The current Israeli government is stunningly indifferent to human life and civilian casualties.
Does anyone have any understanding of how Israeli peacemaking groups feel?
It seems to me that Netanyahu is holding the Israeli population hostage - if the West stops supplying Israel with arms the West at least can believe that retaliation for Netanyahu's actions won't just affect Netanyahu and his supporters.
With more atrocities day by day so it seems, the perpetrators seem to have normalised the idea that everyone is a target, with the shrug phrase of ‘collateral damage’ dispelling any compassion, or consideration that those being killed or maimed are precious human beings.🙏
Saw a short article today about how airlines are concerned about allowing electronics aboard. Last thing they want is cell phones or computers to go off. From what I understand, it does not take much explosive to do the damage.
One thing I’m wondering—why this recent attack on Hezbollah?
According to Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian the Israeli secret service believed that their plan had been suspected and if they didn't go ahead with it then they wouldn't be able to do so at all. Which, as Freedland comments, isn't really a solid reason for going ahead with the plan.
One thing I’m wondering—why this recent attack on Hezbollah?
According to Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian the Israeli secret service believed that their plan had been suspected and if they didn't go ahead with it then they wouldn't be able to do so at all. Which, as Freedland comments, isn't really a solid reason for going ahead with the plan.
Well it is a totally solid reason to go ahead. It’s not an ethical one, but it’s a solid one if you don’t care…
Which, as Freedland comments, isn't really a solid reason for going ahead with the plan.
Well it is a totally solid reason to go ahead. It’s not an ethical one, but it’s a solid one if you don’t care…
The problem is as Freedland says whether it serves any strategic purpose. Did it actually make any significant dent in Hezbollah's willingness and capacity to attack Israel?
Which, as Freedland comments, isn't really a solid reason for going ahead with the plan.
Well it is a totally solid reason to go ahead. It’s not an ethical one, but it’s a solid one if you don’t care…
The problem is as Freedland says whether it serves any strategic purpose. Did it actually make any significant dent in Hezbollah's willingness and capacity to attack Israel?
From other forums and sources that I follow I think it smashed their leadership, their command and control, and their communications.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not endorsing it for a minute, but definitely their capacity to attack yes. More than by mindlessly flinging rockets south anyway. So in purely military terms, it’s probably the most significant success the IDF have had for decades. How long it will last, who knows.
Willingness maybe not but the point is a lot of the key players are now dead or incapacitated. In the hundreds. It also had the ‘value’ (from an Israeli pov) of flushing out a lot of ‘known things’ like whether Iranian diplomats have every day tactical comms with Hezbollah.
Again it’s completely unethical, it’s not very sensible, etc. but ‘significant dent’? Yes, probably.
Which, as Freedland comments, isn't really a solid reason for going ahead with the plan.
Well it is a totally solid reason to go ahead. It’s not an ethical one, but it’s a solid one if you don’t care…
The problem is as Freedland says whether it serves any strategic purpose. Did it actually make any significant dent in Hezbollah's willingness and capacity to attack Israel?
It’s always hard to assess these things from the outside, but I’d say both have been affected.
Hezbollah’s willingness to attack Israel has likely been increased. After all, not being in a full scale, active armed conflict with Israel hasn't prevented attacks like this, so they're in a "nothing to lose" situation.
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury, Hezbollah has just learned that one of its main communication systems is not just completely unreliable but outright dangerous. That's something that's going to take years to replace, and always with an eye over one shoulder in case the new system is similarly compromised.
Have Israel tried to engage with the Lebanese government regarding Hezbollah at any point ?
This is not really an angle I’m that clued up on but from what little I do know of Lebanon I’d be surprised if there was much either of them thought that would achieve. You’d hope Israel will have made diplomatic noises over the years for form’s sake if nothing else, but really the Lebanese government writ doesn’t run in the Hezbollah controlled areas (and is shaky enough in the other bits sadly).
The Israeli line on what they’re up to in the north is they’re enforcing a UN resolution (getting Hezbollah north of the river) that the UN have for years failed to enforce.
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury
This is possible; but I think the targeted aspect of it might be being overplayed. If it was genuinely the case that the Hezbollah quartermaster put in a large singular order fulfilled with dodgy devices that would be one thing, but that's not clear, and it's equally possible that the devices were just inserted onto the market on the basis that stochastically they were more likely to be picked up by Hezbollah.
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury
This is possible; but I think the targeted aspect of it might be being overplayed. If it was genuinely the case that the Hezbollah quartermaster put in a large singular order fulfilled with dodgy devices that would be one thing, but that's not clear, and it's equally possible that the devices were just inserted onto the market on the basis that stochastically they were more likely to be picked up by Hezbollah.
They were in pagers specifically ordered by Hezbollah, as it turns out:
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury
This is possible; but I think the targeted aspect of it might be being overplayed. If it was genuinely the case that the Hezbollah quartermaster put in a large singular order fulfilled with dodgy devices that would be one thing, but that's not clear, and it's equally possible that the devices were just inserted onto the market on the basis that stochastically they were more likely to be picked up by Hezbollah.
They were in pagers specifically ordered by Hezbollah, as it turns out:
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury
This is possible; but I think the targeted aspect of it might be being overplayed. If it was genuinely the case that the Hezbollah quartermaster put in a large singular order fulfilled with dodgy devices that would be one thing, but that's not clear, and it's equally possible that the devices were just inserted onto the market on the basis that stochastically they were more likely to be picked up by Hezbollah.
They were in pagers specifically ordered by Hezbollah, as it turns out:
I don't think someone just stuck these things into the market and hoped Hezbollah would buy them. They would have stochastically blown up random people in all sorts of places if this were the case, since the pagers ostensibly came from a Taiwanese company that ships stuff all over the world. I don't think the Reuters piece is entirely correct either; it says Mossad put explosives into Taiwanese-made pagers, but the Taiwanese company says they didn't produce these actual pagers. Reuters source is a Lebanese security official who says they bought these things from a Taiwanese company; that company has said they don't actually make this particular pager model any more and didn't make these pagers.
The NY Times reporting I linked to on the last page makes more sense -- the Israelis made these things and sold them to Hezbollah through a shell company. They did target Hezbollah, and they didn't have to somehow intervene in this particular supply chain; they control the whole chain. The NYT sourcing info is American: "Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as complex and long in the making."
One question I have is whether or not Israel would claim this attack on Hezbollah is justified, and on what grounds. Hezbollah is a genuinely terrorist group which has done many evil things, but when did they last do something like that that we know of?
I don't think someone just stuck these things into the market and hoped Hezbollah would buy them. They would have stochastically blown up random people in all sorts of places if this were the case, since the pagers ostensibly came from a Taiwanese company that ships stuff all over the world.
No, you'd just attack the immediate supply chain within Lebanon itself; this would also make sense of the new security restrictions in Beirut airport.
I imagine the current Israeli government thinks anything they do to Hezbollah is justified.
They may indeed, but I was wondering what justification claims might be made. If Hezbollah is currently firing rockets at Israel, then the question in my mind is whether this kind of specifically targeted counterattack is morally better and/or more morally justified than just firing rockets back and hitting what I’m thinking would be many more innocent people.
This doesn’t mean that Israel isn’t doing horribly wrong things in Gaza and such—I’m thinking specifically about Hezbollah itself.
The IDF are bombing Lebanon from the air and telling the civilian population to move - unsurprisingly they’ve killed hundreds including at least 24 children.
[Edit: I re-checked the BBC site, at least 35 children.]
I suspect Israel's leaders believe they can knock out both Hamas and Hezbollah once and for all and are taking what they believe is a calculated risk knowing that their Western allies will tut and fuss but not intervene.
It has to be said that both Hamas and Hezbollah are existentially committed to the destruction of the state of Israel so it's not as if there is much room for negotiation. By the same token, Netanyahu appears to be willing to stop at nothing to hold onto power.
To use a quote from antiquity, 'You make a desert and you call it peace.'
It has to be said that both Hamas and Hezbollah are existentially committed to the destruction of the state of Israel so it's not as if there is much room for negotiation.
It has to be said that Likud is existentially committed to the principle of no Palestinian state, ever, so draw your own conclusions from that, that leaves permanent apartheid or some form of ethnic cleansing as the only end states.
Daniella Weiss - who used to plan the locations of settlements with Israeli government ministers so as to maximize the fragmentation of Palestinian territory has been leading boat trips for settlers so that they can watch Gaza being blown up.
It has to be said that Likud is existentially committed to the principle of no Palestinian state, ever, so draw your own conclusions from that, that leaves permanent apartheid or some form of ethnic cleansing as the only end states.
Israel had apartheid for a long time, and they've pretty much given up on it. So.
Daniella Weiss - who used to plan the locations of settlements with Israeli government ministers so as to maximize the fragmentation of Palestinian territory has been leading boat trips for settlers so that they can watch Gaza being blown up.
Two wrongs don't make a right, @chrisstiles. Nobody here is trying to defend Netanyahu, Likud or the actions of settlers on the West Bank.
Neither does deploring those things or the alleged ghoulish Gaza bombardment tours give Hamas and Hezbollah a free pass.
We need some kind of two-state solution otherwise we are going to end up with atrocity after atrocity until Kingdom Come.
How the heck that's ever going to come about with constant spirals of tit-for-tat attacks and dangerous and obscene levels of escalation goodness only knows.
I really can't see how an Israeli incursion into Lebanon is going to resolve anything longer term any more than levelling Gaza into the Stone Age.
I think it's becoming more apparent that the extreme Israeli right wants to flatten Gaza and then settle it as they have done the West Bank, thereby ensuring an escalating spiral of violence and resentment for decades and decades to come.
Lebanon is already unstable. Israeli action there may limit the rocket attacks for a while but at the risk of pushing its neighbour into increasingly volatile levels of anarchy and chaos which both threatens Israel's own security, the long-term well-being of the Lebanese people and the stability of the region and the world as a whole.
Two wrongs don't make a right, @chrisstiles. Nobody here is trying to defend Netanyahu, Likud or the actions of settlers on the West Bank.
Well, yes, but no one runs the exculpatory reasoning the other way do they?
We need some kind of two-state solution otherwise we are going to end up with atrocity after atrocity until Kingdom Come.
The settlements have expanded under every Israeli government. Given that and the West's unwillingness to challenge what is official state policy, talk of a "two state solution" is a fig-leaf to cover up the gradual dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Sure. A point which isn't undermined by the comments I made previously.
For there to be a 'two-state solution' there needs to be international pressure and a willingness on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides to accommodate that.
Neither Likud saying that it would never countenance such a thing nor Hamas or Hezbollah saying that they want to completely destroy Israel is going to move anywhere near to that.
Sure. A point which isn't undermined by the comments I made previously.
I'm questioning the selective disclosure of intransigence by one side, because in context it looked very much like an argument of 'war is hell, but really they have no alternative'.
Unless and until the West pressures Israel on the issues of settlements, all talk of a future two-state solution should be treated as exactly the empty and enabling rhetoric that it is.
Separately; there have also been long periods of time when there was very little activity from either Hezbollah or Hamas without any movement from the Israeli side, and both Hamas and Hezbollah owe their existence to acts in the past designed to marginalise less extreme groups.
And even within Hamas there have previously been conciliatory noises in the not-too-distant past. They're pretty much the only game in town when it comes to resisting the occupation so will inevitably attract both the ardent fanatics and those who might be amenable to peace.
For there to be a 'two-state solution' there needs to be international pressure and a willingness on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides to accommodate that.
Neither Likud saying that it would never countenance such a thing nor Hamas or Hezbollah saying that they want to completely destroy Israel is going to move anywhere near to that.
Given the obvious rejection of a two state solution by most of the parties directly involved, who is "We" in your first post?
What I don't understand about those on the Likud side of the equation, including their supporters worldwide, is what they propose as an alternative to a two-state solution.
The only option I can see, and I stand to be corrected, is a single Zionist state with Palestinian Muslims and Christians marginalised. Is that what they want?
I'd certainly not want Hamas or Hezbollah as neighbours but bombing them and anyone else who happens to get in the way to hell and back, bulldozing houses and rooting up olive groves on the West Bank and generally stirring up hatred and resentment for generations to come doesn't strike me as a sensible or sustainable strategy by any standards.
What I don't understand about those on the Likud side of the equation, including their supporters worldwide, is what they propose as an alternative to a two-state solution.
The eventual goal of the revisionist strain of Zionism has always been to get the entire land. They don't need to pretend anything because the their Western allies will pretend for them, and hold up a two state ideal which is eroded in practical terms by every Israeli government (because each government expands the settlements)
I don't think enough is made about the significant number of American Evangelicals who are in complete support of Israel based on their own fever-dreamed eschatology. It's not a small group.
I don't think enough is made about the significant number of American Evangelicals who are in complete support of Israel based on their own fever-dreamed eschatology. It's not a small group.
Plenty in the UK too. Apparently I'm inviting God's judgement for not "supporting Israel".
The Biden administration had evidence from two separate sources that Israel was blocking aid from getting into Gaza, but chose to - at best - downplay this in their statements to Congress:
I don't think enough is made about the significant number of American Evangelicals who are in complete support of Israel based on their own fever-dreamed eschatology. It's not a small group.
Plenty in the UK too. Apparently I'm inviting God's judgement for not "supporting Israel".
It's not as big a thing here though, although some of the restorationist 'new church' networks were seen as pariahs for not going down that particular route.
The root of the issue is religion. The Geopolitics made it worse, but at the end of the day it's Bronze Age religious bullsh*t at its core. There's not much mention of that either.
The root of the issue is religion. The Geopolitics made it worse, but at the end of the day it's Bronze Age religious bullsh*t at its core. There's not much mention of that either.
Comments
Does anyone have any understanding of how Israeli peacemaking groups feel?
It seems to me that Netanyahu is holding the Israeli population hostage - if the West stops supplying Israel with arms the West at least can believe that retaliation for Netanyahu's actions won't just affect Netanyahu and his supporters.
Well it is a totally solid reason to go ahead. It’s not an ethical one, but it’s a solid one if you don’t care…
From other forums and sources that I follow I think it smashed their leadership, their command and control, and their communications.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not endorsing it for a minute, but definitely their capacity to attack yes. More than by mindlessly flinging rockets south anyway. So in purely military terms, it’s probably the most significant success the IDF have had for decades. How long it will last, who knows.
Willingness maybe not but the point is a lot of the key players are now dead or incapacitated. In the hundreds. It also had the ‘value’ (from an Israeli pov) of flushing out a lot of ‘known things’ like whether Iranian diplomats have every day tactical comms with Hezbollah.
Again it’s completely unethical, it’s not very sensible, etc. but ‘significant dent’? Yes, probably.
It’s always hard to assess these things from the outside, but I’d say both have been affected.
Hezbollah’s willingness to attack Israel has likely been increased. After all, not being in a full scale, active armed conflict with Israel hasn't prevented attacks like this, so they're in a "nothing to lose" situation.
On the other hand their capacity to attack Israel has likely been severely decreased. In addition to reportedly losing a lot of mid- to high-level people in the attacks themselves, either to death or injury, Hezbollah has just learned that one of its main communication systems is not just completely unreliable but outright dangerous. That's something that's going to take years to replace, and always with an eye over one shoulder in case the new system is similarly compromised.
This is not really an angle I’m that clued up on but from what little I do know of Lebanon I’d be surprised if there was much either of them thought that would achieve. You’d hope Israel will have made diplomatic noises over the years for form’s sake if nothing else, but really the Lebanese government writ doesn’t run in the Hezbollah controlled areas (and is shaky enough in the other bits sadly).
The Israeli line on what they’re up to in the north is they’re enforcing a UN resolution (getting Hezbollah north of the river) that the UN have for years failed to enforce.
This is possible; but I think the targeted aspect of it might be being overplayed. If it was genuinely the case that the Hezbollah quartermaster put in a large singular order fulfilled with dodgy devices that would be one thing, but that's not clear, and it's equally possible that the devices were just inserted onto the market on the basis that stochastically they were more likely to be picked up by Hezbollah.
They were in pagers specifically ordered by Hezbollah, as it turns out:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-planted-explosives-hezbollahs-taiwan-made-pagers-say-sources-2024-09-18/
That article read closely does not actually provide an answer to the question I asked.
I’m missing the question in the comment?
The NY Times reporting I linked to on the last page makes more sense -- the Israelis made these things and sold them to Hezbollah through a shell company. They did target Hezbollah, and they didn't have to somehow intervene in this particular supply chain; they control the whole chain. The NYT sourcing info is American: "Israel has neither confirmed nor denied any role in the explosions, but 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who were briefed on the attack say the Israelis were behind it, describing the operation as complex and long in the making."
One question I have is whether or not Israel would claim this attack on Hezbollah is justified, and on what grounds. Hezbollah is a genuinely terrorist group which has done many evil things, but when did they last do something like that that we know of?
No, you'd just attack the immediate supply chain within Lebanon itself; this would also make sense of the new security restrictions in Beirut airport.
They may indeed, but I was wondering what justification claims might be made. If Hezbollah is currently firing rockets at Israel, then the question in my mind is whether this kind of specifically targeted counterattack is morally better and/or more morally justified than just firing rockets back and hitting what I’m thinking would be many more innocent people.
This doesn’t mean that Israel isn’t doing horribly wrong things in Gaza and such—I’m thinking specifically about Hezbollah itself.
[Edit: I re-checked the BBC site, at least 35 children.]
It has to be said that both Hamas and Hezbollah are existentially committed to the destruction of the state of Israel so it's not as if there is much room for negotiation. By the same token, Netanyahu appears to be willing to stop at nothing to hold onto power.
To use a quote from antiquity, 'You make a desert and you call it peace.'
It has to be said that Likud is existentially committed to the principle of no Palestinian state, ever, so draw your own conclusions from that, that leaves permanent apartheid or some form of ethnic cleansing as the only end states.
Daniella Weiss - who used to plan the locations of settlements with Israeli government ministers so as to maximize the fragmentation of Palestinian territory has been leading boat trips for settlers so that they can watch Gaza being blown up.
That's -- well, I'll go with ghoulish.
Neither does deploring those things or the alleged ghoulish Gaza bombardment tours give Hamas and Hezbollah a free pass.
We need some kind of two-state solution otherwise we are going to end up with atrocity after atrocity until Kingdom Come.
How the heck that's ever going to come about with constant spirals of tit-for-tat attacks and dangerous and obscene levels of escalation goodness only knows.
I really can't see how an Israeli incursion into Lebanon is going to resolve anything longer term any more than levelling Gaza into the Stone Age.
I think it's becoming more apparent that the extreme Israeli right wants to flatten Gaza and then settle it as they have done the West Bank, thereby ensuring an escalating spiral of violence and resentment for decades and decades to come.
Lebanon is already unstable. Israeli action there may limit the rocket attacks for a while but at the risk of pushing its neighbour into increasingly volatile levels of anarchy and chaos which both threatens Israel's own security, the long-term well-being of the Lebanese people and the stability of the region and the world as a whole.
The whole thing is a bloody mess.
Well, yes, but no one runs the exculpatory reasoning the other way do they?
The settlements have expanded under every Israeli government. Given that and the West's unwillingness to challenge what is official state policy, talk of a "two state solution" is a fig-leaf to cover up the gradual dispossession of the Palestinian people.
For there to be a 'two-state solution' there needs to be international pressure and a willingness on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides to accommodate that.
Neither Likud saying that it would never countenance such a thing nor Hamas or Hezbollah saying that they want to completely destroy Israel is going to move anywhere near to that.
Nor is armed Israeli intervention in Lebanon.
That's the point I'm making.
I'm questioning the selective disclosure of intransigence by one side, because in context it looked very much like an argument of 'war is hell, but really they have no alternative'.
Unless and until the West pressures Israel on the issues of settlements, all talk of a future two-state solution should be treated as exactly the empty and enabling rhetoric that it is.
Separately; there have also been long periods of time when there was very little activity from either Hezbollah or Hamas without any movement from the Israeli side, and both Hamas and Hezbollah owe their existence to acts in the past designed to marginalise less extreme groups.
I imagine the current Israeli government thinks anything they do to get at/to Hezbollah is justified.
"No one"? No one at all?
Yes, in the context of the post I was responding to which specifically talked about 'nobody here'. I'll take the meta-commentary as read.
Given the obvious rejection of a two state solution by most of the parties directly involved, who is "We" in your first post?
But yes, I know that's too broad-brush.
What I don't understand about those on the Likud side of the equation, including their supporters worldwide, is what they propose as an alternative to a two-state solution.
The only option I can see, and I stand to be corrected, is a single Zionist state with Palestinian Muslims and Christians marginalised. Is that what they want?
I'd certainly not want Hamas or Hezbollah as neighbours but bombing them and anyone else who happens to get in the way to hell and back, bulldozing houses and rooting up olive groves on the West Bank and generally stirring up hatred and resentment for generations to come doesn't strike me as a sensible or sustainable strategy by any standards.
The eventual goal of the revisionist strain of Zionism has always been to get the entire land. They don't need to pretend anything because the their Western allies will pretend for them, and hold up a two state ideal which is eroded in practical terms by every Israeli government (because each government expands the settlements)
Plenty in the UK too. Apparently I'm inviting God's judgement for not "supporting Israel".
https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken
It's not as big a thing here though, although some of the restorationist 'new church' networks were seen as pariahs for not going down that particular route.
Zionism started as a largely secular movement.