Tweeting towards Armeggedon
Nov. 14th, 2012 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyI don't even.
So far at least eight people have been killed, including two children whom I guess were terrorist children or something so we shouldn't be concerned about them, one of which was the terrorist child of a terrorist BBC worker. My government certainly isn't shedding any tears.
Posting pictures of dead and dying children isn't really my thing; I am seeing plenty tonight and I'm sure you could easily find them if you went looking. Needless to say, it's horrific, and the flippant Tweets only amplify the awfulness.
So far at least eight people have been killed, including two children whom I guess were terrorist children or something so we shouldn't be concerned about them, one of which was the terrorist child of a terrorist BBC worker. My government certainly isn't shedding any tears.
Posting pictures of dead and dying children isn't really my thing; I am seeing plenty tonight and I'm sure you could easily find them if you went looking. Needless to say, it's horrific, and the flippant Tweets only amplify the awfulness.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 02:34 am (UTC)Except that I think I feel the same way you do.
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Date: 2012-11-15 03:47 am (UTC)And over in Syria children are being murdered by the hundreds. But hey, they can't be used for anti-Semitic propaganda so they don't really matter.
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Date: 2012-11-16 12:54 am (UTC)So fuck off!
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Date: 2012-11-17 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-18 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 03:45 am (UTC)And why no tears shed for the children being murdered in Syria or the children who were murdered in Libya when Qaddafi was murdering his own citizens?
Yeah, I'm pissed off about this too, but I am not going to direct my anger at Israel that was given no choice in the matter and waited WAY LONGER than any nation should wait to respond to attacks with deadly force. I'm pissed at the Hamas who spent years establishing a theocracy, cozying up to Iran, smuggling rockets and launching them against Israel. What Hamas did NOT do was to build up its infrastructure, spend money on building projects, education, health care, etc., etc. Hamas didn't give a shit about these children any more than you gave a shit about these children before this very moment.
Only you have an excuse in that you live on the other side of the world. It's not your job to give a shit about these children. Hamas was responsible for them as people living in their territory. Instead of taking care of them, Hamas decided that it would be better to get them killed by launching rockets against Israel until Israel finally responded. And now Hamas has gotten these children the way it wants them - dead martyrs to fuel its propaganda machine.
It's just rather sad that you are falling for it.
It's also sad that you aren't half as concerned with the dead Arabs who aren't used as propaganda chips against Israel.
Really not cool.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 06:00 am (UTC)If you're going to blame Hamas for putting children in danger, be fair and blame the Israeli government for doing the same.
But don't forget this is also asymmetrical warfare. Israel is far more capable of destroying infrastructure (which we do every time we start one of these rounds), is far more capable of defending itself (which we do with money we've used by cosying up to the US and Canada, who aren't murderous and destructive at all, right? Not like OMG! IRAN!).
If you think Israel isn't using the poor children of Sderot, Netivot and Beer Sheva (while at the same time destroying Bedouin villages and giving fuck all about those citizens of Israel) you have another thing coming.
As for accusing Sabs of not caring about other "dead Arabs"? If someone is utterly callous here it is you.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 06:49 pm (UTC)An average large American city likely experiences more gun deaths per year than the entire state of Israel has suffered rocket casualties in a decade. We don't send the US military in to level entire neighborhoods indiscriminately
yet.Also, comparing Gaza to a sovereign country is interesting, to say the least. I'm trying very hard to imagine who you think would take that comparison seriously. Don't get me wrong: I fully understand the convenience of having an entity that is a "terrorist organization" when it needs to be, and which does not enjoy any of the rights conferred by international law or treaty, etc., but can then be construed as a sovereign state capable of "acts of war" the moment it becomes convenient to drop cluster bombs and white phosphorous on apartment buildings. Expedient, but not believable, if we're going to be talking about "falling for it".
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 10:11 pm (UTC)I'll let
But I'm going to take issue with some of your more specific points.
This sucks and it's a tragedy but is there any way that Israel is supposed to respond that doesn't involve loss of life?
While I'm not a pacifist and there are tons of situations where violence is, regrettably, the only solution and it's merely a question of violence towards whom, this situation wasn't one of them. I'm sure Jabari was a murderous asshole. You don't get very far in either Israeli or Palestinian politics unless you're a murderous asshole. However, whoops, looks like he was working on a long-term truce when they assassinated him.
So possibly holding off on killing this particular murderous asshole could have saved some lives.
And why no tears shed for the children being murdered in Syria or the children who were murdered in Libya when Qaddafi was murdering his own citizens?
Are you basing your suppositions on how many tears I shed for various dead children on my LJ posts alone? Because if so, I do believe that I have posted about human rights abuses in both Syria and Libya. If you're talking about more concrete action, I'm afraid I'm guilty there in the sense that there's not a hell of a lot I can do from here. I urged my government to denounce Assad's regime—which includes a guy who tortured my friend's dad, incidentally—while it was sitting on its ass doing nothing about the situation.
However, neither Assad nor Qaddafi ever claimed to be committing their atrocities in my name or for my general welfare, nor did either of them ever solicit funding from me. So I have a more personal stake, and slightly more room for action, in regards to atrocities committed by Israel.
(By the way, this is the part that reads most like copypasta. "You care about human rights abuses in Israel when there are worse ones going on in Darfur." Weirdly, it's always Arab countries that I don't care enough about. I'm never accused of not crying enough tears over Colombia or the Congo or Haïti or Canadian First Nations reservations. I wonder why that is. I do honestly give a shit about Syria and Libya and was relieved that a good friend's family made it safely—for a certain value of safety—into Lebanon.)
no subject
Date: 2012-11-17 04:07 am (UTC)Text in case you hit a paywall:
Israel killed its subcontractor in Gaza
The political outcome of the operation will become clear on January 22, but the strategic ramifications are more complex: Israel will have to find a new subcontractor to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the south.
By Aluf Benn | Nov.14, 2012 | 10:44 PM
Ahmed Jabari was a subcontractor, in charge of maintaining Israel's security in Gaza. This title will no doubt sound absurd to anyone who in the past several hours has heard Jabari described as "an arch-terrorist," "the terror chief of staff" or "our Bin Laden."
But that was the reality for the past five and a half years. Israel demanded of Hamas that it observe the truce in the south and enforce it on the multiplicity of armed organizations in the Gaza Strip. The man responsible for carrying out this policy was Ahmed Jabari.
In return for enforcing the quiet, which was never perfect, Israel funded the Hamas regime through the flow of shekels in armored trucks to banks in Gaza, and continued to supply infrastructure and medical services to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Jabari was also Israel's partner in the negotiations for the release of Gilad Shalit; it was he who ensured the captive soldier's welfare and safety, and it was he who saw to Shalit's return home last fall.
Now Israel is saying that its subcontractor did not do his part and did not maintain the promised quiet on the southern border. The repeated complaint against him was that Hamas did not succeed in controlling the other organizations, even though it is not interested in escalation. After Jabari was warned openly (Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff reported here at the beginning of this week that the assassination of top Hamas people would be renewed), he was executed on Wednesday in a public assassination action, for which Israel hastened to take responsibility. The message was simple and clear: You failed - you're dead. Or, as Defense Minister Ehud Barak likes to say, "In the Middle East there is no second chance for the weak."
The assassination of Jabari will go down in history as another showy military action initiated by an outgoing government on the eve of an election.
This is what researcher Prof. Yagil Levy has called "fanning the conflict as an intra-state control strategy:" The external conflict helps a government strengthen its standing domestically because the public unites behind the army, and social and economic problems are edged off the national agenda.
This recipe is familiar from 1955, when David Ben-Gurion returned from his exile in Sde Boker and led the Israel Defense Forces to a retaliatory action in Gaza, and his party, Mapai, to victory in the election. (Barak recalled this period with nostalgia, when he spoke last week at a memorial for Moshe Dayan). Ever since, whenever the ruling party feels threatened at the ballot box, it puts its finger on the trigger. The examples are common knowledge: the launch of the Shavit 2 missile in the summer of 1961, in the midst of the Lavon affair; the bombing of the Iraqi reactor in 1981; Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon in 1996, and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza on the eve of the 2009 election. In the two latter cases, the military action turned into a defeat in the election.
There is a disagreement among historians as to whether it is necessary to add the Yom Kippur War to the list. In that conflict, which broke out on the eve of the 1973 election, the Arabs fired first, but their decision to go to war was taken in the context of the increasingly extreme position of Prime Minister Golda Meir's government which had refused Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace offer and declared an expansion of Israeli settlements in Sinai.
This, for example, is the opinion of researchers Prof. Motti Golani and Shoshana Ishoni-Barri.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-17 04:08 am (UTC)The current operation, Pillar of Defense, belongs in the same category. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is interested in neutralizing every possible rival, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak is fighting for enough votes to return to the Knesset. A war against Hamas will wipe out the electoral aspirations of the ditherer, Ehud Olmert, whose disciples expected him to announce his candidacy this evening and it will kick off the agenda the "social and economic issue" that serves the Labor Party headed by MK Shelly Yacimovich.
When the cannons roar, we see only Netanyahu and Barak on the screen, and all the other politicians have to applaud them.
The political outcome of the operation will become clear on January 22. The strategic ramifications are more complex: Israel will have to find a new subcontractor to replace Ahmed Jabari as its border guard in the south, and it will also have to ensure that its action in Gaza does not cause the collapse of its peace treaty with Egypt under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Hamas movement's patron.
These are not easy challenges and the results of the operation will be judged by the extent to which they are met.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 10:11 pm (UTC)What Hamas did NOT do was to build up its infrastructure, spend money on building projects, education, health care, etc., etc.
This is actually how they got popular support. I'm not saying they were good at it, or that it didn't serve a more nefarious purpose, but that's how they won out over the PLO.
Hamas didn't give a shit about these children any more than you gave a shit about these children before this very moment.
I guess this is what I find most offensive.
These particular children? Obviously I didn't know them, and I only know of them because they're dead. Palestinian children in general? I've been involved in the Jewish anti-occupation movement for over a decade now. This mainly consists of staging protests and vigils, writing letters, sending money to peace organizations, running my mouth at inopportune times to people who call me a self-hating Jew, and not buying stuff that I probably wouldn't have bought anyway. You may argue with the politics or the efficacy of these actions, but you do not get to argue that I don't give a shit about this issue and only made a post about it because I saw it on FB or something.
It's just rather sad that you are falling for it.
Falling for what? Like I said, I've been involved in this issue for over a decade. Granted, I don't live there, but as far as a person living here can be informed on both sides of the conflict, I have made that effort. I was raised a Zionist, exposed to various arguments, and came to a radically different position because I could no longer rationalize twisting myself into an ideological pretzel to justify actions that I would have condemned if any other country in the world was doing them.
no subject
Date: 2012-11-18 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 08:28 am (UTC)If anyone deserves death it's that motherfucker.
And most of the pictures of dead children being put forth by the Hamas are Syrian dead children. So definitely not Israel's doing. Not that it's great that any children are dying, but these are not Israel's fault.
Of course, if Hamas gave a crap about the children living in Gaza, it would be working to make their lives better instead of publicizing the deaths that it is responsible for.
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Date: 2012-11-15 12:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 02:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-15 09:42 pm (UTC)Casualties are horrific when they happen on both sides.
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Date: 2012-11-15 10:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-16 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-17 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-17 02:12 pm (UTC)