I don’t think Israel’s problem is that the Palestinians have telegenically dead people. I think their problem is that they started a war of choice and they aren’t achieving their goals and are showing signs of being more vulnerable than ever. I don’t care how much vacuous analysis is published in the United States, if Israel cannot stop the rocket fire then they are not winning this war.
By blowing off the United States’ effort to achieve a peaceful settlement, Israel has basically no standing to complain about their predicament. They’re actually lucky that the administration is officially backing up their right to defend themselves because it’s actually quite clear that the administration thinks Israel has blundered into this conflict and they want it to end now, even though that would be a gigantic defeat.
The latest setback is that the FAA has banned American airplanes from flying into Tel Aviv because of concerns about rocket fire.
I don’t think this is how Netanyahu envisioned things going when he made the decision to attack Gaza.
It is beyond my power to imagine a situation where the US does not support Israel so I don’t buy the ‘lucky’ part of your analysis.
His exlpoitation of terror from the 9/11 attacks is wearing thin. Ariel Sharon was malicious across the West Bank in Jenin and Ramallah where he holed up his arch-nemesis PLO leader Arafat, who just wouldn’t die a natural way. A calculated withdrawal from Gaza (unilateral without talks or agreement with the Palestinians) backfired when Gaza voted Hamas into the government. Now due to the failure of the peace talks, Netanyhau got really pissed-off when the Obama administration indicated a unity government betweeb Hamas and Fatah might be acceptable.
What Netanyahu really thinks a week ago and 17 years ago:
○ Netanyahu finally speaks his mind – July 2014
○ PM Netanyahu Statement to Knesset on Hebron Protocol – January 1997
○ BooMan’s Prophetic Words in 2008
Cross-posted from my new diary – The Root of Israel’s Military Response in ‘Search for Peace’ – Jewish Defense League (JDL).
The nightmare scenario, it apears Hamas took away an IDF soldier after an APC was destroyed.
IDF: Sgt. Oron Shaul missing. A great asset for swapping militants.
Weird to read my own writing from six years ago.
Gaza is basically a large urban conglomeration. This is about the worst terrain to have to dig even a lightly armed and motivated enemy out of, casualties are certain. Remember our marines(?) and Fallujah?
So what can you do as armored infantry? Call in the airstrikes and artillery and armor and mechanized engineers and literally blow the blocks and strongpoints down, one by one. Like the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. Since Gaza is full of civilians, Israel has (so far) declared they won’t do this, although I doubt it would be much of a political problem either domestically or internationally (most certainly not in the US and its Congress) for Netanyahu to raze Gaza ala Warsaw 1944…
As in Israel’s last several Goliath vs David wars, the general staff of Goliath seems not to really have the answers. They apparently assume that all resistance will crumble immediately. As if.
Netanyahoo is just Israel’s version of C+ Augustus, more or less.
But it appears the Palestinians have provided Israeli allies with the beginnings of a way to back away. The airport is now closed. Seems the Incursion is now War.
I don’t know about the word blundered.
what word would you use?
Just saying that it’s not really something in the nature of a careless mistake.
Israeli PM Netanyahu: I “stopped” Oslo peace process – ENGLISH SUBTITLES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl60X_jOsR0
four years old, but relevant
Palestine is too close to use weapons of mass destruction on without serious collateral damage in Israel itself.
Saturation bombing of Gaza will remind too many people of World War II, and they will wonder if Israelis understand what the war crimes were in that war.
The rockets in schools story is getting old because Gaza is supposed to be an independent state already, according to Israel not an occupied territory; that is the entire basis of the state of war that allows Israel’s claim that its blockade is legal under international law. And under attack, as an independent state its military can store weapons anywhere it pleases.
If however, Israel wants to say that it is an occupied territory with Israel as the legitimate police force, then Israel has violation a shipload of provisions of the Geneva Convention governing occupied territories.
Finally, it is clear that Israel is and has been deliberately targeting civilian houses in order to try to intimidate Gazans into submission. That is what the murder of the four boys on the beach and the subsequent destruction of their family’s house communicated. Israel has been deliberately targeting hospitals in order to ensure the death of casualties.
And now Kerry wants a cease-fire. The Gazan government’s response rightly makes a cease-fire conditional on, among other things, a complete lifting of the blockade of Gaza.
For Gaza’s part, it lacks the support of most of the Arab world–Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, Gulf States, Jordan — because Hamas represents political and movemental Islam. And the politics of the movements withing political Islam are rapidly changing with the rise of ISIS and its religious purges of Mosul.
This could become a very messy end for the Israeli state, even with US help and intervention. Stampeded by his Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and the even harder right settler and religious parties, Bibi has overplayed his hand. The FAA action, totally driven by Israeli policy, amounts to a de facto boycott of Israel by US airlines.
What began as a way to distract the US from rapprochement with Iran has now set the Levant on fire. Next place to watch: Saudi Arabia as Wahabism and Salfism come home to roost.
Not quite, Hamas is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. There was an alliance with Turkey, Qatar, Egypt under Morsi and the U.S., especially Hillary Clinton. Al Jazeera and Qatar: Muslim Brothers’ Dark Empire?.
○ PM Erdoğan’s outbursts `hurt Turkey’s standing in the world,’ Washington says
○ Kerry Furious – True Face PM Erdogan of Turkey
○ 1 Year ago – MB Axis Egypt – Turkey – Qatar Faces Defeat
○ Obama/Clinton On Path for Mid-East Balkanization
Great point. With all its weapons the US has been stymied in guerrilla warfare, but the situation is infinitely worse for Israel because the guerrilla war is so close to its borders.
Even if we assume that the Israeli right is pure evil bent on exterminating all Palestinians and grabbing all the land they can, what’s the endgame? They’ve pushed a population to the point that it’s got nothing to lose, committing so many crimes against humanity that even sane Palestinians are so enraged that they can dehumanize Israelis in their own minds to the point of shooting rockets at civilians. Netanyahu has willfully and cynically taken it to this point – now he’s got a dead-end guerrilla war on his doorstep – and as you say, he can’t use nukes, and the truth is that even heavy use of conventional weapons will blow so much depleted uranium dust back on the Israeli population as to turn it into another Basra in terms of cancer epidemic.
Netanyahu is a monster without an endgame.
Under rapidly moving situations of invasion, a settler occupying stolen land is not normally considered the same as a civilian under current international law. The extension of settlements into occupied territory was a cynical strategy to use human shields in order to take land under occupation under a doctrine of military strategic necessity.
The endgame has been specified by the UN for years. Two non-sectarian nations within the 1967 borders. Right of return for Palestinians exchanged for withdrawal from all settlements, as occurred with the Camp David accords. Non-discriminatory civil rights within both states. Democratic parliamentary systems.
Israel’s bid to extort more has resulted in decreasing the security of Israel and setting the conditions whereby for the first time since 1948, Israelis might find themselves expelled and Israel end as a state without the rest of the world expressing opposition or dismay. The arrogance of power might have created that dire a situation if Israel persists in its current policy.
Like a lot of US security issues, the security issues Israel faces are mostly self-inflicted even assuming a good case for its creation in 1948.
And AIPAC keeps operating as if the US public were still under the magical spell of settler romanticism portrayed in Leon Uris’s propaganda movie Exodus.
Netanyahu was the arrogance himself, after he managed to ditch Obama and Kerry on the wayside, he was clearly bored by UNSG Ban Ki-moon. As in his best days, Netanyahu came with his ferocious war rhetoric without any visible goal.
Netanyahu knows better than considering all terror groups similar. By mimicking the United States and CIA intelligence, throughout its history Israel and the Mossad has made use of the emnity between groups to create havoc. My recent post – Hamas rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood.
See my diary – The Hanging Gardens of the White House – Year 2014.
So why the expectation that the Gazan government (not Hamas, the Gazan government) would allow its homes to be indiscriminately destroyed in a policy that has gone on for decades without international sanction.
The man always manages to say something stupid, endless cliches and sycophancy.
It’s why the US engineered his election as Secretary General. Thank Jesse Helms for that.
As I recall, Israel also had a lot of problems trying to suppress Hezbollah rockets from southern Lebanon, last time they tried.
Times of Israel: Netanyahu Finally Speaks His Mind
“Bring it on”, eh, Bibi?
Of course, there is the school of thought that maintains Israel’s 47 year illegal occupation, demonization, pauperization and brutalization of Arab Palestinians contributed mightily to the lamented “rise of Islamic extremism” in the region—google a few bin Laden quotes…
Bibi’s mind is that of the typical rightwing authoritarian “victim”. Frankly, he likes seeing the violence and destruction and (probably) the killing.
They don’t care what their perception is in the middle east. If they did, they wouldn’t let media anywhere near that border. Nuclear warfare makes you a bit bolder in your position.
Israel is going to continue to get support from the United States long after we are dead n gone, most likely.