By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) March 6, 2026; 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 as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. All other editions of the Real Context News AI Reading List can be found here.

Let’s get to it: here are some articles that I came across over the past few years and recently that you should take a look at to have a better understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) and its context in the war erupting in the Middle East, but starting with its recent antecedents in Palestine’s Gaza:

A groundbreaking, revelatory article on Israel’s Habsora (“the Gospel) AI targeting system and its highly inappropriate, irresponsible, immoral, and amoralapplication in Gaza.  ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza—Yuval Abraham; +972 Magazine with Local Call.

The Guardian’s follow up with additional material.  ‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza—Harry Davies, Bethan McKernan and Dan Sabbagh; The Guardian.

Unhuman Killings: AI and Civilian Harm in Gaza—Brianna Rosen; Just Security.

The second big article from +972 Magazine on Israel’s horrific use of AI systems in Gaza, this one concerning the Lavender targeting database. ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza—Yuval Abraham, +972 Magazine with Local Call.

Guardian follow-up: ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets—Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies; The Guardian.

Editorial in an academic journal:Who did that? AI assisted targeting and the lowering of thresholds in Gaza—Marion Birch; Medicine, Conflict, and Survival. PDF

After the Lavender piece, +972 discusses with experts how the Israeli leadership along with global tech companies are involved. Why human agency is still central to Israel’s AI-powered warfare—Sophia Goodfriend; +972 Magazine.

“The Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham on his investigations of the I.D.F.’s use of A.I.-backed targeting systems and the dire cost to Palestinian civilians.”  Q. & A.: Inside Israel’s Bombing Campaign in Gaza—Isaac Chotiner; The New Yorker.

Video interview with +972’s Abraham: Understanding how Israel uses ‘Gospel’ AI system in Gaza bombings; FRANCE 24 English.

Israel offers a glimpse into the terrifying world of military AI—Ihsan Tharoor, The Washington Post.

A major Dutch military journal takes a look: Israel’s use of Military AI-systems in the occupied territories of Palestine—A. El Johari; Militair Rechtelijk Tijdschrift/Netherlands Military Law Review. PDF

A leading tech-writer weighs in.  What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like—David Wallace-Wells; The New York Times.

Israel’s A.I. Experiments in Gaza War Raise Ethical Concerns—Sheera Frenkel and Natan Odenheimer; The New York Times.

Gaza: Israel’s AI Human Laboratory—Anwar Mhajne; The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.

Israel is using an AI system to find targets in Gaza. Experts say it’s just the start—Geoff Brumfiel; NPR.

Some say AI will make war more humane. Israel’s war in Gaza shows the opposite—Sigal Samuel; Vox.

Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – Algorithms of War: Military AI and the War in Gaza—Omar Yousef Shehabi, Asaf Lubin; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Israel-Hamas 2024 Symposium – AI-Based Targeting in Gaza: Surveying Expert Responses and Refining the Debate—Klaudia Klonowska; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Israel – Hamas 2024 Symposium – The Gospel, Lavender, and the Law of Armed Conflict—Michael N. Schmitt; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Military Use of Biometrics Series – Israel’s Use of AI-DSS and Facial Recognition Technology: The Erosion of Civilian Protection in Gaza—Emelie Andersin; Lieber Institute, West Point.

Lavender, Israel’s artificial intelligence system that decides who to bomb in Gaza—Manuel G. Pascual; El País.

When AI Decides Who Lives and Dies The Israeli military’s algorithmic targeting has created dangerous new precedents—Simon Frankel Pratt; Foreign Policy.

The Genocide Will Be Automated—Israel, AI and the Future of War—Leila Katibah; Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP).

RELATED BONUS:

Generative AI Is Playing a Surprising Role in Israel-Hamas Disinformation—Will Bedingfield; Wired.

I also came across some interesting stuff that was submitted for publication, but still under review.  I will await the final versions if I can remember any of this in a few days.

And if you want to spread the word?  It’s easy:  AI reading list dot com: AIreadinglist.com!

© 2026 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!

Twelfth episode on Palestine and Israel—history as well as the current violence—with Palestinian Journalist, Analyst, & Author Rula Jebreal (follow her on Twitter and Instagram and check out her Muck Rack profile here)

Even before October 7, Palestinians and Gazans in particular had been suffering from 3/4s of a century of displacement and oppression. 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. That history and the current assault are among the topics we discuss.

Rula is uniquely qualified to talk about this history: she has lived it. Born to an African Imam father who worked the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City and a Palestinian mother, Rula lost her mother at 5 and her father gave her to an orphanage in East Jerusalem, and the remarkable woman who founded and ran the orphanage became a mother to Rula, who raised her as a Palestinian. Rula’s novel Miral tells the story of several generations of these women living through the tumultuous history of Israel and Palestine and was turned into a movie starring Freida Pinto, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave, the screenplay of which Rula wrote. She holds Israeli citizenship as well as Italian citizenship, as Italy was where lived and worked as a journalist for many years. Her journalism and analysis has taken her around the world, into war zones and the studios of some of the major news networks around the world. On top of all these achievements, she is also a college professor in Miami. The following is my discussion with her.

Notes:

Rula’s novel Miral and the movie based on it

Since I mentioned her unique Vogue profile and photoshoot shot by the legendary Annie Leibovitz:

Some of Rula’s coverage of the current situation:

CNN interview

Washington Post interview also featuring major Israeli opposition politician and former Foreign Minister and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni

France24 interview

Rula on the issues prior to Oct 7:

The awesome video of Ben Shapiro being trounced by Rula

Her New York Times op-ed on being a minority in Israel

Yahoo News profile of Rula

New York Times profile of Rula

Rula on the rise of global fascism on MSNBC

and my take on the same

My article on Israeli vs. American COIN (counterinsurgency)

My take on Israel’s apartheid system in the West Bank

My deep-dive on the 2014 Gaza war and the history of the conflict

The HBO and Israeli Channel 12 miniseries Our Boys I mentioned that highlights the Jewish anti-Palestinian incitement in Israeli society and based on true events from 2014 is discussed here in Time and in The New York Times in the context of Netanyahu accusing it of being “anti-Semitic;” more coverage of the miniseries in The New Yorker and The New York Times; reviews from Variety and CNN

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.

© 2023-2024 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!

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 19, 2023 (*UPDATE October 31: I had some massive technical issues on my site, and an update to the Hospital explosion story mysteriously disappeared, so I have redone that update to include even more information that has been coming out since then about the responsibility for the explosion); excerpted and adapted from yesterday’s much longer 6 Steps for Israel to Take to Still Win, but with Far Better Outcomes for Itself and Gaza; all casualty figures are according to respective local officials unless otherwise noted.

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית coming soon) The article in one 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; 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.

Quite nobly and bravely, some Palestinian doctors, nurses, and medical staff are pledging to stay in northern Gaza—in the hospitals there—dozens even paying with their lives, so as not to abandon their patients, including newborn babies, who will die if they leave.

Especially in light of this, quite sadly and horrifically, the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City in northern Gaza was struck by an explosive projectile in northern Gaza just as I was writing this, with estimates in the dead ranging from roughly 300 to 500.  I’m not a weapons expert, but on the one hand, this confirmed video of the strike does not resemble other videos of misfired Palestinian rocket attacks, as the IDF claims caused the blast and deaths, and seems closer to resembling a video of an Israeli airstrike especially given the size of the explosion; but on the other hand, factors that can push the conclusion in the other direction are still being digested, such as a lack of a large impact crater, video footage of a Palestinian rocket exploding high above the hospital just before the explosion in question and showing the explosion from a distance immediately after, and that if it was a rocket that misfired, it would have had more fuel so early in its journey, resulting in a larger explosion than normal.  The fog of war is still enveloping this situation even if it has become a Rorschach test, with people expressing certainty before having the facts and the incident understandably inflaming the region, making Biden’s visit and diplomatic push far more challenging. 

At first, I believed with strong confidence it was an Israeli airstrike, but most of the evidence put forth of the publicly verifiable type favors Israel’s explanation.

But throughout the day more analysis has come through. Despite Israeli’s track record of being caught lying in prominent cases like this, as excellently discussed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour here, the forensic evidence, from subsequent video to crater/blast analysis, points very strongly, perhaps overwhelmingly, to the conclusion that this explosion resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket and was an accident. As for the audio presented by Israel purported to be Hamas, it may or may not be authentic; in our present age, this audio could very well be an edited or fabricated cherry that Israel is adorning to the top of its cake of evidence to help win the public relations war it is losing, and some experts have called the audio out as fake, so that and some other aspects of the Israeli narrative are far from perfect. The audio may possibly be a distortion or a lie, but the lack of a large crater and the confirmed video evidence is not. On the other side of things, there is no hard evidence that has been presented to be able to draw the conclusion that this was an Israeli airstrike. I have discussed Israel lying in the past myself, and indeed, a whole article could be written about that (Israel in the past lied about airstrikes, including an incident last year in which it claimed categorically as fact that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had killed 5 children, it being later reveled there were no rockets launched or falling near the children and they were actually killed by an Israeli airstrike; conversely, as documented by Amnesty International, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad lied and blamed Israel for two rocket misfires in a 2014 incident that killed 13 civilians—11 of them children—claiming they were killed by Israeli attacks; thus, it is wise to not take everything any of these parties to this conflict say at face value without scrutiny) but even if the audio is possibly not credible, the overall circumstantial evidence is credible and very strongly does not indicate an Israeli airstrike and does indicate a misfired Palestinian rocket, whether from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, was responsible, and without any substantive counterevidence, we must go in the direction of the existing evidence unless further substantive evidence changes the picture substantially.

*(UPDATE) Since this article was published, there have been multiple other independent investigations, most of which admit they can not make a definitive conclusion in the absence of an on-the-ground investigation.  Among the new investigations are ones from the AP and CNN, both of which concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the most likely explanation behind the tragic explosion at the hospital.  The CNN investigation also allowed for the possibility of an IDF artillery round, but found that possibility less likely based on the available evidence.  I personally messaged the serially reliable CNN military analyst, Col. Cedric Leighton USAF (Ret.), to weigh in, and he echoed the CNN investigation in also offering his view that the available evidence strongly favored a misfired Palestinian rocket based on available evidence versus other explanations but also could not rule out an Israeli artillery shell.  The Washington Post’s own investigation corroborated Israel’s and the U.S. assessment that a failed Palestinian rocket was the best explanation.  Following up on its earlier investigation that also found a misfired Palestinian rocket the most likely explanation but cast doubt on details of both the official Palestinian and official Israeli narrative, the UK Channel 4’s more recent investigation found further evidence to discredit what seems to be doctored or altered audio released by Israel that it claimed to be of Hamas operatives and that also cate doubt on Israel’s account of the trajectory of what caused the explosion (likely exposing Israeli hasbara, Israel’s unique brand of information warfare trying to make Israel’s narrative more convincing than the evidence alone would make it).  A New York Times investigation disputed that videos that have been widely cited by other investigations as showing strong evidence that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible actually showed what those other investigators concluded, including the aforementioned; rather, it corroborated some other interpretations that stated the videos do not show a misfired Palestinian rocket, casting the situation into further confusion and intensifying the fog of war.  The UK-based Forensic Architecture presented its analysis conducted with partner organizations that presented seemingly decent analysis discrediting parts of the official Israeli narrative and favoring the theory that an Israeli artillery round caused the blast, but the organization also seemingly presents the problem of anti-Israeli bias in its presentation: it refers to the IDF as “IOF,” which stands for “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Israel Offense Forces,” or “Israel Offensive Forces;” IOF is a pejorative term that some critical of the IDF and Israeli policy towards Palestinians have taken upon themselves to use to replace IDF; I will simply say that I do not find North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and often referred to by the ensuing acronym DPRK, to be either democratic of belonging to the people; to use another Asian example, China’s army is named the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but it is neither liberating anything, nor run by the people; in both cases, I do not invent cute if accurate pejorative terms based on my own views, I use the official terminology because that is how the world works in the realm of journalism and research organization, otherwise we could start renaming everything and retitling anyone based on how we personally feel about them; those that do rename based on personal views more than suggest the presence of bias.  Al Jazeera put forward its own investigation, but it comes off fairly propagandistic: it presents information it claims disproves that a Palestinian rocket was responsible, but it is not convincing or conclusive at all and does not actually provide any evidence it was an Israeli airstrike, not even addressing the issue of crater size.  For its part, Hamas has also not produced any evidence the blast was from an Israeli airstrike or Israeli artillery round.  Greatly adding to the confusion around this incident, there have also been glaring errors made by media outlets throughout this process, with few owning up to their errors and both governments and international organizations not adjusted their narratives to newly revealed facts.  And one independent analyst who has not received proper clarification after reaching out to multiple major outlets may have even exposed that the figure of 500 killed that supposedly came from the Hamas health ministry—a figure later seen as widely non-credible, though numbers coming out of Gaza from all the other violence are generally seen by aid organizations and the United Nations as largely credible—may have no specific confirmation or evidence supporting that such a claim was actually made. After reviewing all of these, my own view—given the preponderance of independent investigations’ conclusions and the indications of “high confidence” U.S. intelligence—is that a failed Palestinian rocket is still the most likely explanation, but I feel less confident in this conclusion given several other investigations that have different interpretations of video analysis and that it seems very likely both Hamas and the IDF are lying about certain aspects of this in addition to no definitive investigation having yet been conducted on the ground; thus, I went from being pretty convinced it was an Israeli airstrike, to being even more convinced it was a failed Palestinian rocket, to still favoring the Palestinian rocket theory with less confidence and more doubt/questions to be answered.

Your not-so-humble author here has little to add to this incredibly inspiring self-sacrifice of the medical staff or the horror of the still-staffed hospital being struck by some weapon to devastating effect.  With the staff, the concept of the Hippocratic Oath taken to such an extreme level will inspire long after this conflict.  The bottom line for the purposes of my article is that, hypothetically speaking, if it was an Israeli strike, such a situation is generally quite avoidable, especially given how large hospital complexes tend to be.  Yet it is far less avoidable with the current Israeli approach.

Their bravery and sacrifice of the medical staff and the helplessness of their patients mean that, despite the crimes of Hamas, these doctors and their patients deserve all the care Israel can take to save them.  Even if this situation was not the result of an Israeli strike—and I am not stating that is the case—the current approaches leave such a possibility wide open, even likely, to still happen.  To this end, I call on the IDF and other Israeli authorities to reach out directly to the administrators of the hospitals and to try to coordinate delivery of aid to the hospitals and to coordinate if possible the IDF securing the hospitals as safe zones for civilians and patients unable to be safely moved as well as for the medical staff tending to them.  To the degree that Hamas avoids using these hospital as defensive positions or staging areas, there is great opportunity for clear, careful, open coordination avoiding needless loss of life or IDF attacks at these hospitals.

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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) October 18, 2023 (*UPDATE late evening October 18/early AM October 19: further analysis on hospital explosion); *UPDATE October 31: I had some massive technical issues on my site, and an update to the Hospital explosion story mysteriously disappeared, so I have redone that update to include even more information that has been coming out since then about the responsibility for the explosion); all casualty figures are according to respective local officials unless otherwise noted.

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) The second 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; 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.

“How we choose to fight is just as important as what we fight for.”

—Ezra Bridger, Star Wars: Rebels

SILVER SPRING—As I wrote in my last piece, a level of violence has been perpetrated against the Jewish people not seen since the Holocaust and against Israelis like never before, a vile terrorist act by war criminals and legally constituting genocidal ethnic cleansing of an up-close-and-personal nature, in which an increasing toll of over 1,400 Israelis are now known to have been killed since October 7, the vast majority on that single day and defenseless civilians butchered in their homes or a at a peace-themed music and dance festival, in addition to over 4,200 wounded and some 200 hostages abducted into Gaza.

An Ugly Atmosphere but with Rays of Hope Thanks for Biden and Blinken

Obviously, emotions are running high and there are understandable calls for vengeance in the air in Israel.  But emotions and vengeance—and dehumanization—cannot be allowed to eclipse sensible policy that can bring about some of the best possible outcomes.  As America knows from its own “War on Terror,” in Israel’s current situation, counterproductive actions and mentalities will help no one, not Israelis, not Palestinians, not anyone else in the region except extremists who would bring about more death and destruction.  And keep in mind Gaza is one of the worst places anywhere to be conducting a military campaign as far as the 2.3 million local civilians are concerned: they cannot leave what has been called an “open-air prison” because of restrictions imposed by Israel—which, as I have noted in detail before, exercises much of the meaningful de facto sovereignty over the Gaza Strip—and Egypt, it is one of the most densely populated territories on earth, about half of the population is children, and the Palestinians in Gaza have been suffering from a humanitarian crisis for many years already.

Even considering, all this, Israel cannot tolerate a Hamas governing Gaza that is now trying to imitate ISIS, not after what Hamas did.

And so Israel must invade.

Unfortunately, already some 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed (before yesterday’s hospital bombing, discussed in measure 4), some 12,500 wounded, including whole families wiped out.  Those numbers are significantly increasing daily, with Israeli strikes still happening in the south of Gaza, right where Israel has told civilians to evacuate.  And while nobody knows how many Hamas members are included in those numbers, footage coming out of Gaza indicates most of the dead are civilians, especially as Hamas has access to its underground tunnel system that civilians do not and that many, perhaps most, Hamas dead would be buried underground in most strikes successfully targeting Hamas terrorists and fighters, therefore, many of them are likely not included in health officials’ body counts easily or quickly, if they even know there are tunnels underground in any given location, which they may not.

Yet even in this bleak atmosphere, I am heartened by U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, President Joe Biden’s skilled behind-the-scenes engagement (as was the case with another Gaza flareup 2021), and other top Biden Administration officials’ diplomatic efforts.  In just days, they have already mitigated some of the worst: an initial, insane demand by Israel for all residents of the northern Gaza Strip—some 1.1 million people—to evacuate within twenty-four hours has seen that timeframe substantially extended (though it may still be a breach of international law, according to the United Nations), water service to Gaza has been partly restored by Israel (though from live interviews I saw on CNN two days ago, including with a senior United Nations humanitarian official, damage to the water infrastructure is so severe that only one of the main water pipes was functional, severely limiting the effect of the partial turning back on of the water supplied by Israel), and there is confused but progressing talks about opening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt to get foreign nationals out, humanitarian supplies in (five United Nations fuel trucks two days ago were allowed through but that is it so far), and perhaps letting some other civilians out (in fact, just as I was wrapping parts of this article up Monday night in what may be a major diplomatic achievement, Blinken announced—after a marathon negotiation session with Netanyahu under Hamas rocket fire (such attacks being war crimes)—that Israel had agreed to the delivery of humanitarian aid, that safe zones for civilians were a major topic of discussion, and that Biden would be coming to Israel and Jordan today (the Jordan leg was canceled shortly after the hospital disaster, discussed in measure 4).  Biden’s trip may very well delay Israel’s near-inevitable assault on Gaza, giving more time for civilians to evacuate and supplies to be delivered to Gazans, saving many lives.

If you track the public statements of both Biden and Blinken, it is clear they have been and are emphasizing—will continue to emphasize—these concerns about protecting Palestinians in their discussions with Israeli leaders; clearly, Israel began on a harder line and clearly the U.S. has been pushing back behind the scenes against some of Israel’s worst impulses as in convulses in grief.  Biden specifically has been emphatic in repeatedly standing up for the vast majority of Gazan Palestinian civilians who are innocent and have nothing to do with Hamas and has even made clear on one of the flagship U.S. news programs, CBS’s 60 Minutes, that it would be a “mistake” for Israel to reoccupy Gaza in the long-term and right after reiterated U.S. support for a two-state solution, which would much displease Netanyahu as he has been against this his entire career in action whatever deceitful verbiage he has uttered to the contrary and still is.  There remain serious obstacles—especially after that hospital tragedy—but knowing Biden and Blinken leading Israel’s closest ally in America are clearly, forcefully, and consistently prioritizing saving Palestinian civilian lives in their private interactions with Israeli officials and their public comments on the crisis are a serious source of hope for me.

Hamas Must Be Neutralized, But Civilians in Gaza Must Be a Priority (and that Would HELP Israel)

Before proceeding, let us condemn Hamas and make it clear that for all their flaws, Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu and his extremist government of right-wing religious zealots and bigots—and I have been extremely critical of them, even examining Israel’s moral flaws in its military targeting and tactics in great detail—are not the moral equivalent of Hamas, a terrorist group that had for quite some time also functioned as something of a government in Gaza but that now has veered in its brutality into ISIS territory and is resembling ISIS in this brutality more than it resembles its own version of itself from five years ago.  And in recent polling, it is also clear that Hamas is not very popular with Palestinians.  During this latest violence, Hamas is even telling Gaza’s civilians not to evacuate, framing leaving as allowing Israel to push Palestinians from their homes, take more Palestinian land, and enact ethnic cleansing; Israel, the U.S., the UK, the EU, NATO, and others have long claimed that Hamas is cynically using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields, purposefully putting them in harm’s way to get them killed to turn global opinion against Israel and/or lessen the intensity of Israel’s attacks (the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, claims Hamas is blocking civilians from evacuating, though despite this claim, at least some 600,000 Palestinians have evacuated from the north as of a few days ago).  While some prominent human rights organizations and other analysts argue the reality is complicated when it comes to whether or not Hamas uses civilians as human shields, what is fairly clear is Hamas cannot be trusted to look after the safety and welfare of the innocent civilians of Gaza, and it will certainly fail in its responsibilities to them.

But this does not mean that Israel can simply dump the entirety of the responsibility for the welfare of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on Hamas, shrug its shoulders, and do anything it feels like at this particularly emotional moment, with the consciousness of the global Jewish community, not just Israeli Jews, reeling in its worst collective moment in close to 80 years.

In short, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust cannot be answered by one of the worst mass displacements in a generation: currently some 1.1 million Gazans being told to evacuate northern Gaza by Israel, without anywhere really safe to go.  Israel’s tragedy cannot be followed by cutting off food, water, fuel, and power to 2.3 million Gazans, including thousands of wounded, 50,000 pregnant women with 5,000 due to give birth in the coming month, and babies in incubators in hospitals who will surely die without power, water, fuel, and food.  One war crime atrocity, no matter how vile, cannot be answered by another war crime.  And while there is certainly legitimate concern as to Hamas appropriating some of any aid that would go into Gaza, the solution cannot be for Israelis to simply throw up their hands and block all aid.  And especially as the U.S. is the main guarantor of international law globally along with the United Nations and that Israel tries to sell itself to the world as abiding by international law in comparison to Hamas, both risk looking like gross hypocrites if the U.S. stands by Israel as commits war crimes.

This would play into arguments and/or propaganda and gaslighting from Russia, China, and others (sometimes rooted in legitimate concerns, many that do not hold up to scrutiny) that international law is a joke and that the West only applies international law to its enemies, not itself.  It is in time like this, though, that international law matters most as ultimately, no matter how horrific a terrorist attack a country might suffer, the response when there are credible accusations of serious violations of international law and war crimes being committed by the responding party cannot be “But look at these pictures of our dead babies!  Let us violate the rules!”  Such an emotional response suggests that international law can simply be set aside when rage and grief arise in response to barbarity on the part of one party, but the point of international law is to ensure fewer dead babies and civilians of all types overall.  Pictures of one side’s dead babies cannot be used to justify illegal war crimes leading to more dead babies on the other side: there may an inevitability to some dead babies on that other side, but international law is there to minimize the amount.  The laws of war must be upheld by all parties that profess to adhere to them regardless of how low another warring party may sink.  Sadly, we cannot expect much from Hamas but it is to Israel’s credit that compliance and conduct of a far highest caliber than Hamas is expected of it, not an unfair double standard.  Hamas’s failure, then, to honor its moral and legal obligations is not an invitation or an excuse for Israel to abandon its own moral and legal obligations.  Because once we view international law protecting the most vulnerable of innocent civilians in war time as something to be tossed aside when one side engages in atrocities, international law truly is meaningless can protect no one consistently.  The only solution is to follow international law even if those we are fighting do not, to have it protect some people some of the time, rather than nobody any of the time.

Unlike Hamas, Israel is a legally legitimate nation recognized within its 1967 borders by over 160 nations (with 165 total offering some form of recognition: the U.S. under Trump extended recognition beyond the 1967 borders and recognized Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, something of  a pariah move).  I know some people don’t like the reality that Israel has long-been a recognized legitimate state under international law but tough, and while people are free to and can even reasonably disagree over the justice and morality of establishing Israel as a state and the manner in which that happened, that Israeli is a recognized international state is history: that ship has sailed and there is no time machine going back to before Israel became a state in 1948.  But the privilege of having statehood as a legitimate nation and a democracy (at least within its proper borders if obviously not in the West Bank) that is a signatory to the major human rights conventions, that comes with the responsibility that it is rightly expected to follow international law, that it can and should be expected to follow all international laws regarding civilians in wars zones and to be held to those standards.  Sadly, while the international community and especially Hamas’s backers can and should press Hamas to do the same, Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a modus operandi of defying international law.

While Israel itself has a questionable track record on international law, there is not an equivalent record between the Israeli government and Hamas: they are not moral equals, and after what Hamas pulled off in its insane attack on October 7, Hamas has signed its own death warrant: the status quo is over and Israel simply cannot tolerate Hamas’s existence right at its border and near its communities any longer.  Israeli must neutralize Hamas (and its mini-me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad), whether destroying it, taking prisoners, some sort of exile, or otherwise demilitarizing (and destroying seems to be the most likely option given Hamas’s posture).  As is the situation with Ukraine’s fight against Russian colonialist imperialism, the “give peace a chance/there need to be negotiations to stop the war” crowd does not understand the reality of how Hamas on October 7 moved itself beyond the pale of what Israel can tolerate, let alone make peace with, and the Israeli voting public would absolutely not accept leaving Hamas in power in Gaza even is in some fantasy world the current government did: the coalition would collapse and voters would put in a new one that would continue with the campaign to remove Hamas.

But that last point only refers to Hamas.  Conversely, Netanyahu’s lack of willingness to engage in real negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party running the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (PA): the de jure Palestinian government in the West Bank propped up by Israel’s much more sovereign de facto “governance” there through its military for well over half a century now.  Fatah has long renounced violence against Israel and cooperated with Israel to prevent terrorism against Israelis, making Netanyahu’s longtime willingness to boost Hamas as a way to undermine its rival Fatah even more shameful—Israel even helped to create Hamas decades ago to do just this—and, as I have noted before, Israel should be engaging with Fatah even now, should have been for years, and advancing Palestinian statehood.  By not doing this at all, Netanyahu has literally incentivized violence by punishing cooperation and nonviolence over many years, sending the message that occupation, dispossession, and privation are the makeup of Israel’s long-term plan “for” Palestinians, and making Abbas and the PA look like mere collaborators in the eyes of Palestinians.

While Israel has to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and that means there will be many innocent Palestinians killed in the crossfire, that does not mean “anything” goes as far as Israel’s conduct, that all safety for civilians is Hamas’s responsibility, or that there cannot be some sensible measures not currently being undertaken by Israel that will make the situation far better, save many Palestinian and some Israeli lives, and lead to a better outcome for Israel and Gaza.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts on some sensible, very possible, very practical steps that if adopted can minimize the worst of what is to come, keep international public opinion from turning even more against Israel than it would otherwise, and minimize the risk of protests in perhaps the West Bank other nearby countries like Jordan and Egypt from boiling over while also reducing the chance that actors like Hezbollah and Iran will enter the conflict in a major way.

My Six-Point-Plan for Mitigating the Horror that Is to Come

So my very first two recommendations are as follows: especially as Gaza is surrounded on three of four sides by Israel and is mostly dependent on Israel for water, electricity, fuel, and food by Israeli design, receiving those supplies at deeply insufficient levels for Gazans even before October 7 (since 2007, day-in, day-out, most Palestinians are malnourished and much of the day there is no power), 1.) the collective punishment of cutting off of water, power, fuel, and food to 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians must end.

Secondly, 2.) Israel must say loudly and unambiguously that the vast majority of noncombatant civilians who end up leaving northern Gaza or Gaza altogether will be allowed back into their homes in northern Gaza or Gaza overall (or what’s left what they left behind) shortly after the fighting stops, that there will be no mass expulsion of peaceful civilians, no ethnic cleansing, no mad pipe dreams that existed throughout Israeli history and in the mind of prominent rightist Israelis like former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among other prominent Israelis even still today, to expel Palestinians into the barren Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and create a “Palestine” there.  This is actually one major reason why Egypt is so reluctant to open the Rafah border crossing to outgoing civilians in Gaza: they fear new refugee camps that will become long-term fixtures, that, left unaddressed, festered instability, insurgencies, civil war, and even terrorism like so many camps set up for Palestinians after 1948 and 1967).

Frankly, given Israel’s track record, that this or subsequent Israeli governments can change their mind or break their word, and the composition of much of the current extremist Israeli government (especially before this unity government), Egypt and others would be justified in doubting whatever assurances Israel would give regarding allowing fleeing Gazans to return:  in what is still regarded as a deeply controversial and illegal move (though quite understandable from Israel’s perspective), Israel has allowed very, very few Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled in 1947-1949 and in 1967 to return, either to Israel or to the Palestinian territory Israel occupied in 1967.

That cannot be the situation with the current possible waves of flight within or out of Gaza.  I personally would not bet on most Gazans that might move into Sinai ever returning unless the U.S. can pressure Israel into agreeing beforehand that they would be allowed to return soon after the fighting stops (in a live CNN interview with the always-stellar Christiane Amanpour I saw two days ago while writing this, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declined to say whether Israel’s leadership would provide a guarantee that displaced Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homes of if he would support such a move).  And it may be temping for Israel to turn all of northern Gaza into a bulldozed buffer zone, but this, too, would be a war crime and illegal under international law, and would be cramming all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people—already in a Gaza that is one of the most densely populated places on earth—into roughly half the territory they were living in before.  This would turn an already intolerable living situation into one that would be catastrophic.

Related to the last measure, this is a conflict mainly between Israel and Hamas; Israeli is in no position, morally or legally, to impose the problem of Palestinian refugees on Egypt and dump the responsibility for accounting and planning for their welfare onto Egypt is a not a party directly involved in the conflict as a primary party but is one that has every right to suspect Israel will be wanting to permanently dump Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai.  Israel is deciding to clear out half of the Gaza Strip and to invade a Gaza from which they are not currently allowing anyone to exit from the three sides of Gaza it controls.  As a major party to the conflict and as the party forcing civilians out of their homes, Israel is just as responsible as Hamas for their welfare as one of the two major belligerent parties, and Hamas’s moral and legal failures do not absolve Israeli form its moral and legal responsibilities, nor are those responsibilities Egypt’s.

Yet I am only hearing that “Egypt should open the Rafah crossing” without any mention that Israel could open one or both of its crossings and set up temporary shelter in its territory.  The simple fact of the matter is the land and infrastructure in Israel surrounding Gaza is far more hospitable, connected, and resourced than the desolate Sinai peninsula near Rafah, that Israel is far more capable of hosting humanitarian operations and a series of temporary refugee camps, and—especially now that Hamas is boxed into Gaza—southern Israel near Gaza is far more secure that the anarchic Sinai Peninsula, which has for many years has been filled with untamed Islamic terrorist insurgents from al-Qaeda and more recently a branch of the Islamic State (ISIS, remember them?).  ISIS even famously used a soda-can bomb to take out a Russian civilian airliner over Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people.  Thus far, the Egyptian government has not been able to quell these insurgent terrorists, despite multiple attempts over the years.

Considering this, throwing a large number of Palestinians into refugee camps into the mix in Sinai would seem to be setting up a disaster for the future in an already volatile area, could lead to a destabilization of Egypt, and, should ISIS gain a presence in the camps and launch, say, rocket attacks into Israel with any frequency or intensity, could also lead to Israel striking into Egyptian territory in response in a repetitive cycle the like had developed in between Israel and Gaza up until this point, a disaster for the region that should be avoided at all costs by taking Sinai off the table as far as discussions of where to settle Gazan Palestinians, either temporarily or otherwise (indeed, the current ISIS franchise in the Sinai has fired rockets into southern Israel multiple times before, though to shruggable effect).

Israelis, ever lacking strategic thinking, would likely consider the problem more or less “solved” if they could pawn the Gazan Palestinian “problem” off onto Egypt, and be much happier worrying, but worrying less, about Palestinians in Egypt than Palestinians closer by in Gaza and would feel less incentive to move the refugees back into Gaza, perhaps playing the semantic games that come so easy to Netanyahu without ever getting to a point of moving Palestinians back into Gaza.  Tellingly, in an interview yesterday with the always-excellent Nic Robertson for CNN, an Israeli man living near Gaza in Sderot, hit hard by Hamas, called for transferring the Gazan Palestinians “into other Arab countries,” a view Robertson noted was “typical of many” there.

Conversely, if Palestinians were in camps in set up in southern Israel on the Gazan border, Israel would want to get the Palestinians there back into Gaza as soon as possible and not a day later.  The dynamics are far more likely to pressure parties into a far better result with the Israel camp option than the Sinai camp option, keeping the conflict and the bulk of responsibility for a competent, swift resolution with Israel and not dragging Egypt into it, which cannot even handle its own situation in the Sinai.  Therefore, 3.) Israel should allow several camps on its own territory neighboring Gaza for many of the civilians who want to exit Gaza, especially women and children (obviously military-age men are going to be more difficult to process but not impossible to at least partly screen).

And Israel does not need to deal with this alone: apart from the UN and NGOs that will certainly be willing to aid (and feel much more secure operating in Israel than the Sinai), Israel can and very much should bring in Abbas’s and Fatah’s PA.  There is obviously great concern about what is the plan is for Gaza after Hamas is defeated, as Israel clearly has none and is not shy about admitting this repeatedly publicly and privately, even to the Biden Administration despite U.S. pushback for not having such a plan.  After Netanyahu has spent so many years deliberately weakening and undermining the only major alternative to Hamas, allowing PA officials into these temporary camps can help the PA build credibility among Gazans up from its current crisis-low levels, allowing the idea of the PA moving into Gaza to govern after Hamas is defeated to actually be built in the hearts and minds of Gazans, bolstered by international and aid organizations (for all its issues, can anyone think of a better choice than the PA to fill this role?).

If a post-Hamas future for Gaza begins with Israel, the PA, and international partners working to the benefit of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, that is about as good of a new start one can hope for.  Without Hamas as a player on the scene, the only good path forward that can lead to justice, safety, and freedom for large numbers of Israelis and Palestinians is one that immediately begins building up a new Palestinian partner in Gaza for self-rule and to restart life there.  And for this, the PA is the only realistic option in the here and now.  Flatly speaking, there cannot be a military solution to what is fundamentally a political problem, and such Israeli-PA political cooperation (as opposed to just security cooperation) is long overdue.  Gaza after Hamas is a good chance for this (along with the West Bank if restrictions are eased and settlers reigned in) and there is no sense in putting it off, which would risk a collapse of the PA while it and Abbas are at their nadir along with a radicalization of its members.

Quite nobly and bravely, some Palestinian doctors, nurses, and medical staff are pledging to stay in northern Gaza—in the hospitals there—dozens even paying with their lives, so as not to abandon their patients, including newborn babies, who will die if they leave.

Especially in light of this, quite sadly and horrifically, the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City in northern Gaza was struck by an explosive projectile in northern Gaza just as I was finishing this last night, with estimates in the dead ranging from roughly 300 to 500.  I’m not a weapons expert, but on the one hand, this confirmed video of the strike does not resemble other videos of misfired Palestinian rocket attacks, as the IDF claims caused the blast and deaths, and seems closer to resembling a video of an Israeli airstrike especially given the size of the explosion; but on the other hand, factors that can push the conclusion in the other direction are still being digested, such as a lack of a large impact crater, video footage of a Palestinian rocket exploding high above the hospital just before the explosion in question and showing the explosion from a distance immediately after, and that if it was a rocket that misfired, it would have had more fuel so early in its journey, resulting in a larger explosion than normal.  The fog of war is still enveloping this situation even if it has become a Rorschach test, with people expressing certainty before having the facts and the incident understandably inflaming the region, making Biden’s visit and diplomatic push far more challenging.  At first, I believed with strong confidence it was an Israeli airstrike, but most of the evidence put forth of the publicly verifiable type favors Israel’s explanation. Still, there is yet doubt and dispute about what happened as of the publishing of this article and I am not sure definitive proof has been presented.

*(UPDATE: Throughout the day more analysis has come through. Despite Israeli’s track record of being caught lying in prominent cases like this, as excellently discussed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour here, the forensic evidence, from subsequent video to crater/blast analysis, points very strongly, perhaps overwhelmingly, to the conclusion that this explosion resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket and was an accident. As for the audio presented by Israel purported to be Hamas, it may or may not be authentic; in our present age, this audio could very well be an edited or fabricated cherry that Israel is adorning to the top of its cake of evidence to help win the public relations war it is losing, and some experts have called the audio out as fake; so that and some other aspects of the Israeli narrative are far from perfect. The audio may possibly be a distortion or a lie, but the lack of a large crater and the confirmed video evidence is not. On the other side of things, there is no hard evidence that has been presented to be able to draw the conclusion that this was an Israeli airstrike. I have discussed Israel lying in the past myself, and indeed, a whole article could be written about that [Israel in the past lied about airstrikes, including an incident last year in which it claimed categorically as fact that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had killed 5 children, it being later reveled there were no rockets launched or falling near the children and they were actually killed by an Israeli airstrike; conversely, as documented by Amnesty International, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad lied and blamed Israel for two rocket misfires in a 2014 incident that killed 13 civilians—11 of them children—claiming they were killed by Israeli attacks; thus, it is wise to not take everything any of these parties to this conflict say at face value without scrutiny] but even if the audio is possibly not credible, the overall circumstantial evidence is credible and very strongly does not indicate an Israeli airstrike and does indicate a misfired Palestinian rocket, whether from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, was responsible, and without any substantive counterevidence, we must go in the direction of the existing evidence unless further substantive evidence changes the picture substantially.)

*(SECOND UPDATE) Since my last update, there have been multiple other independent investigations, most of which admit they can not make a definitive conclusion in the absence of an on-the-ground investigation.  Among the new investigations are ones from the AP and CNN, both of which concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the most likely explanation behind the tragic explosion at the hospital.  The CNN investigation also allowed for the possibility of an IDF artillery round, but found that possibility less likely based on the available evidence.  I personally messaged the serially reliable CNN military analyst, Col. Cedric Leighton USAF (Ret.), to weigh in, and he echoed the CNN investigation in also offering his view that the available evidence strongly favored a misfired Palestinian rocket based on available evidence versus other explanations but also could not rule out an Israeli artillery shell.  The Washington Post’s own investigation corroborated Israel’s and the U.S. assessment that a failed Palestinian rocket was the best explanation.  Following up on its earlier investigation that also found a misfired Palestinian rocket the most likely explanation but cast doubt on details of both the official Palestinian and official Israeli narrative, the UK Channel 4’s more recent investigation found further evidence to discredit what seems to be doctored or altered audio released by Israel that it claimed to be of Hamas operatives and that also cate doubt on Israel’s account of the trajectory of what caused the explosion (likely exposing Israeli hasbara, Israel’s unique brand of information warfare trying to make Israel’s narrative more convincing than the evidence alone would make it).  A New York Times investigation disputed that videos that have been widely cited by other investigations as showing strong evidence that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible actually showed what those other investigators concluded, including the aforementioned; rather, it corroborated some other interpretations that stated the videos do not show a misfired Palestinian rocket, casting the situation into further confusion and intensifying the fog of war.  The UK-based Forensic Architecture presented its analysis conducted with partner organizations that presented seemingly decent analysis discrediting parts of the official Israeli narrative and favoring the theory that an Israeli artillery round caused the blast, but the organization also seemingly presents the problem of anti-Israeli bias in its presentation: it refers to the IDF as “IOF,” which stands for “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Israel Offense Forces,” or “Israel Offensive Forces;” IOF is a pejorative term that some critical of the IDF and Israeli policy towards Palestinians have taken upon themselves to use to replace IDF; I will simply say that I do not find North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and often referred to by the ensuing acronym DPRK, to be either democratic of belonging to the people; to use another Asian example, China’s army is named the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but it is neither liberating anything, nor run by the people; in both cases, I do not invent cute if accurate pejorative terms based on my own views, I use the official terminology because that is how the world works in the realm of journalism and research organization, otherwise we could start renaming everything and retitling anyone based on how we personally feel about them; those that do rename based on personal views more than suggest the presence of bias.  Al Jazeera put forward its own investigation, but it comes off fairly propagandistic: it presents information it claims disproves that a Palestinian rocket was responsible, but it is not convincing or conclusive at all and does not actually provide any evidence it was an Israeli airstrike, not even addressing the issue of crater size.  For its part, Hamas has also not produced any evidence the blast was from an Israeli airstrike or Israeli artillery round.  Greatly adding to the confusion around this incident, there have also been glaring errors made by media outlets throughout this process, with few owning up to their errors and both governments and international organizations not adjusted their narratives to newly revealed facts.  And one independent analyst who has not received proper clarification after reaching out to multiple major outlets may have even exposed that the figure of 500 killed that supposedly came from the Hamas health ministry—a figure later seen as widely non-credible, though numbers coming out of Gaza from all the other violence are generally seen by aid organizations and the United Nations as largely credible—may have no specific confirmation or evidence supporting that such a claim was actually made. After reviewing all of these, my own view—given the preponderance of independent investigations’ conclusions and the indications of “high confidence” U.S. intelligence—is that a failed Palestinian rocket is still the most likely explanation, but I feel less confident in this conclusion given several other investigations that have different interpretations of video analysis and that it seems very likely both Hamas and the IDF are lying about certain aspects of this in addition to no definitive investigation having yet been conducted on the ground; thus, I went from being pretty convinced it was an Israeli airstrike, to being even more convinced it was a failed Palestinian rocket, to still favoring the Palestinian rocket theory with less confidence and more doubt/questions to be answered.

Your not-so-humble author here has little to add to this incredibly inspiring self-sacrifice of the medical staff or the horror of the still-staffed hospital being struck by some weapon to devastating effect.  With the staff, the concept of the Hippocratic Oath taken to such an extreme level will inspire long after this conflict.  The bottom line for the purposes of my article is that, hypothetically speaking, if it was an Israeli strike, such a situation is generally quite avoidable, especially given how large hospital complexes tend to be.  Yet it is far less avoidable with the current Israeli approach.

Their bravery and sacrifice of the medical staff and the helplessness of their patients mean that, despite the crimes of Hamas, these doctors and their patients deserve all the care Israel can take to save them.  Even if this situation was not the result of an Israeli strike—and I am not stating that is the case—the current approaches leave such a possibility wide open, even likely, to still happen.  To this end, 4.) I call on the IDF and other Israeli authorities to reach out directly to the administrators of the hospitals and to try to coordinate delivery of aid to the hospitals and to coordinate if possible the IDF securing the hospitals as safe zones for civilians and patients unable to be safely moved as well as for the medical staff tending to them.  To the degree that Hamas avoids using these hospital as defensive positions or staging areas, there is great opportunity for clear, careful, open coordination avoiding needless loss of life or IDF attacks at these hospitals.

Israel also has to be careful about provocations and incitement against Palestinians by leaders, politicians, settlers, police, soldiers, and perhaps even more normal civilians after such traumatizing events.  This has been a huge problem in Israeli society in recent years, with one of the most complex, top-of-society-to-the-bottom examples being the horrible events in 2014 leading to Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir’s abduction and murder by being beaten and burned to death by Israeli settlers—a “price tag” revenge for the kidnapping and murder by Palestinians of three Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—so heartbreakingly portrayed in the excellent HBO and Keshet (an Israeli TV station) joint-miniseries titled Our Boys.  The show was so revealing of the toxic and dangerous effects of Netanyahu’s style of politics and the warped ideology of many of his supporters that he even outrageously called the joint-Israeli production “anti-Semitic.”  This incident back in 2014 was part of the runup to the worst Israel-Hamas violence before the current fighting.

Yet there are many examples going back years before and years beyond that prolific one.  These include multiple acts of violence, terrorism, and murder against Palestinians by Israeli settlers acting with sheer impunity in the West Bank, including ambushing and killing a father and a son just days ago who were attending a funeral of four other Palestinians recently murdered by settlers.  Israel’s security forces had already been massively escalating the situation in the West Bank all year with provocative raids and arrests before October 7, too.  Overall, the violence earlier this year hit levels not seen in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—both occupied illegally by Israel from 1967 on—since 2005 and is only exploding further now after Hamas’s October 7 pogrom and Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza: 61 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 1,250 wounded since October 7, destined to get worse especially after the Gaza City hospital horror. 

There are nonviolent issues that drive violence that must also be considered: just the additions to, expansions, and continued presence of illegal-under-international-law Israeli settlements in the West Bank on land that that is supposed to be Palestinian are themselves provocations, with the U.S. condemning Israeli settlement expansion moves multiple times just last month and also earlier this year repeatedly, a year that has seen Netanyahu’s unprecedented right-wing extremist government dramatically accelerate settlement expansion.  The recent eviction of Palestinians from their home in East Jerusalem so they can be replaced with Jews and even some recent displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank—textbook ethnic cleansing on a slow, small progression—also adds to the poisonous atmosphere and the feeling held by Palestinians that they are under constant siege and assault.  

Statements from too many Israelis are also incitement, even lawmakers and senior members of the current government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—previously suspected and convicted, respectively, in Israeli legal cases of terrorism against Palestinians—Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and inciter-in-chief Netanyahu himself.  Such statements can even include denying the very identity of Palestinians as a distinct people and pushing for mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land or can surprisingly even recently come from Israel’s leftist figurehead president Isaac Herzog, and though he later walked back some of his worst remarks, he was clearly thinking what he said at the time. 

Additionally, the focus of Netanyahu’s multiple governments on normalization with Saudi Arabia and others while totally ignoring any political negotiations with the Palestinians, along with his recent predecessor Naftali Bennet pledging his government would literally do nothing to try to make political progress with Palestinians, were in themselves provocations because the clear subtext to Palestinians was that “You don’t matter and we don’t care about your political and nationalist aspirations at all,” an unsustainable illusion given false credence by a Trump-Kushner Abraham Accords that totally ignored Palestinian nationalist aspiration (I will be writing a whole article about this later).  And last but hardly least, the Israelis under Netanyahu’s new government have been provocative throughout the year at one of the holiest sites of Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem’s Old City, including in the days just before the Hamas pogrom on October 7.

Israel needs to put its best foot forward during its Gaza operation in regards to these incitements and provocations, which it is already failing to do, or risk blowback that will see more Israelis and Palestinians get killed and complicate what are already a complicated Gaza offensive and simmering, even now exploding, regional dynamics.

The key measures that must be taken here are that 5.) Israeli leaders must police and reign in officials engaging in hate-speech, the language of anti-Palestinian incitement, or ordering provocative security force deployments or actions at Al-Aqsa while prevent any settlement expansion in the West Bank or ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem during this fighting in Gaza.  And they must not only prevent terrorist settler violence against Palestinians but must also prosecute any settlers guilty of such terrorism against Palestinians.

These first five measures absolutely will help to stem criticisms of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” currently being leveled against Israel’s Gaza campaign, and they are prolific and not without meriting concern given some of the statements coming from Israeli quarters, discussed above (indeed, if the Palestinians leaving northern Gaza are not allowed to ever return, that would be the legal definitions of those accusations, and the damage to Israel for playing into the these legitimate criticisms would be considerable on the world stage).  Blunting such criticism with substantive action would not only be effective public relations and buttress Israel’s campaign against Hamas, it will actually save many innocent lives.

Finally, while there is rightly and emphatically condemnation of Hamas’s abduction of children among the hostages, there is an ugly truth that receives far too little attention: according to Save the Children (full in-depth report here), each year, Israel detains without civilian due process but through military authorities between roughly 500-1000 Palestinian children, most of whom are physically abused in custody, a large portion of whom are denied timely legal assistance access (often interrogated before any assistance), and many of whom are “denied a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves against allegations.”  Human Rights Watch also shows Israeli military authorities handling and detaining the children are regularly abusive and that they are often denied anything resembling an acceptable due process, with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem showing more detailed figures and that Israeli authorities have not been transparent or forthcoming when it comes to inquiries about detained children. 

From various statements coming from official Israeli spokespeople, the rescue or exchange of the hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza seem to be taking a backseat to the desires of the Israeli government first and foremost to destroy Hamas, and, indeed, those two goals are largely incompatible; thus, it must be said this does not augur terribly well for the survival of the many Hamas hostages.  And while there is a current proposal that was just floated by Hamas offering to release all civilian hostages if Israel ceases airstrikes and would release all military hostages if Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners, this is ambitious and complicated and probably unlikely to be accepted.  Perhaps Israel offering to exchange the most vulnerable and least culpable prisoners in its custody—the children discussed above—in exchange for some or all the hostages in Gaza would put Hamas even more so on the defensive in the international arena for not acting on a legitimate, balanced, serious offer to exchange civilian life for civilian life, to free children and not all prisoners, including clear terrorists, from prison, so my last proposal is that 6.) Israel should offer to release all the children in its custody in exchange for at least the civilians held by Hamas.  It might not work but it doesn’t hurt as far as posturing and could put pressure on Hamas while showing that Israel is willing to explore ways to save hostages beyond military methods.  This would also be appreciated by many members of the Israeli public, who seem anecdotally in many, many interviews and from looking at social media posts of people I don’t know and people I know personally to at least seem to want Israel to prioritize getting the hostages free.

Conclusion: 6 High-Reward, Low-to-Moderate Risk Steps to Benefit Israelis and Palestinians Alike

As America’s Israel-whisperer, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, noted repeatedly and emphatically, if Israel does not take measures like the ones I am suggesting into consideration and just hurtles itself into Gaza with the sole consideration of destroying Hamas rapidly, then it will be playing into the dreams and interests of Iran, Hezbollah, and all who wish Israel ill in the Middle East and beyond.  Getting drawn into a bloodbath in Gaza in which very doable, practical, and eminently possible measures to minimize civilian casualties and keep civilians fed, hydrated, and overflowing hospitals powered up are simply not taken or only minimally implemented is exactly what Iran, Hezbollah, and all of Israel’s enemies want to see or believe Israeli will do.  Like Friedman writes, Israel should be asking itself, “What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?”  How can Israel prove the cynics and haters wrong?  Israel can hope to influence, but cannot control, the actions of other parties, but it can control its own.

The below picture is a of pair of twins who were just born in Gaza after their mother fled Israeli bombardment.  The world they grow up in—if they even survive—will be largely defined by what Israel and other states and factions decide and do in the coming days, weeks, and months.  If the measures I have suggested are adopted, there is a good chance worthy of a big bet that world will be less awful than if they are ignored, that the dynamics driving decades of conflict will be lessoned significantly by Israel in reducing its own contributions to them regardless of what its enemies do or do not do.  By seriously adopting these six measures, Israeli will serve its own interests and see the obstacles to peace weakened, the rays of hope largened and brightened, with a lot more people actually alive to see the improvement over time, not only many Palestinians, but also plenty of Israelis.

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!

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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 27, 2021; also published May 31, 2021, on The Times of Israel Blogs; see my related article: Death, Stupidity; Rinse, Repeat: What Is New, What Is Old in Latest Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy

SILVER SPRING—When horrible things start happening around the world—especially in the Middle East, and especially in Palestine and Israel—it often seems as if the U.S. cannot win when it comes to the cries of various mobs, both in the street and online, claiming—sometimes accurately, other times not—to represent various factions: “America, how come you don’t to more to stop X horrible thing by Y horrible people, do more to help Z people?” often concurrent not only with opposite cries switching X and Y but also “America, why don’t you just stay out of such-and-such conflict, all you do is make things worse” and even “America, why don’t you just completely stay out of the entire region?”

Practically Speaking

To be fair, it would be an understatement to note America has made grievous mistakes in the Middle East, from former disgraced President Donald Trump’s rapid betrayal of the Kurds in late 2019 to assisting the horrific Saudi-led war in Yemen and the cataclysmic 2003 invasion of Iraq.  But a fairly consistent, longer-term problem has been America’s unbalanced position in the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, in particular, not doing enough to stand up for Palestinians as a people and allowing certain Israeli abuses of Palestinians to continue with impunity (abuses that are also self-destructive for Israel and Israeli Jews).

With any of many outbreaks in violence (Israeli-Palestinian or otherwise), real-world practicality demands that the priority be bringing about a swift end to violence in an effort to save as many lives as possible.  There are some well-meaning but idealistically naïve or blinded folks who will demand, before we even talk about stopping the violence, that we settle the root causes—even calling for a complete surrender of one side on all core issues about which it is fighting—but this is an obscene waste of time while fighting is erupting and the focus needs to be on immediately prioritizing individual human life.  During longer wars, negotiations over longstanding core issues are, of course, to be encouraged, but with individual rounds of bombs falling or gunshots ringing around civilians, the exact same issues that have driven the conflicts of which they are a part will almost invariably be there when that particular round of violence stops.

The only serious exceptions to this are when overwhelming force can actually bring about a decisive end to most of a conflict, but this is rare and in the case of Israel and Palestine, no glorious Saladin-like armies from Arab states will destroy the Israeli state—certainly Hamas has no such capability—while Israel invading and occupying Gaza in a bid to totally wipe out Hamas would certainly not go as Israel would intend and would see such terrible level of casualties and an inflammation of tensions and violence in the region that pressure for it to stop short of such a goal would be unlike anything we have seen with any of Israel’s other major campaigns against Palestinians.  So Israel is not going to wipe out Hamas in Gaza and neither Hamas nor any Arab or Muslim state (let alone any other) is going to invade and dismantle the Israeli state, nor end by force Israel’s control over holy sites in Jerusalem, military occupation of the West Bank, or siege of Gaza.  Thus, the idea that violence is somehow going to address the root causes is absurd.

So, again, it is not that dealing with the root causes is not essential, is that they are going nowhere fast during any particular round of violence and ending the violence is, therefore, both the moral/ethical and practical consideration that must take precedence.  Having said that, once the violence has stopped, the imperative very much should be to then focus on the root causes to avoid further violence and achieve justice, security, and peace for the greatest number of people.

What Biden’s Critics Miss

I have followed President Joe Biden’s career for decades (I even interned in his Senate office in 2006), and I do not think any of this is lost on him.  My gut feelings on this are at least partly validated by the heartening conduct of his Administration throughout the eleven-day crisis between Israel and Hamas and its spillover conflicts between Israeli security forces and other Palestinians and between Arabs and Jews in Israel’s internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.

A good chunk of the media coverage has framed Biden and his team as haplessly overcome by events in the Middle East, with some takes stating that he is all but ignoring the plight of Palestinians and is simply reflexively supporting Israel and still others that Biden’s supposedly weak support for Israel or even supposed hostility to it is to blame for the latest round of violence.  All of these are deeply myopic takes that cannot see the forest for the trees at best or are bad-faith propaganda and disinformation at worst.  In fact, Biden’s approach seemed relatively fairly balanced and nuanced in ways that, more important than anything else, yielded results and saved lives.

First, let us be clear about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: he has had no problem defying or embarrassing American presidents and senior officials in the past, including this one in the month before the recent hostilities, when he rejected repeated criticism from Biden Administration officials—including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—for plans to dispossess Palestinians in East Jerusalem and expand and create Jewish settlements there and in the West Bank (the very day before Hamas began its rocket fire into Israel, Sullivan expressed to his Israeli counterpart that the White House had “serious concerns” about efforts to unjustly evict Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, part of a larger campaign of demographic engineering by Israeli right-wing nationalists).

With the reality that Netanyahu and his country have increasingly embraced right-wing nationalism, if Biden had publicly and loudly chastised Netanyahu and Israel, Netanyahu would have felt compelled to not look as if he was cowing to American pressure and would have only continued Israel’s military operations longer to demonstrate his independence and strength to his domestic audience (remember he is in the fight of his political life to hold onto power while he is simultaneously on trial for corruption).  This would have meant the Israel Defense Forces (Israel’s military, or IDF) killing and wounding many more people and possibly causing the conflict to both intensify and spread while also risking more Israeli lives, even if far fewer.  And Biden has known “Bibi,” as Netanyahu is often called, for decades, knows him relatively well, and has a far better sense than most politicians of how the embattled Israeli prime minister will and will not react to things, including public pressure.

Yet many foreign critics and those to Biden’s left vocal in their anger about his support for Israel—the left’s sometimes raucous “progressive” crowd (Progressive being a much older label for a far more productive historical movement)—seem not to understand this.  Their outrage that Biden was not more vocal in condemning Netanyahu betrays their lack of understanding of basic politics and diplomacy, missing how there is usually far more to politics than speeches and noise (that should not surprise considering that Bernie Sanders is essentially their spiritual mentor and the tactic of screaming at and shaming Democratic voters into nominating a “progressive” for president in 2016 and 2020 failed miserably; to Bernie’s credit, his crushing loss in 2020 seems to have humbled him into a more practical and productive approach).  After all, America is one of the few counties where public opinion favors Israel strongly, so even as support for Palestinians has increased significantly (especially on the left), there is not the political support for a sharp turn away from or reducing support for Israel and such a move could not only cost Democrats the House in midterm elections, but the White House two years later, rendering any major shifts by a Biden Administration moot as a new Republican administration would surely undo those changes and become even more pro-Israeli and less supportive of Palestinians, as was seen under Trump.

Speaking of, to his right, Biden’s critics insanely claim he and his policies are the reason for the outbreak of violence when Biden has done very little other than restore formal diplomatic relations and to reinstate some $235 million in humanitarian, economic, and development aid to Palestinians—aid that the Trump Administration, led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, had cruelly, spitefully, and needlessly cut—while also separately adding COVID-19 aid.

If any American approach has failed recently, it is the incredibly one-sided “pro-Israel” policy of the Trump Administration—including Kushner’s “absurd” “peace” plan—that has deepened the anger, resentment, and helplessness already pervasive among Palestinians while letting Israel feel it could act against Palestinians with impunity, furthering overall division, which intensified and accelerated the dangerous dynamics that exploded over the past few weeks, as I noted just recently.

Biden’s Practicality and Early Results

If anything, critics to both Biden’s left and right seemed to not be aware of what was really happening behind the scenes even as they missed some very public cues.

Instead of starting a public feud with a longtime (if very problematic) ally, Biden refrained from antagonizing Netanyahu in ways that would have been counterproductive and resulted in more death and destruction and instead had himself and his administration act in ways that worked to preserve and exercise leverage over Israel while working intensely when they felt the time was right to rapidly bring about an end to the violence.  In doing so, they consciously tried avoiding what they now saw as a counterproductive approach taken by the Obama Administration during the last major Gaza conflict in 2014 (which I analyzed in detail at the time).

Early in this most recent flare-up, Biden publicly asserted that “Israel had a right to defend itself”—for all the flaws of any particular nation, virtually no nation would not respond with military force against a terrorist group firing rockets into its cities—even while he and top officials also early on expressed a desire for a quick end to the Israeli operation (Biden himself said “My expectation and hope is this will be closing down sooner than later)” and that it was their position to “urge…de-escalation of violence” (this from Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken) and to still pursue a state for Palestinians.

Top officials also early on framed the conflict as very much in part about the systemic issues faced by Palestinians, especially the evictions going on in East Jerusalem, which were raised in conversations throughout (in spite of the efforts of some Israelis to pretend or delude themselves into thinking that the structural issues had nothing to do with the latest round of violence).

As the conflict dragged on, other concerns about civilian casualties and the safety of journalists in Gaza were publicly aired by the Biden Administration, and specific calls for lessening Israeli restrictions on and increasing freedom for Palestinians were also made.  Eventually, calls for a cease-fire—at first gentle, then firmer—made clear that Biden and his people felt it was time for Israel to let up.  And Biden has long made clear he generally did not intend to air America’s dirty laundry with Israeli in public.  That there even were these milder public statements, then, made it clear there was serious pushback going on behind the scenes, and the softer public statements were concurrent with a series of calls—six between Biden and Netanyahu and many others between American and Israeli officials—that were the key parts of the more private pushback.  This was not unqualified support or one-sided; far from it, and throughout and after there were statements along the lines that Palestinians, too, deserved safety as well as dignity and freedom and that reiterated American commitment to the two-state solution (by far the most sane of the various “solutions” that are bandied about) that would result in a Palestinian state, a long-held U.S. position Trump, Kushner, and Blinken’s partisan-hack-predecessor Mike Pompeo had all but abandoned.

Having long made clear he would not lean towards slamming Israel in public, Biden effectively worked behind the scenes to pressure the right-wing Netanyahu—who has not shied away from crisis exploitation and punishing military operations with heavy civilian casualties—to wind down military strikes on the eleventh day when Netanyahu’s security cabinet voted unanimously to agree to a cease-fire; if you think Biden’s quiet but strong diplomacy did not play a major and leading role, consider two points here: one, that Israel’s government is pretty right-wing and anti-Arab in policy and sentiment, and two, that the a plurality to a vast majority of Israelis were against a cease-fire and wanted the IDF to continue operations against Hamas in Gaza (in three Israeli polls, Israelis opposed the cease-fire 72 to 24, 47 to 35, and 48 to 40 percent).  Taking all this into account—that Netanyahu and many of his people would not be generally inclined to keep the IDF operation as short as it ended up being, that stopping it as early as they did was actually a liability domestically when it came to public opinion, and that the cabinet vote was still unanimous—it is hard to argue that Biden Administration’s role in the timing of the cease-fire and shortening of the conflict was not decisive.

And since the cease-fire has taken hold, Biden and his top diplomat Blinken have continued to emphasize America’s commitment not simply to Israel but to “equal” treatment and respect for Palestinians.  As Biden noted in his address just after the cease-fire took hold:

“I believe the Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy.  My administration will continue our quiet and relentless diplomacy toward that end.  I believe we have a genuine opportunity to make progress, and I’m committed to working for it.”

The next day, Biden was even more specific: “We still need a two-state solution.  It is the only answer. The only answer.”

Focused on rebuilding America after a devastatingly bungled pandemic response under the Trump Administration, Biden has not been keen in his first few months on the job to dive into dramatic foreign engagement on the part of the U.S., but now that America is beginning to hit its stride again amidst his administration’s exemplary handling of the pandemic and with a crisis erupting between Israelis and Palestinians, he and his competent people have shown themselves capable of addressing sudden crises and of recognizing that such crises demand U.S. engagement not only to calm the waters but to take serious if not rushed or frantic steps to try to address root causes.

Thus, just months into his presidency, Biden has passed his first major international security crisis with a deft yet subtle approach, the type of qualities that were utterly lacking in the White House for the entirety of Trump’s residence there.  And rather than treat the crisis as a distraction, he has, as noted, rightly recognized it as “a genuine opportunity to make progress,” dispatching to the region his top diplomat in Blinken, who is already working to restore a sense of balance after the clear failure of Trump’s gratuitous neglect of Palestinians.

As case in point: Netanyahu does not want to hear anything about the two-state solution, which he has worked for decades to undermine, but that is exactly what Blinken doubled down on after meeting with Netanyahu and in Israel and, later that day, Palestinians President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank:

“Ultimately, there’s a possibility of resuming the effort to achieve a two-state solution, which we continue to believe is the only way to truly assure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, and of course to give the Palestinians the state they’re entitled to.”

He also made clear that America will seek “to address some of the underlying causes that could, if not addressed, spark another cycle of violence.”  Furthermore, Blinken met with Palestinian activists, pledged significant new aid to Palestinians, reiterated strong opposition to the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, and announced the reopening of a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that had been closed by Trump and was a significant venue for separate engagement with Palestinians.  Few of these moves are welcome ones to Netanyahu or many other Israeli officials or citizens, so, despite claims to the contrary and accusations of being one-sided, the Biden Administration is sharply departing from the extremist approach of its predecessor and will do a lot more to stick up for Palestinians even if many Palestinians would desire further, more immediate, more dramatic action.

Too Early to Write off Biden’s Efforts; Cease-fire Orchestration Reason to Hope

Cynicism, understandably, abounds when it comes to the struggle between Israeli and Palestinians, but Biden’s critics miss the mark in failing to see his and his administration’s major role in shortening this latest round of fighting and in taking both symbolic and substantive steps away from Trump’s one-sided policy towards far more engagement with and support for Palestinians.  Additionally, the commentary that Biden will do little-to-nothing to address the deeper issues is wildly premature, just like the initial commentary on his involvement (or supposed lack thereof) during this latest round of fighting.

Both in clear public actions (if not dramatic or bombastic) and in even more “intense,” to use Blinken’s word, behind-the-scenes efforts, we are seeing Biden and his administration engage in this most intractable of issues and he may yet surprise us with far greater results over time regardless of the verbal gymnastics of critics to his right and left, of Palestinians and Israelis alike as well as their supporters unhappy with his approach.  For most of these critics, a lesson in how real diplomacy works has just been given by Biden and his team.

© 2021 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), 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!

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

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) May 14, 2021; also published by The Times of Israel Blogs May 30, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread and follow-up article Wading into Israel and Palestine Quicksand, Biden Offers a Diplomacy 101 Class for All

SILVER SPRING—The more you become familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more banal you realize it truly is.  One tribe with an extreme emotional attachment to a special religious site will become enraged and violent when another tribe with more control over that site and a competing extreme emotional attachment says or does something involving that site; then, a mob is ready to riot, with a countermob ready to riot back and various extremist government security forces and terrorist extremist actors ready to capitalize to further their maximalist positions.

Whether cavemen fighting over a sacred stone 20,000 years ago or Jews and Arabs fighting over the Western Wall/al-Aqsa Mosque/Dome of the rock compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, little changes: particular plots of land or certain building are weaponized and control of and access to them become tools of conflict between different competing ethnic/religious groups.  “Taking back” what is “ours” justifies all sorts of horrors, from suicide bombing and ethnic cleansing to war and genocide.  Without religion involved, there is still plenty to fight about in petty, repetitive ways, but research demonstrates that the viciousness of such conflict gets worse when religion is involved.

This is the utterly unoriginal politics of much of the world, which even explain many of the animating forces behind Trump’s recent Capitol insurrection in America, as I noted for The Jerusalem Report.  Even within specific conflicts, chapters can also be especially repetitive, and that is certainly the case here between Israel and the Palestinians: the current round of rapidly escalating violence began in ways remarkably similar to how the Second Intifada began in terms of the involvement of heavy-handed Israeli actions at al-Aqsa while also resembling in other key ways the outbreak of the 2014 round of violence even as it also thematically touches core issues that sparked conflicts going all the way back to the First Intifada and the major wars dating back to Israel’s founding.  The same holy sites, the same arguments over whose land it was, is, and will be—weaponizations of history for the present and future—the same arguments over occupation and settlements, equality and dignity, discrimination and freedom, security and sovereignty are always there with few variations and mostly played on the same tired notes.

So in important ways, there is nothing new here: the same unresolved issues, the same powers that be not even trying to advance or resolve them or even making them worse, the same systemic negative feedback loop producing the same outrage, fear, grievance, hatred, dehumanization, and violence that certain leaders on both sides keep capitalizing on to justify their extremist, exclusivist ideologies and policies.

And yet, we do have something terrifyingly new in this round of violence.

During this latest of the cycle, some Arab citizens of Israel—many considering themselves primarily Palestinians, some considering themselves primarily Israeli, some having nuanced, mixed views of their identities—have been both attacking Jews and been attacked by gangs and mobs of Jews as mixed communities in Israel are seeing an explosion of intercommunal violence.  In my own time in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, I found these Arab citizens of Israel to have the most nuanced and least predictable views on the conflict.  Yet of Israeli Jews and Palestinians without Israeli citizenship (including the many Palestinians I met in Jordan), the vast majority were almost entirely one-sided in their views.

Throughout the other conflicts and wars of the past, Arab citizens of Israel have simply stayed out of the fights between Israel and Palestinians and/or Arab states.  Though discriminated against in many ways, Palestinians living in Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders have vastly more freedoms, rights, and opportunities than Palestinians in de-facto annexed East Jerusalem and especially the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (very few of those in East Jerusalem and none of the Gazans/West Bankers are Israeli citizens or can vote in Israeli national elections; those in the West Bank are subject to a military occupation and Israeli military law at any time Israel chooses to exercise it, and those in Gaza are also subject to intense Israeli restrictions in the something of a giant open-air prison Gaza has been for years).

As in the U.S. with the Black Lives Matter movement, an extraordinary coronavirus year fostered increased social media consumption and allowed for way too much time to stew with unpleasant thoughts, contributing to a tinderbox-like readiness to engage in street activism and releasing pent up rage, so that many who normally would not get involved in protests have become protesters, with protests becoming more violent.  Add to the equation that this is all after a rough month of reflection and fasting during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan in the time of COVID-19, after over a year during the era of peak social media activism during COVID-19 lockdowns (the pandemic medically and economically hitting discriminated populations harder all over the world, in this case Israeli Arabs), after years of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and conservative Israelis failing to address inequality and discrimination against Israeli Arabs while catering to Jewish right-wing extremists in continuing with discriminatory policies and racist rhetoric in Israel (the Israelis in power being perpetual sore winners and crowing loudly over symbolic wins like Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital).

So now these Israeli Arabs have seen their sense of identity drift more towards Palestinian and seen a hostility within them grow towards their right-wing Jewish antagonists.  In the face of sustained extremism and discrimination from Jewish extremist politicians and citizens, they are now responding in kind.  In the past, there has been violence between Palestinians and groups of Israeli settlers living in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and, earlier, Gaza; the run-up to the war in 2014 (which I analyzed in detail at the time) involved the kidnapping and murder by Palestinian terrorists three Israeli teens–Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah—and the kidnapping and murder by Jewish terrorists of a Palestinian teen from East Jerusalem, Mohammed Abu Khdeir.  But now, there is the worst intercommunal violence inside Israel proper in decades.  Much like some groups of Jews and Arabs began fighting each other in British Mandate Palestine in 1947 in the beginning of civil war, the current violence between Jews and Arab Israelis has senior Israeli officials and others in Israel worried about the prospect of a new civil war.

In a polarized society, when one side or faction becomes too extreme, over time it can often help generate an increase in extremism in other groups.  As an example, most factions in Syria’s current civil war have become radicalized competing with, or fighting against, the brutality of both terrorist ISIS and dictator Bashar al-Assad’s mass-murdering regime, which helped bring out the worst in other factions over time, as I discussed years ago.  After years of the radicalization of the right in the United States, elements of the left are also becoming more extreme (though still not coming close to the insanity of Republicans), as I have also discussed.  So this is hardly unique to Israel, but as Israel lurches rightward and many of its Jews become radicalized, it was only a matter of time before portions of Israel’s Arabs started down a similar path (anyone wanting to understand these dynamics should watch the singular Israeli/HBO miniseries “Our Boys,” about the aforementioned four murders of teens that led to the 2014 Gaza war).

The Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his exceptionally fair history of the “Zionist-Arab Conflict” titled Righteous Victims, includes as his epigram famous lines from W. H. Auden’s famous “September 1, 1939” World War II poem:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

That to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

If anything, this epigram is all too fitting, for the world and for the tragedy unfolding in Israel and Palestine today.

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

Also see Brian’s follow-up article Wading into Israel and Palestine Quicksand, Biden Offers a Diplomacy 101 Class for All and 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!

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

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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 22, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), September 11th-13th, 2018, and republished by Tuck Magazine September 24th; See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports

AMMAN — As I write this while watching the memorial service at Ground Zero with mourners reading the names of those they and others lost seventeen years ago today, as we remember the horrors of September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath, more and more, it looks like 9/11 can be seen as a turning point, one in which the world went from becoming less tribal to becoming more tribal, and not at all in a good way.

Hell, even tennis has just exploded into tribalism. TENNIS!! A spat between a (THE) tennis superstar and a stickler-of-an umpire became just like everything else: tribes gearing up for war, trying to gain ground in their culture wars consumed by vitriol and hate. TENNIS is now Trump vs. his many enemies, the left vs. the right, Sunni vs. Shiite, black vs. white, Hillary supporters vs. Bernie supporters, men vs. women, Israel vs. Palestine…

How did it get to this?

*****

As the millennium celebrations approached, the world could celebrate an era of increasing international peace, cooperation, and prosperity not seen since the Pax Romana some roughly two thousand years earlier.

Flikr/Paul Mannix

The Cold War had finally ended, and the two most powerful countries in the world had engaged in a massive reduction of their military forces, including their nuclear arsenals, as the great rivalry between Cold War superpowers the United State and the Soviet Union had melted away to a new if rocky friendship between the U.S. and Russia even as the U.S. extended friendship and alliances to many of Russia’s former Soviet republics and satellite states.

Europe was becoming more and more united politically, economically, militarily, as well as more democratic. Longtime enemies Jordan and Israel had finally signed a peace treaty, and a difficult but important peace process between Israelis and Palestinians had begun under the Oslo Accords. Even the U.S. and Vietnam were beginning a new chapter of friendship. Bitter rivalries in Asia had given way to increasing regional economic cooperation, and after a century of hatred, Japan and South Korea had agreed to host the 2002 FIFA World Cup together. Democracy and freedom were spreading in Latin America and Africa too, where apartheid had finally ended in South Africa and other nations were making important strides away from dictatorship.

This era of optimistic globalization would come to a screeching halt as planes slammed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. 

*****

It took a tremendous amount of `both hatred and willpower to plot to plan and fly those planes into their targets on September 11th, 2001. I’d love to say that, overall, we Americans responded with love to overcome the hate. We did, if ever so briefly, but that quickly gave way even more intense partisan rancor, two grossly mismanaged wars, and profligate spending along with a resurgence of all the awful trends that continued and spiraled out of control into what we have now. 

America became incredibly divided well before the 2004 presidential election; while the numbers were not dramatically different from 2000, the level of rancor and acrimony was. And America had just invaded Iraq in 2003, under deceptive and misguided if at least partially well-intention pretenses, and mismanaged the occupation in such an incompetent way that it ripped open the ethnic and sectarian divides in Iraq in a way that would, over time, raise tensions between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, and Sunnis and other minorities like Christians, and this throughout the Middle East.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq exacerbated, but by no means created, these divisions, and the damage would be considerable. For a brief window, the U.S. seemed like it would be able to shape events as it desired, but that dream faded away to reality as soon as an al-Qaeda truck bomb killed dozens and wounded far more at the UN headquarters in Baghdad, including its all-star chief diplomat, the incomparable Sergio Vieira de Mello, that August; the UN pulled out soon after and Iraq, under hapless U.S. misleadership, descended in hell.

Yet the damage was hardly America acting by itself: particularly Syria and Iran—nervous about what American success in Iraq would mean for their regimes—were happy to let terrorists, insurgents, militiamen, other people and/or weapons enter Iraq by the thousands, caring little for the death and violence these actors and equipment would inflict upon the Iraqi people as long as they were undermining American interests there. This only further exacerbated tensions and problems already festering due to American incompetence to such a degree that Iraqi Shiites settled on an Iraqi Shiite strongman—Nuri Kamal al-Maliki—to feel safe, whose oppression of Sunnis was the largest single factor in the degree to which ISIS would experience success in Iraq. 

In a true case of chickens coming home to roost, ISIS—an offshoot of the breakaway former al-Qaeda group in Iraq that killed de Mello—added to the brutality of the Syrian Civil War, both directly in its own barbaric acts of mass murder and mass destruction but also indirectly in dragging less extreme factions closer to its brutality level and giving the regime of Bashar al-Assad and later its Russian allies all the excuse they would need to employ their own barbaric tactics against any and all resistance, pointing to ISIS and making little-to-no distinction between ISIS and Syrians simply fighting for their freedom.  The Syrian Civil War was itself one of a number of failures of the Arab Spring that have turned people against each other rather than uniting them, was already a horror-show of bloody sectarianism bringing out the worst in people all-around by the time ISIS had marched to the outskirts of Baghdad in mid-2014. 

Israel’s right-wing leaders, from the late Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, likened their conflicts with the Palestinians and with Hezbollah incorrectly to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” just as Putin did with the Chechens, and prosecuted these conflicts with a ferocity that only empowered extremists in Hamas and Hezbollah (who do their part to empower extremity in Israeli politics) and has helped make the prospect for peace all but impossible for now, destroying Oslo and the peace process. 

The same increasing sectarianism and tribalism has led to a cruel callousness with which the Saudi-led coalition has prosecuted the war in Yemen and has created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in a half-century.

Just to look at a few other major locations: India is increasingly a hotbed of religious violence, China is engaged in the mass-cultural and religious destruction of its Uighur Muslim minority in its worst oppression since Mao, a genocide against the Muslim-minority Rohingya is happening in Burma, the South China Sea is becoming an increasingly nationalistically confrontational arena, and ethnic and/or religious tensions are driving forces reigniting wars in central Africa, from the Central African Republic to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to South Sudan.

While Americans were focused on the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, including two wars overseas, the Bush Administration and Republicans rammed through a disastrous series of regulatory and economic moves that more than helped set the stage for the 2008 global financial crises. The hardships caused, intensified, and/or perpetuated by the near-collapse of the global financial system created and/or facilitated a state where masses of citizens globally were experiencing regression in their well-being, fostering much of the instability, political division, violent conflict, and rage at the status quo mentioned above.

As people looked for easy targets to blame, economic setbacks gave way to even greater racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious resentment; too many non-whites blamed white people in general for their ills in an unproductive way, painting with a broad brush and alienating possible white allies while energizing angry whites, while, even more importantly, whites laughably and ignorantly looked at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as the roots of all their frustrations. Racial unrest exploded across America over the past few years, and white identity politics, more so than the economy, have brought us Brexit and Trump, though obviously there are relationships between the two. At this point, tribal secessionism in Europe is rising, in Spain with Catalonia and in the UK with Scotland (both having enthusiastic Russian support).

In hindsight, Brexit in 2014 was an obvious herald of Trump’s triumph in 2016 (both dramatically and in determining ways aided materially and abetted by the Russians). By 2016, poor whites in Appalachia and elsewhere were told to check their privilege, while nonwhites moving into the suburbs and in other communities were told to go back to where they came from. The resulting election (with the help of a massive, concerted state-sponsored Russian effort), was the most racially polarizing since the Civil Rights era a half-century earlier, a “whitelash” (to quote Van Jones from election night) of white nationalism that revealed the depths of American tribalism and made American politics in many ways as banal as those of the former the Soviet Republic of Georgia and many other places consumed by ethnic division.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

*****

Since Trump’s win, the world has only plunger deeper into tribal division. The U.S. presidency—the single largest public media organ in global politics—has gone virtually silent on human rights, tolerance, respect for other cultures, and appreciation of diversity, with the consequences far transcending the verbal arena. This is a dramatic swing considering that human rights have been a major theme of U.S. foreign policy (even with all its shortcomings) for most of America’s modern history regardless of which party was in the White House. Concurrently, the forces on the other side of those stances have only too eagerly filled the void, and often with the help of Putin’s Kremlin.

As I noted not long ago, small-minded tribalism was a major factor in the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and it is a major factor in the current unraveling of the West.

Regrettably, a tennis match is now—like everything else in the current cultural landscape—a frontline battle in a vicious global war of tribalism. This tremendous tribal tidal shift can be traced to 9/11, a tombstone not just for thousands of Americans and those who died in the ensuing misguided wars, but also for an era of humanity transcending petty differences. 9/11 is not just a time to mourn the dead, but what is to come, the petty creatures we have become, and the alternate world of lost opportunities: the what-might-have-beens if that glorious march forward—even with all its inconsistencies, bumps, and steps backwards—had continued without the slamming of planes into buildings and without the sad, counterproductive responses launched from what can be called, in hindsight, the ashes of hope.

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

See my related Trumpism and Tribalism Run Amok in the Middle East for Small Wars Journal

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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

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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 20, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2018 (republished in slightly edited form on the English version of Al Bawaba News on June 20th, 2018, and by The Muslim Times on June 20th)

AFP/Getty Images

AMMAN — Recent protests have led some analysts to characterize Jordan as weak and going through destabilization. Instead, Jordan has pretty much schooled the entire Middle East (and, indeed, many other places) on protests, civic engagement, and how government can and should respond to both. Rather than produce fear and apprehension in the eyes of analysts and other observers, Jordan and Jordanians have rightfully earned a tremendous amount of respect, whether or not those that should show this respect realize this.

Longstanding Grievances Flowing Together

Something remarkable has happened—is happening—in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the past few weeks. The small but relatively very stable country has seen a confluence of several trends and grievances that have spilled over—erupted would be rather too strong—into a flowering of national protest.

One long-running trend in for Jordan is that it has been a dumping ground for refugees from various regional conflicts for years now (really decades, but especially of late). The majority of today’s Jordanians are Palestinian refugees from the wars with Israel and those refugees’ descendants. A decade ago, Jordan was hosting from around 700,000, perhaps as many as a million, Iraqi refugees. Today, there are some 1.4 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, including informal, unregistered refugees, comprising roughly 20 percent of the small Kingdom’s total population. The Syrian refugee influx, in particular, has had serious negative economic consequences for Jordan, especially in terms of soaring rent increases, food price increases, and increased youth unemployment, with Syrian refugees costing Jordan some six percent of its GDP, or about one-quarter of Jordan’s yearly governmental revenue, roughly $2.5 billion a year according to a 2016 World Bank report.

Many Jordanians see the conflicts driving these refugees to Jordan as being driven and orchestrated by the U.S. (conspiratorially, so much so that, after four years in Jordan, I have yet to hear a Jordanian that blames the American people, whom they usually see as pawns being manipulated by elites, and many do not even blame Trump, Obama, Bush, or other past presidents, seeing them as puppets of a mysterious international cabal) and Saudi Arabia.

With recent Saudi comments and moves indicating an informal alliance of common interests between Saudi Arabia and Israel, many in Jordan (especially Palestinian) see the Saudis as selling out to Israel, and feelings towards Saudi Arabia in Jordan are far from warm.

Indeed, there is a perception among many Arabs that there is an emerging U.S.-Israeli-Saudi axis that is throwing the Palestinians under the proverbial bus. And it was in this context that Donald Trump threw more gas onto the fire when he announced in early December, 2017, that he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking decades of official U.S. neutrality on the subject (both Israelis and Palestinians claims Jerusalem as their capital) and prejudicing the Israeli side in any future negotiations. After the first Friday noon prayers (the Muslim equivalent of Christian Sunday mass) at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina) after Trump’s announcement, worshippers, of course, vented anger at Israel and the U.S., but were also very vocal in blaming Saudi Arabia, too, for seeming to at least tacitly support the U.S. decision behind the scenes. Saudi Arabia is also a driving force behind the rebellion against Assad, particularly in its support of Sunni rebel militias challenging his rule, and yet, Saudi Arabia has not taken in a single official Syrian refugee, content to let Jordan and others shoulder that burden despite the Saudis intense involvement in Syria.

That same Friday, this led to massive (but peaceful) protests in Amman, witnessed by yours truly. 

Protests were hardly limited to Jerusalem, Amman, or Jordan.

In particular, protests have been organized mainly by Hamas in Gaza—under an Israeli semi-siege for over a decade—since late March, protests in which many thousands of Palestinians have approached, and even rushed, Gaza’s militarized border manned by Israel. While the vast majority of these protesters, including women and children, have not been armed, many have still thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as rolled burning tires towards them and sent kites with burning material attached over Gaza’s border with Israel in an attempt to start fires on the Israeli side. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded by these actions, but Israeli gunfire against the protesters have killed over 120 Palestinians and wounded another 3,800 more in actions much of the rest of the world calls disproportionate.

Many Jordanians, even those not of Palestinian descent, feel an intense emotional connection to their fellow Arabs—often kin—living across the Jordan river under some form of Israeli control. Thus, is has been very difficult these past few months for them to accept Trump’s decision and to witness the violence from the Israeli army in Gaza meted out on the protesters.

The bloodiest day was the day of the official move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a day in which at least 58 people were killed and several thousand more injured.

The move was officially made on May 14th of this year, on the Western calendar reckoning of Israeli’s Independence Day, in this case the 70th anniversary the end of the British Mandate and the declaration of Israel as a state, an event Palestinians remember as al-Nabka, the Catastrophe, in which some 700,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during a conflict in which the Jewish state of Israel was established on most of British Mandate Palestine, an area which had been majority Arab for many centuries. The embassy move in 2018 came just two days before the holy month of Ramadan began, a month of intense day-long fasting, reflection, and spirituality. But with this Ramadan coming right after U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the bloody Gaza protests, and the relocation of America’s embassy to disputed Jerusalem, from a Palestinian-centered standpoint (a view shared by an overwhelming majority of Jordanians, whether they have Palestinian blood in them or not), this was a Ramadan with all too much that was unpleasant left to linger in the minds of Jordanians as they engaged in deep reflection.

Tone-Deaf Policies Lead to a Chorus of Protests

In the months leading up to this, there was another form of violence occupying the minds of Jordanians besides the violence in Gaza: the assault of steady price increases throughout 2018. The year began in January with a series of tax increases in January, first increasing sales tax and taxes on a range of goods, including cigarettes (extremely popular in Jordan: Jordan has the 8th-highest smoking rate in the world), with the first major decrease in bread subsidies since 1996 announced shortly after, leading to the main staple bread in Jordan going up in price by 60%. The move sparked unrest back in 1996, and the deeply unpopular moves to start this year were also met with some protests. Early in 2018, Jordanians in general were estimated to have to increase spending by 10-15 percent just to maintain their current living standards after these changes.

A least a proposed tax increase on medicines that month was canceled after over half of the parliament voiced disapproval, though.

But more pain was to come.

While in February, Jordan raised the minimum wage, a tax increase was levied that month on non-essential goods and the government also raised taxes on cigarettes again and on widely-consumed soft drinks and telecom services, including mobile phone plans and credit used by virtually everyone. There were further increases in electricity in March (sparking some protests) and also in April, and in In May, it was more increases, a minor one in fuel and an over 13 percent increase in electricity costs.

While in these months, the increases in electricity excluded households that consumed lower amounts of electricity, that exemption was absent for an announced whopping 23.5 percent increase in electricity prices for June that was also accompanied by a smaller fuel price increase.

The series of price increases and proposed tax increases were in part a result of an agreement made between the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) and the Jordanian government. Despite a lot of ignorance and conspiracy theories about what the IMF is and what it does, it is not simply a tool of U.S. control and “neoliberal” “imperialism” designed to keep countries like Jordan poor and weak, though, as with so many things in this region, it is easy to understand why such misperceptions and conspiracy theories flourish. In reality, the IMF is a global financial institution that is part of the United Nations group of institutions and is somewhat economically proportionately dominated by the wealthiest nations with the biggest economies and that contribute the most to the IMF’s fund. The U.S., as the largest contributor and world’s largest economy, has by far the largest voting share (less than 17 percent) in the IMF, and, to be sure, it wields a lot of influence in the institution beyond that voting share, but the point to recognize here is that the IMF is a broad international financial institution that generally reflects the collective will of the world’s largest economies, and if they decide to provide financial assistance to other countries, like any loaner, they have a right to attach conditions to those nations who want their money. At the same time, the agreement for a $723 million IMF loan between Jordan and the IMF—reached back in 2016—seems to have clearly overestimated Jordan’s capability to enact reforms at the desired pace and significantly underestimated the continuing problems posed by the refugee crisis and other maladies plaguing Jordan, and that should have been clear to both sides when the agreement was made.

Even before June’s price increases were announced, on May 22nd, a major proposed income tax law overhaul designed to keep pace with agreed-to IMF reforms was approved by the Cabinet, to be sent to and debated by the parliament. This tax law would have greatly increased the corporate tax rates, empowered tax collection capabilities to deal with tax evasion, and doubled the income tax base (only 4 percent of Jordanians currently pay income tax).

By May 30th, Jordanian civil society had organized a massive general strike of the professional middle class: doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, pharmacists, journalists, and others, along with some of the key related professional organizations and unions. Other Jordanians, in particular youth, joined the protests. 

A tone-deaf government then announced the aforementioned June major price hikes the following day, the day before Friday prayers and during Ramadan, no less, when fasting and reflective moods would only contribute to the agitation felt by the new policy proposals after many months of steady increases. In fact, one could not think of a much worse time than on a Thursday during Ramadan, the day before main Friday noon prayers—the traditional time to go through with major protests in the Muslim world—and coming so soon after the Jerusalem-Gaza drama that affected so many Jordanians so deeply on an emotional level.

These Jordanians may not have been able to stop violence in Gaza or reverse Trump’s Jerusalem decision, but they were not going to look at these latest government tax increases and price hikes with the same spirit of frustrated (if rage-filled) resignation. Unlike Donald Trump and Israel, Jordanians would expect their government to listen, and they would be sure to make sure their government heard their voices loud and clear.

The same day as the announcement, and just one day after the civil-society-orchestrated general strike against the tax law, a far more spontaneous series of mass protests broke out throughout Jordan against the utility price increases specifically and in general against the overall price/tax increases. As noted, the timing all but guaranteed mass protests on Friday, after noon prayers. Seeing the mass public outcry, later that day King Abdullah II froze the just-announced price hikes, responding swiftly to what was clearly widespread public pushback against them.

Yet the protests did not diminish, not Friday night, not throughout the weekend. If anything, they grew and intensified around the country. No one-off temporary freeze on price hikes would suffice: the people were focused wanted an indication of deeper change, also taking up the cause of the earlier civil society protests against the changes to the income tax law; if anything, the two seemingly separate protests had clearly merged into one nation-wide movement.

These were the most intense protests in Jordan focused on domestic policy since the 2011-2012 “hirak” protests over a range of issues that were concurrent with the heyday of the Arab Spring, then fluctuating between price (especially gas) increases and tribal and Islamist issues, peaking in early 2011 and late 2012, with a few notable flare-ups in violence that were still ultimately minimal, especially considering the regional context.

Arab Spring 2.0?

Unlike the wider Arab Spring protests, despite some exceptions the overwhelming focus of the 2011-2012 protests were not overthrowing the government but on calling for action on specific policies. Those protests were more sporadic and less representative of the overall population that the recent protests that just took place, which had a very unified, mass-participatory character that transcended what happened before even as Jordanian protesters and civil society organizations built upon what happened back then.

In fact, Jordanians in the past few weeks seemed largely committed to avoiding the mistakes of the larger Arab Spring with these latest protests, almost as if they had studied them in detail and took away specific lessons of what not to do, making clear their peaceful intentions and enthusiastically waving abundant Jordanian flags. The same could be said of both government leaders and security forces. If 2011-2012 could really be seen as a major emergence of civil society, even a birth (or rebirth?) of it in Jordan, then 2018 can be said to be Jordanian civil society’s coming of age, perhaps even an Arab Spring 2.0 that can avoid much of the tragedy of the first iteration.

As the 2018 protests continued into the following week, on Monday the King sacked Prime Minister Hani Mulki, who had stood by seeing the bill through to a parliamentary debate and had thus drawn the ire of protesters. But still the protests continued.  So the King appointed reform-minded, liberally-inclined Omar Razzaz as the new prime minister, who had been a supporter of civil society and had also held a significant position at the World Bank and was thus poised to be able to balance the competing interests in question. Yet still the protests continued, and for several days, until Razzaz promised to withdraw the income tax law. He promised dialogue and an unprecedented, robust engagement with civil society. The King himself directed that such an approach be undertaken, too, so it seems clear that Razzaz will have support from the highest levels of the Jordanian system.

It truly seems as if the people and civil society have won: by all indications since Razzaz took over, the government will take into account input from the people and civil society, especially on reforming the tax law, and it seems highly unlikely that the same attempted price hikes will be tried again to that degree anytime soon, as the people made clear they were able to organize quickly and sustain their pressure if only cosmetic adjustments were made. Thus, after the eighth day of what were almost entirely peaceful protests, after it was announced the tax law changes would be tabled, the protests basically ended on Thursday, June 7th, one of their epicenters in Amman’s Fourth Circle near the Prime Ministry with a far smaller group of young people celebrating their achievement that evening, replacing the protesting crowds of earlier, far tenser nights.

In fact, things seem to be coming together nicely for Jordan: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait just pledged some $2.5 billion in aid to Jordan, the EU has indicated that it will keep supporting Jordan economically, and Jordan has indicated it will push the IMF for a slowdown in the reform plan. Together, these three things could really alleviate the strain of the increasing economic burdens on Jordan’s weary population.

It is probably safe to say that, when the civil society-organized strike began on Wednesday, May 30th, that nobody imagined that things would be where they are now. In a region—heck, a world—starved of positive political developments and hope, this series of events in underappreciated Jordan is nothing short of remarkable.

*****

A Model the Cynics and Extremists Can’t Easily Dismiss

In the end, Jordan—its people, its civil society, its security forces, its government, and the King—all faced a series of challenges in the past week and then some; all overall conducted themselves in a deliberative, focused, organized, respectful, restrained way. The preceding adjectives are basically impossible use if you are trying to describe the angry hordes of protesters and activists, both right and left, that seem to monopolize protest scenes in the West and many other places of late, as well as both traditional and social media and can, therefore and unfortunately, be more effectively described as ineffective mobs content to do what satisfies their emotional needs as opposed to doing anything that might even be remotely described as helping to bring about effective change. 

This was not a group of radicals hijacking a disciplined civil society movement, as has happened far too often in history.

This was no amorphous Occupy rabble, no Tea Party mob, no Women’s March asserting their collective identity as a gender against a misogynistic president but not having any overwhelmingly clear aims.

This was not a Tahrir Square crowd vaguely demanding unspecified massive change or a whole new government, and this was certainly not a mass of Palestinians calling for a total reversal of the entire status quo.

No, this was a disciplined, focused, restrained coming together of civil society, the middle class, and the working class. 

It was the population of Jordan speaking out more or less in one clear voice, about clear specific desires on specific issues.

And this is a model the whole world can learn from, as much of it seems to have forgotten that this is how change happens: incrementally, with discipline, organization, patience, and non-violence.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

As opposed to weapons, Molotov cocktails, or rocks, protesters chanted peaceful slogans and even handed refreshments to security forces, and the security forces returned the favor. Only very small numbers on either side were looking for trouble: the rest were looking to make a difference and/or keep things peaceful. There was respect all around here in Jordan over the past few weeks, between protesters and security forces, between the people and government, between civil society and both the people and the government.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

That’s right: tiny little Jordan has just schooled the world as how to mount an effective protest movement that leverages civil society to bring about meaningful change, bringing the people and the government closer together in their positions on specific policies.

What is remarkable is that so few people either here in Jordan or in the international media seem to understand what has happened, and how urgently this needs to be celebrated and respected and—most importantly—copied.

In the end, a reformer who is perfect for this moment now leads Jordan’s parliament, the two major problems—the tax law amendments and the price hikes that were the focus of protesters—will not proceed as originally planned, civil society showed it is now truly a force to be reckoned with in Jordanian politics, the government showed its people and the world it is ready to listen and respond to the people, and the people showed all would-be protesters how to get the job done.

If you’re Jordanian, you can hold your head up high after a truly special week in Jordan’s history. And if you’re not Jordanian, swivel that head to pay attention to Jordan, and be sure to take notes.

See a related article by the same author in Venture Magzine: Relief and Development: Ending the Zero-Sum Myth

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. 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 

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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 28, 2018

by Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 28th, 2018

Support Brian and his work by donating here

AMMAN — Israeli public opinion is, to quote The Economist, “a remarkably forgetful and fickle force.” The same can be said for Israeli politics in general. So it is hardly a stretch to say that measuring Israeli public opinion’s effects on Israeli policy is a significant challenge. And one of the most controversial of all of Israel’s policies over the years has been that of creating and expanding Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory over several decades. Especially given what a lightning-rod issue the settlements are and, in typical Israeli fashion, how complicated everything about them has become, this is a question worth asking.

Challenging Data for a Challenging Question

Almost as soon as I began this project, I knew there were many challenges that would make it impossible for any kind of definitive, clear, unqualified conclusions to emerge from this exploration, in the sense that public opinion cannot simply be said to be Variable A affecting settlement policy, Variable B, in such-and-such a way.

Such simplicity is as elusive as the “Two-State Solution” itself.

For one thing, Israel is a small country, and though it is powerful for its size, it is subject to a remarkable amount of factors from within and without, and its sensitive reactions to these factors are often intense, with Israel’s increasingly volatile neighborhood (and often volatile involvement in that neighborhood) only compounding these effects. Therefore, rather than look at public opinion and settlement policy as some sort of isolated factors, it is essential to account, at the very least, for some of the other major forces that can account for shifts in policy and opinion. Thus, when I was assembling my data points, I knew it would be essential to frame shifts in both Israeli public opinion and Israeli settlement policy against the backdrop of the more salient events affecting Israel, generally, those that could generally affect the feelings of Israelis and, specifically, those that could affect settlement policy. This approach should be more than obvious in the dataset I have uploaded here (this will be an ongoing project, so check back frequently for changes).

As time went on and I looked more and more at the different surveys, I also realized that measuring public opinion in Israel carries a unique set of challenges in contrast to studying similar subjects in the United States. 

The U.S. is a huge country, with hundreds of millions of people spread across a continent; Israel has far less than even ten million people squeezed into a tiny sliver of the Mediterranean coast. During major U.S. elections, political polls are ubiquitous, and even not during election cycles, major issues are polled often. Whatever the polls, there are usually long histories of polling by that firm and other major polling firms, asking relatively similar questions and often the same questions.

Israeli political polling is another beast entirely: there are far, far fewer pollsters, and there is little consistency in how questions are phrased between pollsters and, sometimes, even with the same polling outfit. Also, because there are far fewer data points the polling data must be taken with much more of a grain of salt than American polling.

We simply don’t have ten or even twelve years of data that says “Do you approve or disapprove of Israeli settlements?” What this means is that there is a broad array of approaches to categorizing the data and presenting it. The only agenda I pursued in my presentation was one of simplicity, and I take responsibility for the costs such an approach carries. For example, instead of a question asking “Are you for or against evacuating settlements?” a question might ask “Are you a.) for removing all settlements b.) for removing most settlements except major ones near the Green Line [i.e., 1967 borders] c.) for removing settlements from the Green Line and illegal outposts d.) for removing illegal outposts e.) against any removals?” In this case, I would (and basically did) combine a.), b.), and c.) to refer to serious support for full or partial settlement removal, ignored d.) as not really being conclusive of sentiment supporting settlement removal in general, and took e.) for being against removal. Other may have found it more beneficial to include all these nuances or created different categories and groupings. I opted for the ones I chose, again, for the sake of simplicity, but I welcome comments and suggestions.

Even with the limitations and subjective approach I took, I still feel there is value in looking at this data thus arrayed, and I can say with confidence that no one else has undertaken a similar effort as comprehensive as mine, at least not in English but also not likely in Hebrew, either. As imperfect as the data may be, it can still help to give a relative sense of the forces at work. See the dataset here (data does not include East Jerusalem)

The Inconsistent Effects of Public Opinion on Israeli Settlement Policy

Looking at my (provisional) compilation of the data, in the years just before the Palestinians’ First Intifada (uprising) at the end of 1987, over half of Israelis (as high as 57%) were inclined to annex Palestinian land in part or in full, therefore making many or all the settlements permanent Israeli communities, and support for “land for peace” initiatives was below 50% (as low as 39%). In reaction to the (relatively moderate-to-low-scale) violence of the Intifada, public opinion reversed: sentiment supporting “land for peace” began to steadily increase, and support for annexation dipped below 50% and continued to decline as the Intifada continued. By 1991, the positions has essentially reversed, with one poll showing 58% for “land for peace” style ideas and only 40% for annexation.

Yet with the exception of a small dip in 1989, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s hardline government continued with steady settlement population increases and construction expansion, with the highest settler population increases in 1987 and 1991, which also had dramatically higher percentage increases in settlement construction (over 144% and over 314%, respectively). Though the latter coincided with the peak years of the Soviet-Jewish Aliya (immigration) to Israel, U.S. president George H. W. Bush still felt that Shamir’s government was going far too far on settlements, and exerted heavy pressure on him and Israel to curtail settlement growth and construction. Along with changing public sentiment, this helped precipitate the rise of Yitzhak Rabin’s pro-peace Labor government in 1992, which would severely curtail settlement construction, though not so much settlement population growth. 

Here would be one of the times that Israeli public opinion on settlements seemed to lead and push Israel, its politicians, and its government on settlement policy. 

The year before and year of Rabin’s assassination were two of the deadliest years in all of the 1990s for Israelis in terms of Palestinian violence, and, according to one survey, sympathy for settlers among the Israeli public rose in the year after Rabin’s assassination, even as settlement activity was being curtailed. This same year was when Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud, pro-settlement forces pushed Labor out of power, and it is ironic that under Netanyahu’s three years in power, sentiment (with some vacillation) seemed to increase and remain high for “land for peace” (60s and high 50s) initiatives and for evacuating settlements (high 60s/low 70s), while support for annexation was far lower than before (mid-20s). Yet Netanyahu—who had himself hold the housing ministry responsible for settlement construction along with the office of prime minister for the entirety of his prime ministership—pushed ahead robustly with settlement expansion.

This may in part help to explain the rise of Labor and peace candidate Ehud Barak’s government in 1999, under whose watch public opinion in several surveys increased sharply against settlements and rise sharply for “land for peace.”

But this would be short-lived. Under the intense diplomatic efforts of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat engaged in intense U.S.-mediated negotiations in 2000, and settlement expansion activity by the Israeli government accordingly fell sharply. But these talks fell apart, with some encouragement by Barak’s rival, Likudnik Ariel Sharon, who could have been fairly said to have helped instigate the Second Intifada late in 2000. Amidst a dramatic rise in violence—far worse than anything during the First Intifada and the rest of the 1990s—Sharon, the famously harsh warrior, toppled Barak’s government amid plummeting support for “land for peace” and settlement evacuation, a pessimism that was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks in America.

Previously, Labor had ridden waves of anti-settlement and pro-“land for peace” sentiment with Rabin and Barak, and Likud had tried (but failed) to lead public opinion with Netanyahu. Sharon, it seems, would succeed where Netanyahu had failed. But Sharon would have a unique and surprising agenda: even while crushing the Palestinian uprising with overwhelming force, Sharon would shepherd his people towards a historic disengagement, a sort of a “land for peace” led by an archconservative, much like strong anti-Communist Nixon would credibly able to normalize relations with Mao’s China.

Under Sharon, Arafat died and the settler population steadily if moderately expanded, even as Sharon withdrew all 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 (even allowing for that, both the settler population and settlement construction saw a net increase that year), though Sharon’s government definitely curtailed construction of new units.

The pullout from Gaza caused a rift in the pro-settler Likud party, so much so that Sharon broke off and formed a new, centrist Kadima party, which led a new government that would significantly curtail support for settlement expansion. 

But the next year, Sharon would fall into a coma, while Hamas would win elections in the evacuated Gaza Strip and Israel would become embroiled in an embarrassing and controversial war in Lebanon. Amidst these developments, Israeli anti-settler and “land for peace” sentiment fell sharply, even as Sharon’s Kadima successor, Ehud Olmert, would risk major peace talks with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. When these fell apart, more conflict in Gaza ensued and set the stage for Netanyahu’s comeback as prime minister. Since then, opinion has been conflicted, with volatile opinions on whether settlements should be evacuated and a tightening of pro/con land-for-peace sentiment and an increase in pro-annexation sentiment up until the major conflict with Gaza in 2014. Sentiment on settlements under Netanyahu remained divided up through 2014, so it seems ironically fitting that in his right-wing, pro-settler government, a moderate has been giving the housing ministry. The major declines in government support for the settlers during this period coincided with Obama’s first-term pressure on Israel to freeze settlement activity and his second-term peace effort, led by John Kerry.

Conclusion: It’s Complicated

In summary, there is no overall consistent effect of public opinion on settlement policy. In the 90s, Labor seemed to chase public sentiment as it turned against settlements and for “land-for-peace,” but violence and an assassination meant this did not lead to any long-term peace deal or long-term change in settlement policy. Likud tried twice—first, failing, second, succeeding—to shape public opinion and succeeded, but that led to a strong-willed Sharon forming a new party, and his coma mirrored Rabin’s assassination attempt in seeing efforts fail before new leadership acted to halt new trends in government policy, in both cases, Netanyahu. Thus, it would seem public opinion is at best only as strong a factor as individual leadership, violence from Palestinians, American pressure, and other x-factor events, and that opinion is highly susceptible to all of these factors. It is public opinion that is more variable then, when compared with relatively consistent settlement policy, perhaps best exemplified in the net increases in settlement construction and population growth the same year Sharon took about 8,500 settlers out of Gaza. 

Thus, whether public opinion shapes settlement policy depends on a number of factors, and is hardly the most dominant of factors affecting that policy.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. 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 

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!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 11, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 11th, 2016

Clockwise: Facebook, CBS News, AP

UPDATE: July 18th, 2016: In light of today’s attack on police in Baton Rouge, I was sadly reminded that my article discussing U.S. and Israeli counterinsurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine discusses dynamics that are wholly applicable to these shooting by and of police in America: Counterinsurgency (COIN) & Civilians: Israeli vs. American Approaches

AMMAN — Yet again, I set to writing my thoughts with a heavy and exasperated heart. Sometimes I feel like I am in the movie Groundhog Day, one that is decidedly more dark and violent. 

A Catalogue of Warning Signs and a Middle-Eastern Mirror

I go back through the articles I’ve written over the last few years, and common themes emerge, common themes of repeated bigotry and violence, fear and hate, ignorance and lack of understanding, terrorism and oppression, and societies tending to react in counterproductive ways to all of these problems.  It seemed years ago, we in the West could look at Iraqis, Afghans, Israelis, Palestinians, and more recently Syrians and Yemenis, among others, just to use the Middle East as an example, and say “Wow, those crazy people can’t stop killing each other, and sure can’t stop the drivers that lead to the violence and the killing and its cyclical reoccurrence.”

Then the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson happened. Along with the deaths of Eric Garner, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, the earlier episode with Trayvon Martin, and other less-well-publicized killings by police. People were angry. Protests were happening all across the country. The largest civil disturbance in the country since the 1992 L.A. riots. People demanded change. Months, a few years, after these events, more of the same: 123 blacks killed by police so far in 2016, including two of the most recent, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, killed in obviously unjust circumstances that were caught on video, one day after the other. And the day after that, 5 Dallas Police officers were murdered, 7 others wounded, by a man who wanted to kill white police officers in revenge for the aforementioned shootings; 3 days, 3 shootings; those 3 days were unlike any other in America in recent memory.

This reminds me, after Ferguson and other high-profile wrong killings of black men by policy officers, of when two New York City police officers were murdered in cold blood by a black man, apparently in part in retaliation for wrongful police killings of black men, late in 2014. It was small and isolated, but it was a form of terrorism. The Dallas incident appears to be more of the same.

As someone who lives in the Middle East, I find that this series of American events reeks of much of the internecine violence here: some groups, often minorities, have grievances with a state government that abuses them, and a cycle of violence between heavy handed government security forces and enraged members of the victimized community(ies) ensues. Sunnis and Shiites/Houthis/Alawites; Kurds and Turks; Israelis and Palestinians, etc. etc. With an explosion of rage in American, European, and global politics, and more violent behavior than we are accustomed to coming at times from both Donald Trump supporters and Bernie Sanders supporters here in America, with racial resentment, division, and prejudice seemingly on the rise in America, I am really worried that we are standing at an abyss, far too familiar in conflict zones in the Middle East and elsewhere, where we are looking at a transition from semi-regular but semi-isolated violence incidents and transitioning into something of a genuine cycle of violence between relatively small numbers of bad actors in both parties (police and African-Americans) whose gaps between each other politics has failed to bridge. After all, no matter where in the world you live, anarchy and violence are under the surface, waiting to erupt, once the hard-won, painstakingly built yet thin veneer of civilization is removed, even in the United States.

The Frustrating Impotence of a Wordsmith?

I’ve repeatedly called for people to take a step back from this abyss, after Ferguson, after San Bernardino, after the Charleston attack, after the Brexit vote, after the Paris attacks, after the Brussels attack, throughout the rise of Trump and Sanders, after Orlando, and throughout the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If I had any illusion of self-importance before, I can report back that, don’t worry, my calls seem to have gone unheeded. If I may pay myself one compliment, however, I cans say that after over a decade-and-a-half of studying, conflict, war, terrorism, and genocide, that even now I can still feeldisappointment, depression, and dismay, and even if my ability to be shocked is being eroded, I haven’t become numb.

Sadly, though, I guess this article I am writing is just more of the same: words from someone who is fairly powerless, calling on all of us and many of our leaders to get our heads out of our asses. I fight my war not with bullets but with words, wondering if much of the rest of the world has lost its mind or not. Not sure if it will do any good, but I write and solider on I must, it’s who I am.

From Despair to Rage?

Black Americans are used to being mistreated in particular. They are used to feeling a mix of impotent rage, deep despair, a choking sadness. Their remarkable patience is being tested, has been tested, will be tested, and, frankly, they have been far more patient than most groups who have suffered such ill-treatment from their own societies and governments. They have every right to be enraged, to express this rage, and with such a long history, it’s hard to blame black Americans if they feel like giving up on the political process, and it should not be so alien as to be able to sympathize, or at least empathize, with those who would explore a continuation of politics by other means, to quote von Clausewitz, especially since America as a nation is one founded on an armed rebellion against and oppressive government.

To anyone in the black community considering giving up on politics and moving to political violence (though I know the vast majority of you aren’t), as a white American, I know it is unfair to ask or expect continued patience with white misrule. After suffering so much and for so long, desires of revenge and resistance and rage are understandable. But what is understandable, what are typical reactions of human nature and human emotions, is often not what will bring about the best result; don’t go down the road of political violence, it won’t help you or your community, and it will only make things worse, as the Middle East shows us.

To African-Americans, I say, the problem isn’t primarily you, it’s my fellow white Americans. 

The one positive thing I can say definitively is that there have never, ever before in American history been more white Americans who are more or less with you, and who are appalled and ashamed of whites’ collective past and present mistreatment of blacks and other minorities.

Right now, though, I must sadly say, far too many police offers for far too long have abused and still abuse their legal and physical power over black people, too often lethally (even a very recent non-comprehensive study that raised questions as to whether there was a racial disparity in the general use of lethal force found that there was a tremendous racial bias in the use of non-lethal force), and this abuse produces justified rage. And white Americans are too blithe and complacent—and therefore complicit—about all this. From the time they were first brought over as slaves even through Obama’s election and today, African-Americans and their descendants have been systematically treated horribly by society, individual, and government, and though in recent decades the degree of this maltreatment has been mitigated significantly, the disparity is still so massive on so many levels, and is, in fact, apparent in every possible measurable way, so massive are the inequalities still. While Americans can be proud of the general shrinking of that trajectory, we should still be ashamed of the awful disparities and injustices that are an everyday part of existence for most of black America. Considering all this, I am amazed at the remarkable patience of the African-American community, and am actually shocked that there is not more political violence from African-Americans; most other groups in the world would have and have reacted far more violently under similar circumstances. Whether in the relatively low numbers of slave rebellions, very little violent resistance to the state terrorism of Jim Crow, or the remarkable restraint of the black community today in the face of an epidemic of killings and maltreatment at the hands of officials who are supposed to protect and serve them, this restraint is undeniable.

From Rage to Radicalization? The Middle East vs. America 

But I am truly worried that a small number of extremists could begin to start targeting police and others in revenge for abuses by police and others. It is clear that much of white America already has too much racist paranoia and prejudice regarding people of color, too much ignorance about race (most whites remarkably think white people suffer from discrimination as much or even more than black people suffer from it), and even in 2016 the gap in views on race and racism between whites and black is astounding. And society, including even black Americans, are conditioned by society to feel prejudice towards blacks. This problems cannot be underestimated; if white people were being killed in the same proportions as black people by police, there would have been outrage and massive change already. But as D. L. Hughley pointed out on CNN in tears, white America is just too complacent with these black deaths, too willing to accept these killings. Under these circumstances, and in our time of rage, when social media and the internet tend to bring out the worst in human nature, when our nation by far has the highest per-capita civilian gun stockpile in the world, I fear the likelihood of violent terrorist reprisals against police and others is too high for us not to worry.

As situations in the Middle East have taught me, radicalization and terrorism are processes that often stem from long exposure to mistreatment with a feeling that there is no serious way to have your grievances redressed through peaceful political means. From Hamas and the PLO to even ISIS, from the PKK to the Iranian Revolutionaries to the Mahdi Army and others, I see violence—often through small violent radical movements or even from a significant number lone-wolf violent individuals—arise that generally succeeds in poisoning politics even more so than they were before and in pushing people farther away from each other, making them less receptive to each other’s narratives and less willing to compromise, let along consider “peace.” The intensify conflicts and make them much harder to resolve; and in the end, nobody seems to really “win” much anything.

Even a very tiny increase in the number of killings of police by black perpetrators in revenge would significantly increase what are already serious problems with white paranoia and anxiety over their status and also police militarization. And it would not matter if the vast majority of blacks would be opposed to this rise in violence; white America would look at black people with even more suspicion and unease, including the police; mistreatment of blacks would increase, leading to even more violent extremism from a fringe movement of blacks, and that fringe movement would likely grow, still a fringe, but a bigger one; white people would be less sensitive to the grievances of the black community, than they already are, seeing accommodation as giving into “terror,” and so on and so fort, to more hate and violence, to more political stagnation.

Think this sounds like it couldn’t happen here? Trust me on this, I’ve seen this sad sitcom play out in the Middle East over and over again. And in the year of Trump, we must extend the horrible depths of our imagination and consider what was recently unthinkable. And then, we must act to prevent such unthinkables.

A Week of Shootings and Possible Israeli-Palestinization of America

Reuters

More than any other single act in recent memory, the terrible shootings—terrorist shootings—of the police officers in Dallas right on the heels of the shootings in Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights are a reminder that the chances of such violence increase the longer legitimate grievances continue to be unaddressed or even have their existence denied.

Looking at Israel and Palestine, Israel occupied Palestinian territory starting in 1967, and began harsh military rule over Palestinian Arabs that denied that basic human rights and dignity, a rule designed to nip any peaceful, let alone militant, formation or organization of Palestinian nationalism in the bud, and, eventually, designed to facilitate the colonization and settlement of the territory by thousands of Israeli Jews, not subject to Israeli military law like the indigenous Palestinians, but to democratic Israeli civil law, an apartheid like-double standard. For the first 20 years of this occupation, only small groups of Palestinians, generally based and operating outside of the occupied Palestinian territory, conducted terrorist and guerilla attacks, but they were small and sporadic and the occupied Palestinians were not engaged in such activity on any significant level. But after 20 years of living under such a system, the Palestinians themselves erupted in a grassroots, spontaneous, violent uprising—and intifada—late in 1987, their patience with such treatment having reached their limit, catching both the Israeli authorities and Palestinians leadership by surprise. This uprisings, later ones, and later violent resistance would grow to include terrorist attacks on civilians that would leave hundreds of Israelis dead over the next three decades, and Israel’s responses often amounted to collective punishment of millions of Palestinians civilians and included military actions that generally kill far more civilians than militants, with thousands of Palestinian dead over the years. Now, chances for accommodation, let alone peace, seem further off than before, with hearts hardened, each side exhibiting an almost pathological ability to dehumanize the other side and an inability to empathize with or understand it. 

Very few Israelis acknowledge that the period from 1967-1987 was a window in which Israel had both the ability and responsibility—as the party with virtually all the power—to avoid the explosion of rage and violence, a twenty-year opportunity to treat the occupied Palestinians as humans and with dignity, to accommodate their legitimate aspirations and desires, to address their legitimate grievances. They absolutely failed, and failed miserably in this regard. And violence has now become the new normal between Israelis and Palestinians.

White America better realize that its window will not remain open forever, that the time to act and accommodate is now; I hope with all my heart that historians won’t be looking at America in this current period and say that the rise of a fringe black militancy that poisoned race relations and tore American society apart was born out of white American ignorance of and complacency with a status-quo that was unbearable for African-Americans, the way that Israeli-Palestinian violence was borne out of Israeli ignorance of and complacency with a status-quo that was unbearable for Palestinians. It would take far less than a Palestinian-style intifada to wreak havoc with what is already a fragile and weakening American social fabric. 

For the lessons Israelis and Palestinians and others in the Middle East teach us is that once real momentum behind violence grows and a cycle of violence emerges, the Pandora’s box of recurring civil conflict is extremely difficult to lid shut. 

Yes, there is a very real chance that the state terror meted out by local police and the government on people of color in America could result in a response of long-wolf or even budding terrorist organizational terrorism. Obviously, such violence should be condemned and this would be an awful choice made on the part of such self-styled “insurgents,” just like it is on the part of Palestinians under Israeli control. But arguably even worse would be to deny the state terrorism being carried out against black America of structural and, yes, physical violence, a state terror that for roughly a century was in large part deliberate by meticulous design, and though today it has been significantly mitigated and is now largely a unconscious program on the part of government and society, that it is no longer an excuse to ignore, be ignorant of, be complacent with, not take responsibility for, and not confront it head on, especially since for so long, so many voices in the black community have been so vocal in denouncing this system creates very oppressive conditions lived every day by millions of African-Americans for anyone willing to listen, but have been so long ignored or dismissed by white America.

Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Time for White America to Wake Up and for Whites Who Get It to Make Sure That Happens

Now, white America has a choice that only it has forced itself into: galvanize America’s political systems to act now towards justice, or set the stage for what could be a new normal of civil political violence, something of an Israeli-Palestinization of race relations and government-minority relations; few things are ever simply black-and-white, but this clearly is. To avoid a specter of significantly increased likelihood of the latter nightmare, a civil war needs to happen: not between white black, but within white America, between those who accept the clear reality and those who willfully and foolishly deny it. This fight will not be a physical one, but will be fought on Twitter and Facebook, on TV and in newspapers, on the phone and at the dinner table, during work breaks and city council meetings. Those who understand the reality must challenge the misinformation, mythology, and ignorance of those who would deny it and would fight necessary and just redress at every turn. 

Again, that is not to say that black-Americans are, as a group, threatening violence, but political violence would be a natural occurrence if the path of inaction is maintained. And there is nothing wrong with accommodating legitimately aggrieved groups to defuse tensions and potential conflict; doing so—doing the right thing—should never be thought of as “rewarding terror.” After all, what is politics but the chance to resolve disputes and solve problems peacefully? If peaceful means continually fail to bring about needed change, well, that is the story of the failure of governments all over the world, including democracies, and of the roots and emergence of violent conflict, themselves the natural byproduct of the failure of politics and governments. 

Right now, America is on the wrong path, and certainly not on the path to addressing the legitimate concerns of African-Americans. At a time when the world is exploding into rage, racism, violence, and terrorism, the right path forward in the near future is clear: serious, meaningful policing and criminal justice reform nationwide, at a national level or in a massive well-spring of local and state-led initiatives or both. As with so many things these days, the question is, will America—will white America—do the right thing? Or will it give in to ignorance, fear, hate, and violence? That, of course, remains to be seen.

See related article: A Ferguson Intifada: Why African-Americans are America’s Palestinians

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The entire series of disturbing events surrounding the Democratic Party’s state convention in Nevada, discussed in Part I, provides excellent insight into the condition I am labeling Sanders Derangement Syndrome. Weeks away from their national convention in Philadelphia, Democrats are right to worry about Sanders and his supporters: their willingness to use low-level violence and threats of disruption as political terrorism is both insidious and unacceptable, in addition to being incompatible with American political values and democracy. A detailed exploration here in Part II of just what Sanders Derangement Syndrome is will shed light on just how serious a threat it is to American democracy, a serious threat overshadowed and not given appropriate attention because of the larger spectacle of the Trump phenomenon.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 20, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2016

AP

JERUSALEM — Having seen a full-range display from the Sanders campaign recently in a number of telling ways, and, specifically, having gone through in detail the events surrounding the Nevada Democratic Party’s state convention controversies, we can now describe how the whole Nevada situation is an excellent prism through which to understand Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters on a more general level. Specifically, this means we can break down the very real phenomenon I am labeling Sanders Derangement Syndrome.

If there’s one thing that I am learning during this election cycle, it is that in many ways the far-left and the far-right do not “cancel each other out,” they simply both make things much worse in their own, sometimes similar, ways and can even feed off of each other, much like Hamas and Likud and other like-minded non-moderates feed off of each other in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Sanders and the Rise of the Tea Party of the Left

There were times during the Bush years and some of the Obama years when I really questioned whether Democrats had any spine, and I even considered registering as an independent a few times. But with the rise of the Tea Party, I increasingly grew proud to call myself a Democrat because of the Republican Party’s descent into extreme irrationality and silliness and the Democrats’ refusal to follow suit, with my party choosing rationality and compromise over hostility to facts and favoring results over “principles”.

But now I look at Sanders and his Sandernistas, and I have become horrified: they truly have become our own version of the Tea Party, cocooned in an alternative reality of “alternative” “news” media outlets like AlterNet.org, Salon.com, and USuncut (among others) that constantly praise Bernie Sanders as the second coming and political Messiah for America, preventing the permeation of much of anything that does not fit their worldview or agenda; such outlets constantly demonize Hillary Clinton and moderates in the most extreme manner while buoying false hopes and delusional expectations. Wrapped snug as babies in this blanket of generally one-sided coverage, Sanders supporters have become hostile to facts, context, and nuance; they are brimming with anger and ideology at the expense of being level-headed and exhibiting any shred of practicality, and are determined to push their views without compromise and to both “Bern” the system in the hopes of a clean start and “Bern” those with whom they disagree as punishment for holding different views.

This type of nonsense brought the Republican Party to the brink of self-destruction this spring, helped to bring about the rise of Donald Trump and see to his successful hostile hijacking of the Party “Establishment” and apparatus, and history shows us that the Tea Party may have cost Republicans control of the Senate and may have been a deciding factor in Romney’s 2012 defeat at the hands of Obama. I tremble for the damage this type of nonsense might do to the Democratic Party. I am a proud Democrat today in part because I am so proud of Democrats’ pragmatism, respect for data and context, and willingness to compromise; the Sandinista wing of the Democratic Party rejects all of this. Furthermore, Sanders and his people are engaging in a series of behaviors that are dangerous for the health of democracy. And all this and much more was on display throughout the Nevada state convention drama, which is fully emblematic of Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters.

Sanders Derangement Syndrome 

Specifically, we have the clear symptoms of Sanders Derangement Syndrome:

1.) Sanders and his fans exhibit blatant hypocrisy:

a.) Bernie and his supporters claim to be champions of democracy, but have no problems favoring undemocratic means when it suits them

Just to recap what we discussed in Part I: Clinton won Nevada by over 5%, and Sanders supporters didn’t have any problem disenfranchising the voters of Clark County (home of Las Vegas and most of the state’s delegates) when Clinton’s supporters failed to organize at the subsequent county convention, giving Sanders more state delegates from there going to the state convention even though Clinton won the county by almost 10 percentage points. Some Sanders supporters happily talked about their (mistaken) prospects of being able to win the state in defiance of the voters. In the same vein, Sanders has been complaining about the undemocratic nature of superdelegates for months, but now has no problem courting them to pick him and overturn the clear majority of voters, who have favored Clinton over Sanders by a margin of about three million votes as of May 19th no matter how you calculate it (and even if superdelegates were allocated proportionately to the votes, he’d still be losing by a lot). 

And while Bernie is happy to complain about superdelegates and closed primaries (primaries where, e.g., only Democrats can vote in a Democratic primary), he has said precious little about caucuses, which are abominations of democracy that involve public peer pressure, favor the passionate and outspoken, and discriminate against the working class, producing a result that generally does not actually represent the will of voters statewide like primaries do. As a case in point, the Washington State caucuses produced a Bernie win over Hillary, 74% to 27%, with 230,000 participants, which was the basis for how the state awarded its delegates; in a nonbinding primary, Clinton won over Sanders, roughly 52%-47%, with over 800,000 participants, and that contest was obviously a better representation of the will of the people, with people being able to vote all day, quickly, and privately, and with far, far more people voting. Likewise in Nebraska, where Sanders won 57%-43% with about 33,000 participants in that state’s caucus, and which was the basis for the state awarding its delegates; in the non-binding state primary, Clinton won 53% to 47% with over 80,000 participants. It’s pretty easy to see why Sanders is so quiet on caucuses: like most politicians, he’s pretty mum on things that benefit him (note to Sanders supporters: this is something that particularly irks non-Sanders supporters since his mantra is basically “I’m a holier-than-thou political white knight, not like other politicians!”). In fact, mostly because of caucuses favoring passionate Bernie-supporting-types, being less democratic, and having far lower voter turnout than primaries, Sanders has earned many more delegates than he would have otherwise and more delegates than the percent of the vote he has won, rending laughable the claim that the overall system is “rigged” against him.

b.) Sanders and his supporters condemn most other politicians and their tactics, but then copy those tactics when such tactics are convenient for them 

I know there is some overlap here from part a.), but we can point to when Clinton’s campaign outorganized the Sanders people at the state convention, after the Sanders people outorganized the Clinton people at the Clark County convention; yet even as Sandernistas did not even give pause to the idea that they had won more delegates out of organization than they should have won based on the caucus votes, they went into a holy rage when they were outorganized in turn and lost that advantage at the state convention even though that restored things to what the will of the voters had initially set. The issue with superdelegates, as explained above, reflects the same principle. 

Another reflection of this principle involves how Sanders criticized Clinton’s votes and positions as pretty much black-and-white, right and wrong, on anything from Iraq to the TPP; but when Sanders is attacked for his record of not being as tough on guns as he could be, he expects people to take into account that Vermont is a rural state; in other words, he is saying “My controversial positions deserve a nuanced understanding, but Clinton’s do not.” Sanders was also quick to condemn Trump for violence at Trump’s rallies, but then hypocritically issued the statement he issued in response to his own supporters’ actions in Nevada that I discussed in Part I absolving himself and his campaign. He claims that his is a campaign of high-minded principles that will avoid personal attacks, but constantly engages in indirect personal attacks on Clinton’s character and credibility by association and implication and is more than content to let his surrogates and supporters do his dirty work, rarely reigning them in. 

In other words, while Sanders claims to transcend politics, he’s still a politician who’s pretty good at politics and is quite capable of giving unfair jabs and engaging in distortions, just like many other “Establishment” politicians he criticizes.

2.) Sanders supporters are obsessed with absurd conspiracy theories that they think specifically target them and their candidate: “The Whole World Is Against Us!” (or, “Losing Is Never Bernie’s fault!”)

During the Obama years, much of the right could (and still can) be characterized by an insane sense of perpetual victimhood, that they were the victims of massive conspiracies and everybody and everything was out to get them. This was one of the great contrasts between the Republicans and the Democrats: the mainstream left generally avoided such paranoid, conspiratorial mentalities. In part thanks to Sanders and his supporters, as well as a rising culture of highlighting “microaggression,” the left is now catching up rapidly to the right. I’ve been proud for some time that the right was a bunch of whiny people with an overinflated sense of victimhood and that my left presented a real contrast to this. It’s now much harder for me to say that today (not that there aren’t many Americans, particularly minorities, that are entitled to a real sense of victimhood because of very real and present grievances, but white college-attending/graduate Millennials—a very large portion of Bernie’s base—are generally not among American society’s greatest victims).

But how you fight these battles, and what you choose to fight over, is important and says a lot about you and your crowd. And I’m very sorry to say that Sanders and his Sandernistas are at the very forefront of helping the left close the gap with the right with their own growing hyperbolic outrage on often questionable or relatively tangential issues/incidents, if it hasn’t already. As I’ve noted before, Sanders and his supporters constantly explain in nearly identical, hackneyed responses that all setbacks and defeats are a conspiracy against them, the effort of the “Establishment” media/political elites; they claim thinking people only support Sanders, and everyone else has been brainwashed; it’s up for Sanders and his supporters’ missionary zeal to convert the stupid heathens and “Bernie-splain” the truth to them, including Republicans, who will be with Bernie once they see the light. And in his effort to campaign on a sense of perpetual, partly-imaginary victimhood, he resembles all-too-much one Donald J. Trump. Sanders and his supporters constantly feel as if they are unfairly treated when, in fact, they are often treated with a lot more tolerance and their candidate treated much more gently by Clinton, her campaign, the Democratic Party, and the media than they realize; if anything, “the system” has demonstrably given Sanders a relative advantage with its many caucuses in states demographically favorable to him that skewed delegates even more towards him and with a calendar that started with states like Iowa and New Hampshire that were also very favorable to him. 

Yet in Nevada, Sanders superdelegate Erin Bilbray was quick to level wild charges of “disenfranchisement” when the state Party chief Roberta Lange calmly swatted such a conspiratorial accusation away, noting that it was the Sanders camp’s own disorganization, lack of long-term planning, and inability to effectively engage existing avenues and persuade enough people that were the reasons they were not seeing the outcome they had desired. But for far too many Sandernistas, everything that happened in Nevada is “proof” of a massive “conspiracy” and they, personally, are victims of “the Establishment.”

3.) Sanders and his supporters can’t even entertain the idea that they don’t represent most Americans despite mountains of evidence that they don’t 

It seems as if they are almost incapable of conceiving that they just don’t have a message and a candidate that is as appealing as Clinton’s and that most Americans, particularly African-Americans and Hispanics by incredibly wide margins, prefer Hillary Clinton and have entirely reasonable and data-backed foundations for concluding that Clinton is a more capable leader with a more accomplishable agenda and a more effective plan for implementing it, thus making her a leader that will help them and the country much more than Sanders and his incredibly idealistic platform and approaches that are far less likely to succeed; it doesn’t occur to Sandernistas that most Americans are not receptive to an informed understanding of Sanders and his agenda and methods, and that by far most Democrats by a margin of millions simply prefer her to him and not because they are brainwashed (if anything, Clinton supporters have a much more nuanced and data-driven mentality about politics than Sanders supporters). In fact, a major mantra of Sanders and his campaign is that, ispo facto, the more people that turn out to vote, the better it is for Sanders, that Sanders will win with high turnout but Hillary will triumph when there is low turnout; this is demonstrably incorrect (just see my discussion of Washington/Nebraska above as two examples). 

Thus, when Nevada’s state convention awarded two delegates to Clinton that gave her the 20-15 edge over Sanders that reflected the actual caucus numbers and the initial projection based on those numbers, Bernie Bros and Bernie Sistahs howled at the unacceptable idea that somehow they did not come out on top. They “feel” they are the majority and “the will of the people” even without any serious numbers or evidence to prove this.

In reality, there is no mass Bernie Sanders “movement,” just a common coalition of the leftist opposition within the left that is challenging the more centrist and mainstream Democratic Party, a coalition that rises here and there in various election cycles, “from George McGovern to Jerry Brown to Bill Bradley to Howard Dean,” even if this one is more to left and exceeded expectations.

4.) Sanders and his supporters have a wildly inflated view of their self-importance and self-entitlement, and partly as a result his supporters take political disagreements in a deeply personal way that leads to deeply personal attacks as a response 

Sanders supporters really tend to take everything very personally; they feel that they are victims (one wonders how so many young voters who haven’t lived long enough to generally have experienced too much hardship, that are participating in all this as part of a cozy-college-existence extracurricular social activity, feel so deeply aggrieved), feel personally hurt by reasonable criticism of Sanders, take it as a personal insult when you challenge anything about their worldview, and respond with personal attacks, harassment, and vicious insults to almost any challenge or criticism directed at them or their candidate; for Bernie supporters, it’s all about them, their feelings, what they want, their issues, to the exclusion of any others(’). And for Bernie, it’s all about his candidacy; he clearly feels entitled to force his agenda on a Democratic Party and Democratic voters even though a majority supported a different candidacy, with different ideas and a different approach, just as his supporters feel perfectly entitled to force their candidate and agenda on a majority of voters who picked Clinton and her agenda, Nevada just being one salient example.

Another important point to make is that Sanders was not even a Democrat when the year 2015 began, and he was proud of the fact that for years he was not part of the Democratic Party as an independent (small “d”) democratic socialist, having actively campaigned against Democrats repeatedly. And most of Sanders supporters come from voters who are not actually Democrats, but left-leaning independents: from many exit polls, it’s clear that Clinton won Democrats by about 2-1 throughout the primaries and caucuses, while Sanders won non-Democrats who voted in the Democratic contests (independents and some Republicans) by about the same margin (keep in mind these independents are generally left-leaning to begin with and are not actually representative of true independents who don’t lean right or left, with whom Sanders struggles, and struggles almost equally as much as Clinton). In fact, Sanders only won more Democrats than Clinton in 2 of the 27 states surveyed: his home state of Vermont and neighboring New Hampshire. So Sanders—only a recently-minted Democrat who has generally avoided fundraising for his fellow Democrats—and his non-Democrats feel they are entitled to control the Democratic Party and its direction.  Talk about chutzpah…

That registered Democrats think and feel otherwise is merely inconvenient; because they are Bernie Sanders supporters, and because they know Bernie Sanders is “right,” the majority must be with them. This mentality puts the utmost importance on themselves as individuals, how they feel, what they think; what others think is irrelevant, and the idea that a majority of Americans would dare to disagree is explained away as smokescreens of the political/media “Establishment.” Hence, Sanders supporters get really, really angry when there are voting irregularities (which they term voter “suppression” as if it was directed to benefit Clinton though there is no evidence for such a charge to be leveled), and assume that any irregularities, which are common in elections, are deliberately targeting them and are the difference between victory and defeat. 

For Sanders supporters, it’s all about them, what they think and want, and how fast they want it; other voters with similar views but preferring different methods, and others with dissimilar views, who together clearly outnumber Sandernistas, are not even considered, and ridiculous ideas of bringing people with fundamentally different views on board in matter of months are confidently bandied about, even though there is no such precedent in American history. Sandernistas also arrogantly assume that they are the future of a Democratic party to which many of them are not even really attached in any deep sense. 

Their certainty that they speak for “the people” without even taking time to understand what and how people other than themselves think and feel is unquestionably one of the most off-putting things about Sanders supporters.

The Nevada drama sums this up nicely: at the state convention, Sanders supporters assumed they had a majority of legitimate delegates in the room (they did not) and that it was dirty tricks (it wasn’t) directed at personally disenfranchising them (they weren’t) that made the difference (it wasn’t), that they are so important as to be the object of a mass conspiracy (they aren’t) and they took it so personally and lashed out in such a deeply personal way in response. This particular type of delusional narcissism is rampant throughout Sanders, his campaign, and his supporters.

5). Sanders and his supporters constantly project and feed off of wildly unrealistic expectations on a massively delusional and fantastical level

I’m sorry, but to anyone who’s been paying attention to the details of American politics for the last eight years, if you think there is even a remote chance in the very near future that any of Sanders’ three main policy pillars of his campaign—1.) single-payer government run healthcare for all, 2.) free public college for all, and 3.) a massive tax increase on particularly the wealthy and corporations but also the middle class to pay for the first two pillars—you are simply delusional and peddling and subscribing to fantasy of the sort that only serves to dash hopes and increase cynicism once the inevitable letdown occurs. As I have noted before, America is a conservative country—with 47 out of 50 states with more self-identified conservatives than self-identified liberals—and Bernie keeps talking as if the millions of Americans who outnumber him and his followers simply don’t exist. Expectations that even today in 2016 that a man who puts “(democratic) socialist” proudly before his name actually has a chance in a general election race are also delusional. 

Yet for Sanders supporters, visions of sugarplums danced in their heads along with visions of imminent free college, single-payer health care, massive punitive taxes on the rich, and political revolution, all arm-in-arm with the victorious Bernie Sanders candidacy both in the primaries and in the general election; feeding such expectations is particularly unforgivable on Sanders’ part (especially so late into the primaries), but with his constantly reinforcing these expectations and beliefs among his many enthusiastic followers, one truly wonders how they will cope with or without therapy when the inevitable reality becomes clear even to them. 

When it came to the Nevada convention, Bernie’s campaign had led supporters to believe they could “win” and/or expect to overturn the rules, people, and system in a matter of days and weeks, all while they were a minority; if that’s not the definition of being delusional, I don’t know what is.

6.) Sanders and his supporters subscribe to an extremist narrative and an extremist worldview

If you listen to Sanders and especially his supporters, how warped their vision of the world is becomes ever so clear. Basically, Sanders thinks that the really REALLY bad rich Americans and EVIL Wall Street have bought the “corporate” media and the “Establishment” politicians to serve their interests. He does not allow for the reality that they are, in part, the engine of much of America’s economic success even considering their massive transgressions; he does not say they have too much influence influence or a seat at the table that is too big; rather, the entire system, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, are part of a “corrupt campaign finance system” and a “rigged economy” and a “rigged” party nomination process. The “corporate” media keeps people uninformed and in the dark on all this and if only the media told the truth and if Bernie missionaries were then to make their case to people with fundamentally different beliefs, if only the masses rose and put the wealthiest Americans in their place and limited their ability to corrupt the system with their money, then a clear majority of Americans would support Bernie Sanders, democratic socialism, and Bernie’s policies and methods, which would fix pretty much everything. Other problems like racism would melt away once corruption and the wealthy are curtailed. 

In this view, the primary evils in society are capitalism and the people and institutions who benefit the most from a capitalist system. Only the “alternative” media give Bernie a fair shake. Hillary Clinton is a major force promoting this corrupt system and therefore is a major part of the problem. Using military intervention to stop mass killing is hopeless, and the current domestic system is also hopeless. With Sanders peddling this to his devotees, is it any wonder that many of them think that whenever Sanders loses, foul play and cheating MUST be to blame? That they have no faith in the current system? That there MUST a “corporate” media conspiracy or cover-up, a “Bernie blackout?”  That Hillary deserves to be called SHillary, a warmonger, and far worse? And her supporters also? That there’s “no difference” between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, or Clinton or Trump? That liberal moderates are now somehow exposed as part of the right? 

This view overemphasizes the importance of Wall Street and the wealthy in contributing to America’s problems even as they are clearly far from blameless. This view fails to make basic, obvious distinctions in a self-serving manner. This view makes his supporters think that any outcome which does not result in a Bernie victory is illegitimate, that they and their candidate are perpetual victims in a system rigged against them. This view makes his supporters think that dealing with inequality and corruption is a silver bullet for the rest of America’s woes. And this view fails to acknowledge that very real progress has been made from working within the system, instead making people believe that nothing positive can happen with our public institutions and creating an unrealistically cynical view that breeds further hopelessness and makes it even harder for actual elected leaders to mobilize support for real reforms that can help real people; to put it another way, Bernie turns people off when it comes to the system, the success of which depends on people’s engagement with it, and it creates a cycle of inaction and anger that only leads to worse outcomes and more anger. And all this just feeds further into the hopeless, cynical views that are peddled by Sanders and consumed by his supporters, regardless of reality. As an Atlantic piece notes:

“…anger and frustration are far more likely to create chaos and confusion than they are to facilitate a productive discussion about common goals—like keeping a Republican out of the White House.”

Twitter meme, totals as of late May 

This view also fails to take into consideration that by every metric (and even if the system awarded delegates differently, including if every state held primaries open to independents), Bernie Sanders lost and lost “fair and square,” to use even the words of Bill Maher, a strong Bernie Sanders supporter; it fails to take into account that no matter how just you feel your cause is and how self-righteously you behave, “sometimes you just lose.” Yep, despite flaws, the system worked, awarding the nomination to the candidate with the broadest support and the most votes by far.

Yep, in “Bernieworld,” pretty much every politician is a corrupt hack; the media, wealthy, and corporations control pretty much everything and brainwash everyone; the rich and corporations are what primarily stand in the way of solving our problems; and only a democratic socialist revolution and candidate can save the day, with anything less being meaningless. Such a mentality is not only unhelpful and unproductive, but decidedly dangerous for the health of any democracy, from the ancient Roman Republic to the republic of the United States today. 

And this extremist worldview and mentality is well-illustrated by Bernie’s supporters’ explanations and accusations swirling around Nevada, the DNC, Chairwoman Lange, and Bernie’s own statement on the Nevada state convention.

7.) Sanders and especially his supporters have an incredibly selective intake and total disregard for information that runs counter to their narrative 

Without a doubt, one of the most annoying things about Bernie Sanders and his supporters is that they constantly make their case using arguments that are easily refutable or made far less compelling with information that is easily and readily accessible and hardly in dispute. “Bernie as a socialist has a real chance to win the general election!” (but voters are more likely to vote for a Muslim, a homosexual, a black candidate, a Mormon, or an atheist than a socialist, with the hypothetical socialist earning less support than any other candidate category). “Bernie has relatively high favorable ratings!” (but he is new to the general public and has not been really attacked on many of his biggest weakness by any major candidate or organization, and Republicans are laying off Sanders [Trump is even encouraging him] with hopes that he will weaken Clinton or somehow be the nominee, a situation in which Republicans see a far better chance to win in November). “General election polls show Bernie is the better candidate!” (but polls at this stage are wildly and demonstrably historically inaccurate). “The public is behind big parts of Bernie’s agenda like free college and single-payer healthcare!” (except when members of that public are shown how much their taxes will increase as a result, when support drops dramatically to 17% and 15%, respectively). “Independents love Bernie!” (but only left-leaning independents, not truly middle-of-the-road or conservative ones). “The system is rigged against Bernie!” (except because of caucuses Bernie has more delegates than if those states held far more fair and participatory primaries). “Hillary voted ‘for the Iraq war!’” (she actually voted to authorize the president to use force if necessary, and implicitly as a last resort, to disarm Saddam Hussein of WMD and enforce United Nations Security Council resolutions). “Bernie wins most working class voters!” (but only if you completely factor out African-Americans and Latinos, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, and ignore that older white working class voters support her over Sanders, too). The list goes on and on…

Thus, even in a contest in which he lost the caucus vote, in Nevada, Sanders and his supporters were able to whine that they were being robbed, whine about their delegates being disqualified, and accuse the state’s Democratic Party of foul play even though it was Sanders supporters themselves who had failed to organize properly or follow the rules, even though Clinton won the caucus by over 5%, even though Sanders’ own people sent the wrong information to their prospective delegates about deadlines. Of course their complaints and Bernie’s own complaints fail to mention any of these facts, fitting into a clear trend of selectivity and misrepresentation.

Melina Mara/Washington Post via Getty

Conclusion: A Liberal Tea Party Is Still a Tea Party, And Must Still Be Called Out And Fought As One

In the end, then, we have a compelling and clear idea of the symptoms and manifestations of Sanders Derangement Syndrome: a blithe combination of the following characteristics exhibited by Sanders and/or his supporters:

1.) hypocrisy when it comes to democracy, tactics, and politics

2.) a conspiracy-oriented mindset that allows for all manners of explanations for Bernie’s losses other than that he actually lost and was the less appealing candidate

3.) incorrectly assuming that they speak for “the people,” this not being the case being inconceivable to them

4.) a narcissistic sense of self-importance and self-entitlement that helps lead to a vindictive personalization of political discussion

5.) holding onto a set of wildly unrealistic expectations to the extent that Sanders supporters live in an alternate reality

6.) the articulation of an extreme narrative and an extreme worldview

7.) both a strong disregard for and an inability to incorporate facts and context unfavorable to their positions

If this sounds familiar, it should: these are exactly the type of symptoms exhibited on the right by those in the Tea Party. Much like how whatever we would want to call the syndrome that led to the creation of Tea Party spread rapidly like a virus and created a horde of zombies that was dangerous to anything in its proximity, Sandernistas infected with Sanders Derangement Syndrome have descended upon America, the left, and the Democratic Party and are wreaking havoc and damaging all in their path. Ultimately, like with Trump, the responsibility is not as much with the candidate but with the voters themselves but that still does not absolve Sanders of his responsibilities for channeling such an unhelpful and unproductive group of voters and encouraging their worst tendencies.  And with these crowds rising on both the right and the left, the ability of society to discuss its differences is simply deteriorating.

Just like Trump with his fans, these people were not created by Sanders, but he did bring many of them into the political process and looking at both Trump’s and Sanders’ more extreme supporters, the argument that it is always better when more people participate in democracy looks problematic at best; the fringes are better off being on the sidelines than in derailing those who are actually more interested in governing than in making noise and disrupting. It is Sanders more than any other single person, then, who can and must do something to harness these people and their passions in a productive way that thus far he has spectacularly failed to do, and it is doubtful as to whether even he will be able to do so, so extreme and myopic are Sandernistas.

I understand that what I said may be offensive to some, and that I may be ruffling some feathers. But I don’t care; the time for platitudes and pretending obvious problems are not problems is long past, if it ever existed; few people outside the Tea Party would agree that its emergence and the participation of its ranks in politics has been a good thing, and that we weren’t all better off with them stewing in irrelevance. Well, the same is true about how hardcore Sandernistas are viewed outside their own camp. There is no doubt that, rather than releasing a force upon the American body politic that will help advance meaningful and workable reform, Sanders has helped to unleash a force as unhelpful and unproductive as the Tea Party, in style if not so much with some of their intentions and end-goals.

Sanders Derangement Syndrome is a virus that must be treated as an infection, especially since it infects so many young people that could be the future of American politics. Maybe Obama and more practical minority voters are the future, and I hope that this is the case; but if Sanders and the angry white liberal hoi polloi that has so strongly contributed to the breakdown in civility and rationality in the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination contest are the harbinger of things to come, we’re in even more trouble on the left nationally than we have been over the majority of Obama’s presidency. And that thought, even in the year of Trump, is terrifying in its own right.

I have written before about how the ancient Roman Republic shows us how bad precedents, once set, can destroy a democracy from within, and have recently taken great pains to discuss Donald Trump and the precedents he is setting in this context. Without a doubt, Bernie Sanders is a far better human being than Trump and represents far less of a problem than Trump. But that does not mean that Sanders and his supporters have not set some disturbing precedents that must be called out and dealt with in their own right, regardless of the many separate and often more alarming maladies with which Trump has infected our body politic.

For anyone who thinks I am being hyperbolic or paranoid, I point the reader to the Nevada Democratic Party’s state convention and Bernie Sanders’ response to his own supporters disruptions and death threats: it is truly a textbook example of the wider phenomenon I’ve identified as Sanders Derangement Syndrome; combined with the “penchant for extra-parliamentary behavior — indeed, actual violence” his supporters exhibited in Nevada, it’s not unreasonable to view Sandernistas as a serious threat with which one cannot reason. They are indicating they will behave as political terrorists willing to use low-level violence to intimidate the majority whom they could not persuade into granting them concessions they did not and could not earn democratically; with Nevada set up as a potential coming attraction for the Democrats’ national convention taking place in Philadelphia this July, Sanders himself is still vowing to take his fight to the national convention floor, potentially inflicting serious harm on the Clinton campaign and indirectly aiding Trump, the Republicans, and their chances of victory at a time when the fate of Western democracy for the foreseeable future may be at stake.

For years and especially since the so-called “Gingrich Revolution,” the right has falsely caricatured the left as a disruptive angry mob; now that disruptive angry left has finally arrived. Call it whatever you want, but it’s real and it’s here and it is a problem that demands attention; we ignore it at our own and our collective peril, and perhaps why I have been so strident in calling all this out for what it is is because too many others are ignoring this serious problem, distracted by the antics of Trump and his flock, without whom this would be the darkest emerging trend of our current unfortunate and calamitous election cycle.

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

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 May 26, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26th, 2016

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

EILAT and TEL AVIV — In what has become a constant occurrence throughout the 2016 Republican nomination contest, Trump’s own behavior has so lowered the bar as to what is considered “acceptable” that when he behaves in a way that is only mildly offensive as opposed to egregiously offensive, that when he speaks using prepared notes in a normal tone as opposed to yelling and rambling incoherently, people that are held to be respectable mainstream analysts are able to claim Trump is “presidential” and “serious” and is “improving” as a candidate.

Apart from Trump’s AIPAC speech, perhaps no better example of this has happened thus far during his campaign than his recent foreign policy speech.

Trump’s Elementary Mentality

For starters, Trump used the word “great” eighteen times in his address.  While it would be inane to expect the American people to elect someone of the linguistic abilities of Shakespeare, I myself remember how by middle-school, my instructors took great pains to teach us that using the same word over and over again was not to be desired, and that variety was an essential aspect of what is to be considered “good” communication.  Then again, as it has been pointed out, Trump tends to communicate at best at a middle-school level, and often at an elementary-school level; this is not some expression, but the result of sophisticated linguistic analyses.

Pretty early in his speech, Trump made clear that the cornerstone of his foreign policy would be to “put…‘America First.’”  I think it would be hard to accuse even the worst of our presidents of not acting in what they felt were the best interests of the United States, or to find one that acted on behalf of other nations primarily, and not on behalf of America; thus, while this is certainly a crowd-pleaser among some segments of the population, on a substantive level this “cornerstone” can only fairly be regarded as pointless, for while the segments of the population that appreciate such language feel that President Obama and others who don’t think like them are traitors who actively try to sabotage the United States in the interest of helping the Muslim Brotherhood or other apparently nefarious actors, such talk is simply inane and not even worth addressing… unless you are a mainstream Republican candidate for the presidency.

Another thing worth noting is how many times Trump repeats himself throughout.  That means even though Trump spoke at some length, the “content” of the speech was stretched pretty thinly throughout.

Dr. Trump Diagnoses U.S. Foreign Policy Problems

Trump then went on to assert that there are five main weaknesses in today’s American foreign policy, only one of which was accurate, and even that one is not exactly something that can be controlled on America’s end directly.

1.) “First,” he began, “our resources are totally over extended,” and maintained that Obama’s actions that have weakened the economy have thus weakened the military and America’s power in the world. 

What’s ironic about this criticism is that Obama, more than any president since the end of the Cold War, has retrenched, reducing and pulling back American commitments overseas, most notably in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, and cutting what was a historically and unnecessarily high defense budget in ways not seen since the end of the Cold War and more steeply than any time since the end of the Korean War.  If anything, Obama has clearly helped the U.S. to be less overextended. 

POGO.org

As for the economy, since the peak lows during the Great Recession—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—Obama has overseen 74 consecutive months of net job creation (a record for any president), the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 stock indexes have more than doubled in value, the export-import trade deficit has fallen by 24%, America has risen to become the world’s number-one producer of both oil and natural gas, and the unemployment rate has been cut in half.  So Obama has clearly “outperform[ed] Reagan on jobs, growth, and investing.”  Now, this does not tell the full story, and there are aspects of the economy which are certainly still troubling, but by any measure these numbers are impressive, even when allowing for very real problems, and one can hardly claim that Obama is “weakening our economy” overall, as Trump claims. 

Trump’s first major point can be dismissed, then.

2.) “Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share,” and he expects them, especially fellow NATO members, to pay up, and pay up far more than they have been. 

Trump actually has a point here, besides the U.S. only four other NATO members are meeting their NATO defense-spending obligations.  But these decisions are not up to the Obama Administration, and while Obama could try to undiplomatically strong-arm close allies to do even more than the Obama Administration is already urging them to do, at a time when China and Russia are rising, when combating global terrorism requires better, not worse relationships, it is hardly a given that bullying our allies into paying more would be the best method.  And yet, Trump still has a point—EU nations and others that enjoy a high standard of living (including better education and healthcare than America) while America puts more effort into defending these same countries from potential foes like Russia, China, and North Korea than these countries expend themselves is definitely an imbalance that should be adjusted—but this has been the case long before Obama and Obama is not the one to blame for it.

3.) Then, “Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country.”

Like his first claim, this statement of Trump’s is also very problematic.  As noted above, the Obama Administration does more than its fair share to contribute to European security, and Obama has led a regime of economic sanctions against Russia that have quite likely restrained the scope and intensity of its aggressiveness.  Europe, India, Russia, and China also very much wanted progress in improving the West’s relationship with Iran, and Obama led the way in achieving a historic nuclear agreement between the world’s most powerful nations and Iran’s government on their nuclear program.  But Trump’s criticism focuses on this Iran deal, which he and many Republicans (and Netanyahu and many Israelis) myopically and erroneously label a “disastrous deal.” 

Part of the argument that is made against this Iran deal is the claim that this deal makes Israel less safe, an absurd argument that is related to an absurd general criticism that many Republicans and many Israelis make in which, in Trump’s words, “President Obama has not been a friend to Israel.”  In fact, under Obama, Israel has seen a notable increase American in military aid and has been given more American military aid overall and on average per year than under any previous American president.  This aid includes the highly effective Iron Dome missile/rocket defense system, so effective in neutralizing Hamas’ and other militant groups’ rocket attacks against Israel. Besides this, Obama has not been shy in using the diplomatic might of America to defend Israel, the U.S. both being the sole Security Council veto of a resolution critical of Israeli settlement building in early 2011 and using pressure behind to scenes to push against Palestinian diplomatic efforts.  As is obvious to many, doing right by Israel does not mean supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s agenda.  That Obama challenged Israel under Netanyahu to do what’s in its own interests is not “throwing Israel under the bus,” it’s being a true, honest friend.  So while Obama does not hand over to Israel (increasing) billions every year in military aid without letting Israel know that its occupation and expansion of settlements is inflammatory and self-destructive, this does not make him an enemy of Israel. 

As for our other allies, Obama has been increasing America’s military presence in Eastern Europe to reassure allies wary of Russian aggression as well as increasing it in East Asia to reassure our Asian allies wary of aggressive Chinese moves.  So it is hard to find substantive examples of where we have let our allies down, though we may not always agree 100% with each other, as is the case with every American president.

And the whole fuss that people made over Obama “bowing” to foreign leaders was selective outrage at best and misleading at worst.  Another silly non-issue.

Thus, Trump’s narrative here is also false.

4.) After that, we have “Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.”

“No longer” in this case implies that America’s image in the past was better.  As objectively measured in reliable global public opinion surveys, this can be dismissed at least in comparing America under Obama to America under George W. Bush, where a clear general trend of global opinion has been an improvement in America’s standing under Obama.  The largest downward trend in recent decades was a sharp decline in global opinion from the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency to when George W. Bush was president.  In short, any recent major decline in the respect people have had for America has a strong association with the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, not Democrats Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.  So Trump’s characterization of placing a supposed decline in the respect the world has for America as being associated mainly with Obama simply flies in the face of the facts. 

While it is true that, in contrast to many other nations, China’s opinion of America has dipped slightly and Russia’s has tanked, this is due to the increasing divergence of interests in the South China Sea on one hand, and in Eastern Europe and Syria on the other.  In addition, Putin has based much of his power on using state-owned and social media to whip up propaganda, including anti-American sentiment.  In addition, Russia was happy to invade U.S. ally Georgia even when George W. Bush was president, and China’s recent assertiveness is a reflection of its recent growth in power more than anything else, fueled by its impressive economic growth in recent years.  And in both Russia and China, it could be argued that its people like America less because Obama is standing up to their governments’ aggression.

To be fair, the Obama administration’s single biggest blunder to its credibility—backing away in 2013 from the “red line” it set for Syria’s Assad—did not help with the respect America’s rivals have for America; but to define Obama’s presidency on this single incident, and to blame him for the chaos erupting around the world, from the Arab Spring to the refugee crises in Europe and the Middle East, is myopic and extremely American-centered.  If anything, anti-Americanism is fueled by decades-long American policies, including aggressive military action, support for Israel, and support for oppressive regimes during the Cold War, not specifically because of President Obama.

Under Obama, even after historic cuts, America’s military spending (#1 in the world) still dwarfs China’s (#2) and Russia’s (#4) combined spending, and that is a reality of power that both Russia and China respect whether they admit it or not.  In the end, tying our rivals’ assertiveness to Obama’s policies and personality at the expense of other factors is speculative at best, then.

Thus, we have another dubious assertion on the part of Trump.

5.) And “Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy.”  

Perhaps that is because the world is much more complicated now as far as international relations.  Trump early in his speech vowed to create a “new foreign policy direction, one that replaces randomness with purpose.”  For Trump, “after the Cold War…our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.”  This involves the typical assumption that conservatives makes all too often about the American foreign policy and the current world in which that policy needs to be crafted to fit.  For American conservatives, the Cold War is remembered somewhat fondly: the Soviet Union was unquestionable our biggest problem, threat, and adversary, with no other nation even coming close; our foreign policy subordinated all else to the competition between our two nations and their competing ideologies of free-market democracy vs. state-run economic communism/socialism.  Our aims and objectives throughout the Cold War remained consistent and obvious: counter the Soviet Union by any means necessary, preferably but not limiting ourselves to the spread of free-market capitalism and democracy, at least in theory.  Conservatives fail to remember with much clarity that this often meant, in practice, promoting undemocratic and abusively oppressive regimes that opened their markets to us but opened as well as prisons and torture rooms for dissidents within their own borders.  It is in these very trade-offs of convenience that roots of both the 9/11 attacks and many of the problems in the world today lie.

So for Trump and Republicans, they are right on one thing: foreign policy was far more simply conceived and strategized in the Cold War, and was executed without the same amount of hand-wringing and (social) media attention that is the norm in our present world.  If people living in Vietnam could live-tweet and post camera-phone pictures and videos of American carpet-bombing raids and killings like those at My Lai, the Vietnam War would have been a very different experience with potentially very different outcomes.  In other words, simplicity did not necessarily lead to the best long-term results.  Of course, Trump presents a hubristic vision of the Cold War in which the U.S. “won big,” with Reagan the Great getting much of the credit (of course, in this view, the Berlin Wall coming down and the the Soviet system was a consequence of Reagan’s rhetoric, and internal Soviet dynamics and policies, decisions on the part of Gorbachev to reform the USSR and essentially stand his forces down and to respect the will of the people—a hallmark of much of his later period of leadership—are myopically not considered or mentioned as major factors).

The solution to today’s foreign policy problems?  To return to the consistency and simplicity of our foreign policy approach of Reagan and the Cold War.  He engaged in a critique of what he called the “Obama-Clinton” approach to the world, notably repeating a number of repeatedly debunked assertions about Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks.

The problem is, the world is a much more complex place than the bipolar world of the Cold War; the current unipolar system, perhaps transitioning to a multipolar one, begs for a different approach, one not rooted in simplicity but in complexity.  A one-size-fits all “consistent” approach would very clearly be a poor fit for today’s more complex world.  This means that consistency is not to necessarily be pursued, as a nuanced and complex world requires different approaches for each new crisis.  Another problem is that while policy during the Cold War was relatively consistent compared with today’s foreign policy, it, too, was subject to nuance and departures and is hardly as simple as some make it out to be.

Trump also made clear that “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”  This statement itself is a slap in the face of logic, as it is weakening, failing, and failed states that are among the greatest contributors to global and regional instability, including the fueling of terrorist movements like ISIS. It’s also a slap in the face to the most successful U.S. foreign policy ever: nation building in Europe with the Marshall Plan and with the American occupation of Japan after WWII are the main reasons why peace has reigned in Europe and East Asia ever since; without nation building, it is very likely that war, extremism, and chaos would have reigned instead.

Still, Trump seemed to articulate that the solutions to today’s crises are rooted in the strategy America had in the Cold War, a conflict that was quite different from the challenges faced by the world today and an ill-fit for as a toolbox for crafting an approach for today’s very different world.

Thus, Trump is wrong to call for a simple, unified approach to foreign policy; if anything, today’s more complex world requires inconsistency as each crisis and region requires solutions that defy them being lumped into a single box.

Dr. Trump’s Prescription to Make America’s Foreign Policy Great Again

Trump then laid out the pillars of his own “foreign policy”:

1.) “First,” he said, “we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Trump doesn’t really have a plan, as the lack of specifics in this speech demonstrate.  However, Obama has an approach that is set up quite well for longer-terms success, as I have pointed out before.  As part of this, he says “we must as a nation be more unpredictable.”  While there is merit in keeping our enemies guessing, too much unpredictability will unnerve our allies as well.  Either way, Trump has far from demonstrated that he has any competent, detailed ideas for dealing with ISIS, while Obama’s strategy, which Trump criticizes profusely without even understanding it, is very sound.

2.) Then, “Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.” This has been covered, already, and this statement is simply nonsense.  See above.

A.) After that, either as an aside or as a separate point, Trump says “We must even treat…[our veterans] really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.” There’s no denying the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) had and still has serious problems, and there’s no denying that the Obama Administration should have addressed these problems with far more energy than it did.  But the simple fact of the matter is that the lion’s share of the VA’s problems go back many years, and Obama inherited a situation that was a ticking time bomb, most notably from the fact that the Bush Administration fought two significant wars over nearly a decade and did not prepare the VA for what was going to obviously be a serious increase in the number of veterans needing treatment; as soon as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions began, expansion of funding, staffing, and support for VA services should have been among the first steps undertaken and should have been further expanded as the wars grew longer and more costly.

3.) “Finally,” Trump continues, “we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.” Again, going back to our earlier commentary, this almost doesn’t even need to be addressed, so silly is this statement. 

Still: Trump engaged in a disorganized and meandering explanation of what this means.  He cites the Clinton years of the 1990s as a time of policy in which we were not acting in our interests based on a few isolated but not insignificant attacks Trump cited as somehow indicative of American policy being totally off -course, even though under Clinton we enjoyed an unprecedented jobs boom and employment growth, helped to bring stability to Europe several times by ending two wars there, and had a better relationship with Russia than any during any other American president’s administration, with the arguable exception of FDR.  Trump then made points he already made about the Middle East.  He then proceeded to spout a series of vague generalities on improving relationships with Russia and China and about the use of military force.  

For Trump, success relies on having a “disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”  This coming from a candidate whose entire behavior on the campaign trail has been anything but.  Even within the speech, he seems unaware of the apparent contradictions (e.g., calling for stability while casting aside the role of nation building, calling for closer alliances while also threatening to weaken them).  He then repeated yet again some of his earlier points about the Middle East and the U.S. economy, and took additional jabs at NAFTA, tying all this into putting “America First” again, and vowed to bring in new and different voices into the foreign policy machine in order to do so.  Additionally, he also had this very contradictory statement to make:

“Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.” 

In a broad sense, basic Western values—democracy, human rights, equality, transparency—have been spreading, and even where they are not present are generally sought by people in the face of their intransigent governments.  Battles over religion and gender are particularly difficult, but do not negate the fact that many “Western” values since WWII and especially after the Cold War are approaching a universal quality, especially as embodied by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Trump correctly maintains that these values should not be spread at gunpoint, but then calls for “promoting Western civilization” even as he criticizes the idea that we should “spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants.”  So in the same paragraph, Trump is confusing as to whether or not he thinks the West should promote its values, even as he is clear about not using force to do so, while at the same time asserting he would be firmer than Obama about use-of-force red lines, or “a line in the sand,” as Trump put it.  In fact, this paragraph sums up his speech nicely: full of different ideas and talking points that sound good alone, but that Trump failed to connect coherently in this address and articulated in ways that were often either confusing at best or contradictory at worst.

Trump’s Speech: A Perfect Representation of GOP “Foreign Policy”

Several Republican foreign policy bigwigs, falling pretty easily for Trump’s plummeting expectations game, including the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker and George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, praised the speech.  Former Republican Speaker of the House (and possible Trump vice presidential running mate) Newt Gingrich also praised Trump’s speech, calling it “very serious” and “presidential.”

Seth Wenig/AP

But this Republican Party is a party that has been devoid for some time of substantive and serious ideas about foreign policy, which is a reality that was on display beyond any reasonable doubt (and not for the first time) as numerous Republican presidential candidates showed how out of their depth they were back in a December debate focused on foreign policy and security.  A few months before that, we had the Benghazi hearing featuring Clinton, and well before that, another case in point is George W. Bush’s presidency.  Trump’s foreign policy speech—and candidacy—is only the latest sign that the Republican Party and most of its voters are not serious or substantive.

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

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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