Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 4 of 10

The Rate Of Child-Deaths In Gaza Are About To Soar

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On February 21, 2024

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From the start of the conflict I have been most concerned, not with the bombing, as bad as it is (6x as much as the US dropped on Iraq during the last war in postage-stamp sized open-air prison) but by the cut-off of food and water. Israeli protesters have been blocking much of what little humanitarian aid is sent, the main aid agency has been defunded by the largest donor countries, most Gazans are starving and most of what little water they have is dirty.

UNICEF now reports, and these numbers are from January and thus almost a month out of date (meaning the current situation is wrose), that:

The report finds at least 90 per cent of children under 5 are affected by one or more infectious disease. Seventy per cent had diarrhoea in the past two weeks, a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.

We don’t tend to take diarrhoea seriously, because we have medicine and enough water and we aren’t malnourished and underweight to start with, but historically diarrhoea is a mass killer. Without hospital care (and there is almost none left in Gaza), water or medicine, Gazans, and especially children, are going to start dropping like flies.

I am also seeing that due to malnutrition new mothers can’t breast feed, and there isn’t much if any formula meaning death of newborn babies will be astronomical.

Moving on to the military situation: the Israeli military remains unable to destroy Hamas, but destroying Hamas has never been the goal: the goal is ethnic cleansing.

Egypt is building camps in the desert near Gaza. Egypt has, in the past, refused to allow ethnic cleansing into their country, on the grounds it would be destabilizing and they can’t afford it (and a pretense of caring about ethnic cleansing, which is true of the population but not the ruling caste), however it appears a deal between Israel, the US and Egypt may have been cut.

If this is so, Israel will win the war unless Hezbollah and Syria attack before the ethnic cleansing. Remember, the real Israeli  goal is, and always has been, to get rid of the original occupants of Palestine by any means possible. Once the Gazans are pushed out, the Palestinians in the West Bank, who don’t even have a Hamas, will be dealt with: indeed settler, police and military violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and seizure and bulldozing of homes is way up.

There are multiple players here, but unless the war expands or I’m wrong about Egypt, which I could be, I don’t see how this doesn’t end in an Israeli “victory”.

They learned well what the Nazis taught.

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The US & Nine Other Nations Now Helping Israel Starve Gazans

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On January 29, 2024

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So, right after the ICJ enjoined Israel to stop genociding Palestinians, ten nations decided to suspend payments to UNRWA, the agency which feeds Palestinians in Gaza. The excuse is that Israel has accused eight of the 15,000 employees of being complicit in the October 7th attacks.

Yeah.

The only way to win the war is to starve Gazans out, because the Israeli military is too incompetent to win. The countries are major donors and are sufficient to cause real harm to the program:

The countries who have cut funding are: America, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, UK, Italy, Australia, Finland and Japan.

The leaders of all these countries are guilty of aiding and abetting a deliberate famine meant to cause a genocide, and all should be tried for crimes against humanity and hung from the neck till dead

The total funding involved is about 700 million dollars out of a 1.1 billion dollar budget. That’s peanuts, and other countries could easily step in and fund UNWRA. We’ll see if any of those who are wringing their hands about genocide do so.

Politically it’s a very cheap way for countries to make big points, but, of course only a few countries in the world who have actually been willing to do anything real: Yemen, South Africa being most prominent.

“Never Again”, it turns out, means, “how can we help commit genocide?”

(Oh, and all those years I was saying the EU was evil? I was right.)

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Will Israel Invade Lebanon? Will They Win If They Do?

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On January 27, 2024

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Hezbollah’s Flag

Lots of reports coming out that an attack is imminent.

Israel is caught in a bind. The constant attacks on settlements and military targets in the north of Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon have forced settlers to leave. There’s are at least a quarter million internal Israeli refugees, and they can’t return until Hezbollah stops firing. The ongoing war, the problems with trade, the refugees and so on are causing massive budget and economic problems.

Hezbollah won’t stop firing until Israel leaves Gaza, stops bombing it and stops the blockade.

Israel, or rather Netanyahu, needs a win in Gaza or his political career is over.

Hamas won’t give up the hostages until there is a permanent peace and all Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza, but the Israeli project is to occupy at least part of Gaza permanently.

The only way Israel can end the Hezbollah strikes is thus to, in effect, lose the war with Hamas. Such a loss isn’t just the end of Netanyahu’s career, it’s a massive strike to Israel’s legitimacy, and to the myth that Israel is powerful.

And it’s the end of the settler project in the North, since any new settlers (or old ones) will know that they’re there at the sufferance of Hezbollah, which wants them gone and will eventually try and force the issue. Settlers will leave and stop coming if the IDF can’t protect them, and protecting them means having deterrence over Hezbollah

So Israel needs to force Hezbollah to stop attacking without meeting Hezbollah’s demands. They need to prove they can still force Hezbollah to what they want. The threat of force isn’t working any more, so like a bully whose victim won’t give them what they want, they now have to go all in.

Problem is Israel can’t even win against Hamas, who are far weaker than Hezbollah. Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles, many of which can reach Tel Aviv. Israel won’t be able to defeat Hezbollah and they won’t be able to stop the missiles, so to “win” they’ll have to devastate Lebanon’s civilians: mass destruction, like in Gaza.

Problem is, again, that Hezbollah is a LOT stronger than Hamas and has enough missiles with enough range to launch absolutely massive attacks against Tel Aviv. They can take out Israel’s power, their water: everything. Anything that Israel does to Lebanon with air power, Hezbollah can do in return. And Israeli civilian morale is likely to be a lot weaker than Lebanese civilian morale.

Worse, though I don’t believe the Israelis understand this, if they lose the war on the ground, Hezbollah’s strong enough to advance into Israel and take and hold ground.

Israel’s in a bind, and unless they’re a lot stronger than I think they are (they aren’t) or Hezbollah’s a lot weaker, or the US mobilizes for war against Hezbollah, they’re marching into a war they can’t win; a war which will destroy their internal legitimacy by proving the IDF can’t protect civilians and can’t win wars, and which will badly damage and possibly even destroy the settler project and thus the “River to the Sea” for Israel.

Could happen to a country who deserves it, but only with a lot of looking.

The price of expelling Israel from Palestine will be huge, but Israel is on that road.

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The ICJ Ruling On Israeli Genocide In Gaza

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On January 26, 2024

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So, the ICJ has ruled:

THE COURT ,
Indicates the following provisional measures:
(1) By fifteen votes to two,
The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

– 25 –
(a) killing members of the group;
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; and
(d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

The state of Israel shall ensure WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT that its MILITARY does NOT commit any acts described in point 1.

The court will rule on whether or not a genocide is occurring in a month, at which point a lot more Palestinians will be dead, including from the Israeli engineered famine.

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, the ICJ ordered Russia out one month after the original invasion.

Of course, Russia ignored the ruling, just as Israel will—the genocide will continue, evidence will be destroyed and humanitarian assistance will not be provided.

The ICJ ruling matters because Israel survives due to support from the US and Europe. When that support goes away, so will Israel. Their crimes are not possible without the US shipping them arms 24/7, and their economy needs assistance from the West.

Anything that chips away at the support of various internal political groups in Western countries for the Israeli project thus matters because Israel support is a domestic issue.

Although people don’t like to come out and say it, there are a lot of rich Jews (no, don’t, this is backed up by the statistics) and a lot of them are Zionists, and money is political power. In the US evangelical Christians also support Israel. There is a lot of money and a lot of votes for politicians in letting Israel ethnic cleanse and genocide Palestinians.

(This does not, obviously, mean Jews are bad, or even Evangelical Christians. It means Zionists are bad, and there tend to be more Zionists in those two groups.)

Domestic political support in places like the US, Germany and France for Zionism is what matters. Anything that cuts away at the legitimacy of Zionism is thus dangerous to the ethnic cleansing and genocide program. Europeans, in particular, like to think they support international law and even the US drones on about the “rules based order” constantly.

Elites, at first, were unified in support of Israel’s actions in Gaza. The reason is simple: it’s seen as career and political suicide to oppose Zionism, and this perception is largely correct. Over time, however, Israel’s actions became so grossly disproportionate and their targeting of civilians, schools, hospitals and even children and babies, that more and more members of the elite felt they couldn’t support Israel.

But that doesn’t mean they’ll speak out against genocide, it means, in practice, that they are mostly silent: caught between the fact that opposing Israel is career suicide and that supporting an obvious genocide may also come back to haunt them.

Still, if they have cover, many of them would like to just abandon Israel. They don’t like being put in this position, and Israel has been particularly naked about its crimes: screaming them to heavens for all to see and making plausible deniability all but impossible.

So, the ICJ ruling is still a good thing, not because it can or will be enforced, but because it makes the cost of supporting Israel just a little higher.

And the day the West won’t or can’t support Israel, is the day their little apartheid state is done.

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The Weird Pro-Biden Messaging

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On January 17, 2024

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Democrats, Democrats never change.

It’s all, “well yes, Biden is bad, especially that *cough* Gaza thing, but, ummm, Trump will be worse. So hold that nose, crawl up to the cesspit and vote Biden.”

I mean, I’ve always been anti-lesser evil, but is there any line?

We’re talking a full blown genocide, with deliberate starvation of the population. Only one working hospital remains in Gaza and it is under attack as I write this. If you want to, and you have a strong stomach, you can find such fun videos as a father who is a doctor amputating his own daughter’s leg, on his kitchen table, without anaesthetic. (There is no anaesthetic left in Gaza, all surgery is without anaesthic. Welcome to Hell.) Babies died abandoned in incubators and Palestinians running to get food from aid trucks are gunned down by quad-copter drones.

Israel couldn’t do this without the US, which has been in constant bomb and missile airlift mode since it started. Further, the only person who could stop the genocide with a single phone call is Joe Biden.

But sure, vote for him because Trump would be worse. Vote for a genocider.

There will be some commenters, I bet, who say, “but Trump would be worse: he’d support the genocide and do other bad things.”

Possibly true.

“Vote Beelzebub, he is 3% less bad than Satan.”

Let’s explain basic politics in a democracy (the same rules apply in non-democracies, with slight adjustments.)

You have power if you can deliver voters, volunteers or money in sufficient quantities to make a difference, and no one can get those voters, volunteers or dollars without going thru you.

That is it, that is all. If you want to have influence on policy, you must have enough voters/money/volunteers who will only make that difference if they get what they want and who will absolutely work against you if they don’t. Doesn’t matter if it’s single payer or “don’t genocide”. If enough people won’t say “you don’t get what you want from me if I don’t get what I want from you” then you have no power. None.

The right has power because they will absolutely vote against and work against people who cross them and are loyal to those who do what they want. Say what you want about Trump and the right: he gave them the abortion ban they’ve been wanting for generations. He did that. They got what they wanted from him, the single most important thing they wanted.

“Progressives”? No principles. They believe in nothing. There is no red line they will not cross, no slight or betrayal they will not forgive if it is wrapped in a smarmy right wing Democrat’s lying lips.

Fortunately, in this case, there are lot of Muslims in Michigan, a battleground state. And apparently there is a red line for them, “you killed my relatives!!!!!” So there’s a good chance Biden will lose, even if the usual suspects whine that he’s better than Trump, even if he did everything he could to make a genocide happen.

But until there is a voting/giving/volunteering bloc with actual principles which aren’t garbage and which they can’t be cajoled out of with empty promises and lies and “but he’s even worse!”, no one’s getting a better country or world, for that matter.

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The Sun Sets Slowly—Then Quickly

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On January 14, 2024

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And there are moments when you realize it is setting:

The people of the mountain have checkmated the people of the sea. As commenter VietnamVet wrote:

The Five-eyes Oceanic Empire is dying before our eyes. UK, Canada, Australia, and the USA (let alone New Zealand) simply do not have armament or manpower to occupy Yemen to push the Houthi back far enough from the Gate of Grief at the mouth of the Red Sea to reopen the Suez Canal to western shipping. A global logistic choke point has closed. The second, the Panama Canal, is limiting ships due to the drought.

The American and UK navies both have manpower shortages. When the aircraft Carrier Gerald Ford left the region, it was already vastly undermanned:

In the face of a massive shortage of Navy sailors, America’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), has downsized, cutting the crew aboard by hundreds of sailors.

The cuts appear to be deep and dramatic. Over the past six months to a year, some 500 to 600 sailors have left the USS Ford and not been replaced. In fact, the USS Ford has shed so many crew members that the ship’s company (core crew members that operate the vessel) is now below the Ford-class Carrier Program’s original Acquisition Program Baseline objective of 2,391 billets—a goal set back in 2004 that many observers considered unrealistic.

On top of this, ships can only store so many missiles. Every missile salvo reduces the amount of time before they have to return to base. America and Britain have been sending vast numbers of missiles to Israel and Ukraine and western manufacturing capacity is vastly below what is needed to refill stocks.

Meanwhile the Yemenis live in a mountainous country and their missiles are all mobile. It is impossible to take them out just with naval power: boots on the ground are necessary: a full invasion and occupation, in fact and that just isn’t happening: the US might be able to do it by going all out, but it would have nothing left for anywhere else.

So fundamentally, the US can’t invade and it can’t stop the Yemenis from shooting missiles. It might be able to bomb a lot, but that won’t stop the Yemenis: the endured one of the longest and most brutal bombing campaigns of the last hundred years just recently.

The US — the West, doesn’t have deterrence. We can’t do anything to the Ansar Allah which will make them back down and we don’t have the ability stop them by main force.

Trying to stop them by main force has made the situation worse: now even more vessels can’t enter the Red Sea—commercial cargo lines are not going to chance being shot up.

America is a naval empire. It, like the old British empire, rests on being able to keep the shipping lines open and on using naval power (and air power) to hurt nations while those nations can’t fight back. In the 19th century the Brits would park ironclads off the coast and just pound cities, and there was nothing those cities could do in return.

This is, then, one of the key moments in the end of Western hegemony. The point at which we no longer have deterrence; at which we can no longer “big foot” other nations.

The end of Western dominance is close, very close. I can taste it, like a hint of salt on a sea breeze. The Chinese are only behind in a few technological areas. Once other nations can get everything they need from China/Russia and other lesser nations they will be free to throw off the Western order, because the new and improved missiles make “stand off and bomb” far less effective than it used to be.

They don’t have to be scared of us, and soon they won’t need us.

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Conditions For Israeli Loss

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On January 10, 2024

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The condition for loss by the Resistance is clear: Palestinians are ethnically cleansed further, ideally (from the Israeli point of view,) out of Palestine entirely.

How does the resistance win? It’s unlikely to be marching thru Tel Aviv, although I don’t think that’s necessarily impossible given how small Israel is and how incompetent its military at everything but aerial bombardment.

Collapse of the Settler Project: Israel currently has about a quarter million internal refugees. The settlements near the Lebanese border have been evacuated. People say Hezbollah is doing nothing or little, but in fact they’ve cause the Israelis serious problems. Without settlers, Israel cannot complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, plus a lot of the economy is based on settler expansion.

Tourism Collapse: Israel relies a lot on tourism. Strangely  war is bad for tourism, and they’ve lost 80% of their tourists.. If this war goes on for another year or more (the way Sharon is talking), well…

Too Many Dual Citizens Leaving: About 10% of the Israeli population has dual citizenship, but these are often the most economically important citizens, especially engineers and scientists. If they don’t feel safe, they don’t have to stay.

Military Mutinies: Israel’s military is reliant on calling up civilians when they expect mass combat. Those civilians don’t want to stay in the military for long periods, and their families don’t actually want them shot up.

Budgetary and Economic Problems. If Israel can’t pay its bills, well its got problems.

Historically states collapse when the violent enforcers refuse to work or are defeated.

Basically, the Israeli project requires people to trust the Israeli government and the IDF to keep Israel safe. If people don’t feel safe, well, those who can leave, the settler project collapses and companies outside Israel are far less willing to set up business in Israel or to even contract with Israeli businesses.

Israel seems to be skating towards war with Hezbollah, with both sides angling to be able to say the other side started it.

But Israel can’t “win” a war with Hezbollah. It’s impossible. In the last war when Hezbollah was much weaker, Israel was never able to stop the missiles, and Hezbollah has far more and better missiles now and more troops, plus a huge drone fleet. The missiles have the range to hit anywhere in Israel. Tel Aviv will get hit. Yes, Israel can flatten large chunks of Lebanon, but it can’t stop Hezbollah from doing the same to Israel.

Fundamentally, Israel has lost much of its deterrence. Yes, it can still stop a full invasion, but it can’t stop constant missile attacks.

Pretty hard to run a prosperous country people who have other options want to live in if you’re constantly being hit by missiles.

The only way to get out of this would be to make genuine peace: but genuine peace can only be made by giving up the settler project and the idea of Israel as a Jewish supremacist state, and that’s a loss condition to both Israel’s leadership and most of their population.

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Assassination Will Not Help Israel

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On December 29, 2023

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This is sheerest stupidity:

Nothing will change about Iran’s policy, or to how well it is carried out. Not a thing.

The problem with American leaders is that they don’t believe in anything enough to die for it. Oh, they have beliefs, the beliefs of a leech (which is unfair to leeches, which are, unlike ticks, largely beneficial to their hosts.) They really, really believe in neoliberalism, because it has made them filthy rich.

But die for it, except in the sense of “destroy the world for profit?”

No.

The leadership of Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran to a lesser extent, have beliefs they are willing to die for, personally, not just send other people to die for.

Further, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian army (especially the Revolutionary Guards) are ideological organizations. From top to bottom, they believe in more or less the same things. You could kill the top 99 leaders of those orgs, and Mr. would not be that much different.

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In our society and our organizations, corporate or military or civil service, the people at the top have significantly different beliefs from the people in the middle, who have different beliefs from those at the bottom.

Further, because in our organizations there is vast infighting, because there isn’t any consensus beyond “make money” or “get power”. In organizations where, in fact, everyone isn’t pulling in more or less the same direction (if perhaps fighting a bit over “how to get there) leadership matters. The interests of employees in corps are not the same as executive interests. They don’t want the same things, or benefit from the same policies.

None of this applies significantly to Hezbollah or Hamas, to Ansar Allah (the Houthis) or (to a lesser extent) to the Revolutionary Guard. You could kill Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah tomorrow and it would make very little difference.

Leaders of genuine ideological organizations (we’re going to discuss this more in the future) do not have the calculus of late capitalists “leaders.” They do not think the same way. they do not feel the same way. And the organizations they run have genuine missions that the leaders and followers both believe in.

It’s been so long since we had almost any of that in our society that we don’t get how it works. Even NGOs aren’t like that: I know NGO workers and professional staff: they believe, but the people who run the NGOs don’t, actually, and don’t act in alliance with their values, morals and ethics.

Assassinating leaders of ideological orgs doesn’t matter. They just keep going.

This, plus the fact that the Israeli army is incompetent and low moral, is why Israel can’t “destroy” Hamas or Hezbollah.

As the master once wrote, “first make yourself invincible, then wait for your enemy’s moment of vulnerability.”

Israel has already lost. In truth, for those with eyes to see, in 2006 we learned they had already lost. Now it’s just about when and how much suffering.

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