U.S. puts Ukraine $$ "at the end of the rope" where it will hang along with hopes for peace in the Middle East
Unconditional support for Israel vs carefully paced and parceled aid for Ukraine with major restrictions....and now the end in sight.
The picture appeared in Reuters on Oct. 13, 2023 of the Israeli dead at one of the many settlements attacked by Hamas on Saturday, Oct. 7th. Picture by Reuter’s Violeta Santos Moura.
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
It hasn’t been an easy week for those trying to make sense out of the attack of Hamas, a calculated pogrom, if ever there was one, on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. It was barbarous on a scale not seen outside the Shoah and the pogroms through the ages in Central and Eastern Europe. And thus no one wanted to hear the history of the old conflict in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, and rightly so.
However, now, with the Middle East on the brink of warfare that will dwarf anything seen since 1948, 1967 and 1973…and on through earlier battles with Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon, it is time for more considered reactions.
And here is the one I left this morning in response to Clyde Prestowitz’s long piece at Substack, entitled Israel, the Palestinians and America - The More it Changes the More it stays the Same.”
“A real act of political courage to write this Clyde. Of course, the important history you lay out, which is not being presented in most of the current reporting, is called irrelevant and only the barbarism of the Hamas attack dominates. There is no way around that dynamic, and in the short run public revulsion and condemnation must take place, and is called for. The Hamas slaughter of Israelis is a directed pogrom, and there is a lot of calculation behind it, to say the least, about as far from "spontaneous" as can be. (With the deeper question unanswered for now: how much Iran and thus Hezbollah are part of the strategic planning, driven in part, recently, by the threat of Israeli-Saudi rapproachment.)
Now a week later, some can see an approaching catastrophe as Israel overreacts (for example, Richard Haas’ views on Fareed Zakaria's show this morning, Sunday, Oct. 15), because it is probably impossible to "eliminate" Hamas without causing enormous civilian casualties, and creating a vacuum in Gaza, as there will be no standing government in the wake of what is coming. The more Israel is driven by revenge, however understandably, the greater the likelihood that it creates a humanitarian crisis - the siege is already breaking human right legalities and the rules of war which aim to protect civilians.
In public the US is writing Israel a blank check in the way they have not for Ukraine; privately they may be urging restraint, seeing that Arab public opinion and "the street" will not be as tolerant of Israeli revenge as Arab governmental leaders. And the dynamics have been clear from the start: at some point if Israeli goes the full route of invasion and generates a massive flood of refugees and/or leaves a Carthage of ruins for Gaza (not mutually exclusive outcomes), then Hezbollah to the North is bound to act and if they do so on a large scale, it will be warfare of an intensity which far exceeds Hamas capabilities, and is likely to emerge in many other places around the Middle East as terror bombings and sabotage.
No one has an answer on how to support "moderate" Palestinian leadership, which always seems to be undercut by a combination of Israeli political dynamics (you cite Sharon quite correctly) the Palestinian "street" and the expected band of extremists.
It's an old story in the "Anatomy of Revolution" which Crane Briton gave us in 1938, with two later revisions: the moderates always seem to lose ground to the radicals - whether in the English, French or Russian Revolutions. (Which in general are moving from Right to Left). Add in the worst of ethnic and religious intolerance, and territorial disputes, and we're looking for comparisons at the 30 years war in Europe in the 17th century and in the Balkans after the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990's as disputes of comparable intensity. And the Jewish people have seen nothing like this since the Shoah and before that the pogroms directed at them in Central and Eastern Europe, some "spontaneoous" and some deeply orchestrated.
If Israel's outrage is to be tempered at all, the effort must come from the United States and Western Europe.
For readers who want coverage of comparable quality to Clyde's, the NY Review of Books has featured five takes, the last of which is by the incomparable Fintan O'Toole ("Eyeless in Gaza") and of course, I went looking for something by Peter Beinhart which I found as an guest opinion in the NY Times: "There is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It must survive." (even as Beinhart admits to a level of despair which eclipses everything before it...)...and I better get to searching to see if John Mearsheimer has written about the war.”
Now let me add some further details to my comment on Clyde’s able history lesson, a lesson which even predates Israel’s founding, and goes back to the earliest settlers of Zionism in the last decades of the 19th century.
We’ve lost track, speaking of average citizens in the U.S., of two points. First, my reference to Crane Brinton’s “The Anatomy of Revolution” returns to my senior year at Lafayette College to a course limited to recommended students, because it required writing papers on each of the Revolutions we covered - the English, American, French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban (adding two to Brinton’s selections.)… The professor who taught the seminar, Dr. Heath, was a popular but demanding teacher, and a great lecturer, the best I’ve heard and that still stands.
Brinton reminds us still that revolutions can travel in other directions - in Spain, 1936-1938 (Chile, 1973…) that is from the Left or Center to the Right and I would suggest that we look at the Republican Right in Congress in the contemporary US as a good example, drifting further and further to the Right since Reagan in 1980, with “radicals” inside the Right very much echoing Brinton’s observations, that refusing to compromise with “moderates” bestows some very real tactical and strategic advantages. And of course, inside Israel itself, from Ariel Sharon to Benjamin Netanyahu, support for the Two State Solution has withered, as the religiously conservative parties seem to drive Israeli politics, growing stronger and stronger as the settlements slowly shrink and isolate the holdings of Palestinians. And I remember reading long, detailed articles in the NY Review of Books over the years that this was Sharon’s carefully guarded strategy, to divide Palestinian holdings, shrinking them as well, into such a configuration that they were no demographic threat in Israeli elections nor capable of being a viable military threat should even a bifurcated Palestinian State emerge. He was, if memory serves me, as obsessed with his maps as the Republican Right today with re-districting to cut out the support of Democratic (dare I then say democratic voters?) voters, successfully capturing a majority of state legislatures and aiming for control of Congress and therefore more electoral if not popular majorities in Presidential elections.
Editor’s Note, October 16, 2023: on Ariel Sharon, please visit Jonathan Friedland’s article “The Enigma of ArielSharon,” which appeared in the Dec. 21, 2006 edition of the NY Review of Books here. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/12/21/the-enigma-of-ariel-sharon/ And it serves as a refresher course in the deep moral ambiguity that has engulfed Israel and its relationship to Palestinians, both citizens and displaced people.
And Prestowitz’s article deals in a way current coverage does not with the crucial and still very disputed issue: who wrecked the Oslo Accords and then Bill Clinton’s last ditch effort in the waning days of his administration to salvage a Two-State Solution: was it Yasser Arafat or Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak who wrecked the 15 days of negotiations held at Camp David in July of 2000?
from the Brookings article of April 12, 2018, “How the Peace Process killed the two-state solution,” image by PBEHULJCAN.
Perhaps it’s obvious now: Brinton’s observations also would seem to hold to political dynamics within the Palestinian movement as well, that the moderates seem to fade as they cannot control the terror tactics of the radicals (which also drives the Israeli public to the Right and a “Fortress Israel” mentality and strategic outlook.) and control of the Palestinian “street.”
Does anyone see a moderate Arab alternative emerging from the wreckage of today, October 2023? Much less a revival of the “Two State Solution”? (even if Netanyahu is thrown out of office?) No Palestinian Gandhi or Martin Luther King? And in Israel, how have advocates of peace, at the crucial time, fared? Wikipedia gives us this:
The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, took place on 4 November 1995 (12 Marcheshvan 5756 on the Hebrew calendar) at 21:30, at the end of a rally in support of the Oslo Accords at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. The assassin, an Israeli ultranationalist named Yigal Amir, radically opposed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiative, particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords.
Thus it was for good reason that author Peter Beinhart remarked in his October 14th guest editiorial in the NY Times (which did not allow comments) that “like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known.” Here’s his full article Peter Beinhart...there is a Jewish Hope...
And from the fistfull of articles which the NY Review of Books posted online Five takes on the crisis; the authors who posted them between Oct. 10-12 are in the order I found them: Raja Shehadeh, “Causes for Despair”; David Shulman, “Deja Vu in Israel,”; Tareq Bacini, “Gaza without Pretenses”; Joshua Leifer, “Inhuman Times”; and Fintan O’Toole, “Eyeless in Gaza.”
Here are two of the most powerful passages of O’Toole’s piece, an author whose review of “Game of Thrones” and the career of Joe Biden really caught my attention - and admiration:
“The Hamas incursion, in which more people died violently in Israel in a single day than ever before in the turbulent history of the state, is frightful. Even in the present state of the world, the murder, wounding, and kidnapping of so many defenseless civilians is shocking in its depravity. Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that it cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s. The dehumanization of the whole population of Gaza by Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who said that “we are fighting against human animals,” and his explicit threat to deprive civilians of food and electricity are also profoundly disturbing. Retaliation against noncombatants has been established as Israel’s equal and opposite reaction to Hamas’s crimes and it foreshadows horrors even greater than the many hundreds of Gazans already killed by Israeli air strikes. Yet none of this is truly surprising. Nothing justifies these assaults, but when violence has become the only means of communication, everyone knows that its language will be spoken—and not in whispers but in screams.” (Editor’s emphasis.)
And his concluding paragraph:
“There is no doubt that Israel can, if it chooses, level Gaza city, kill many thousands of its inhabitants, and hunt down Hamas militants. It can, and presumably will, enact a biblical revenge. It may even believe that this time, if the punishment is sufficiently severe, the Gazans will learn a lesson they will never forget. But what lessons do people actually learn from the cruelties they applaud and the ones they suffer in return? Almost always, only that violence is the way of the world. For some, the wars become holy; for most they become just grimly unavoidable. Until there is a political settlement, atrocity will have its dominion. Samson will still be there, eyeless in Gaza, turning the terrible millstone that grinds lives to dust.”
And now to my query put to Clyde Prestowitz’s fine piece: what does Professor John J. Mearsheimer think of the situation? I’ve given him much coverage in developing my own views on the war on Ukraine, and it was from this interview of Mearsheimer’s that I learned of John Kirby’s statement on aid to Ukraine ending, Kirby being the National Security Council’s “Coordinator for Strategic Communications.”
Readers should know that this is the first I’ve heard of “Judge Napolitani’s Judging Freedom” show which sent me to Wikipedia to fill myself in on his history, from NJ and of a strong Right/Libertarian bent, so strong that Trump considered him for a Supreme Court seat at one time. Be that as it may, it is Mearsheimer’s clear and calm analysis - one of despair to match any of the five commentator’s I cited at the NY Review of Books that commands attention, agree or not.
Mearsheimer stressed, along the way to his astonishment at John Kirby’s mention of aid to Ukraine ending soon, that Netanyahu has been playing Hamas off against the weaker (and more peaceful) Palestinian officials over at the West Bank, somehow, as hard as it is to believe now, thinking that Israel could manage Hamas, and through them the Gaza situation of 2 million or more humans stewing in abysmal conditions.
He attributes the astonishing Israeli intelligence failure to the same framework which led to the surprise crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973: Israel just could not conceptualize the ability of their enemy to carry out such massive planning and executions of a strategy…not just tactics but a strategy (and Hamas also seems to have a deeper strategy for turmoil in the Middle East, depending on Israel to take extreme vengeance). And he questions what the Israeli strategy is today if it is to crush Hamas in the way Fintan O’Toole concludes his piece…self-defeating in the long run and bound to provoke the wider Arab Street if not its leaders…
As others of good will have long ago concluded, there is no hope for stability or a long run peace without a viable “Two State Solution,” yet he readily admits its chances have died, years ago, as Israel drifted to the Right and especially under the influence of the Orthodox religious forces. But aided all along the way by bombings and attacks against civilians.
Mearsheimer, and this is why I respect him even as we have disagreed on the strategic situation in Ukraine, says John Kirby’s statement left him incredulous and “sick to his stomach” at the betrayal broached in this offhand manner, in public, of a Ukraine which we have led down the primrose path of eventual membership in NATO and the European Union.
It’s shocking to me as well, as my readers might understand based on everything I’ve written prior to this on the war on Ukraine. Anyone who has followed what Russia has done in the areas it overran in the winter of 2022 knows what a Russian victory will mean for the people of Ukraine: torture, deportation, re-programming as Russians…look to the fate of Mariupol, the city and its defenders, as the forecast. Does not the Russian campaign to starve (grain disruption), and freeze Ukraine echo the announced Israeli policy on Gaza, the seige?
Russia runs out of excuses for all the civilians it has blasted out of their homes, plazas and theatres, usually under the excuse that military targets were blended in…Israel’s vaunted military says it never targets civilians, well no, but they also operate on the assumption, probably true that Humas has hugged the civilians close to prevent their own soldiers demise. And as I write Sunday, the Gazan civilian deaths are listed as 2700 - before the ground invasion. Given the Gaza reality, killing civilians in large numbers is inevitable and “built in” to the military dynamics.
A few years ago, I participated in an Email group organized by the late author and journalist William Greider, consisting of writers, teachers, editors and columnists - and citizens/activists Bill had met in his many journalistic travels here and abroad. It was private, and as far as I know no one has published views shared in the group.
Bill, despite comparing Trump on policy discussions to a “drunk on a bar stool,” kept hoping that there would be a constructive populist revolt in the United States against the two major parties, perhaps even a joining of the disgruntled from both ends of the political spectrum. He was an optimist about America, the Midwestern American “Heartland” in the best, non-ideological sense of that term the region that had been devastated by the deindustrialization he had warned against in his reservations about globalization in “One World Ready or Not: the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism” (1997), and what the two parties had turned into - servants of the economic powers that be - in his “Who Will Tell the People” (1992): who will tell them about those who stepped into the vacuum created by the destruction/decay of American civic and political life - corporate lobbyists and institutions like ALEC to give the shorthand of a long, long list. Bill wasn’t alone in this view; Kevin Phillips also told us who was running the “Arrogant Capital”…Phillips having just passed away at the age of 82 on October 9.
When I first met Bill Greider via a long essay I sent to him as a complete stranger in 2004 - and getting a multi-page critique in return, with much warmth, and his sharing that he had begun to feel “like a bag lady waving a placard on K Street” - futile and ignored, that is, much as the American people now express in the polls their dislike of the candidates. A graduate of Princeton University with a degree in economics, Bill, unlike a later famous Bill in the White House, whom he turned against, never lost his feel for the average citizen, he having close relatives who farmed in Pennsylvania -without electricity - long after the New Deal delivered it to rural America against the wishes of corporate lawyers for the power industry, like Wendell Wilkie.
I later, years later, wrote back to Bill in a private Email which I did not share, if I recall correctly with the group, that I was coming up with a grimmer, more pessimistic assessment of American politics and possibilities. I told him I was picking up on the “climate of the times” - in politics the tactics emerging from the “Gingrich Revolution.” And fresh on my mind was the Republican Right who would not cooperate at all with that radical black man Barack Obama on anything (a man so white in manner, so upper middle class in values that one just has to laugh instead of crying about Republican characterizations)…. But deeper than that, I listed the mood conveyed, the Zeitgeist I was seeing in such popular shows on cable TV as “Gladiator, The Walking Dead, Black Sails, Breaking Bad, The Handmaidens, and to me the clincher and perhaps longest running and most popular of the series…Game of Thrones. “
Fintan O’Toole helped shape my views on the changing mood with his March, 2019 take on the then ending famouus series, which ran for eight seasons if I recall, the critique appearing in the Irish Times: An Epic for our Times
Aside from praising the high level of acting and the staging, he was horrified at its drift to a world view which trashed serious historical events and chronology even as it borrowed from them (like the slaughter at a royal wedding feast, children and pregnant woman included) leaving us with the clear impression of a “Hobbesian world of all against all.” Here’s just a sample of his impassioned, informed writing…unfortunately, I want to add…prophetic writing as well:
Why does this terrible vision appeal to us? For all its elements of fantasy and wonder, it is, as John Lanchester has put it, “not a world any sane person would want to live in”. There are, of course, many insane people who would love to live in it. At the most basic level, Game of Thrones is a far-right fantasia. Its apparent worldview is the one that is taken for granted in far-right thinking: that there is no such thing as society, only a crudely Darwinian struggle for existence and dominance in which one must kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved. The vision would not be out of place in Mein Kampf and it informs (if that is not too flattering a word) the rantings of every white nationalist psychopath.
You can add in the views of the Palestinian ultras of several different shades, all of whom want to eliminate Israel and as many citizens as possible…matched in drift, if not yet deeds by the ultra-orthodox views of Israel as specially blessed by the Old Testament…it being “their land” historically, and not of the 700,000 Palestinians who lived there in 1948. This is not the worldview of much of Western Europe and its rapidly fading Social Democratic tradition, nor the best descendants of the Israeli kibbutzim, some of whom were slaughtered on October 7.
As someone wrote famously in the late summer of 1914, as World War I unfolded:
"The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time": British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (from Wikipedia).
I hope I am wrong, but that’s the way it looks, and feels from a county in Maryland not far from the West Virginia border.
Tonight, Sunday night, I’ll be tuning in to Masterpiece Theatre’s continuation of the interrupted series from a couple of years ago, about Europe in 1939-1940, and entitled, appropriately enough for our times - the “World on Fire.”
William Neil
Frostburg, MD
I don't think the American public, even most of the policy wonks which dominate the major media, appreciate what Spokesperson for the National Security Council John Kirby has just publicly broached about Ukraine aid coming "to the end of the rope." Professor Mearsheimer clearly did grasp it, and it made him sick to his stomach in hearing the announcement...which was hardly a formal one and in the spirit of "oh, by the way..." if I wanted to be very crude in my translation of Kirby-officialdom speak, what he meant was "Ukraine had its chance, couldn't make it to the Sea of Asov despite all our aid, majestic aid (everything but what it really needed militarily to breach 20 km of russian defenses) ...and now with the situation in the Middle East, and no sympathetic House Speaker (and probably a betrayal behind the scenes by Mitch McConnell to help with the McCarthy brokered avoidance of the shutdown) the end of the aid is in sight. This is astounding in its cruelty and crudeness. What, no manners any more in Washington? I thought the Beltway was polite, awash in K Street etiquette...
And it reinforces my point in the last post blasting the Democrats negotiating skills to have been outmaneuvered on aid to Ukraine with only vague promises to restore it...in a situation they don't control and now facing the deep trouble of "clients" who have a higher standing than Ukraine, despite all our half-way teasing overtures to them over the past decade or so...longer actually.
I wanted to place a final picture near the end of the essay, of Meriupol's erasure to rubble to match the footage on the fate of Gaza, but Google's Chrome was not co-operating with my attempts.