Middle East exigency 2023

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Without a current existing thread titles and feeling that this is a very important situation, that will affect all the world including us, I am re-opening this topic with the fervent hope that it will be a calm, wise and considered place for interested members.

This latest from NYT, which may eventually get picked up by other media

I think this AP online article may be easier for some to access:

I am concerned that the truth and perception if truth are becoming dangerously and violently distant from one another in the current ME conflict. There is so much accumulated hatred and wish for revenge that there seems hardly the slightest chance of a path towards peace. Leaving only war and survival of the strongest to ‘win’ an end.

The US, as declared ally of Isreal is being sucked in to the conflict whether or not it wishes and the rhetoric repeated throughout the ME is doing nothing but muddying the truth

“Our missiles, drones, and special forces are ready to direct qualitative strikes at the American enemy in its bases and disrupt its interests if it intervenes in this battle,” Ahmad “Abu Hussein” al-Hamidawi, head of the Kataib Hezbollah militia, said in a statement last Wednesday.

“These evil people must leave the country. Otherwise, they will taste the fire of hell in this world before the afterlife,” the statement said.

I for one cannot see how this can lead to peace.

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Understatement of the year

As apprehension spread across the region of a major war, the Jordanian foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, said: “All the indications are that the worst is coming. The catastrophe will have painful consequences in coming periods.”

Even if, a big IF, the hostilities are contained within Isreal, and surrounding states do not feel the need to join in with violence, there will be tremendous suffering and tragedy inflicted on civilians.

Seems to me the absolute necessity is to allow Palestinians trapped in Gaza to leave right now. Where to, is another problem but barricading them inside what is becoming a war zone is inhuman. Makes me think of Oradour-sur-Glane.

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One of the most disappointing aspects of this current situation is that the US, the UK and to a lesser extent the EU have given almost unequivocal support for Israel’s retaliation rather than try and calm things down. Netanyahu could have been reigned in because without the US’s backing he’d be on his own, unfortunately, Biden is weak and doesn’t have it in him to take the brave decisions, Israel needs to back down and show the world that they still want peace despite Hamas’s attack.

I can’t predict how or when this will end but what is certain is that innocent civilians will suffer in their 0000’s because of the stupidity of just a few people.

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In addition to the obvious unnecessary loss of life in Gaza, I think the most concerning aspect of all this is the more widespread ramifications of unrest in other parts of the world, as those that feel they need to ‘support the cause’ more strongly take more dire retaliatory measures, and we all know what that looks like with the many horrific examples of the past. Praying that there is some sort of resolution to stem the impact, but as the days roll on, I must say I am becoming less and less hopeful. A very sad unnecessary situation.

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I think ultimately it will come down to how Iran wants to play this out, they hold the purse strings of Hamas and Hezbollah and make the ultimate decisions that they then play out, Israel fear the Hezbollah a lot more than Hamas as they are vastly better equipped and dangerous.
The last thing Israel wants is another devastating conflict like in 2006.

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I can’t pretend to make any knowledgable contribution to this thread apart from that fact all this scares the sh*t out of me thinking about what future consequences could be in store for all of us. Am I right in thinking Israel is a nuclear nation, Iran is I believe? From what I have seen on TV and obviously a lot of reporting is biased by whoever is broadcasting it, maybe some of the major arab nations will step in and broker some sort of peace deal as they too would most likely suffer if things escalated too far.

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I agree with your sentiments @Shiba but @tim17 may be right.

Can’t help wondering about Putin and Xi’s recent meeting that they must have been avidly discussing “How can we make this ME thing work for us?” Both see US as a common rival/adversary. The old tactic

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Biden is not fit to be in such a dangerous situation, he can’t find his way out of a pair of curtains without his wife! The US should send someone who is not such a public spectacle that no one takes him seriously. My daughter in the US said he (Biden) said on TV there the other day that he was born in Iran, getting muddled with Ireland.

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This seems like a major gaffe…but I cannot find any reference to it on the internet or ‘msm’ sites. I would have thought his many enemies would seize on such a daft statement to highlight his deficiencies.

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From msn…

The Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed Biden had said he was born in Israel.

As is stated by the White House transcript, Biden spoke about how “The State of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people of the world.”

I imagine his speech was slurred to the extent that it sounded like he was saying “I was born…”

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I think that is a bit of a stretch but I can’t understand much of what he says, his speech is so slurred. He comes across as drunk to me although I don’t believe he is which is hardly a comfort. And that silly little half run he has, presumably to make himself look less doddery only serves to emphasise just how doddery he is, when he regains his more normal hesitating walk in between.

If I was an American with voting rights I would be as much, if not more, distressed at the awful supremely impossible choice I would have at the next election. Even more than the hopeless choice I would have in England, if I had voting rights there.

Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, I am not a fully fledged citizen of the world. :slightly_frowning_face:

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Yes, sorry bit mistake by me but I thought daughter said Iran or maybe I have them on the brain currently with all the hooha. She said she howled with laughter when she heard him get so muddled.

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I listened to this speech on YouTube and seems clear to me his following sentence is “That’s why it was born.” Perfectly in context. American without enunciating the ‘t’ in ‘it’ but no surprise from a Pennsylvanian. I think the Russians are as usual just trying to stir.

Adding to the criticism in social media of something so facile at this time is only playing into the hands of those who want an end to both US dominance and democracy. Might help to think what another world would look like.

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That’s a worrying reaction :frowning_face:

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If you are interested, some interviews by alArabiya before the act by Hamas in Isreal show how local Gaza feeling was about Hamas.

https://www.alarabiya.net/whispered-in-gaza

If you are unable to auto-translate the Arabic into English, a translated version is here

Hamas most certainly decided to act because they could see support for them was waning. They also undoubtedly, and with the support of other groups, saw peace in Isreal being brokered by Saudi as a threat to their power and ongoing war against anyone not them.

Hamas are absolutely no doubt terrorists, no less than were ISIS and the IRA, feeling justified in committing atrocities and taking innocent lives to ‘win’ recognition.

Palestinian citizens in Gaza have long been bravely trying to speak out, sometimes at great risk, against Hamas. When the rest of the world sees all Palestinians as supporters of Hamas it is making a gave error in judgement.

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The US president, like him or not, at some personal risk went in person to Isreal for a very good, and increasingly important reason

Because in the first week of this war the Supreme Leader of Iran and the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to be keeping very tight control on their militiamen both on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders may be considering letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets, and maybe American targets if the United States intervenes.

Have no doubt: the possibility of a regionwide war that could draw the United States in is much greater today than it was five days ago, senior U.S. officials told me. As I write on Thursday night, The Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. More missiles likely from pro-Iranian militias were fired at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and at Israel from Lebanon.

Israel is not likely to let Iran use its proxies to hit Israel without eventually firing a missile directly back at Tehran. If that happens, anything can happen. Israel is believed to have submarines in the Persian Gulf.

What makes the situation triply dangerous is even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday.

As the Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (P.I.J.) achieved more this week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and the P.I.J. rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that the P.I.J. accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The Arab street was on fire and a meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled.

Imagine what will happen when the first major Israeli invasion of Gaza begins in our wired world, linked by social networks and polluted with misinformation amplified by artificial intelligence. No wonder pro-American Arab leaders are beseeching Biden to beseech the Israelis to act in ways that leave them some space to continue to work with Israel.

We must make not make the mistake of belittling President Biden. He is in a crucial and unenviable position at a critical moment.

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The NYT article writer, triple Pulitzer winner Thomas L. Friedman, of the astute piece (link above) goes on to suggest (loooong but very important so I copy it here for those who cannot jump the firewall)

Israel today is in raw survival mode. We Americans can advise, but Israel is going to do what it is going to do.

Where I have a vote — just one — is in America. The president, in his prime-time speech Thursday night, vowed to ask Congress for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel to get through this war, along with an immediate injection of $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

I’m all for helping Israelis and Palestinian civilians at this time — but not without some very visible strings attached.

If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)

I am well aware that Hamas has been committed to eliminating the Jewish state since its inception — not because Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank. But if Israel has any hope of nurturing a Palestinian leadership that could replace Hamas in Gaza in the long term and be an effective partner for a two-state solution, then the settlement project has to stop and it has to stop now.

As for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, it needs, as soon as possible, to elect or appoint a new leadership — one with the competence to build decent Palestinian institutions in a noncorrupt fashion that earns its people’s respect and legitimacy. The Palestinian Authority, which is ready to coexist with the Jewish state, needs to be able to actually win a free and fair election against Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza.

Without those two sets of conditions being met, there’s no future for moderation in this corner of the world, no chance of a sustainable peace and no chance of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — no matter if Israel eliminates every single Hamas leader, foot soldier and rocketmaker or no matter how sympathetic one might be to the Palestinian cause.

The keystone of Bibi Netanyahu’s 15 years as prime minister has been strategically expanding settlements to prevent any prospect for a contiguous Palestinian state ever coming into being.

In doing so, the Israeli leader knowingly and blatantly acted against U.S. interests. He was willing to destabilize America’s allies, Jordan and Egypt, to pursue more settlements. He was willing to risk America’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, if the pact meant halting settlements. He has shown no willingness yet to halt settlements to secure a historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia.

Folks, Israel is a wealthy country today and money is fungible. For way too long U.S. economic and military aid has allowed Netanyahu to have his cake and eat it too — to fund the insane settlement project, and maintain an advanced military, while not having to raise taxes on the whole Israeli public to pay for it all. While Israel got U.S. aid in one hand, the budget of its Ministry of Defense paid to build roads for settlers with the other hand. Uncle Sam’s wallet, indirectly, was the slush fund for Netanyahu’s politics.

So no, we’re not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza — Israel is a sovereign country. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

America has been indirectly funding Israel’s slow-motion suicide — and I am not just talking settlements. Look at what Netanyahu did last June. To buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties he needs in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, Netanyahu’s government gave the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers “an unprecedented increment in allocations … including full funding of schools to not teach English, science and math,” explained Dan Ben-David, a macroeconomist who has focused on the interaction between Israel’s demography and education at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T.,” Mr. Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”

Bottom line: Netanyahu has a completely incoherent strategy right now — eliminate Hamas in Gaza while building more settlements in the West Bank that undermine the only decent long-term Palestinian alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, which Israel needs to safely leave Gaza.

If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after. I am hardly the only one who wants to know. As the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in an essay this week in Haaretz about Netanyahu’s government: If it “does dream of exploiting victory to annex territories, forcefully redraw borderlines, expel populations, ignore rights, censor speech, realize messianic fantasies or turn Israel into a theocratic dictatorship — we need to know it now.”

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I hope that’s unintentionally hyperbolic - or do you seriously mean that you’d have difficulty choosing between Biden and Trump?

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As the choice is demonstrably impossible, it would certainly be awful. :worried: