We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Steven Den Beste provides what I think is a plausible analysis of thinking behind the latest Israeli tactic of occupying more of the West Bank in response to terror attacks on Israeli Civilians; a sort of ‘You bomb, We conquer’ strategy.
Steven takes the view that the purpose behind the strategy is to make the Palestinians pay a price in land for every attack, even to the point of rolling them into reservations and keeping them there. Given that the bombers are prepared to sacrifice their own lives they will have to consider the well-being of the families and communities they leave behind who will be even worse off after they have carried out their mission i.e. plenty of pain, no gain.
To be fair to Steven, he expresses doubts as to whether this strategy will work but he still rather too bullish about it in my view.
If the aim is to stop the bloodshed then a prolonged occupation of the whole of the West Bank will only lead to more. Israel simply does not have the resources to maintain such an operation and, in trying to do so, the IDF will be stretched to the limit. The Palestinians are far more radicalised than they have ever been and are hardly likely to accept such occupation with equanimity. They, too, are now well-versed in the art of urban warfare and will wage it fiercely as well as sending as many ‘martyrs’ into Israel proper as they can. Expect lots more Jenins and French Hills.
The Drawing-Board calls.
Another bombing attack in Israel has left 19 people dead, many of them children. Scores have been maimed and blinded by the bolts and ballbearings that are always packed into the explosive mix just to press home the indiscriminately homicidal intent. This is unleashing of hell by instalments.
The Israeli government has promised a response and, as I type these words, tanks are once again rolling into the West Bank. But to what end, I wonder? To what purpose? What is this squadron of Merkavas going to achieve by trundling around Jenin or Tulkarm boldly seeking an enemy that has no intention of engaging on the battlefield? How long, this time, until those same tanks come lurching back to their base like snarling, frustrated guard dogs that have just watched an intruder clamber over the perimeter fence to escape them?
There is a ‘Groundhog Day’ feeling about all this. Bomb attack followed by rolling tanks, followed by withdrawal, followed by bomb attack and so on and…well, that seems to be the emerging pattern.
How strange that a military force so famous for its elan and innovation appears to be so leaden-footed, paralysed even, in the face of this new war? I cannot help but think that Israel’s current crop of leaders, veterans of ’67 and ’73, are still fighting the last war; as if they are waiting for the Palestinians to don uniforms and march on Jerusalem for a turkey-shoot.
Well, that ain’t going to happen because this is a whole new ball (bearing) game. Hamas wants Israel to bleed and she will continue to do so unless Sharon and his cabinet get it into their heads that Soviet-backed Syrian infantry divisions are yesterday’s news.
I don’t know much about MEMRI, and I don’t know who David Tell is except that he writes about MEMRI’s activities in a way that strikes me as illuminating:
IF THERE WERE JUSTICE in the universe, the Middle East Media Research Institute would already have been awarded some kind of special-achievement Pulitzer Prize. MEMRI has pioneered the careful translation, and dissemination to European and American audiences, of print and broadcast news sources in the Arab world. The group’s work now pops up everywhere; here in the States, hardly a week goes by when some major daily or cable news show doesn’t make use (generally without attribution) of a MEMRI translation. And the cumulative effect of such translations is–or ought to be, at least–roughly analogous to the body blow struck against European philo-communism by the first Western publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novels in the 1960s. Here, really for the first time, non-Arabic speaking Westerners are being given a direct, first-person look into a previously unseen gulag. Only this time there is no barbed wire, the prisoners all serve by choice, and the anti-Semitism is no longer ancillary but central, basic, and paramount. It turns out that the Islamic Middle East, just as the Israelis have been begging us for years to figure out, has got itself trapped in a deep, deep swamp of near-psychotic Jew hatred.
I got the link to this from Instapundit (Thursday), and what Glenn Reynolds was interested in was what followed, which is a report of a video exchange involving a small Muslim girl who is being brought up as a nice respectable anti-Semite. So if that’s the sort of detail you’re looking for, follow the link and enjoy. Me, I love to look at the big picture, and Tell’s introductory paragraph above says a lot about that to me. Any short but well-done compare-and-contrast job on the similarities and differences between the Cold War and the present confrontation between the West and Islam gets my complete attention whenever I encounter it.
Robert ‘I don’t blame them for hitting me’ Fisk makes a rare intelligent point in the UK daily newspaper, The Independent. He points out that the U.S. government’s proposal to finger-print certain Arabs and Muslims from a set of Middle East countries will not apply to people travelling from Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that the men who attacked the U.S. on September 11th were mostly Saudis.
He is right to point out the absurdity of this. While I detest much of Fisk’s reflexive anti-American, anti-Israeli rhetoric, on this point he is right. Saudi Arabia is the country which has contributed the lion’s share of terrorists waging their war against the West. The sooner that Western policy-makers recognize that fact and reduce our reliance on their oil, the better. (This is already starting to happen due to growing ties with oil-rich Russia). Of course, whether fingerprinting will make an iota of difference to catching would-be terrorists is another point entirely. Predictably, Fisk does not object to the U.S. government fingerprinting persons on a matter of principle, but mainly to use it as a stick to hit Bush.
Well that is certainly what the redoubtable Sarah Lawrence thinks and on the basis of his latest idiotic article I am inclined to agree. Now it is well known amongst regular Samizdata readers that I am not reflexively pro-Israel but the notion being peddled that Arafat is not part of the terrorist problem in the Middle East is so patently idiotic that I can only speculate that this is indeed what Sarah categorises it as… an example of The Big Lie technique from a person who sees the world in Chomskyist terms, i.e. devoid of any objective meaning at all.
Spiffy graphic by Scrofulous Steve!
There was I thinking it was looking like a slow news day when, apparently, Israel drops a political bombshell on the Palestinians by voting against the establishment of a Palestinian State.
Except it wasn’t quite the Israeli government but the Likud Party and, on second sight, it wasn’t quite such a bombshell either. However the development deserves comment if only for the brows it appears to be furrowing round the Blogosphere. General opinion seems to be that it is a serious blow to the prospects for peace and a snub to Washington. I beg to differ.
No, the vote by the Likud Central Committee (59% to 41%) was actually a re-affirmation of a long-time plank of the Likud manifesto that there shall be ‘no Palestinian State West of the Jordan and it is a posture that says far more about Likud in-fighting than it says either about the ‘Peace Process’ or Washington.
Ariel Sharon is in the peculiar position of riding high in the opinion polls whilst appearing as a dithering embarrassment to many within his own party. Sharon had actually abandoned the above-mentioned Likud principle whilst in power because that’s the kind of thing leaders have to do in the cut-and-thrust of diplomacy and compromise. But it is meat-and-drink for his arse-kicker-in-chief, Benyamin Netanyahu, Likud’s blue-eyed boy, who has made no secret of the fact that he has his sights firmly set on the cat-bird seat. It was Netanyahu that sponsored the motion and, to everyone’s surprise (maybe even his own) actually won it.
It makes little material difference to facts on the ground. Until there is a change of Palestinian leadership then all talk of a Palestinian State anywhere remains so much moonshine. Likud’s reaffirmation of its traditional hard-line stance does not represent a change of heart or policy but rather a formalisation of extant positions. It will make a material difference to the bit of ground on which Sharon is standing for it’s a humiliation that will remind him that he cannot take his own party’s support for granted nor ignore the theatrically ferocious Netanyahu snapping at his heels and every other part of his anatomy.
I have read that this shows that Netanyahu is even more hard-line than Sharon but that is a simplification. Netanyahu is not in the hot-seat so he has the licence to act as man-of-the-hour for the party faithful and play the firebrand. Were he to find himself back in the premiership again, he would have to play the International Statesman and that means confronting and making hard choices. The same kind of hard choices Sharon had to make.
President Bush may well be losing sleep tonight, but not over this.
Inspired by a call in Saudi Arabia for Jewish women to be enslaved, my very good friend in the USA, Ed Collins sent me this e-mail:
“I see on Instapundit and Damian Penny’s sites that a Saudi preacher has advocated enslaving Jewish women. I’m all for it. Since I read the articles, I’ve had visions of Rachel Weiss and Natalie Portman in harem costumes”.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hubba hubba!!
Many Jews in Israel want to make the lives of Palestinians intolerable so that they will wish to live elsewhere. Many Arabs in Palestine find the lives of Jews intolerable anywhere.
– Tariq Bay (a Palestinian who married a Jew and moved to London)
Al-Ahram in Egypt interviewed one of the Islamic Jihad sappers who helped booby trap Jenin. “Omar” said:
“Of all the fighters in the West Bank we were the best prepared,” he says. “We started working on our plan: to trap the invading soldiers and blow them up from the moment the Israeli tanks pulled out of Jenin last month.”
Omar and other engineers made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.
“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them,” he said.
“We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four metres apart throughout the houses–in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas.”
At least they are not trying to blow up civilians for once
I have had two e-mails asking what ‘our’ views are on the Jenin massacre/counter-terrorist operation (choose one), both of which seem to expect ‘us’ to reach diametrically opposed conclusions.
Firstly, there is no Samizdata editorial position per se on anything in particular. Our contributors write within a libertarian meta-context (i.e. a world view or frames of reference) but other than that, we all have separate views on many issues and air them as we wish on this blog.
My personal views on what did/did not happen in Jenin are… I really do not know. I regard the IDF as no more or less reliable a source of information than the Palestinians. Both lie through their teeth when it suits them. That is what all governments do.
I regard press accounts as something that need to be assessed on the basis of past performance and plausibility. Some bloggers have noticed that UK media reports are similar and have taken this as a sign of either collective hostility to Israel or collusion or whatever. I suspect the fact they were being herded around in a group by the Israeli authorities might have something to do with their similarity of reports and observations. However the mere fact Israel is not receiving collective songs of praise from the UK media is evidence enough for some people of all manner of sinister motives. Sorry but the entire UK media is not represented by Robert Fisk and I for one am far from reflexively supportive of what the State of Israel tends to do. Thus sometimes I think maybe the reason some people write that Israel did something bad was that Israel did indeed do something bad. Do I think the IDF is institutionally capable of wiping out hundreds of Palestinian civilians to get a much smaller group of terrorists as some have claimed? Yes, I don’t doubt they are capable but that is not the same as saying I think they actually did that in Jenin. I simply have no way of knowing one way or the other.
However, the fact Israel wants to control what the media sees and the fact this is going to upset the media is also no evidence that what the Palestinians have claimed the IDF have done is true either. Israel is conducting a military operation and in military operations, security is life. As I pointed out in a post yesterday regarding Antony Loyd’s rather daft remarks about the US and UK militaries keeping journalists in the dark in Afghanistan, there are sound reasons for doing just that which have nothing to do with hiding atrocities or failures. And just because Arafat is howling about atrocities, so what? Most of what the Palestinians do ‘militarily’ are criminal terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and as Arafat is bottled up in a room by the IDF, I doubt he has any more idea of what really happened in Jenin than I do… thus anything he says can be safely ignored (plus the ‘minor’ fact history has demonstrated he is a pathological liar). High intensity urban street fighting is a messy business and sometimes innocent people get killed. That is not the same as a cold blooded massacre and professional journalists are just as capable of failing to understand what they are looking at as anyone else. Destroyed houses and the pitiable residue of shattered lives are not in and of themselves evidence of Israeli malfeasance. Maybe there was a guy with an RPG-7 leaning out of a window immediately before the Merkava tank put an H.E. shell into the building. Or maybe not. Context is everything.
And so I have no idea what the truth is about Jenin and really have no desire to venture much in the way of opinions on that. I am sure who is telling the truth will come out (if anyone) but not for a while yet in all likelihood.
According to the Washington Post:
“The cause of Israel drew a multitude of Americans yesterday to the historic West Front of the U.S. Capitol, where Israeli flags fluttered by the score, thousands of signs signaled support, and speakers at the podium and in the crowd voiced vigorous defenses of the country’s right to strike back against Palestinian bomb attacks aimed at its civilians,”
According to James Taranto in the Opinion Journal email newsletter:
Local officials estimated the size of the crowd at 100,000, with an estimated 1,200 charter buses carrying out-of-towners to the capital for the rally. The crowd was fired up; a few churls even booed Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, when he observed–accurately–that there are innocent Palestinians among the casualties of the war in the Mideast.
Given that politics is the act of finding the biggest parade and getting in front of it, I’m sure the Bush administration will soon enough get the point. The Israeli’s have every bit as much right to kick the crap out of the people supporting Kamikazi bombings in their cities as Americans do.
And we’d better support them because this time around the Nazis* have someone higher on their killing agenda than those of the Jewish faith.
*= Mein Kampf sales are said to be skyrocketing in Arab communities; Arab newspapers are pulling out 60 year old Nazi disinformation; Arab pundits are saying Hitler didn’t finish the job of the Final Solution. I do not mean Nazi in a figurative term. I mean it absolutely and literally.
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