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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Neutral and Israel alligned countries have been calling for a humanatarian pause on purely humanitarian grounds. Even if you don’t care about the hostages, that Hamas was willing to offer them means that they had an interest in such a pause as well; making Israel the only obstacle to it happening. That is to say, the severity of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is squarly on Israel’s shoulders. The most charitable reading of the situation is that they have determined that the tactical advantage of blocking a humanitarian pause outways the civilian lives they put at risk by doing so.






  • So, will the people currently living in the to be annexed territory be allowed to become Israeli citizens and retain full rights to their homes? Will the people who left northern Gaza at the instruction of Israel (instructions which Israel used to justify their bombing campaign), be allowed to return to their homes as Israeli citizens?

    Will the conditions in a smaller and more densely populated Gaza; where Israeli annexation is now fresh in everyone’s living memory be less conducive to terrorism. Will this help Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighboors, which had been seeing significant normalization prior to Hamas’s attack?

    I’ve been hereing a lot of people warn of this offensive as being a second Nakba. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba Comparing this reporting with what happened in the Nakba, that seems like a scaringly likely prediction.

    Looking at how the first Nakba turns out, it is hard to see how anyone can think repeating it will end well for Israel.


  • Beyond just ‘not ok’, Israel’s response is playing out exactly how the terrorist’s playbook says the terrorized country should respond: terrorist launches a terrorist attack, terrorized country responds with forced, civilians hit in the crossfire blame the terrorized country and move towards the terrorists.

    In the past few days, we have been hering Israeli officials refer to this as their 9/11. What they do not seem to appreciate with their comparison is that the emotion ladden responce the US engaged in after 9/11 proved to be one of the greatest military blunders in the countries history.

    If they want to learn a lesson from 9/11, they should address the immediate military threat, fix the security and intelligence failures that allowed the attack to be so successful (such as diverting soldiers away from the Gaza border; and (allegedly) ignoring warnings that Hamas was planning an attack). Once the immediate concerns are addressed, they should back off and allow time for cooler heads to think through what a strategically effective response would look like and implement that.

    Unfortunately, such a response is politically difficult in the best of circumstances. Given that the current ruling coalition is almost the definition of hotter heads, built itself up on the promise of “security”, and was already on shaky ground domestically, I don’t think they have many options other than a rash response.

    Hopefully they constrain themselves to just responding in Gaza. If they decide to respond by going after Hamas’s supporters in, say Iran, we are looking at a major regional war.