Shabbat shalom.
“The Horror, the horror.” These were the final words of Colonel Kurtz from Joseph Conrads book, “The Heart of Darkness”, and borrowed by Francis Ford Coppola for his same character in Apocalypse Now. Coppola based the movie on Conrad’s book and while the movie was generally considered a muddled and laborious interpretation, it effectively conveyed its major theme: the darkness potentially inherent in all human hearts.
There is only darkness in the hearts of Hamas. I force myself to watch the news and the videos and images emerging from the disaster make me sick. Horror mounts upon horror. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate evil. It’s like watching a snuff film unfold on mass media. “This is the most difficult image we’ve posted,” ran the UK’s Daily Telegraph’s front page, reprinting a tweet from the State of Israel’s official account.“As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this. But we need each and everyone of you to know. This happened.”
The images were of the charred and blackened corpses of babies. I have never felt that level of nausea. Nothing is beyond the sadism of Hamas. Nothing, now, might be beyond the response — comes the reply from Israel.
As I write this morning, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is preparing to launch a ground campaign after dropping over 6000 bombs on the densely populated spit of land known as the Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians have already been killed or wounded. The IDF is working to locate some of the roughly 150 hostages and kill Hamas terrorists.
Given current events, I am skipping the usual weekly roundup and, instead, providing some excellent writing on this horrific situation. Since the pieces are mostly behind pay walls, I have copied and pasted them for your convenience. I will try and return next week with the usual stuff, but I am too overwhelmed this week with the darkness perpetrated by these animals.
The first piece is the latest from Jessica Yellin’s News Not Noise Letter, and provides a great summary of the current situation and the challenges ahead for the IDF as they seek to destroy Hamas. The second is a well written piece from Andrew Sullivan, who compares the Hamas raids to a pogrom, and calls out the woke morons supporting Hamas across the globe. Some of the woke shit going on at Harvard and Stanford, and other universities of “higher learning” are really disturbing, and giving liberal progressives a very bad look.
I will close with a couple of positive notes. The first is from our Muslim friends in Sharon, my home town. We have a Facebook page for the town, and this was posted the other day along with many kind replies of the same tone:
As a Muslim I’d like to speak on behalf of the Muslim community especially the one here in Sharon. Although we may have our differences, we don’t ever want to hurt anyone especially not our own neighbors. I personally grew up in Sharon and have plenty of wonderful Jewish friends of whom I’ve grown very close with and often compare and contrast the beauties of our cultures and religions. We Muslims and Arabs alike have no intention of harming anyone, as it goes against our cultural and religious beliefs. We will do whatever we can to keep you all safe, and out of harms way during these trying times, as I hope you would do the same for us.
And lastly, this short piece from J.D. Heyman’s The Culture Wag, reminding me of the resilient spirit of humanity:
Like it or not, we are in this messy world. Oddly, there are still people who believe that there is a foreign policy box marked Pick Up Your Toys and Go Home. Hello, we are home. Lucky stiffs in rich nations yearn to check out of messes we had a hand in making, but there is no escape hatch. We wake up every day on a troubled planet. It’s possible to face this and find pathways to a full and periodically happy life. In any case, a defensive crouch is bad for the posture.
For all the pain we inflict on ourselves, we are a resilient species. A measure of that resilience is how quickly we put catastrophes behind us. When the worst happens, the habit is to frame tragedy as a point of no return, the moment when everything changed forever. We say never forget because we can’t help but forget. Social media is giving it a go, but it is impossible to be suspended in perpetual horror. Life is endlessly punctured by trauma and leavened by renewal. Even in our bleakest moments, we are blessed with the capacity to laugh. This hardly disrespects those we have lost. It is a most exquisite tribute.
Survivors of the worst cruelties do find their way back to laughter. Humor isn’t a silly luxury, but an inspired survival mechanism. No matter what the algorithms feed you, know you will laugh again. Magically, it can’t be helped.
Be safe out there, and see you next week.
Brad out.
Jessica Yellin’s News Not Noise Letter
The IDF says they have undertaken the grim work of notifying 120 families of those taken hostage. Still others remain missing. This, as Israel grapples with the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust: 1300 Israelis killed. As a proportion of the population, that would be equivalent to losing 46,000 Americans to a single terror attack.
Across the border, bombs are falling. Palestinians are fleeing in cars, trucks and even donkey carts after Israel ordered Gaza City evacuated by morning. The death toll is mounting and one UN official says “Gaza is fast becoming a hellhole.” With the electricity off for days, hospital generators are running low on fuel forcing health care workers to make impossible choices about who to treat.
We are on the brink of a war that will claim many lives and “change the Middle East”— with unknown results. What awaits Israel’s soldiers inside Gaza? Can Israel actually wipe out Hamas, will they sacrifice the hostages? How will Israel’s allies and Hamas’ sympathizers respond to a protracted battle — does this explode into a larger regional war?
My goal is to help you understand some realities of the fight with Hamas ahead, the circumstances that shape Israel’s strategic decisions, and the impossible dilemmas faced by people on all sides of this conflict.
Before we get into it, I want to underscore that Hamas is not the Palestinian people. Hamas hasn’t allowed elections in more than 15 years, and they rule by fear and intimidation. For more on this, see Monday’s newsletter.
Israel orders 1 million to move:
In a surprise announcement overnight, the IDF ordered over 1 million Palestinians in the north to evacuate south – dropping leaflets on the city encouraging the move. Israel’s ambassador to the UN says the evacuation is intended to protect Palestinian civilian life, explaining “we want to eradicate Hamas and sadly there is no other way to do it.” CNN says some people are already moving on car and foot though where to is unclear — there are no available shelters. The UN condemns the order as “impossible,” saying it would lead to “devastating humanitarian consequences.” In fact, the UN considers the forced transfer of people a crime against humanity. The US is not party to that agreement.
Why would Israel ask 1 million people to move overnight? To understand this and the war ahead, it is essential to understand how Hamas operates inside Gaza.
The Gaza below Gaza:
You’ve likely heard about the tunnels Hamas uses to move weapons and people underground, covertly, evading Israeli detection. These tunnels aren’t simply narrow holes in the dirt. Soldiers call them the “Gaza Metro.” Think of them more as a second city underground.
According to video evidence and firsthand accounts by soldiers and others, the tunnels are lined with cement and big enough to stand up and move around in. Underground warfare expert Dr. Daphné Richemond-Barak says they are “equipped with electricity, lighting and rail tracks,” and designed “for a longer, sustained presence… The leaders are hiding there, they have command-and-control centers.” Some Palestinians say the tunnels are also used to move medicine, food and fuel into and through the city. Hamas claims there are over 300 miles of tunnels under the buildings you see on Gaza’s surface. Some video here.
When Israel and the US say that Hamas uses its civilians as human shields – that’s partly because they locate weapons depots, offices for Hamas leaders, and other crucial infrastructure underground at the location of civilian buildings, all connected by a labyrinth of tunnels. Search the word “tunnel” in this NATO document and you’ll see among the locations: residential houses, UN schools. Israelis say in the past Hamas located its command center under Gaza City’s hospital as well.
Note: when Hamas came to power in 2007, Israel imposed a blockade that included many goods — barring import of things like cement and pipes or anything that could have dual civilian-military use. They say Hamas uses the materials to build these tunnels, make weapons, and enrich its leaders. Gaza gets other construction materials, food and medical supplies both through Egypt and — prior to this attack — through Israel. Israel turned off that spigot after Hamas’ massacre. (We can cover this in more detail in a future newsletter.)
What’s coming next?
Now the IDF’s stated goal is to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” That means they will target the organization – including terrorists in the military wing and politicians (many are believed to have fled Gaza, leaving civilians to pay the price for their actions). It also means the IDF seeks to take outHamas’ physical operations centers, Hamas’ weapons factories and storage in the tunnels under Gaza. Destroying the tunnels means destroying what lies on top of them as well, pulverizing buildings. And there’s no way to protect civilians who would remain.
Realities for the Palestinian civilians:
I want to pause to acknowledge the following. In an effort to punish Hamas and damage Hamas infrastructure before soldiers enter, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs in one week. The impact:
- The Gaza Ministry of Health reports over 1,900 Palestinians have been killed in the past week in Gaza, including 614 children and 370 women.
- 7,696 Gazans have been wounded.
- Over 423,000 Gazans have been displaced in the past week.
- And the UN says at least 12 of its workers have been killed in Gaza since Saturday.
Hamas set things up this way. They knew Israel would respond with ferocious force, putting Palestinian civilians in grave danger. This is another way Hamas uses civilians as a human shield.
Why move 1 million people?
Destroying the tunnels means leveling parts of Gaza. It’s impossible to imagine civilians enduring the bombardment to come. Plus, when the IDF arrives, no one wants civilians caught in the crossfire. Except, apparently, Hamas, who called on Gazans not to leave.
Why did Israel give them 24 hours?
Many reasons – that could include psychological warfare against Hamas.
Also, Egypt.
As I mentioned earlier, Gaza has a land border with Egypt. It’s called the Rafah Crossing. There is intense international pressure on Egypt to open a humanitarian corridor and welcome Palestinian civilians into Egypt where they can wait out the battle free from bombings and gunfire. In this version of events, other Arab nations could also offer them sanctuary, setting up refugee camps in multiple locations.
The Rafah crossing has been damaged by the bombing campaign, but Egypt’s foreign ministry says the crossing is still open. By making such a sweeping demand and putting a ticking clock on it – Israel is ratcheting up pressure on Egypt and its allies to relent and accept Palestinians.For Israel it is crucial to minimize civilian death. The only way that happens in a campaign to pulverize Hamas and its tunnels is if civilians leave the warzone. As a practical matter, that requires other countries to let them in.
Would Egypt and Palestinians agree?
No. Not so far. Arab states say Palestinians must stay on their land. Palestinians compare a humanitarian corridor to “a second Nakba,” displacing them from their homes again. This goes to the very root of the conflict.
Also, Egypt doesn’t want a new refugee crisis in its borders, nor do many other Arab nations. Hosting refugees is expensive, and hosting this many without time to vet them could also be destabilizing and dangerous.Hamas is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the adversary to Egypt’s sitting government. How could Egypt ensure Hamas doesn’t enter with refugees? Some analysts say Egypt “would never risk its sovereign territory being compromised in such a way.”
A no-win situation:
From the Israeli perspective, this is an impossible situation. Asking Palestinian civilians to evacuate threatens to repeat the root trauma of the conflict and further antagonize the Arab world. But, as the Israeli ambassador to the UN said, “It’s the only way to survive. And the civilized world should understand we are fighting not only for Israel but against a jihadist genocidal organization exactly like ISIS.”
Underground urban warfare:
Many of Israel’s soldiers are preparing for underground warfare. It will be brutal. With limited visibility, in tight quarters, with very little communication with the surface or access to escape routes, combatants are vulnerable to “biological and chemical hazards, smoke inhalation, blast injury, booby-traps, infectious diseases, as well as brain injury and hearing loss,” according to a recent paper by Richemond-Barakpublished in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Hamas is expecting them. Who knows what they have planned?
So you see everything here is contingent.
Military analysts uniformly predict that this will not be a quick battle. There is no simple path to security. There are no easy choices.
Andrew Sullivan – The Weekly Dish
The last couple of weeks, I found myself engrossed in Band of Brothers, the newly re-released 2001 miniseries on the D-Day landings and the aftermath. In the penultimate episode, the Yanks stumble across their first Nazi death camp. Soldiers accustomed to the worst of the worst in wartime, men who’d already seen things that would traumatize anyone for life, were suddenly speechless. Nothing, even in wartime, prepared them for it. A new tear in the fabric of humanity’s moral order opened up in front of them: the sadistic capture, dehumanization and mass murder of women, men, children because they were Jews. “New” isn’t quite the word, of course. Pogroms already had a long-long lineage in Europe. But new in the sheer scale and nakedness of the barbarism.
That’s what we saw last weekend in the south of Israel. That’s the first and most important thing to say. The same ethno-fascism; the same blood-and-soil ideology, but this time blessed by the Almighty; the same fathomless hatred of Jews qua Jews; the same internalization of an entire group of human beings as subhuman, to be treated like dangerous vermin; the same hideous sadism; the same eliminationist ideology; the same glee. This time, in Israel itself, the one place on earth where Jews hoped a pogrom would never arrive.
I’ve been to many raves myself; I know the kind of young dreamers who go to them; no doubt many were still rolling on MDMA as they squinted into the distance to see hang-gliders coming down from the sky. Then the gun-shots rang out, the Einsatzgruppen descended, and the methodical, barbaric, medieval slaughter and rape began:
260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave. … “Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.” Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.
This is what this was: a 21st century pogrom.
One difference between the Nazis and Hamas, of course, is that the Nazis concealed their genocide for as long as they could, while Hamas instantly broadcast their atrocities to the world. Twitter — increasingly geared toward snuff footage in general — is filled with images of dead and kidnapped Israelis. One terrorist uploaded a video of a slain grandmother on her own Facebook page for her family to discover. Hamas says the 150 hostages — among them the disabled, children, and even a 9 month old — will be executed on camera. They have already murdered babies in their cribs. A Jew a few months old is still a Jew to them. And they want you to know this. We do now, if we hadn’t woken up to it before.
The second thing to note is how many in the West instantly celebrated the pogrom. This, I have to say, shocked even me, and I’ve been closely watching the “social justice” left for years. It wasn’t the usual support of Hamas, nor the familiar condemnation of Israel’s settlements. That I anticipated. What shocked me was the vivid and genuine expressions of solidarity with the mass murderers — even as their atrocities were in front of our eyes. That requires real ideological commitment, to repress every human impulse of empathy to uphold your priors.
Yet dozens of Harvard student groups did indeed cheer Hamas. Various chapters of BLM did the same. Ditto the Democratic Socialists of America. University leaders — quick to pontificate on any current topic — went conspicuously mum. The Black Caucus of Young Democrats of America declared support for Hamas because “Black folks and Palestinians both know what it feels like to be oppressed and experience white supremacy.” BLM Grassroots said the pogrom “must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.” In Australia, demonstrators actually chanted “Gas the Jews!” In London, the Israeli Embassy was besieged. BLM Chicago, one of the biggest chapters, put out a poster showing an actual hang-glider coming to slaughter the innocent, with the slogan “I Stand With Palestine” and a brief explanation: “That is all, that is it!”
Do you see now why some of us have been calling out this “social justice” movement for years? It should not be a shock to know where BLM stands. Their founder, Patrisse Cullors, urged us “to end the imperialist project called Israel” as far back as 2015. And from the perspective of critical theory, Hamas is obviously in the right. CRT emphatically places the rights and dignity of the individual far below the right of the non-white masses to defeat “white/Jewish supremacy.” Of course they support Hamas. Palestinians are merely punching up — and that exonerates them of any moral culpability. Just as African-Americans cannot commit a hate crime, so Hamas definitionally cannot commit terror.
Once you see the world in this way — as groups of the oppressed and oppressors, with the oppressed always justified in their resistance to the oppressors — the rights of individual Jews, or whites, or Asians, or even dissident non-whites are irrelevant. It’s all about “power structures” and “systems” and “context”. All morality is relative to privilege. There is not a trace of universalism among the woke left, not a single objective measurement of morality except what is justified in response to “oppression”. And ideas matter. Grewal, the Yale professor quoted above, responded to this week’s bloodshed with admirable woke clarity: “There is no question who the oppressors are [and] who the oppressed are. And somehow people are confused by this. White supremacy never stops being shocking to me.” The actual victims of the Nazis are now their equivalent.
It has been gratifying to see some liberals this week wake up to what critical theory really is, and who their alleged allies actually are. This is Judith Butler, a campus goddess, and the critical gender theorist behind much of the madness of the alphabet cult, speaking at an “Anti-War Teach-In” at Berkeley in 2006:
Understanding Hamas and Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the left, that are part of a global left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence.
A leftist can be critical of “certain dimensions” of Hamas — its brutal theocracy, its subjugation of women, its murder of gays, its Nazi-style anti-Semitism. But they’re still on our side! They’re still battling whiteness. “Extremely important” to remember that. And it is not up to us to condemn their violence, remember, just to explore “options besides violence” ourselves. And you wonder why our leading universities couldn’t quite clear their throats this week? That’s how deep the rot has gotten in academe. I’m increasingly ashamed to be a Harvard alum.
What about the broader context for this latest horror — all the way back to 1948? Yes, that’s a necessary conversation, vital even. But in judging the events of the past week, it’s utterly irrelevant. There is no historical context — none — which can excuse or mitigate what Hamas did and what Hamas is. There is no oppression that justifies the murder of infants in their beds. And from some of the videos, you can see how the act of personally murdering a Jew is cherished by these fanatics, a glorious achievement, a life goal.
But has the Israeli government been reckless, expansionist, and determined to destroy any chance for a Palestinian state for a while now? Yes, it has. Since the excruciating near-miss of 2000, Israel has treated the Palestinians as a menace to be managed and, with any luck, ignored. Has it treated the population in the West Bank appallingly in this century? Yes, it has. Has the Israel lobby supported the unconscionable and relentless establishment of settlements for decades? For all their hand-wringing, yes. Is Israel’s achievement the immiseration and dehumanization of all Palestinians in the occupied territories? I don’t think any objective observer at this point could deny it. The attempt to deny the core problem has only made it worse.
Last week, I linked to a new campaign that some Israeli settlers are currently conducting. From the NYT:
Across remote parts of the West Bank, the mountainous territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Palestinian herding communities are abandoning their homes at a rate that has no recorded precedent, according to the United Nations. Simultaneously, Israeli settlers are establishing wildcat herding outposts at close to record levels, often near Palestinian villages, according to land assessments by Kerem Navot, an independent Israeli watchdog that monitors settlement activity …
“It’s not the nicest thing to evacuate a population,” said Ariel Danino, 26, an Israeli settler who lives on an outpost and helps lead efforts to build new ones. “But we’re talking about a war over the land, and this is what is done during times of war.”
This is ethnic cleansing, enabled by the US government and the Israel lobby. It comes after a series of Israeli triumphs under the Obama and Trump administrations: the annexation of the Golan Heights, a US Embassy in Jerusalem, recognition of Jerusalem as the capital, the collapse of the Iran deal, and no pressure whatever on restraining the relentless growth of settlements by the most fanatical Israelis.
The coup de grace was normalization of relations with some Arab states through the Abraham Accords — all of which simply ignored the fate of the Palestinians, and treated them with contempt. For four years, Middle East policy was crafted by Jared Kushner, a man who had personally funded the very settlements designed to destroy a two-state solution forever. As the Saudis edged toward some kind of deal with Jerusalem, the Palestinians were on the verge of being completely humiliated and isolated in the region. You can see why Hamas wanted to prove that it is still relevant — even if they did so by destroying what pitiful moral credibility they ever had.
And while one can sympathize with Israel’s conundrum on how to take out Hamas within the laws of warfare, since Hamas has embedded itself among civilians and hostages as human shields, that does not, cannot, justify collective punishment. As I write, Israel has cut off water and electricity to the whole of Gaza; hospitals may soon run out of power; brutal carpet-bombing has laid waste to whole neighborhoods; innocents are dying under a bombardment that must be simply terrifying. Israel has ordered the population to move out of Gaza City, Hamas’ base, to the south. Better than Hamas, but still redolent for many of the expulsions that created the state of Israel in the first place.
And I worry that the vehemence of the response will be both vulnerable morally and stupid strategically. The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, this week denied any distinction between Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas:
It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup ‘d état.
That’s perilously close to: “settlers are not civilians.” From a usually even-tempered moderate. I understand where he is coming from. But I truly, deeply do not want Israel to make the same errors in the same headspace that we did after 9/11. In fighting Hamas, it remains vital not to become them. Or to create new generations of Hamas terrorists. And in the history of the Jewish state, the moral corruption that comes with occupying and controlling another people for decades is real and cancerous. It’s a risk Israel runs. I pray she overcomes it.
The bigger picture? The more I’ve thought and read about Israel, the more it seems that its founding was both a moral necessity and a practical insanity. The moral necessity is proven by last weekend. If Jews can be subject to a medieval pogrom in their own country in 2023, what hope could they ever have without a country at all? The practical insanity lies in the simple fact that the state of Israel was created on land laden with deep religious symbolism, where much of the existing population did not give consent, and despite the early promise, no country for the Palestinians was ever constructed alongside it.
Worse still: in its subsequent wars of legitimate self-defense, Israel found itself occupying the whole region, and then took the fateful step of settling it with the most fanatical parts of its own population, deliberately preventing a two-state solution from ever taking place. For me, that’s where I draw the line. Those settlements are still growing. They are indefensible. They are essentially a form of ethnic cleansing — and they have been protected and enabled by almost every Israeli government and almost every US administration in my lifetime. And any serious American attempt to stop them — from the first President Bush to Barack Obama — has been met with implacable hostility from the Israel lobby.
Israel needs our support right now. And we should give it forthrightly. But in due course, if Hamas is destroyed, and things calm down, we need to confront the Israelis with a sobering reality. There is no future for Israel without a state for the Palestinians, however hard that may be. And the longer we postpone that day, the darker the future will become.
Jew News Review 