Nobody can stand the Palestinians

And Arabs least of all.

You might not know it from the outcry from Hamas stooges, but however pained the western world feels about the deaths, injuries and day-to-day lousy standard of living of the Palestinians, closer to home, the people that know them best have no pity for them.

RtO has said this for years, but it was not really restating the obvious because virtually no one was in agreement. Today, even the New York Times cannot fail to notice the deafening silence from Arab capitals.

 “There is clearly a convergence of interests of these various regimes with Israel,” said Khaled Elgindy, a former adviser to Palestinian negotiators who is now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. In the battle with Hamas, Mr. Elgindy said, the Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants were nearly identical. “Whose proxy war is it?” he asked.

The Times story is both tone-deaf and remarkably uninformed historically, even if it does recognize, without really comprehending, what is going on.

In 1948, the Arab leaders cynically -- or perhaps naively -- exploited the racism of the Palestinian Arabs (who were not then regarded as, nor regarded themselves as Palestinians; that came later) as a public relations fifth column to subvert world opinion against the Jews (who then did regard themselves as Israelis, even if world opinion had not come to the same understanding).  They urged the Arabs to evacuate Israel, assuring them they could return as soon as the Jews had been wiped out.

At that time, borders and self-images were not as hard as they have since become. The people who became Palestinians, if they thought about it at all, probably thought of themselves as Syrians and Palestine (including Jordan) as properly part of an Arab Great Syria. Had the armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt pushed the Jews into the sea, the soon-to-be Palestinians would have returned home, but they no doubt would have expected to be able to move freely around Syria.

If they had thought it through -- it seems unlikely any did -- they probably would have thought that in the event of an Arab defeat they could retreat to new homes in "Syria." That they would be -- in the language of the day -- DPs, displaced persons, segregated in camps would not have crossed their minds; and even if it had, in Europe DPs were being resettled, not confined permanently in "refugee camps."

That they are still in camps after 64 years has been a shock to them, and I have never read anything to indicate that they understand even now what happened to them. It is worth asking why they were not resettled.

It is obvious why they were not quickly resettled. The place (Jordan being too poor to be attractive) would have been Syria, but until 1954 Syria was in the hand of the most radical and violent of all Arab regimes. It was not in Syria's plans for pressure to be reduced.

The 1956 war removed the residual influence of Britain and France, and by that time the Arab states had learned that the United Nations (that is, the United States) would pay to feed the Palestinians. No reason for them to alter arrangements that were by then becoming customary.

Population pressures and increasing political sophistication was by this time generating a Palestinian diaspora. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was created in 1964, with the sponsorship and as a tool of Nasser, dictator of Egypt.

It planned the destruction of Israel but as the Arab regimes soon found, it was more dangerous to them than even to the Jews. The regimes of Jordan and Lebanon managed -- Jordan just barely -- to save themselves. Lebanon was destroyed, however, in the civil war.

Arab leaders learned to distrust the Palestinians, which is why none has ever done anything to bring the Palestinians into the pan-Arab polity they claim, when convenient, to want. At times, as in Iraq, they have massacred their Palestinian refugees when they became obnoxious.

Palestinians are more useful to Arab regimes as a club to beat the Jews and entertain their masses than as either sources of well-educated (compared to other Arabs) labor or as residents of another Arab state. But from time to time the Palestinians start listening to their own propaganda and making trouble for not only the Israelis but for the stability of the Arab states. Then the Arab regimes keep up the mask but behind the scenes expect Israel to clean up the mess.

In rank order of who really cares about the lives of the miserable refugees, from least to most, are the western stooges of Hamas, Hamas, the other Arabs and the Israelis.

For the Israelis, a tenderness for refugee lives does not require us to believe that Israelis are more moral or less bloodthirsty, but merely to acknowledge the obvious -- Israel has something to lose from a high body count of Palestinians, the others something to gain.
 








 

A sampling of political ads on teevee

Aren't I cute?

A sampling of political ads

I don’t own a TV so I don’t usually see political ads, but this week I saw several. Not all getting on air, I am sure, but a complete rotation during a news hour.

No attack ads but equally, with the exception of one candidate,  Brian Schatz, no issue ads either.

The gubernatorial ads for Ige and Abercrombie were bland and forgettable.

Colleen Hanabusa’s senatorial ad was very subtly done. Depending upon how you interpret the dog whistle, it was, at best, a veiled appeal to maintain the political style of the Revolution  of ’54; at worst, a racist appeal to localism.

If I am wrong, and no dog whistle was intended, then it was a waste of money, because otherwise it was as empty of content as it could be.

Schatz’s issues were uncontroversial enough: for Social Security, for background checks for gun buyers (not really a hot local item) and for environmental protection (although Hanabusa has criticized him for voting for a pale green environmental bill that allegedly exempts HC&S’ boilers, while she voted against it).

I am of two minds about issue ads on TV. On the plus side, they are at least better than the anodyne “aren’t I cute?” ads that are usual. On the minus side, as Schatz’ attempt shows, a claim to be “for the environment” needs some explication. (I got it by reading The Maui News; that is a good way to be an informed voter, although I will not be voting in the primary.)

One ad, though, shocked me and is the reason for this post. I wouldn’t have taken your time to note that Governor Abercrombie -- aka “Mr. Excitement” -- runs boring ads.

Congressional candidate Mark Takai had a poorly produced ad (with a voiceover so hurried I missed most of it) that opened with old news footage of the 442nd RCT and some gabble about Mark Takai in the tradition of the 442nd. Funny, I don’t recall that Takai rushed any machine gun nests in Italy.

It’s a bold, and disgusting, ploy for the 47-year-old Takai to claim the mantle of the 442nd, which laid down its weapons 69 years ago.

(A cursory search finds a Chad Blair report on Civil Beat from February which said Takai would be citing his military service, which he does as a “veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom” although he never got to Iraq.)

I don’t know anything against Takai but I find his commercial repellant.

Last note: Shan Tsutsui has an unintentionally funny ad for his run for the do-nothing job  of lieutenant governor featuring do-nothing-much retired senator Dan Akaka saying Tsutsui “reminds me of me.” I saw that one three times and laughed harder at each viewing.

Book Review 330: Night

NIGHT, by Elie Wiesel. 120 pages. Hill and Wang paperback

This would be a good time to read -- or reread -- Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” always keeping in mind that all memoirs of the concentration camps were written by survivors, almost always those who, for one reason or another, got less severe treatment.

Elie Wiesel, for example, spent his first months at Auschwitz-Birkenau in an undemanding slave labor job sorting parts in an electrical factory.

Things got worse later and he barely pulled through.

The world did not want to hear such stories in the ‘50s, and it took a campaign by Francois Mauriac to find a publisher for “Night” in France. There was even less interest, and no academician to mount a campaign, in English-speaking countries.

Now, “Night” is famous, taught in schools, but one is left wondering exactly what impact is has. My copy was originally owned by a high school girl, and she left notes that make me doubt whether the power of the spare narrative, so evident to me, was felt by her. Apparently not.

In a late foreward, written to accompany a new translation by his wife, Wiesel asks himself why he wrote the book and, characteristically, remains uncertain. But we understand why we read them, at least as grownups.

“Night” is not about Jews but about Germans. By extension, about Palestinians, which is why now is a good time to read or reread it.

Book Review 329: How Rome Fell

HOW ROME FELL: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy. 531 pages, illustrated.Yale paperback

Adrian Goldsworthy felt obliged to spend the first and last pages of “How Rome Fell” explaining that the answer, whatever it is, cannot be copied over as a cautionary admonition to the United States today.

Not that he does not draw conclusions. Some historians claim history does not teach lessons -- a silly idea equivalent to saying that you cannot learn from experience -- but Goldsworthy does not do so. He claims that superpowers, when they fall, fall from within.

When I was a boy in the South, the fall of Rome was a favorite theme of holy roller preachers, although these men were so ignorant they could not have found Rome on an Esso map of Italy. They were persuaded that it was the moral depravity of the Romans. They were too stupid to note that the decline leading to the fall coincided with the Christianization of the empire.

Edward Gibbon thought the fall was the result of religion and barbarism. A German historian counted at least 200 proposed causes.

Goldsworthy is cautious. For one thing, the decline can be fairly precisely started in the third century, and he notes that we know so little about that time that if we were equally ignorant about the 20th century, we would know there had been a Great Depression and two world wars but would not understand how serious they were.

Still, he dates the beginning of the end to the murder of Emperor Commodus and the civil wars that followed. Surprisingly, he offers no discussion about why the murder -- not the first of an emperor -- was so dire.

The reason was that Augustus, 200 years earlier, had not devised a rule for succession in the constitution of the empire. There was a vague feeling that sons should follow fathers, but Roman emperors did not have many sons, or if they had one, tended to die (or be murdered) when he was an infant. There was no plan for the death of an emperor without an heir.

The empire was basically the army, so the strongest, best-placed general grabbed for the diadem. And others, too, often enough.

Goldsworthy identifies a structural change that this system of musical chairs began: the later emperors stopped using senators as legates to command armies or undertake other crucial tasks. They were afraid of creating a viable rival.

But if senators could not be trusted, the emperor had to do everything himself, which meant leading the army. If campaigns were necessary at opposite ends of the empire, one would be left unattempted.

Although he says relying on a small aristocracy -- around 600 men -- “may seem odd in this day and age,”  especially since they were “amateurs in the modern sense,” the method worked well in the Roman context.

By keeping the ruling class wieldy, it allowed emperors to judge whom to trust and whom to keep away from temptation. And until the breakdown in the third century, senators did not think of themselves as potential emperors, which helped keep them contented as subordinate servitors of the state.

Expanding the upper leadership to the class of equestrians -- perhaps as many as 10,000 men -- meant an emperor lost intimate knowledge of whom to rely on and whom to fear.

This is a more subtle argument than barbarism and religion, and Goldsworthy is at pains to show that the barbarians were never numerous enough, skilled enough or united enough to do critical damage to such a strong empire. He has much less to say about religion.

No empire ever lasted so long. The western empire lasted around 1,300 years (though much of that period as a republic), the eastern portion much longer.

The Hamas tunnels

Israel’s open warfare with Hamas is, so the government says, partly about the tunnels by which terrorists are introduced into southern Israel. This opinion piece in The Washington Post attempts, not entirely successfully, to account for the alarm the Israelis feel about tunnels.

Be that as it may, I wonder why there is not a tech defense against tunnels. Israel has one of the best archaeological infrastructures in the world.

Israel knows how to use airborne magnetic anomaly detectors and sidescan radar to identify long buried ancient sites. It ought also be possible to use seismic sensors to indicate where tunnels are being dug. In this Haaretz story, other methods are suggested, from something as simple as microphones (used during World War I) to microgravity sensors to satellite observation.

The purpose of this post is only to ask whether there is not a tech answer to the ancient military use of tunnels, not to suggest that a ground invasion of Gaza is not necessary on other grounds

Haaretz hints both that the Israel Defense Forces have been remiss and that they have tried at least some tech defenses with indifferent results:

Langotsky says it was a mistake not to give Military Intelligence and the IDF’s technological units responsibility for finding a solution to the tunnel problem. Instead, too much money has been wasted, he says.
For secrecy’s sake, the IDF, the Defense Ministry and the defense contractors developing the technology — such as Elbit Systems and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems — declined to answer TheMarker’s queries on the matter. Scientists from the Technion, where two teams are working on the tunnel problem, also declined to comment.
The Defense Ministry said: “All the technologies mentioned in the story are very well known to the defense establishment and have been examined in depth in light of the threat and soil conditions in the sector. For reasons of classified information, we are prevented from providing details on the use of each of these technologies.”

 RtO suggests that finding tunnels offers superb opportunities for psychological warfare, a chance to reverse the thrust of asymmetric warfare that usually works against the stronger side.

For example, a tunnel could be mined with an “Ambien bomb,” something to put terrorists to sleep as they emerge or wait near the Israel exit of a tunnel. (Strictly, such a  “bomb” would violate international law, but I do not think these laws are worth acknowledging.) Then the would-be terrorists could be hog-tied and perp-walked through Tel Aviv.

More fiendish would be turning the psychological reaction that Gerard DeGroot says is the tunnel’s reason for being against the tunnelers.

If it is possible, as Haaretz asserts, to detect people in a tunnel, then preset mines or air attacks at each end, sealing them in, ought to make even dedicated Palestinian would-b e martyrs reluctant to become tunnel militants.

A Fox News story, using IDF sources, says the Gaza entrances to the tunnels are hidden in mosques, schools, homes and sometimes UN relief buildings, which make locating both ends of a tunnel from outside problematic, although daring Israeli “tunnel rats” could overcome this problem.

Open carry + Minnesota nice = ?

This.

I will admit that he didn't pull his gat and shoot the CHILD in a hot rage. It was a cold rage.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Stupid, Simple)

So, Gene Simmons becomes (I believe) the first Mauian to be the subject of the Washington Post's truth squadding, for his claim that the 1% pay 80% of the taxes and half the population pays no taxes.

Simmons scores "4 Pinocchios," which is the Post's way of saying: Big fat liar.

FOLLOWUP, August 16:

It's hard to understand why anybody listens to this guy:.