Latest Israeli-Palestinian Violence Worsening

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast.

Related Post Roulette

37 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    We need to get a handful of celebrities to sing “Imagine”.Report

  2. A war that’s in the interests of both sides’ governments is hard to stop.

    See Falklands War, 1982.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Report

    • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

      So stunned, a dollar bill I left on the bench is missing.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Pinky says:

        The administration has commented:

        Report

        • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

          The safety of journalists should be a priority, but there are parts of the world where the reporters are stationed and places where they’re embedded.Report

          • InMD in reply to Pinky says:

            True as far as it goes. But how would we react if the Saudis hit a target like this in Yemen? Or the Assad government in part of Syria under rebel control? The NPR sob stories write themselves, as do the deeply concerned statements from the state department.

            I mean, I know we make excuses for ourselves in our own conflicts. That’s regrettable but also predictable given the self-interest. But why do it for others?Report

  4. Jaybird says:

    An explanation:

    Report

  5. Jaybird says:

    This entire thread is interesting but the thing that I find most interesting is that the IDF felt the need to make it. They seem to be noticing that they’re not winning on the public perception front.

    Report

    • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

      mostly because a lot of people are skeptical that the IDF is giving out factual information.Report

      • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

        Is there anybody out there that we can trust to confirm or deny what the IDF is saying?

        I mean, I’ve seen this go around more than once:

        Can we trust Tommy Vietor? “I asked around!” is a pretty slim reed, even if we can trust him to not be intentionally lying, after all.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

          Needs to be balanced with:

          Report

          • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

            AP would know if Hamas was in the building. So would Al-Jazeera. You will notice neither of them is corroborating that story.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

              To the extent that there are a lot of incentives at play, I find this particular argument less persuasive.

              There are reasons that the AP would have to not confirm Hamas being in the building in addition to the “well, they weren’t there” reason.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

                I remembered the particular essay that makes this point perfectly:

                The news we kept to ourselves

                Here’s an excerpt:

                Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

                The op-ed goes on to explain some of the really bad things that they kept to themselves.

                Now, keep in mind, I’m not necessarily *BLAMING* Eason Jordan for making the calls he did. Hey. News is news, right?

                But if Hamas remains in power over there for the foreseeable, I have no reason to believe that there ain’t no Eason Jordaning going on.

                (But Whatabout! Yes. You should be skeptical about the embedded news covering that government too.)Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

                And there it is:

                Excerpt:

                When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

                Is that happening now?

                I have no idea.

                I have no reasonable expectation to be told that it is happening if it is happening, though.Report

          • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

            I recall one of the things the American military did during Vietnam was to use loaded phrases in describing their targets.

            Like, a hut where a couple Viet Cong would cook rice and reload bullets would become a “munitions factory” and therefore a legitimate target, even if it was adjacent to a school with children.

            In truth, guerilla movements thrive on not having large central factories and command and control centers like conventional armies, so in one sense, yes, a hut where bullets are reloaded is in fact a legitimate target.

            What was missing, was any sense of how counterinsurgency can and should work, because insurgency/ counterinsurgency is as much a political battle as a military one.

            What was the value of this target, in terms of neutralizing Hamas’s ability to operate, versus building worldwide support for the Israeli cause?

            Did destroying the building actually end the operations which were being performed in that “office”?

            On balance, was this a net victory for Israel?Report

    • Pinky in reply to Jaybird says:

      As noted on another thread, grocery stores put out updates about their covid precautions. It’s hard for me to imagine a country that wouldn’t engage in PR these days, so I’m not inclined to think it’s motivated by backlash.Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    Gamergate Part Umpty Million:

    Report

  7. Jaybird says:

    John Oliver destroys Israel:

    Report

  8. Philip H says:

    And late last week the Congress was notified that the U.S. had sold Israel $735 million in arms. No doubt that sale is a vestige of the last administration. No doubt it was all properly noticed and commented here at home.

    And no doubt it sends a signal to Israel that they can do no wrong in the eyes of the US.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

      From Bernie:

      Given that:
      It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations.
      (insert partisan premises here)

      Therefore: Israel did not violate human rights. (And the US did not do anything illegal.)

      Q.
      E.
      D.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

        Everything Augusto Pinochet did to his countrymen was legal under Argentina’s laws. And it was certainly a violation of their human rights. The fact that the US sold arms under its internal legal processes doesn’t mean Israel didn’t then violate Palestinian human rights with those arms, or our aid.

        If you want to be the next George Turner around here you need to work a lot harder.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

          Not my goal.

          I’d be more interested in exploring the whataboutism that will start popping up the second we take “It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations” seriously as a premise, though.

          How would George tackle this topic? I don’t know… maybe something about how this didn’t happen under Trump’s strength but Biden’s weakness or something.Report

  9. Swami says:

    I always wonder what would happen if Tijuana started routinely firing rockets at San Diego (“stolen” from Mexico in part via a battle which occurred right behind where my house is now located). Would the US respond similarly to Israel? How would world opinion differ?Report

  10. Jaybird says:

    There’s a protest happening in front of the UN.

    Report

  11. Jaybird says:

    Amnesty International weighs in:

    Report

  12. LeeEsq says:

    Based on observing social media posts from both sides of the conflict, the problem seems to be that the partisans of both sides both inhabitant different universes and are deeply concerned about theocratic politics from the other side.

    When it comes to Israel’s supporters, the entire righteousness of the Jewish State is self-evident because of the world’s failure to protect the Jews during the Holocaust and the fate of Jews in the MENA countries and Communist Bloc states after the Holocaust. People who are sympathetic towards the Palestinians just see Israel as a venture into colonial imperialism, any problems faced by the Jews being totally irrelevant to whether or not Israel should have been created or continue to exist.

    The Israeli Jews and their sympathizers do not want to be a minority group in a majoritarian Arab Muslim Palestine where at least a plurality is going to believe that heavy association between Islam and the state is a good idea and wants to form international links with the Muslim majority states that goes beyond normal diplomatic relationships. They will find this experiencing at best alienating and at worse prosecutorial. The reason why Israel’s supporters don’t quite believe in the secular multicultural Palestine line is because nobody has an explanation on how to prevent Political Islamists from operating politically or prevent Palestinian politics from following the course of politics in other Muslim-majority countries.

    Palestinians and their supporters find the idea of a Jewish state alienating and persecutorial for the same reasons and have the same questions. Both sides see their argument as self-evidently correct.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:

      The debate over who you should cheer for in a fight between David and Goliath has been settled for millennia.

      We’re now stuck fighting over who gets to be David and who gets to be Goliath.

      You watch enough episodes of Tom and Jerry, you start to notice that Tom loses a lot.Report

      • Philip H in reply to Jaybird says:

        both of those are bad analogies. Israel has taken enough territory through wars and illegal settlements that its now definitely David and Goliath. The Palestinians are more probably thought of as the shepherds working with David who had to give him their rocks in case the first one missed.

        And Israel is definitely Jerry.Report

  13. Jaybird says:

    These things happen.

    Report