(I do find it interesting that a 31-year-old woman would say that she wants to “stand with Palestine” right after the Gazans (combination of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and “civilian” males) went through the fence and did what they wanted to do with 31-year-old women (and other ages). Maybe she means “stand with Palestine, but not in or around Gaza”?)
How soon before we see poster versions of this mural in UNRWA and Oakland, California schools?
Police in Ireland arrested 34 people in relation to riots that swept through Dublin on Thursday, when cars and a bus were burned following a stabbing earlier in the day.
Around 500 people wreaked havoc on the streets, with about a dozen stores looted while rocks and bottles were thrown at crowd control officers equipped with helmets and shields. An empty tram train that had been left at a stop had its windows smashed and was also set on fire.
The violence began after rumors circulated that a foreign national was responsible for a stabbing outside a school on Thursday afternoon.
The suspect, who is understood to be of Algerian descent and is a naturalized Irish citizen, attacked three children with a knife outside an elementary school in the city center just after 1:30 p.m. A 5-year-old girl was seriously injured, while the two other children, a boy and a girl, suffered minor injuries.
Last month, Yousef Palani, who is of Iraqi descent, was convicted of murdering two men in an apparent anti-gay attack. One murder victim was decapitated with 43 stab wounds, and the second man was stabbed 25 times mainly to his head, neck and chest, according to court reports.
The chief suspect in the multiple stabbing that left a five-year-old girl fighting for her life was arrested earlier this year for possession of a knife, the Irish Daily Mail has learned.
The man, originally from Algeria, has been living in Ireland for the past two decades. He took Irish citizenship more than a decade ago.
The man, who is in his late 40s, has come to Garda attention several times in the past year.
Sources have told this newspaper that the man was living in Dublin City Council hostel accommodation before he went on the rampage off Parnell Square on Thursday afternoon.
I think the “diversity is our strength” story here is that the guy arrived in his 20s, a prime age for working, but after 20 years was still living at taxpayer expense.
An elite Irish friend finds little to admire among the rioters. He sent me this:
Apache Warrior movie (documentary on the destruction of $200 million (pre-Biden dollars) in AH-64 hardware while 26 pilots/gunners risk their lives over Iraq; looks like Carrie Bruhl decided it would be safer to work in the elevator industry and I can’t blame her!)
If we’re going to have solidarity with the Palestinians, we might want to look at what they want and how they’re feeling. Western media tends to portray the Palestinians as helpless victims. They lack agency, know that they’re defeated, are cowering in fear, and feel “humiliated”. Example from the New York Times:
The Palestinians interviewed just as bombs were falling and artillery shells were exploding, however, tell a different story. First, 73 percent expect to win the current round of battles (or maybe the entire war that Arabs declared in 1948):
What’s the long-term goal? “A Palestinian state from the river to the sea” (say 75 percent):
They are overwhelmingly supportive of what the pollsters refer to as “the military operation” of October 7 (let’s put aside whether raping, maiming, killing, and kidnapping civilian women and children is “military”) as progress toward the above goal of river-to-the-sea liberation:
How are the current leaders of Gaza government and society viewed? The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have 75-85% positive ratings among Palestinian civilians:
His way of expressing solidarity with Palestinians is to propose a two-state solution when that is supported by only 17 percent (see above) of the Palestinians (75 percent want river-to-the-sea).
The city council in Oakland, California, unanimously passed a resolution Monday calling for a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war — while spurning language that would have condemned the terrorist group for the Oct. 7 massacre following an uproar from anti-Israel protesters.
Councilman Dan Kalb’s amendment spotlighting Hamas’ role in the slaughter of an estimated 1,200 people across southern Israel was rejected 6-2.
The proposal was met by boos from demonstrators, who condemned the language as “anti-Arab” — with some going as far as to spread conspiracy theories that the Israel Defense Forces had slaughtered Jews to justify an invasion of Gaza.
“There have not been beheading of babies and rapings. Israel murdered their own people on Oct. 7,” one woman told the city council.
Another woman, who was eventually cut off from speaking, claimed: “The notion that this was a massacre of Jews is a fabricated narrative. Many of those killed on Oct. 7, including children, were killed by the IDF.”
“To hear [the Jews] complain about Hamas violence is like listening to a wife-beater complain when his wife finally stands up and fights back,” the man said.
UNRWA, which has provided the basics of life (food, health care, education, etc.) to Palestinians for 75 years (funded by US and EU taxpayers), thus enabling both one of the world’s highest rates of population growth and the ability by Palestinians to maintain a permanent wartime footing (up to 100 percent of GDP can be spent on military because UNRWA pays for the essentials) is also more supportive than the top UN guy: “It is a day to affirm our support for the full rights and national aspirations of Palestinians”. (“national aspirations”, as noted above, means river-to-the-sea for about 75 percent of Palestinians)
Feminists in India support the guys who broke through the fence on October 7 to interact with Israeli women and girls:
Readers: What are you doing today to follow the United Nations guidance for expressing solidarity with Palestinians?
Can a private citizen change the outcome of a foreign war? The answer is “Yes” for Citizen Musk. From Elon Musk, the book:
An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company Viasat that provided communications and internet to the country. The command system of the Ukrainian military was crippled, making it almost impossible to mount a defense. Top Ukrainian officials frantically appealed to Musk for help, and the vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, used Twitter to urge him to provide connectivity. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” he pleaded. Musk agreed. Two days later, five hundred terminals arrived in Ukraine. “We have the US military looking to help us with transport, State has offered humanitarian flights and some compensation,” Gwynne Shotwell emailed Musk. “Folks are rallying for sure!” “Cool,” Musk responded. “Sounds good.” He got on a Zoom call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, discussed the logistics of a larger rollout, and promised to visit Ukraine when the war was over.
Every day that week, Musk held regular meetings with the Starlink engineers. Unlike every other company and even parts of the U.S. military, they were able to find ways to defeat Russian jamming. By Sunday, the company was providing voice connections for a Ukrainian special operations brigade. Starlink kits were also used to connect the Ukrainian military to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command and to get Ukrainian television broadcasts back up. Within days, six thousand more terminals and dishes were shipped, and by July there were fifteen thousand Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine.
How much of a difference did this make?
“Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war,” one Ukrainian platoon commander told the [Wall Street Journal].
Musk is lucky that the Russians don’t currently have a space machine like Bird One (from You Only Live Twice) that can vacuum up the Starlink satellites!
Elon Musk ended up making decisions at least as consequential as any made in Kyiv, according to Isaacson:
“This could be a giant disaster,” Musk texted me. It was a Friday evening in September 2022, and Musk had gone into crisis-drama mode, this time with reason. A dangerous and knotty issue had arisen, and he believed that there was “a non-trivial possibility,” as he put it, that it could lead to a nuclear war, with Starlink partly responsible. The Ukrainian military was attempting a sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet based at Sevastopol in Crimea by sending six small drone submarines packed with explosives, and they were using Starlink to guide them to the target. Although he had readily supported Ukraine, his foreign policy instincts were those of a realist and student of European military history. He believed that it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. The Russian ambassador had warned him, in a conversation a few weeks earlier, that attacking Crimea would be a red line and could lead to a nuclear response. Musk explained to me the details of Russian law and doctrine that decreed such a response. Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.
He also called the Russian ambassador to assure him that Starlink was being used for defensive purposes only. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” Musk says. “We did not want to be a part of that.”
Isn’t this a bit like the United Nations in Gaza? For 75 years, they’ve been providing nearly everything that the Palestinians to raise the next generations of soldiers/martyrs and simultaneously claiming to be involved only in peace/defense. Musk strengthened Ukraine’s defensive capability, which gave them more resources to put into offense.
Like the UN, Musk tried his hand at diplomacy:
He took it upon himself to help find an end to the Ukrainian war, proposing a peace plan that included new referenda in the Donbas and other Russian-controlled regions, accepting that Crimea was a part of Russia, and assuring that Ukraine remained a “neutral” nation rather than becoming part of NATO. It provoked an uproar. “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you,” tweeted Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany. President Zelenskyy was a bit more cautious. He posted a poll on Twitter asking, “Which Elon Musk do you like more?: One who supports Ukraine, or One who supports Russia.” Musk backed down a bit in subsequent tweets. “SpaceX’s out of pocket cost to enable and support Starlink in Ukraine is ~$80M so far,” he wrote in response to Zelenskyy’s question. “Our support for Russia is $0. Obviously, we are pro Ukraine.” But then he added, “Trying to retake Crimea will cause massive death, probably fail and risk nuclear war. This would be terrible for Ukraine and Earth.”
Eventually he ended up in a text message exchange with Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Fedorov:
Musk: “Russia will stop at nothing, nothing, to hold Crimea. This poses catastrophic risk to the world…. Seek peace while you have the upper hand….”
After his exchange with Fedorov, Musk felt frustrated. “How am I in this war?” he asked me during a late-night phone conversation. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
In a world of war profiteers, Starlink seems to have been the only involved company that didn’t get rich off the conflict:
[SpaceX President/COO Gwynne] Shotwell also felt strongly that SpaceX should stop subsidizing the Ukrainian military operation. Providing humanitarian help was fine, but private companies should not be financing a foreign country’s war. That should be left to the government, which is why the U.S. has a Foreign Military Sales program that puts a layer of protection between private companies and foreign governments. Other companies, including big and profitable defense contractors, were charging billions to supply weapons to Ukraine, so it seemed unfair that Starlink, which was not yet profitable, should do it for free. “We initially gave the Ukrainians free service for humanitarian and defense purposes, such as keeping up their hospitals and banking systems,” she says. “But then they started putting them on fucking drones trying to blow up Russian ships. I’m happy to donate services for ambulances and hospitals and mothers. That’s what companies and people should do. But it’s wrong to pay for military drone strikes.”
There have been active battles since October 7, 2023 in and near Gaza (I wouldn’t call this a new “war” because these battles are still part of the war that Arabs declared on Israel in 1948). The Israeli counterattack seems to have started in earnest on October 28 (Wikipedia), though that was preceded by some bombing. So Israel’s campaign is about a month old.
If this were a battle between two conventional armies, that might be long enough for one side to win a decisive victory (see the 6-week Battle of France during World War II, for example). The continued existence of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), complete with plenty of rockets, ammo, and tunnel ventilation, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, could, in that case, be evidence of failure by the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel, however, seems to be treating these battles as a fight against insurgents. That description seems to fit Hamas to some extent. Hamas mostly attacks civilians, e.g., via launching rockets into cities or the October 7 attack. On the other hand, Hamas also exhibits many of the characteristics of a standard national government with army. Hamas won a free and fair election and should be the legitimate government of all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank was stolen from Hamas, but the majority of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza continue to support Hamas. See a 2021 poll, for example, and a poll taken earlier this month:
A larger percentage of Palestinians support the October 7 attacks, in which civilians were raped, maimed, and killed, than strongly support Hamas. This might be accounted for by the fact that Palestinians overwhelmingly expect their side to “emerge victorious”:
Israel seems to have constructed a fictional world in which only 10 percent of Palestinians are in favor of eradicating Israel, via violent means if necessary. Thus, the IDF has been tasked with going into Gaza and sorting through the 2 million residents to find the 100,000 who either carry guns on behalf of Hamas, Palestinian Jihad, or a similar group, or who provide substantial administrative and logistical support for those who carry the guns. (And maybe it is more like 10,000 people that Israel is seeking, on the assumption that the ordinary soldiers won’t cause trouble once officers are captured and imprisoned.)
What stops the Hamas fighters [encircled in the north] from simply evading the IDF by proceeding south via tunnel? Once in the southern zone, the fighters can melt into the population that elected Hamas and continues to support Hamas according to opinion polls
How long has it taken other militaries to accomplish similar goals? I.e., sift through a population to find the 1 in 20 or 1 in 100 who are insurgents when the general population supports the insurgency. We can look at Russia’s Second Chechen War, a decade-long operation. There was the 25-year civil war in Sri Lanka. There is the Syrian civil war, now in its 12th year.
For all Israel’s military gains in northern Gaza, Israeli officials admit that if they are to achieve the aim of defeating Hamas, the next phase of the fighting will have to involve an advance into the south of the strip.
Israeli forces have already begun to prepare for such a move, and officials have begun warning residents of Khan Younis to flee towards what they have said will be a “safe zone” in Muwasi, a 14 sq km area in the south-west of the territory.
Aid groups have dismissed the idea of cramming hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have already been displaced from the north of the strip, into such a tiny space as unworkable. But Israeli officials insist there is no other way to defeat Hamas, as its top leaders in Gaza, such as Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are thought to be hiding there, and because Hamas has also redeployed numerous fighters from the north to the south.
“I’m quite sure that hundreds, if not thousands, of Hamas members who are originally from the northern part of Gaza are right now in the south,” said Michael Milstein, a former IDF intelligence official. “And of course, they also transferred their weapons and rockets to the south with them.”
What about the tunnels? I’m hesitant to quote either side in any war as an authoritative source, but here’s what Israel says:
Israel’s military said on Wednesday that its combat engineers had destroyed the shafts of some 400 tunnels. But officials concede this is only a limited dent in a system that is thought to be more than 500km in length.
“Once we [take all of Gaza] it will probably take almost a year to clear the whole Gaza Strip, and to explore all their underground infrastructures, and find all their rockets and missiles . . . The strip is one big bunker,” said [Amir Avivi, former deputy commander of the Gaza Division of Israel’s military]. “It’s full of booby traps, full of IEDs everywhere, bombs, munitions — it’s unbelievable what they built. So there’s going to be a lot of work.”
Is Israel actually on track to succeed in accomplishing what it has promised to accomplish, from a purely military point of view, in Gaza? (Obviously, Israel has already lost in the court of world popular opinion. This post is about the purely military aspects of the conflict, not whether progressives and/or Muslims are right to accuse Israel of war crimes, genocide, etc.)
This year, I’m especially grateful that there is no war on U.S. soil. Regardless of which side in the Hamas-Israel fight one supports, nearly everyone will agree that war is hell and those who are insulated from war are fortunate. Since 1865, Americans have enjoyed better insulation than almost any other group of people, though, of course, quite a few Americans who identified as men have been sent off to fight.
Zooming all the way to the other end of the spectrum… I’m grateful that we can eat outdoors in nice weather in Florida without being besieged by yellowjackets, the wasps that ruin what would otherwise be great experiences in the Northeast U.S. I’ve enjoyed outdoor meals on both coasts and in Orlando and never been bothered. Florida is supposedly part of this insect’s range, so I have no explanation for why yellowjackets don’t swarm around restaurants and backyard barbecues.
For something in the middle… ChatGPT, which will be one year old on November 30, especially its ability to liberate programmers from the tedium of having to search for libraries and API calls (admittedly a tedium created by other programmers, drunk on the near-infinite memory capacity of modern computer systems). ChatGPT and similar have the potential to make programming an interesting job once again (see Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?).
When Col. Fred V. Cherry of the Air Force, a decorated fighter pilot, was released in 1973 after more than seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he came home to find that his wife, who had deserted him, had been paid a total of $121,998 by the Air Force – his salary, his subsistence allowance, his flight pay and his savings.
Colonel Cherry, who is 54 years old and has retired from the service, recalls that he was not only ”wiped out because I had lost everything I had stayed alive for for seven years,” but penniless until the Air Force advanced him money.
The North Vietnamese turned out not to be this guy’s worst enemy.
According to records cited in the opinion, Colonel Cherry, at the time a major, was shot down in October 1965 and listed as missing. The next month his wife and children were returned from Japan to Portsmouth, Va.
In the fall of 1967, Colonel Cherry’s sister, Beulah Watts, who lived nearby in Virginia, learned that although the Air Force had by that time confirmed that Colonel Cherry was alive, Mrs. Cherry would not be sending him an Air Force-authorized Christmas package. Indeed, while he was still officially missing, she asked the Air Force if it would be possible to have him declared dead.
In 1968 Mrs. Watts told the Air Force Mrs. Cherry was living with another man. In 1969 she reported that Mrs. Cherry had given birth and was ”squandering Colonel Cherry’s money.
The litigation around who should get the money earned by the pilot lasted for at least 16.5 years after he was shot down and 9 years after he came home.
Despite outward appearances, the reunion was an unhappy one for Stirm. Three days before he arrived in the United States, the same day he was released from captivity, Stirm received a Dear John letter from his wife Loretta informing him that their marriage was over. Stirm later learned that Loretta had been with other men throughout his captivity and had received marriage proposals from three of them. In 1974, the Stirms divorced and Loretta remarried, but he was still ordered to provide her with 43% of his military retirement pay once he retired from the Air Force, although the divorce judge stated that much evidence was presented to the court of Loretta’s unfaithfulness while Stirm was prisoner.
After Burst of Joy was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, all of the family members depicted in the picture received copies. The depicted children display it prominently in their homes, but not Colonel Stirm, who in 2005 said he cannot bring himself to display the picture.
So… as we reflect on the comfortable lives that we enjoy as a result of the work done and sacrifices made by veterans, we should also remember to Check Six. Our most serious problem may not be the one that we are focused on.
(The October 7, 2023 attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and other Gazans happened while many Israelis were saying that their worst enemy was a change to the relative power of the parliament and judicial branch. That’s another example of the failure to Check Six.)
Related:
Hogan’s Heroes turns out to be reasonably accurate: A man wrote to thank a Stateside woman for knitting a sweater that he received. She responded with “I didn’t realize that they would give it to a prisoner. I knitted it for a fighting man.” A man received a letter from his wife: “Dear Harry, I hope you are broad-minded. I just had a baby. He is such a jolly fellow. He is sending you some cigarettes.” There were so many similar letters that each bunkhouse had a wall of photos of former wives and girlfriends who had decided to discard their imprisoned mates via a “Dear John” letter.
“Grimes chased Elon Musk around 12 different locations to serve him custody papers” (Page Six, November 10, 2023) (It looks like Grimes is trying to get child support profits under the California formula, which offers potentially unlimited cash, rather than in Texas, where her revenue would be capped at about $33,000 per year for three children. Based on the biography that I recently read, it seems as though both litigants were living primarily in Austin, Texas.)
A tweet from Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council:
The folks who get paychecks from the victimhood industry are hanging out in a Parisian palace with chandeliers blazing while the victims whose victimhood enables those paychecks are fighting the Israelis street-by-street and tunnel-by-tunnel.
The MIT Coalition for Palestine is planning a demonstration in the Infinite corridor (we’ll be sitting in the hallway) and a fast on Thursday, Nov 9 from 8am-8pm in solidarity with our siblings in Palestine facing genocide and a total blockade orchestrated by the US and Israel. Please fill out the form below if you are committed to taking a stand through this action; details will be sent out later this week.
Everyone, regardless of affiliation with MIT, are welcome (can enter from 77 Massachusetts Ave)! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
If you misgender a classmate, you can be expelled from MIT. If you think that college admissions should be on the basis of merit rather than skin color, you will be disinvited from speaking at MIT (New York Times story on Dorian Abbot, 2021). But nobody will complain if you accuse the Jews of Israel of committing a “genocide”.
Update from Lobby 7… “No Science for Genocide”; “MIT: We Charge YOU with Genocide”. Note the megaphone, perfect for bludgeoning elderly Jews (Los Angeles-style).
How does sitting with a fully powered laptop computer in a climate-controlled building compare to the sacrifice that ordinary Palestinians are willing to make? One of the world’s most successful humans, from a biological perspective, willing to give all of that success away:
The above video raises a question, however. She is willing to sacrifice her 17 children and 65 grandchildren to the Palestinian cause. Why doesn’t she say that she is willing to sacrifice herself? Maybe she is too old to be a good soldier in a conventional battle, but she could fight as a suicide bomber. The Jews likely wouldn’t suspect a grandmother until she was too close for them to escape the blast.
A question for armchair general readers… We are informed that the IDF has surrounded Gaza City, is engaged in urban combat, and is hoping to kill or capture Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad soldiers (“freedom fighters” or “terrorists”, depending on your perspective; 300 University of California professors, who are also designing the state’s K-12 curriculum, say that the heroes of October 7 were fighting for freedom and are definitely not “terrorists” (letter)) via standard military encirclement tactics.
We were previously informed that there is an extensive tunnel network underneath Gaza. A CNN story reports a Hamas claim of having more than 300 miles of tunnels.
What stops the Hamas fighters from simply evading the IDF by proceeding south via tunnel? Once in the southern zone, the fighters can melt into the population that elected Hamas and continues to support Hamas according to opinion polls (example).
Has the IDF already cut the north-south tunnel links?
Four weeks ago, we were told that the hospitals in Gaza had just a few days of fuel left for their generators. October 17, United Nations: “Fuel reserves at all hospitals across Gaza are expected to last for an additional 24 hours only.” Yet this video shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer. We are also told that Gaza has been without Internet for 32 days (example), yet a continuous stream of video content emerges from Gaza. (See also, a November 8 broadcast from the ICRC, in which people in clean clothes (both patients and health care workers) move around under blazing overhead lights.)
Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame, has been dutifully posting press releases from Hamas regarding deaths among the noble Gazans at the hands of the genocidal Jews. Others seem to accept the relevance of body counts, but question whether Hamas is a reliable source. Graham then cites some people who think, as he does, that Hamas is a reliable source. Example:
One of the first things young doctors learn in training is “don’t order a test unless you know what you’re going to do with the result”. You’ve gathered and broadcast various body counts on one side of an active ongoing battle. What is the practical value of these numbers? Is there a threshold number at which you are planning to take some action or think that, e.g., NATO and the U.S. military should take some action? If so, what’s the threshold and the proposed action?
Graham didn’t answer, of course. From the United Nations side, the answer is never “Hamas should surrender and release its hostages,” but always “there should be a ceasefire [during which Hamas can be resupplied].” Is that the guaranteed subtext of all of these reports of casualties among Gazan fighters and civilians? If so, could Hamas achieve victory simply by killing a lot of civilians and making it look like Israel did it? Suppose that Hamas puts implosion charges around some apartment buildings and detonates them, for example, causing 10,000 civilians to die. Then Gazans use the Internet and electric power that we’re told they don’t have to broadcast images of the destruction. Then General Joe Biden uses the U.S. military to force the Israeli military to withdraw.
(Some more posts from Paul Graham:
A grim month: 31 Israeli and at least 3600 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7. (link)
Is there a threshold number of their constituents’ children dying that should motivate Hamas to surrender? Graham doesn’t say.
One gauge of the civilian toll in Gaza so far: At least 72 United Nations staffers have been killed in Gaza so far, the UN says. Whatever that is, it’s not surgical. (a repost)
Graham was thinking that all fighters in Gaza have RFID tags implanted, thus enabling the IDF to target only estimated 50,000-ish Gazans who carry guns for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad?
Graham reposted an article suggesting that Gazans do not support Hamas (which makes the IDF a liberation force?).
A November 2 tweet from Graham himself:
I didn’t get “Turn the other cheek” when I was a kid. Why let people hit you? But when you combine it with “Hurt people hurt people,” you see the point. You have to absorb hurt instead of merely reflecting it, or it just keeps cycling around forever. (link)
A suggestion that Israel ignore the cross-border excursion of October 7 in the same way that the U.S. ignores the daily cross-border excursions of noble migrants? An accusation that Palestinian Islamic Jihad members are defective “hurt people” rather than brave fighters for what they believe and for what is written in the Koran?
One in which Graham seems to agree with the idea that Israel is killing civilians intentionally and without any military goal (if true, why doesn’t Israel bomb the various outdoor mass gatherings of Gazans that we see on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok? The IDF could kill thousands of civilians with one bomb if that were its strategy):
Graham reposts an accusation about Israel’s purported “ethnic cleansing” plans. To my knowledge, he has never posted about Kuwait’s cleansing of 400,000 Palestinians in 1991 (Wikipedia) nor about Pakistan’s recent cleansing of 1.7 million Afghans.
It’s not a sufficient defense of activism to claim that it “increases awareness” of a problem. There are forms of activism that increase awareness and yet set back efforts to solve the problem.
Graham won’t leave his comfortable UK/US homes to help the Gazans defend against the Israeli aggression that he highlights (i.e., increases awareness about).
Graham’s first posts about the battles in and near Gaza were on October 11. Example:
The events of October 7 were not “a humanitarian catastrophe” for anyone (as far as I can tell, Graham never posted anything about the Hamas freedom fighters’ October 7 operation in which Israeli civilians were the victims). The “humanitarian catastrophe” is that people embroiled in a war will be short of electricity for a while.
(A Ukrainian friend after reviewing the Paul Graham oeuvre: “These people weren’t posting like maniacs when half of Ukraine was without power for several days, including including dozens of hospitals in EACH city.”)
That’s your analysis of world events from the Great Statesman of California Tech.
Circling back, so to speak, to the main topic of this post… how is encircling an enemy effective when the enemy has tunnels leading to safe spaces with millions of friendly civilians on the ground?
Related:
“Behind Hamas’s Bloody Gambit to Create a ‘Permanent’ State of War” (NYT, today): Thousands have been killed in Gaza, with entire families wiped out. Israeli airstrikes have reduced Palestinian neighborhoods to expanses of rubble … But in the bloody arithmetic of Hamas’s leaders, the carnage is not the regrettable outcome of a big miscalculation. Quite the opposite, they say: It is the necessary cost of a great accomplishment — the shattering of the status quo and the opening of a new, more volatile chapter in their fight against Israel. It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told The New York Times in Doha, Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.” … “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times. … [the October 7 attack] broke a longstanding tension within Hamas about the group’s identity and purpose. Was it mainly a governing body — responsible for managing day-to-day life in the blockaded Gaza Strip — or was it still fundamentally an armed force, unrelentingly committed to destroying Israel and replacing it with an Islamist Palestinian state? … “Hamas’s goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,” said Mr. al-Hayya, the politburo member. “Hamas, the Qassam and the resistance woke the world up from its deep sleep and showed that this issue must remain on the table.”
“Dabblers And Blowhards”, a 2005 look at Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters”: Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data. Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick. … Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings – in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface – will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk. Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.
We’re informed that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) has, literally, tons of fuel. NBC:
As U.N. officials say hospitals in Gaza are running dangerously low on fuel, Hamas is maintaining a stockpile of more than 200,000 gallons of fuel for the rockets it fires into Israel and the generators that provide clean air and electricity to its network of underground tunnels, according to U.S. officials, current and former Israeli officials and academics.
How long will this last?
“We don’t know how much they have, and we definitely don’t know how much they need, because no one is sure to what extent this underground city goes,” said Elai Rettig, an assistant professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv who studies regional energy cooperation. “If it’s just for ventilation and basic communication, it will last for months.”
I wonder if these estimates are wrong. Hamas’s western allies have been demanding fuel deliveries ever since the battle began. Here’s one from the UN Secretary General, just four days after the Gazans’ mostly peaceful attack on Israelis:
Note that fuel is listed first, so we can infer that it is more important than food and water. A week after the latest round of fighting began, state-sponsored PBS wrote that hospitals were “desperately low on fuel”:
Medics in Gaza warned Sunday that thousands could die as hospitals packed with wounded people ran desperately low on fuel and basic supplies. … Hospitals in Gaza are expected to run out of generator fuel within two days,
Every few days we are informed that hospitals in Gaza are 1-2 days from running out of fuel.
Hamas supposedly keeps its fuel reserves directly underneath hospitals so that (1) the fuel will be safe from Israeli bombs, and (2) any fuel delivered to the hospital can be easily transferred into the tunnel ventilation reserve.
If Hamas truly had “months” of fuel, why would their allies be so interested in supplementing this supply? And why did the calls to send in fuel begin just a few days after the October 7 attacks? Is it possible that the “months” of fuel that the Islamic Resistance Movement was estimated to have is actually more like “a month”? Also, what if the IDF is able to clear one or two hospitals of civilians and destroy the Hamas fuel supplies underneath? The useful lifetime of the tunnels could be radically shortened.
American and British bombing of Germany wasn’t very efficient in slowing down Germany’s war-fighting capability. As many as 635,000 civilians in Germany were killed, for example, more than 55,000 RAF Bomber Command crewmembers, and 75 percent of the pre-P-51 American bomber crews were shot down or killed. Yet the initial effects on German war production were minimal. Monday morning quarterbacks have concluded that the Allies should have concentrated on bombing energy production, energy transportation, and electricity production facilities. In other words… fuel. If Israel can prevent Hamas from being resupplied, either directly or via hospitals and UN facilities, perhaps Hamas will be forced to fight in the open (or just melt into the civilian population and wait for Israel to leave).
Readers: What’s your guess as to when Hamas runs out of fuel to keep its tunnels ventilated? (“Never, because the United Nations and other allies will keep the fuel restocked” is an acceptable answer.)
Update: A November 6, 2023 video posted from Gaza shows lights on, fully charged mobile phones, and doctors in clean scrubs that appear to be fresh from the washer/dryer.
Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea (explains why tunnels need ventilation; “oxygen would be depleted by things like the growth of aerobic bacteria and the rusting of metals, such as bolts”)
