Category: War

Israel has given everyone weeks of warning about an upcoming battle in Rafah. Here’s my dumbest question of the week: Why would there be anyone left to fight the IDF in Rafah? After weeks of warnings, why haven’t fighters from the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc. all left Gaza along with the reported 800,000 other people who’ve left (Al-Jazeera). There has been no news coverage of 800,000 people being screened at a checkpoint (and, even if there were a checkpoint how would an Israeli be able to discern a Hamas fighter from a “civilian” Palestinian (i.e., typically a supporter of Hamas and PIJ)).

CNN has covered the story, but doesn’t mention anyone being checked when leaving. In fact, it doesn’t look as though there would be any obstacle to bringing RPGs and rifles out as part of a family evacuation.

Iran launched 120 ballistic missiles at the Zionist entity earlier this month (Wikipedia) and most of them were shot down.

America’s expert class ridiculed Ronald Reagan for his credulous belief that ballistic missiles could be intercepted either in space or on their way down to earth. The Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) was Edward Teller‘s dumbest idea ever, certainly! New York Times, 1985:

A computer scientist has resigned from an advisory panel on antimissile defense, asserting that it will never be possible to program a vast complex of battle management computers reliably or to assume they will work when confronted with a salvo of nuclear missiles.

The scientist, David L. Parnas, a professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, who is a consultant to the Office of Naval Research in Washington, was one of nine scientists asked by the Stategic Defense Initiative Office to serve at $1,000 a day on the ”panel on computing in support of battle management.”

Professsor Parnas, an American citizen with secret military clearances, said in a letter of resignation June 28 and in 17 pages of accompanying memorandums that it would never be possible to test realistically the large array of computers that would link and control a system of sensors, antimissile weapons, guidance and aiming devices, and battle management stations.

Imagine a dusty academic quitting an easy job that paid $1000/day in pre-Biden money! At official government-certified CPI, that’s equivalent to nearly $3000/day right now.

The geniuses at the New York Times were so fond of feeling smarter than Reagan that they were still talking about this after Reagan had left office. From 1993, for example:

Star Wars can never work as a defensive system because there are too many targets in the U.S. and because the weapons arrayed against it are too diverse and powerful.

But do the recent interceptions of Iranian missiles prove that Ronald Reagan was actually smarter than the expert class?

Separately, the Iranian attack seriously injured a 7-year-old Muslim Israeli. Given that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Muslim, what is the plan among the Iranians, Houthis, Gazans, et al., who are going to destroy the Zionist entity? How will they protect fellow Muslims and, especially, Muslim children?

We regularly read about foreigners doing heroic deeds on behalf of Palestinians seeking to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and establish a river-to-the-sea nation. Most dramatically, we have learned about the deaths of six foreigners working for World Central Kitchen (Wikipedia):

The IDF claimed that before the incident, the WCK cars had escorted an aid truck that had a gunman on its roof that fired a gun … A second gunman was spotted at the warehouse joining the first gunman, leading to the drone operators assuming that they were of Hamas, claimed the IDF. As a result, according to the IDF, the IDF drone operators believed that the WCK cars were being used by Hamas militants, and further suspected that they saw a person entering a WCK car with “a rifle but at the end of the day it was a bag”, in a “misclassification”. The IDF claimed that the drone operators believed that the WCK aid workers had remained at the warehouse with the aid truck, instead of leaving in the cars.

It doesn’t surprise me that people get killed by mistake in a war zone (especially if they share a warehouse with armed men who look just like one side’s fighters). If the risk weren’t there one couldn’t claim credit for heroism by volunteering to work in a war zone. What does surprise me is that WCK employs non-Palestinians to work in Gaza. Even before the October 7, 2023 resistance action, only a minority of adult Palestinians worked (one of the lowest rates of labor force participation of any society ever to exist, presumably at least partly due to the fact that EU and US taxpayers provide food, health care, education, etc. via UNRWA). If the majority of adult Palestinians don’t work, why can’t an aid organization do whatever it wants to do with an all-Palestinian workforce? Gaza has an enormous surplus of potential labor, in other words, so it shouldn’t make any sense to send workers rather than cash and material goods.

Here’s UNICEF, for example, sending a blond do-gooder to delivery food and water:

Instead of paying her salary, why not hire 10 locals with the same money?

There are plenty of Palestinians who can drive trucks, stock shelves with food and water, and cook. Why do UNICEF and WCK bring in foreigners to do these jobs?

When SARS-CoV-2 burst onto the world stage societies could choose whether to absorb the damage quickly or drag out the misery. Sweden, for example, chose a sharp spike in infections and deaths while attempting to isolate the oldest and most vulnerable. The typical western countries attempted to drag out what Angela Merkel said was inevitable (i.e., that almost everyone would eventually get COVID-19) via lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, etc. Although Sweden had the smallest percentage of “excess deaths” over the multiple years of coronapanic, the differences in COVID-tagged death rate weren’t huge (even here Sweden had a lower rate than many of the countries that chose lockdowns and compared to U.S. states that shut their schools and businesses (except for alcohol and marijuana!)).

For the nations and states that chose what seemed to be a more cautious and humane approach, the population’s misery extended for years. Public schools closed for 18 months in some big Democrat-run cities, for example. Increased alcoholism, drug abuse, withdrawal from the workforce (not “unemployment” since the Army of the Lockdowns was no longer seeking work), etc. The increased deaths from these factors, plus deferred health care and loss of education, will continue for decades.

I wonder if we can apply the same analysis to Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. The conventional military strategy for Israel would have been to begin bombing and shelling Gaza on October 8, 2023, giving priority to the targets of maximum military value but not worrying about collateral damage, and to have continued until either the Gazans succeeded in their goals of liberating Al-Quds and destroying the Zionist entity or chose to surrender unconditionally. There would be no phone calls in advance of bombing or shelling and both buildings and humans would be destroyed. The battles might have lasted a few weeks before one side decided that the price paid was too high and surrendered to the other. While it is clear that this standard strategy would have resulted in a higher number of deaths among Gazans in the first few weeks, it is unclear that this approach would have resulted in more deaths overall. If Gazans saw that an intolerable (to them) price was being paid, they might have surrendered after just a few days.

Whatever has happened in Gaza thus far, it hasn’t been bad enough to convince a significant number of Gazans that (a) the October 7 attack was a mistake, or (b) the goal of destroying Israel should be abandoned. A November poll showed strong support for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as for the October 7 attacks. The idea of a two-state “solution” was rejected. More recent polls show similar resolve among Gazans. For example, this Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll from March 2024 found that support for the October 7 attacks is actually increasing among Gazans, the majority of whom believe that Hamas will rule Gaza indefinitely. The poll also found that Gazans don’t want to go to Egypt because they think they’re more likely to be shot and killed by the Egyptian army and police than by the IDF (i.e., they don’t believe that Egyptians subscribe to the “no human is illegal” axiom).

While progressives accuse Israel of “genocide”, the population of Gaza is likely larger today than it was on October 6 due to births at a rate of 66,000 per year:

Even if we limit to the period since October 7, Gazans have better access to health care than do working class Americans: 3.3 million health consultations for 2.3 million people in less than 6 months, just from the US-/EU-funded UNRWA (maybe some additional from private doctors).

So whatever the sacrifices that Gazans have made since October 7, they haven’t been severe enough to motivate the society to consider a change of objectives nor to think about surrendering. The result of this is that the active battles continue and the war that the Arabs started in 1948 will continue (Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties so they’re no longer involved in this war). So long as there are active battles, the lives of Gazans are significantly disrupted in terms of where people can live, whether children are in school, etc. Given that Palestinians will never have to work (US and EU taxpayers supply all of the essentials via UNRWA) this is of less practical relevance than it would be in almost any other society, but there is still a price to be paid for engaging in active battles. A non-working Palestinian with 10 children was likely better off on October 6 than today. The quality of the free food, health care, and education delivered by UNRWA was better on October 6 than today, for example.

What about the purported “famine”? The typical society that is starving will abandon its goals of military conquest in favor of food. If the Gazans are, in fact, starving, why don’t they want to surrender and give up on liberating Al-Quds? All of the videos and photos that I have seen on X decrying the “famine” show crowds of normal-weight humans. Pro-Hamas videographers have managed to find some unhealthy-looking children to feature, but they are always surrounded by healthy well-fed adults. Either the kids are suffering from a disease rather than malnutrition or we are forced to infer that Palestinian adults are feasting while letting their children starve. That’s the hardly the admirable behavior we’d expect from progressive role models and, from a liberal Democrat’s point of view, the builders of an ideal society.

Here’s an example from a UN official who highlights the purported starvation, asks for what Hamas wants (a ceasefire during which its soldiers can be resupplied), and doesn’t mention the hostages taken by Palestinians on October 7:

The video shows one youth who is indeed in an unfortunate condition, but everyone else in the video seems healthy and well-fed, even plump in some cases (tough to tell since the crowd scenes aren’t that clear and the women are covered in accordance with Islam).

Considering all of the above, I wonder if Israel’s attempts to be kind to Palestinians who support Hamas but who were not actively carrying guns for Hamas have actually turned out to be cruel. A lower body count sounds like a humane goal, but dragging out the active fighting inevitably means a delay in when rebuilding can begin and normal societal activities can resume.

Related:

• (I wrote this post on March 23, so was not influenced by this March 25, 2024 interview with Donald Trump) “You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace, to get on to a normal life for Israel, and for everybody else.”

A jihad was waged at a concert hall in suburban Moscow yesterday. It is tough even to imagine the grief of Russian families touched by this event. However, since I didn’t know any of them (as far as I am aware), a question worked its way from the back of my mind to the front…

“What we know about the attack on a Moscow concert hall” (BBC):

The Islamic State group (IS) has said four of its members carried out the attack.

Vladimir Putin has a supporter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”). France24 (December 2023) reported that Putin was trying to help Hamas win the ceasefire that it wanted to consolidate its rule over Gaza, re-arm and re-supply its soldiers, etc.:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is among Israel’s loudest critics and has refused to denounce Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack. … Russia has officially backed calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza at the UN, while early in the war Putin accused Israel of contemplating tactics comparable to Nazi Germany’s brutal siege of what is now Saint Petersburg during World War II.

He’s on the “right side of history” from a progressive Democrat point of view, certainly, and, one might have imagined, from an Islamic point of view. Why does Islamic State not give some credit to a supporter of Islamic Resistance and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? At least refrain from attacking Russians until the battles that began in Gaza on October 7 are resolved?

A reminder of happier times…

Question: Wouldn’t Hamas be finished in a few days if the typical Gazan were anti-Hamas? Presumably, the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) couldn’t survive amidst civilians if they were hostile to the cause and told the IDF where to find the Hamas members, tunnel entrances, etc. Although we are informed that Gazans ran out of power in October and don’t have Internet, every video from Gaza shows people using fully charged smartphones and posting to social media. Thus, it would be easy for a Gazan who disagreed with Hamas to drop a dime on the nearest Hamas platoon.

In a November 2023 poll, about 13 percent of Palestinians had a “very negative” view of Hamas and 10 percent had a similarly negative view of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. I wonder if these numbers are way too high. If even 10 percent of “civilians” disagreed with the Hamas goals of defeating the IDF, eliminating the Zionist entity, liberating Al-Quds, and establishing a river-to-the-sea Hamas-ruled Palestinian state then that is way too many potential snitches for Hamas to relax.

How can the poll numbers be reconciled by the fact that, apparently, nobody in Gaza is cooperating with the IDF? There are people who don’t like Hamas in particular but agree with most of Hamas’s goals?

Note that the righteous estimate support for Hamas among Palestinians at approximately 0 percent, which would be even tougher to square with Hamas continuing to thrive right next to the IDF. Our greatest intellectual, for example, says “The overwhelming majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. And Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. In fact, they’re also suffering as a result of Hamas’ terrorism.” If the typical Gazan thinks that he/she/ze/they is suffering, as Joe Biden says, why doesn’t he/she/ze/they drop a dime on the source of the suffering? If no dimes are dropped, shouldn’t we infer that Joe Biden is incorrect regarding Gazans suffering as a result of Hamas?

Related:

• “Palestinian poll shows a rise in Hamas support and close to 90% wanting US-backed Abbas to resign” (AP; December 13, 2023)