held the Abbas and the PA responsible because of the unity government move; those initially arrested included “Hamas members of Parliament, former ministers, imams and professors,” taken “in night raids across West Bank cities, villages and refugee camps.” Additionally, over fifty of the prisoners released in the Shalit deal—which Netanyahu himself had orchestrated—were re-arrested. Even a non-violent, secular NGO that had helped work out the reconciliation deal had its offices “ransacked.”Palestinians even doubted if the kidnapping was real, or if it was staged as excuse to crack down on Hamas and ruin the unity government, and also noted that Hamas did not claim responsibility for the kidnappings and that it had normally taken responsibility for kidnappings it had carried out in the past. Many of the arrests were aimed at punishing and suppressing Hamas, and not specifically undertaken to find the missing boys. Israel also virtually shut down access to Hebron and Gaza (Gaza even more so than usual), the week-long shutdown of Hebron costing the city about $12 million a day in lost business, while non-Hamas militants began firing small numbers of rockets into Israel from Gaza, and Israel would respond with airstrikes.

When three Israeli teens disappeared and were feared to have been kidnapped, Netanyahu immediately criticized Abbas and the new technocratic government, saying that Abbas was responsible for the safety of the teens and telling Kerry that “This is the result of bringing a terrorist organization into the government.”

On the Israeli side, the whole nation was gripped by the fate of the three missing boys, with thousands praying, holding rallies and vigils, and avidly checking the news for any new developments; Jews around the world offered their emotional support, too. A “semiofficial” social media campaignwas even started by Israelis: #BringBackOurBoys; it was quickly turned and used against Israel by Palestinians in reaction to young Palestinians being detained by Israel during the West Bank crackdown, and also in reaction to the many young Palestinians detained and killed in general by Israeli forces over the years. As the arrests grew to be in the hundreds, protests erupted in the West Bank, and Israeli troops shot and killed four Palestinians over the course of several days, including a 15-year-old-boy; more were wounded. Livni came out during the crisis and said that Netanyahu was wrong to criticize and blame Abbas at the beginning of this situation; in fact, Abbas had constructively aided the investigation after Israel had demanded his aid, even though just by doing so he was criticized at an “unprecedented”level for aiding the “enemy,” painted as a “traitor,” and sent death threats by more than a few Palestinians. Hamas, for its part, stupidly and unproductively praised the kidnappings as an act of resistance, but at the same time (first implicitly, then explicitly) denied it was the culprit; other claims of credit from other groups were questionable. It is doubtful as to whether Netanyahu would have taken a different course of action if Hamas had offered cooperation and a sympathetic tone, given Netanyahu’s reaction to Abbas even after the PA was aiding in the search for the boys, but it is still a possibility that Hamas could have avoided more confrontation by taking different public stances; it certainly did not do everything it could to avoid confrontation in its selection of words that it used publicly.

The massive operation to find the three boys—which by the end of June would leave five Palestinians dead and more wounded in confrontations with Israeli security forces, would lead to unrest and protests, would lead to thousands of homes being searched, would lead to suspects’ homes being demolished, would lead to the arrests of over 400 Palestinians who were mostly Hamas-affiliated and included much of Hamas’ top leadership, and would bring Israeli-Palestinian relations to their worst level since the Second Intifada—finally turned up their dead bodies on June 30th. Netanyahu, who kept up his accusations against Hamas throughout the operation even though he provided absolutely no evidence of its involvement in the crime, was unequivocal: “They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts…Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” Regular TV programming—including World Cup broadcasts—were interrupted to share the fate of the boys with the Israeli public, who were grief-stricken and outraged.

Before continuing with this narrative, it is important to make several points about Israel’s operation: the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli youths was awful and tragic, but is more of a crime than a massive military act or escalation. At this point, Israel’s response to deal with the lives of three of its own had ended up killing more Palestinians than the number of lives it was trying to save; it had collectively punished the West Bank’s largest city and its hundreds of thousands of Palestinians for a week; it had arrested over 400 Palestinians using the military without due process (Palestinians do no really have much of a due process when it comes to being arrested by Israeli authorities); it had aggressively targeted the Hamas movement, and not just its terrorist/militant wing, even though no evidence was provided to implicate Hamas as an organization or its leadership; it had severely undermined Mahmoud Abbas and derailed his unity deal with Hamas; and it had inflamed tensions to level not seen in almost a decade.

I would not be the first to question the massive, aggressive, ongoing collective punishment of a large amount of Palestinians (now well over a million, if you count the current fighting) as a response to the kidnapping/murder of three Israeli teenagers; and I would also not be the first to suggest that Netanyahu cynically and obscenely used the tragic events surrounding these three innocent Israeli teenagers to pursue a wider agenda against Hamas, Abbas, and the PA in response to their unity deal. As head researcher at a the Interdisciplinary Center based in Israel noted, “Netanyahu wants to use this kidnapping as a way to accomplish something which he wanted to accomplish anyway, which is the serious degradation of Hamas activity in the West Bank.” Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed similar thoughts even more explicitly, noting that “Instead [of working with the new unity government pledged to non-violence] Netanyahu launched a campaign of defamation against Hamas, seized on the killing of three innocent Israeli kids to immediately charge Hamas with having done it without any evidence, and has used that to stir up public opinion in Israel in order to justify this attack on Gaza, which is so lethal.”

Netanyahu’s actions after the disappearance of the three boys seem to truly be a master class and clinic on Churchill’s famous maxim “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

It is no secret that Netanyahu was incensed at Abbas’ unity deal and international (and especially American) support of it. Netanyahu’s cynicism is hardly disputed, and his willingness to be both extremely shrewd and harsh in his actions is not in dispute either. I have been following politics closely for almost a decade-and-a-half, and I have to say Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the shrewdest, most gifted, and most effective politicians I have ever seen. As one political academic in Israel notes, “Bibi [Netanyahu’s nickname] continues to be the consummate politician in the short term, but things could come back to spite him in the long term.” His ability to rally public opinion—both Israeli and American—is remarkable; he knows just what to say, just how to pull on a heart’s strings; he also knows how to play almost any situation to his advantage politically in the short-term (and to be fair to him, Israeli politics are notoriously volatile and unstable, which can often make-longer term political considerations a secondary concern). This is not to say that I agree with what he does, just that he is very good at getting what he wants done, done. Netanyahu’s actions after the disappearance of the three boys seem to truly be a master class and clinic on Churchill’s famous maxim “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

I am here going to ask the reader to keep this next point in mind throughout the remainder of this article: even at the time, Israeli authorities involved in the investigation into the disappearance, then murder of the boys acknowledged that whoever was behind it might have been acting as a lone cell, without any direction, authorization, or support from Hamas as an organization or its leadership, and no evidence has yet been provided demonstrating anything to the contrary. Those suspected of the act are from a clan—the large Qawasmeh clan—that, while affiliating with Hamas, at times acts independently and even against Hamas’ aims and directives, trying repeatedly to derail cease-fires Hamas has agreed to in the past. In fact, we now know from the Israeli police that it actually was a lone cell, apparently Hamas-affiliated (of which there must be at least a little doubt, given the clan’s history of acting both against Hamas and for it) but acting independently and not acting on Hamas orders. All this means that what we have so far is an extremely aggressive operation in the West Bank that targeted Hamas for something for which it was not directly responsible and in which it was not involved as an organization; at this point, Israel would clearly have to be said to be the aggressor and instigator, especially after so long a period of quiet from Hamas and its support for a unity government that did not include its members in the Cabinet but instead renounced violence and recognized Israel as a state, even if Hamas itself did not explicitly endorse those principles.

We now know from the Israeli police that it actuallywas a lone cell, apparently Hamas-affiliated but acting independently and not acting on Hamas orders. So, what we have so far is an extremely aggressive operation in the West Bank that targeted Hamas for something for which it was not directly responsible and in which it was not involved as an organization; at this point, Israel would clearly have to be said to be the aggressor and instigator.

According to unnamed Israeli officials, even while this was going on, Hamas was—as it had all throughout 2013—working to reign in the smaller militant groups that were trying to engage (and sometimes succeeding) in firing rockets, and refrained from firing rockets itself. Under severe pressure from Israel despite its extended period of generally non-violent behavior, Hamas continued to deny responsibility after the teens were found dead and threatened to retaliate if Israel continued to attack Gaza. The same day the boys were found, and in response an Israeli strike, Hamas itself launched rockets at Israel for the first time since November 2012 that Monday, and Israel responded on Tuesday by escalating its air attacks, carrying out 34 strikes in Gaza. Israel made it clear that it was going after Hamas once the boys were found dead, and that is what it did. And things were only about to get worse, with more heartbreak on both sides.

If this series of events brought out some of the worst in Palestinian society—praising the kidnapping of three innocent teenagers and vilifying Mahmoud Abbas for trying to help Israel save their lives—the second phase of all this ugliness would certainly bring out some of the worst in Israeli society. Even as the funerals for the three boys were underway, right-wing mobs numbering in the hundreds hit the streets of Jerusalem, demanding revenge and chanting “Death to Arabs!” as they tried to attack people. A Facebook campaign called “The People of Israel Demand Revenge” emerged, garnering 35,000 supporters before it was taken down; it highlighted people calling for violence against Arabs, including active-duty IDF soldiers holding their weapons. This incitement was condemned by Justice Minister Livni. And even worse, a Palestinian teen named Muhammad Abu Khdeir was abducted close to his home and killed in Jerusalem the day after the funerals for the unfortunate Israel boys. In contrast to the rush to judgment of the Israeli government after the three Israeli teens’ abduction, Israeli authorities called for calm and patience and for people to await the results of an investigation. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, in a rare outbreak of violence for that area, rioted and confronted Israeli authorities in response to the killing. The suspects for the kidnapping and murdering of the three Israeli Jewish teens were called “terrorists,” their houses demolished; but the Jews suspected of killing the Palestinian Arab teen were “Jewish extremists,” and hypocritically being treated by a different set of procedures. (Just a quick aside: Hamas should be held just about as responsible for the acts of a lone cell acting without authorization as the Israeli government should be held responsible for the killing of Khdeir by lone Jewish “extremists.” And both societies and governments are quite clearly guilty of ongoing incitement and extremism, even if not to totally equal degrees). William Saletan wisely called for the house demolition to apply equally to these Jewish suspects, or to have the policy of house demolitions be terminated. Violent riots, incitement, protests and clashes between Jews and Arabs in Israel only worsened and spread when it was revealed that Khdeir was likely burned alive; furthermore, Khdeir’s Palestinian-American cousin, visiting on vacation, took part in a protest and video footage of him being savagely beaten by Israel police, even when he was not resisting, surfaced on YouTube. Tensions continued to rise, including rocket-and-airstrike exchanges between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, as Khdeir was given a martyr’s funeral that became a public rally against Israel. Violence continued, and Israeli troops began to mass around Gaza as the Israeli government approved a call-up of 40,000 reservists on July 8th.

If this series of events brought out some of the worst in Palestinian society—praising the kidnapping of three innocent teenagers and vilifying Mahmoud Abbas for trying to help Israel save their lives—the second phase of all this ugliness would certainly bring out some of the worst in Israeli society.

And, that, weary and exhausted readers, is how we got to this latest round of death and destruction.

Who Really Controls Gaza? (or, Does Israel Still “Occupy” Gaza?)

(This section later became the basis for a future article)

The final thing we must reckon with before we delve into our final assessment of blame and responsibility is to look at who controls Gaza, because the degree of control matches the degree of responsibility for the welfare of the people of Gaza and for what happens in Gaza.

Israel and its supporters are fond of claiming that it totally withdrew in from Gaza 2005, that there is no more occupation, that Israel has no obligations to Gaza as an occupier under international law, and that Hamas is fully responsible for Gaza. Some go as far as to claim Israel’s control never even amounted to legal occupation, even from 1967. However, Israel’s position is incredibly misleading. While people may debate the reasons for, and the justification of, and the exact degree of Israel’s control over Gaza, there can be no debate that Israel still exercises a significant amount of control, and that with that significant control comes significant responsibility.

Israel’s position is incredibly misleading. While people may debate the reasons for, and the justification of, and the exact degree of Israel’s control over Gaza, there can be no debate that Israel still exercises a significant amount of control, and that with that significant control comes significant responsibility.

Let us break down the specifics of that control:

Israel has complete control over Gaza’s airspace. Gaza’s airport was only built in 1998, but Israel closed it in 2000 with the outbreak of the Second Intifada and later bombed it in 2001. The only aircraft going into Gazan airspace are Israeli military aircraft.

Israel also has total control over Gaza’s coastal waters. It does not allow goods to move by sea into or out of Gaza (with only very rare exceptions), and imposes severe restrictions on Gaza’s fishing industry. And Israel also maintains a naval blockade. It destroyed Gaza’s nascent port facilities in 2001, and has prevented new facilities from being established ever since.

Israel also maintains full control over all land crossing between Israel and Gaza. It often keeps most, and sometimes all, of the crossings closed. Sometimes, some of the few crossings that are open are open only for humanitarian situations or urgent medical situations. Only a few thousand of Gaza’s 1.8 million people are allowed to cross, on average, each month. Israel has total control over which good are allowed in and out and when, exercising an enormous influence over the economy, zoning, and urban planning of Gaza. Israel also has some control over the one crossing between Egypt and Gaza, as anyone who travels through it must be pre-approved by Israel via the population registry. Egypt’s crossing saw a lot more movement of goods and people under Morsi, but this movement shrank dramatically after his ouster, and after clashes with militants in the area in August 2013, it was closed by Egypt’s military government, but has just been reopened “sporadically” during the past few weeks of conflict to allow a trickle of Gazans injured in the fighting (140 as of August 1st) to seek medical treatment in Egypt.

Israel also still has complete control over the Palestinian population registry. Any changes to birth, marriage, divorce, or death records, in addition to official address changes, must be approved by Israel. The issuing of official ID, including passports, must also be approved by Israel. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israel has not allowed Gazans who have been living for years in the West Bank to change their official addresses to reflect this.

Israel also controls most of Gaza’s taxation. It sets the international customs rates and Value Added Tax (VAT)—which is included in the price of any goods—for all goods sold in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel collects the VAT or customs fees from the merchants, and then it has the power to transfer these taxes to the Palestinian Authority. When Israel chooses, it can (and often has) withheld these taxes when it has disputes with the Palestinians. Hamas has gotten around some of this by levying its own taxes on goods smuggled into Gaza from Egypt through tunnels (not to be confused with the tunnels Hamas built for military reasons). Most of these tunnels were destroyed recently by Egypt, crushing Gaza’s economy, and in the past, Israel has also taken action against these smuggling tunnels.

On the ground inside Gaza, do not let anyone tell that Israel completelywithdrew; Israel actually controls several buffer zones inside of the Gaza Strip, totaling 17 percent of all Gaza’s territory and one-third of all of its farmland. These zones include an officially off-limits zone, and a further zone which is a “grey-area.” Any Palestinians in either zone risk being shot, and shootings are not uncommon. Furthermore, Israel destroys crops and structures within this zone multiple times a week, on average. Israel also says it maintains the right to militarily enter all of Gaza at will, which is clear from its repeated invasions and military operations conducted after the 2005 disengagement.

Israel actually controls several buffer zones inside of the Gaza Strip, totaling 17 percent of all Gaza’s territory and one-third of all of its farmland.

Israel controls most of Gaza’s civilian and utility infrastructure. Israel supplies most of Gaza’s power through eleven power lines running into Gaza from Israel. Though Gaza has a power station that was built in 1998, it was severely damaged in 2006 and has not been fully repaired since, and was just hit multiple times by Israeli forces in this last round of hostilities, completely shutting the plant down. Israel had also previously restricted the importation of resources needed to run the power station. Gaza’s dependence on Israeli-supplied electricity also means that most water and sewage utilities are also dependent on Israel, since they need electricity for their pumping actions. Internet, wireless and wired communications services are also all run through Israeli networks, and Israel obviously controls the importation of materials necessary to repair, maintain, and expand them.

Israel also controls all travel of Palestinians between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to anywhere else. This is not just because Israel separates the two territories; Israel also controls all entrances into and exits from the West Bank, including its border with Jordan, and does not allow those with Gaza residencies to travel into the West Bank, even for academic reasons.

Given that all this amounts to “effective control,” when it comes to international law and treaties which Israeli is a signatory to, Israel still has legal responsibilities under international law, including under Article 42 of the Hague Regulations, as it is still an occupying power governed by the Law of Occupation, even if its ground forces have generally withdrawn from 83 percent of Gaza. Despite the partial withdrawal of ground forces, then, the Gaza Strip must still be considered for all practical and legal purposes an occupied territory and under Israeli military occupation from 1967 through today for all of the reasons mentioned above. Gaza has not had one day of full sovereignty, or anything even close to it, since the 2005 Israeli “disengagement.”

Gaza has not had one day of full sovereignty, or anything even close to it, since the 2005 Israeli “disengagement.”

All this means that yes, while Hamas exercises a major degree of control, so does Israel, and under international law, both have responsibilities for the Gazan people and for what happens in Gaza. It could even be argued that Israel bears most of the responsibility, but even if it does not, it still bears a major portion of it, and Hamas itself can only held responsible for the people of Gaza and what happens inside Gaza to the degree that it can exercise full control over Gaza. The sad reality for Gazans, then, is that they are the joint legal responsibility of two entities—Hamas and Israel—that do not directly communicate with each other, that hate each other, that want to destroy each other, and that rarely put the interests of the Gazan people over their own.

The sad reality for Gazans, then, is that they are the joint legal responsibility of two entities—Hamas and Israel—that do not directly communicate with each other, that hate each other, that want to destroy each other, and that rarely put the interests of the Gazan people over their own.

****************************************************

V.) Assessing Responsibility

How Should We Assess Blame?

Here we finally are, looking into how to divide responsibility in this miserable mess of a fight in Gaza, part of the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It must be stated that we cannot judge the actions of the current Gaza fighting in isolation from the other events and long-term context of this conflict, and not just in relation to the physical violence. That is not to say the events of the past necessarily do or do not excuse actions in the present, but they certainly can make them more understandable. If two peoples live side-by-side in peace, harmony, and equality, and one of the peoples attacks another with rockets without provocation, that situation is easy to judge. And that situation would not be the one we are discussing in this article.

We have seen the history of Gaza going back to 1967. We could have discussed the previous period, but the more recent past has far more bearing on the present than that which is more distant, just as the more distant past has more bearing than the even more distant past, and 1967, as such a watershed year in the history of this conflict and the region, seemed the best place to start for this discussion. I have provided links to many quality sources should the reader wish to explore further, and I encourage the reader to do so; and if the reader does do so and sticks to quality sources that make an attempt at objectivity and are not cheerleading, then I am confident that the reader will not dispute my overall characterization of the events up to this point.

Having seen the history of Israel’s relationship with Gaza going back to 1967, then, I feel confident that you will be on the same page when I quote John Judis to sum up a bit of the long-term reasons for why this fighting is happening now:

What matters to me, and what is often ignored, is the overall moral and political context in which this and past conflicts have occurred.
Israel is one of the world’s last colonial powers, and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are its unruly subjects. Like many past anti-colonial movements, Hamas and Fatah are deeply flawed and have sometimes poorly represented their peoples, and sometimes unnecessarily provoked the Israelis and used tactics that violate the rules of war. But the Israeli government has continued to expand settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to rule harshly over its subjects, while maintaining a ruinous blockade on Gaza. That’s the historical backdrop to the events now taking place.
… ultimately the colonial power bears a great deal of responsibility for the continuing conflict.

So it is clear that to argue that Hamas’s rocket attacks were unprovoked or an act of aggression, full stop, period, is not accurate. And here, we must begin a discussion of violence, behavior, and structures.

What Israel, amazingly, does not seem to understand is that such extreme collective punishment is likely to generate more hostility, not less, that could lead to more violence, not less, so that, in the process of going after and killing however many militants or terrorists, Israel ends up creating at least as many terrorists and militants as—and probably more than—it actually kills.

It seem to me that speaking of this Israeli operation as pure self-defense is a falsehood in and of itself. For one thing, Israel’s very effective Iron Dome missile defense system—partly developed and funded by the U.S. and having close to a 90% success rate against the missiles it is targeting in this current round of hostilities—makes it much harder to justify such a large-scale operation in Gaza in only defensive terms, and makes such a large-scale operation unnecessary from a defensive perspective (and even before the Iron Dome’s deployment, Palestinian rocket attacks killed very few Israelis). Israel was apparently safe enough for Birthright trips to Israel for young diaspora Jews to continue and for Netanyahu to urge the U.S. not to cancel flights to a Tel Aviv coming under rocket fire, but not safe enough to approach the military operations Gaza in such a way that would have inflicted far fewer civilian casualties. We have already seen that official Israel military doctrine allows for a very broad idea of self-defense that includes severe collective punishment as a force intended for deterrence, but war for punishment’s sake can be very problematic in terms of its justification. The word “punish” comes up a lot in Israeli discussions concerning Israel’s policies and actions regarding the Palestinians and their militant groups, and over the almost decade-and-a-half that I have been observing this conflict, it seems that often there is a significant punitive element in Israel’s military activities that goes beyond any purist’s definition of self-defense. What Israel, amazingly, does not seem to understand (but, as we saw, U.S. military doctrine now finally does) is that such extreme collective punishment is likely to generate more hostility, not less, that could lead to more violence, not less, so that, in the process of going after and killing however many militants or terrorists, Israel ends up creating at least as many terrorists and militants as—and probably more than—it actually kills.

When Kerry said to Netanyahu that “it is worthwhile to try to understand what life looks like from the Palestinian point of view,” Netanyahu’s response summed up what he thought of the relationship between Israeli policies and Palestinian violence: “This has nothing to do with the occupation and the settlements.”

Israel views the problem with the Palestinians as behavioral, one requiring a stern hand to punish bad behavior, but does not look at the problem as structural, or stemming from the systemic oppression, colonization, and dispossession that are hallmarks of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories; when Kerry said to Netanyahu that “it is worthwhile to try to understand what life looks like from the Palestinian point of view,” Netanyahu’s response summed up what he thought of the relationship between Israeli policies and Palestinian violence: “This has nothing to do with the occupation and the settlements.” In this analysis, Israel does not need to change its policies as the behavior and individual choices of Palestinians and their leadership are what leads to violence, not any unjust structures that Israel has created and forced upon the Palestinians. This myopic view strikes me a bit like looking at Spartacus’s revolt in the Third Servile War against the Roman Republic as if the fault of that war lies entirely with slaves who “initiated” violent “behavior” in “choosing” to attack their masters and not to submit to their masters or Roman armies and Roman authority. Clearly, the dehumanizing conditions of Roman slaveryand the cruelty inherent in much of its practices would be a fairer place to lay the blame instead of blaming the slaves suffering under that system for taking up arms to secure their basic human rights. So when we look at Palestinians using violence against Israelis, is there any doubt as to the dominant role of the occupation and the settlements? Whether Spartacus and his slaves or the Palestinians today (and that is not to equate the Palestinian condition with slavery), we can say they both were/are suffered/suffer from structural violence. And structural violence cannot be viewed as any less violent or any less awful than physical violence* [I have since evolved on this, see note on the bottom]. This truth was echoed by the Roman statesman Cicero, who was a contemporary of Spartacus’s revolt, when he himself wrote that “wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice” (On Obligations 1.35). In other words, you can fight when you are being either physically attacked or suffering from structural violence. This represents a conception of peace going back over 2,000 years that is not merely the absence of physical violence, but also of structural violence as well. Thus, peace and justice are inextricably linked, and structural violence is, if nothing, the perpetuation of the suffering of injustice through the imposition of unjust structures and systems.

Structural violence cannot be viewed as any less violent or any less awful than physical violence.* This truth was echoed by the Roman statesman Cicero when he himself wrote that “wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice” (On Obligations 1.35). In other words, you can fight when you are being either physically attacked or suffering from structural violence. This represents a conception of peace going back over 2,000 years that is not merely the absence of physical violence, but also of structural violence as well.

I hope that it is obvious to the reader at this point that the nearly half-century of Israeli occupation “was always a brutal and mortifying experience for the occupied” (Morris 568) and clearly a major form of structural violence. Does this mean that Hamas should be sending rockets to Israel in order to kill Israeli civilians? No. But it does mean that, in general, we cannot put the blame for the overall conflict squarely or even primarily on the shoulders of Hamas or the Palestinians. If American slavery or Jim Crow still existed in the U.S. today, would not those suffering under those institutions have the right to fight for their freedom if those imposing these institutions upon them did not cease and desist to do so after non-violent attempts to get them to stop had failed? The first American patriots who felt justified in taking up arms against the British Empire did so because of the structural violence of “taxation without representation” and of other particulars enumerated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. One can only imagine how the American Founding Fathers would react to the conditions imposed upon the Palestinians by the Israelis. But Hamas is no Continental Congress, Khaled Meshal no George Washington. And Hamas has certainly engaged in more than its fair share of unproductive behavior.

Hamas, in this case of renewed fighting in Gaza, undertook a course of action that makes sense only if you think that trading the lives and limbs and houses of thousands of Palestinians is an appropriate bargaining chip in a hardcore game of deadly poker in which it is not guaranteed that those “chips” will win you anything, but there is a guarantee of massive suffering, destruction, and death. As we already saw Abbas poignantly asking, “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?” Violence only makes Israel less likely (compared to its already low likelihood) to grant Hamas and Gaza (and the Palestinians in general) any concessions; even Livni, the Palestinians’ best friend within the current Israeli government, was just recently quoted as saying, in reference to Hamas and the fighting, “You want to talk about lifting the siege? Not with us, and not now.” Hamas had a choice as to how to respond, and it chose to fire its rockets, to the detriment of its people.

In the end, Hamas must be blamed for its indiscriminate tactics, its rejection of cease-fires, and its willingness to use Palestinian civilians as bargaining chips in its political duel with Israel. There seems to be something perversely obscene when your side is the one incurring almost all the casualties, and the vast majority of those casualties are civilians under your protection and care, and you reject a cease-fire proposal so that you can push for terms more to your liking as bombs and bullets and missiles and shells rain down on your people. A battle is not the time for negotiations when a cease-fire is already being offered, which is what an actual cease-fire is for. To re-quote Abbas again, “We are the losing side, and every minute there are more and more unnecessary deaths. … I don’t like trading in Palestinian blood.” Additionally, whatever Israel does, blindly and deliberately targeting civilians is not a justified response, and Hamas’ deliberate targeting of civilians gives Israel a moral edge over Hamas in its intentions, a moral edge Israel uses to justify to both the world and to its own people its own questionable choices in tactics; you constantly hear Israeli spokespeople claim “We Israelis value our lives and the lives of Palestinians; Hamas does not, it deliberately targets Israeli civilians and deliberately puts Palestinian civilians at risk.” In regards to the welfare of the people of Gaza, that means that much of the time spent on the public international debate is consumed by Hamas’s choice of tactics, and not spent highlighting the actions of Israel’s that are also worth condemnation. In addition, Hamas encouraging people to stay in the line of fire, and telling Gazans to ignore Israeli warnings, suggests a very diabolical plan indeed: it would not be crazy to suggest that Hamas’s main goal here was to goad Israeli into a massive assault which would kill many innocent Gazan civilians and spread images of dead children and women all over Twitter, Facebook, and the global news media, further isolating and generating outrage towards Israel, and allowing Hamas to be portrayed as the heroic defender of its people, which it clearly is not (one should note the eerie similarity to the playbook of Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda, whose explicitly stated goals were to use the 9/11 attacks to goad the U.S. into a disastrous war against a Muslim country and use that war to rally international support for al-Qaeda, tarnish public opinion of the U.S., and hurt the U.S. economically). Unlike Abbas, Hamas seems all too willing to trade in Palestinian blood to achieve its goals.

Very shrewd of Hamas, indeed, if the lives limbs and homes of thousands of your own people are to be viewed as acceptable bargaining chips for you to gain political points at the expense of your rivals and for you to posture yourself better in your prime-time showdown with the hated Zionist enemy. One truly wonders, beyond all the propaganda, how many of the dead, mangled, and displaced would have given their consent if asked beforehand to be used in such a way.

Rather than serve the interests of its people, Hamas is using the people to serve its interests. And, having just reached a deal with apparently-erstwhile rivals Abbas and Fatah on a unity government from a position where it had little or nothing to lose, Hamas may also be seeing a chance to gain at Fatah’s and Abbas’s expense, which has already started happening in West Bank. Very shrewd of Hamas, indeed, if the lives limbs and homes of thousands of your own people are to be viewed as acceptable bargaining chips for you to gain political points at the expense of your rivals and for you to posture yourself better in your prime-time showdown with the hated Zionist enemy. One truly wonders, beyond all the propaganda, how many of the dead, mangled, and displaced would have given their consent if asked beforehand to be used in such a way. After that fact, it is more likely to be given, if only for the very human reason to want to be able to say your loved one died, or you lost it all, for some meaningful reason. One poll taken in the middle of this latest fighting in Gaza showed that Gazans wanted both a cease-fire and Hamas to stop its violent actions. If the results of every single other round of violence between Israelis and Palestinians is to be even a remotely decent indicator, the actions of Hamas will all very likely very much be in vain.

Hamas must also be blamed for much of the general suffering of the people of Gaza; if Israel exhibits little willingness to alleviate Gazans’ suffering and to loosen the siege/blockade of Gaza, Hamas’s behavior makes it almost certain that Israel will have no willingness to do so now. And instead of putting more funds into alleviating the deep, pervasive poverty of most Gazans, Hamas’s leadership focused, relatively, on building a series of expensive tunnels from which it could attack Israel and on acquiring an arsenal of rockets. And Hamas is far from blameless for Gaza’s siege/blockade itself, which is justified by Israel primarily because Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and does not renounce violence and terrorism. Were it to do these things, especially to recognize Israel’s right to exist and remove the language in its charter calling for Israel’s destruction, it would be exponentially harder for Israel to justify its blockade/siege and the international pressure for Israel to end it would be overwhelming. Yes, Hamas does not want to “give” Israel something for nothing, and recognition is one of the things Israel most ostensibly wants from Hamas. Nevertheless, these position could have been changed at any time since Hamas was voted into power eight years ago; they were not, and maintaining these positions makes it much easier for Israel to justify its inexcusable collective punishment of all Gazans, and much harder for the rest of the world to get Israel to end it. Instead, the people of Gaza are stuck with the “double imprisonment” of “Hamas rule” and Israel’s siege. And Hamas’s constant and vile incitement, extreme rhetoric, and positions refusing to recognize Israel and calling for its destruction are the Israeli right-wing’s best justifications and excuses for its own extreme behavior and positions, and the best source of its empowerment. In short, the distasteful and provocative extremist Avigdor Lieberman would not be Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs without Hamas or its equivalent. Hamas’ words and actions also fill ordinary Israelis with fear that an entity sworn to destroy them controls Gaza and would be one of two major political parties in any future Palestinian state.

However, we must remember that in firing rockets Hamas was acting in response to what was politically motivated Israeli aggression in response to kidnapping/murder in which all current evidence shows Hamas as an organization was not involved. One of the standard Israeli narratives is that if Hamas would just stop firing rockets, Israel would stop its offensive. There is some truth to this, but such a statement implicitly supposes that Hamas initiated this, and that Israel was simply reacting in self-defense. While I am loth to call firing rockets at Israel indiscriminately as any sort of “self-defense,” this round of rocket-firing can only be properly viewed as an (improper) response to Israeli aggression against Hamas. Firing rockets was far from its best option, but Israel’s extremely aggressive actions towards Hamas in June led to the rockets of July after over nineteen months in which Hamas had shown exceptional restraint, nineteen months in which Israel did nothing to significantly reward such behavior, or even to bolster Hamas’ rival, the Fatah of Abbas and the PA, during nine months of farcical “peace” talks; instead, Netanyahu’s utter intransigence, greatly increased settlement building and aggression from settlers, and a continued blockade/siege were the only rewards for the Palestinians. That is not to excuse the rocket attacks, but we must also not excuse Israel’s relatively unprovoked action against Hamas, coming so soon after the collapse in the talks. Israel then proceeded with its extremely violent actions in Gaza, all based on more-or-less false pretenses, when calm had been the norm on the Gaza front since November 2012. Israel, then, is the party most (but hardly solely) responsible for escalation in the past few months.

Israel definitely gets a moral victory over Hamas’s tactical intent—it does not target civilians in order to kill them like Hamas does—but that is basically where its moral victories over Hamas in tactical choices end. Yes, Hamas operates among the population, which is certainly putting people at risk, but that is both a given in asymmetric warfare and how virtually all guerrilla armies for thousands of years have operated, and Israel’s planners clearly did not take that into account in its choices of its overall tactics. And Israel’s tactics—even if Israel calls ahead of time and warns civilians to evacuate (even if sometimes just minutes before), which is certainly more than Hamas does (but is still certainly not enough)—are still brutal and show deep negligence on Israel’s part regarding its obligations to protect innocent life, as has been demonstrated earlier. A nation that prides itself on Western, democratic values and that is the number-one recipient of U.S. aid must do better than to set the bar at Hamas’ level and say “See? We’re better than they are.” In addition, Israel is so much more powerful than Hamas that it also carries more responsibility with this power to exercise it more carefully. Again, asymmetric warfare is not pretty, and it is not fair, but I imagine that Israel would much rather be in its position that in the position of Hamas or the Palestinians, and being the more powerful party does carry certain additional responsibilities.

A nation that prides itself on Western, democratic values and that is the number-one recipient of U.S. aid must do better than to set the bar at Hamas’ level and say “See? We’re better than they are.”

Then, of course, there are the structural issues. Israel, as just mentioned, is far more powerful than Hamas, and also than the Palestinians. This power imbalance extends in the same way to all of Israel’s Arab neighbors. This has been the case for decades, if not since Israel’s founding. More so than any other party since 1967, then, Israel has had the power to shape Gaza, Hamas, the West Bank, and the Palestinians. And its policies in these areas and towards these people have been defined by three things: a military occupation that denies them even the most basic rights and freedoms, a settlement policy that is itself an aggressive, violent act of dispossession and theft that makes Palestinians distant second-class citizens in their own land, and a conscious attempt to derail Palestinian nationalism and break the will of Palestinians to resist. Some argue that Israel deliberately uses the so-called “peace process” to simply stall while it continues to further expand into and divide the West Bank, a process in part designed to divide the Palestinians not only physically but also politically. If Israel was serious about peace, the argument goes, it would reward the PA, Abbas, Fatah, and West Bank Palestinians for recognition, non-violence, and cooperation by making serious concessions to them and allowing major progress on the road to Palestinian statehood in the West Bank; this would show Hamas and Gazan Palestinians that it is non-violence that gets rewarded, while violence is only punished and achieves nothing. If anything, Israel’s own behavior has done the opposite: two decades of peaceful protests and attempts at politics were crushed and ignored by Israel from 1967 until 1987, when in December of that year the First Intifada erupted, which was also a rebellion against Arafat’s Fatah for its inability to improve the lives and conditions of Palestinians. Hamas played a key role and gained a lot of power in the Intifada, at Arafat’s and Fatah’s expense (does this seem familiar at all? It should, because you are watching a rerun today). By denying the Palestinians any progress through peaceful means, Israel was giving Palestinians a choice: submit, defeated and humiliated and on their knees, to Israeli domination, or, engage in violence. So the Palestinians chose the latter instead of submission, contrary to Israel’s hopes.

Israel even helped create and supported what would become Hamas as a way to weaken support of Fatah, even more evidence that Israel was not seeking a partner for peace so much as pursing a British-style “divide-and-conquer” strategy. In this case, the Islamists were seen as a way to undermine and counterbalance the main Palestinian faction of Fatah.

Israel even helped to create and supported what would become Hamas as a way to weaken support of Fatah, even more evidence that Israel was not seeking a partner for peace so much as pursing a British-style “divide-and-conquer” strategy. In this case, the Islamists were seen as a way to undermine and counterbalance the main Palestinian faction of Fatah. The Israelis succeeded in weakening Arafat and Fatah, but helped create a Frankenstein in Hamas. It was only after the First Intifada that Israel agreed to relinquish some control of Palestinian territory with the Oslo Accords of 1993, and this only after twenty years of ignoring Palestinian pleas for self-rule. Instead of self-rule, though, Palestinians got a rivalry between a Hamas trying to derail the Oslo peace process and corrupt Fatah on the one hand, and on the other hand, less than a year after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, it got Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, who gave his own best effort to derail the Oslo peace process, cater to right-wing Israelis, and continue to colonize, settle, and expand Israeli control in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu, ever the obstructionist, was opposed to Oslo, like Hamas, albeit for different reasons, of course.

It was David Ben-Gurion himself, the founder of Israel and its longtime leader, who said that “the most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security;” and it was a Palestinian journalist who said that “the legal father of the suicide bomber is the Israeli checkpoint, whilst his mother is the house demolition.”

As one paper states, “Israel’s general strategic goal has always been that of maintaining the status quo by deterring major attacks against it.” This in and of itself is essentially a strategy that lacks strategy, or a strategy that is a prescription for a merely tactical approach. A cynicism bound both by almost two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and the Holocaust mindset is hardly a way of thinking that is likely to lead to a brighter future. That Israel’s leaders may be resigned to an inevitability of the status quo is both a failure of imagination and a danger to the future of Israel. It was David Ben-Gurion himself, the founder of Israel and its longtime leader, who said that “the most dangerous enemy to Israel’s security is the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for security;” and it was a Palestinian journalist who said that “the legal father of the suicide bomber is the Israeli checkpoint, whilst his mother is the house demolition.” Thus, Israel can be said to have created violent mass resistance through twenty years of occupation that ignored Palestinians’ peacefully expressed aspirations for freedom and dignity; it helped to create the second round of mass resistance in 2000 when it failed to be a genuine and committed partner in the Oslo process; it empowered and paved the way for Hamas’s rise with its disengagement plan designed to undermine Abbas, Fatah, and the PA, along with America’s inane coup attempt and Fatah’s corruption; and has since undermined the moderate, non-violent Abbas, Fatah, and their PA by giving them nothing to show for their efforts in a near-pointless peace-process and thus, conversely, encouraged violence by showing the fruitlessness of non-violence and cooperation. By creating the conditions for the rise of a violent resistance movement and then giving that resistance movement no reason to not resist, Israel has done more to create the current crisis and overall state of affairs than any other single party in this conflict. Or, to relate all this to the quote about Hannibal in the beginning, Israelis have been able to “gain tactical success that they were unable to translate into strategic success.”

By creating the conditions for the rise of a violent resistance movement and then giving that resistance movement no reason to not resist, Israel has done more to create the current crisis and overall state of affairs than any other single party in this conflict.

Something must also be said about the U.S. here: in many ways, the U.S. has never been treated so poorly by an Israeli government or leader. Having engaged in a big push for diplomacy that has now failed, the U.S. is still aiding Israel’s military with roughly $3 billion in official aid per year in recent years (over 16 percent of Israel’s defense budget in 2013), among other types of aid and strong diplomatic support, especially in the UN Security Council, support that continues even now. It is far past high time that the U.S. use and the threat of the loss or reduction of that aid as leverage to encourage Israel to change its course, since asking nicely has so far gotten nowhere. Reaching a long-term settlement with the Palestinians should not be viewed by Israel as a “favor” to America or as a “concession” to Palestinians; it is vital to Israel’s national security and its preservation of its identity as both a Jewish and a democratic state. If the U.S. keeps enabling Israel to engage in policies that are both criminal towards Palestinians and self-destructive for Israel, it will be acting as if it is Israeli’s drug dealer and should be rightly blamed when its customer harms itself and its neighbors. If the U.S. does not apply substantive pressure to Israel to change its course, especially on settlements, the U.S. will be even more complicit in this disaster of a situation than it already is, and will deserve a decent chunk of the blame should a real “Third Intifada” erupt, if we are not seeing that happen already.

In a very sick way, Hamas and Israel’s current government need each other to justify their most questionable behavior; they each almost gleefully point their finger at the other whenever justifiable criticism is lobbed their way. Israel and Hamas thus are each other’s political Iron Dome, each empowering the other to feel confident in pursuing their most reckless and reprehensible policies and actions. Caught in the middle as casualties are the Gazans, the Palestinians in general, Abbas, Fatah, the PA, and, to a much lesser extent, the Israeli people. Oh, and, of course, the peace process and any chances of peace.

In a very sick way, Hamas and Israel’s current government need each other to justify their most questionable behavior; they each almost gleefully point their finger at the other whenever justifiable criticism is lobbed their way. Israel and Hamas thus are each other’s political Iron Dome, each empowering the other to feel confident in pursuing their most reckless and reprehensible policies and actions.

Hamas and Israel are agents; Israel does not “force” Hamas to fire rockets, and Hamas does not “force” Israel to invade Gaza. The actions of each are decisions made by the individual parties, and as independent agents, they both bear a lot of responsibility for these decisions. But people also make decisions because of the circumstances they are in and because of the long and short-term behavior of other parties influencing them. These forces are not ones that simply begin or end with any specific round of fighting, but are generally present long before and long after any particular set of hostilities. In this sense, Israel and Hamas can also be said to be negatively influencing each other into committing even further acts of stupidity and violence; they truly bring out the worst in each other. Sometimes, one wonders if this is the goal; it would be so much better if, for once, they would try to bring out the best in each other, however drastically short that would be of anything even resembling an ideal.

Conclusion: Means vs. Ends

By now what I stated in my article’s title should be obvious: the people of Gaza (and to a far, far lesser degree, the people of Israel) are bargaining chips in a high-stakes poker game between Israel and Hamas, not at all ends in and of themselves, but means to Israel’s and Hamas’ own ends.

In the case of Hamas, these ends are staying in power and some vaguely defined freedom in some distant future, no matter the cost in human lives. This freedom will involve the destruction of Israel as a state and the liberation of all of historic Palestine, righting the wrongs of the British imperialists, undoing the Nabka, and redeeming the pride of Palestine. The Jews, perhaps, can stay and be well treated to a degree, but under Palestinian control and under a Palestinian state, absent the blight of the Zionist entity now called Israel.

To the Israeli leaders, the ends are the short-term politics of coalitions and elections and suppressing the Palestinians enough so that their national aspirations will never be a threat to Israel’s status quo of power and control over Gaza and the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria, as Israel officially calls the West Bank, almost as if it is just a normal part of Israel); in their cynical worldview, the oppression of Palestinians is necessary and only by teaching them that submission is their only choice in the long run can they diffuse the Palestinian threat to Israel’s existence. Palestinians must accept a large degree of Israeli control, leave, or die fighting it. Perhaps after realizing this, someday Israelis and Palestinians can live in a degree of peace and freedom, but under Israeli domination and with Jews clearly in charge, as Netanyahu has indicated he believes deep down.

This is not to sound entirely cynical; both Hamas’ and Israel’s leaders surely believe they are the best leaders for their people, that the alternative leaders are terrible, and that they are justified in sacrificing human lives in order to stay in power and do the most good in the long-run.

That there are large numbers of Israelis and Palestinians who want this should not make people forget that there are also large numbers who would settle for a lot less (and even within Hamas and the current Israeli government). If there is to be any hope in this miserably depressing, tragic conflict, it is with the idea that the people on both sides who are willing to settle for a lot less in the interests of peace can find common ground.

That common ground seems pretty obvious: Hamas must renounce violence and terrorism, and recognize Israel as a legitimate state, while Israel must lift the siege of Gaza and end its occupation in the West Bank. After this, Israeli and Palestinian leaders must each pledge to work out details of final borders and pledge to work closely together to protect the other side from their own extremists. This will require the current Israeli government and Hamas to each made drastic changes in their policies, approaches, and attitudes.

It was the great philosopher Immanuel Kant who wrote that you should “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

It was the great philosopher Immanuel Kant who wrote that you should “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” If there is ever to be true peace and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, between Arabs and Jews in this troubled region, Israeli and Palestinian leaders will need to treat their own people and each other’s not just as means for the leaders’ own ends, but as ends in and of themselves.

The alternative? Copy and paste this article, but add a different date when the next round of fighting starts, and repeat this action until they get it. Then, we may finally be able to write a different story, one that is long overdue.

Several weeks after this piece was published, hostilities in the Gaza area finally ceased on August 27th, leaving 2,104 Palestinians, 72 Israelis, and 1 Thai guest-worker working in Israel dead. Little if anything has changed for the better overall, and many would argue things are getting or are about to get worse in terms of chances for real peace.

*****

*December 5, 2018: I would, in hindsight, have said my views have evolved as regards this statement: “And structural violence cannot be viewed as any less violent or any less awful than physical violence.” I would now argue that you very much can grade non-physical structural violence as being of a degree of severity that is less than physical violence, but it is still a terrible thing.

See related May 14, 2021 article on the 2021 fighting: Death, Stupidity; Rinse, Repeat: What Is New, What Is Old in Latest Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy  

© 2014-2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome