The Mess in Israel

I have some thoughts about Gaza, and the mess going on there for the past several years. Lots of people are using words like terrorism to describe the rocket attacks on Israel. Many of the people who so characterise them also say Israel is justified in “disproportionate response; which is in contravention of the laws of war, common sense, human decency and the biblical principal of equal justice (eye for an eye, and all that).

What lost in all this is the merits of the situation. Israel has been blockading Gaza. Blockade is an act of war. That’s why the Cuban Missile Crisis was as serious as it was. It wasn’t that Cuba was being used as a staging ground for threats against the US, but that by blockading Cuba we were committing an act of “hot” war, and Cuba’s ally, the Soviet Union, could have used that as casus belli for a declaration of war against us.

Israel, herself, believes blockade is a cause for just war:

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded the Straits of Tiran on May 21st and 22nd to all shipping from and to Eilat; the area was open to Israeli ships under UN supervision since 1957, and Israel repeatedly stated that such a blockade will be considered as casus belli (justification for acts of war).

Israel included the right to make an actual attack on Egypt, in retaliation for the blockading of Eilat. In the early morning of June 5th 1967, the war broke out. Israel made a preemptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force.

Eilat isn’t all of Israel. There were open ports. The residents there could leave. they were free to travel outside of Israel. Egypt wasn’t blocking access to food, medicine, and freedom. Nonetheless Israel was of the opinion it was grounds for a Just War (the principle of jus ad bellum) it got international support for the war.

Which brings us to the present allegation of the rocket attacks being reason for the level of response Israel is making now. With jus ad bellum is twinned the idea of jus in bello, which is; to sum up, the idea of fair play.

Proportionality in war is part of the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Israel isn’t being proportional. I’ve hunkered down when people were lobbing things my way, trying to kill me, and the people I was with, it wasn’t like this:

A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.

Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."

Pilchick, and his compadres were on that hillside in Sderot on a sightseeing trip. They drove down from Jerusalem to watch the fireworks.

Why do they feel so comfortable heading down to treat it as a spectator event? Because in all of 2008, with hundred of rockets and mortars fired into Israel, a grand total of 81 people have been wounded, and 5 killed.

For the role of Irony in Everyday Life I particularly like this snippet: A cease fire was declared on 19 Jun. It was almost broken with a rocket attack on Israel, by an Israeli, who'd built a homade rocket with which he was trying to hit the Palestinian West Bank.

The first actual break occured on 24 June, when Isreal conducted an operation in Nablus.

On the 26th of June Hamas warned Israel that maintaining the blockade of the West Bank would cause a formal ending to the cease-fire.

All in all, Israel has been acting ham-handedly. They haven’t adhered to reasonable responses. They treat the Palestinians like red-headed stepchildren, and then wonder why the bad faith actions they take are greeted with something less than cheer and joy by those whom they are harming.

Are the Palestinians lily-white in this? No. But they are acting with far more restraint than the Israelis. The Palestinians have a case for their attacks. The Israelis don’t have justification for the level of response they’ve made.

Add the reports I saw on Monday, where Israel was spending it’s diplomatic efforts to keep any ceasefire from happening, so they could initiate the invasion they are undertaking now, and what reserves of trust and faith I have that the gov’t wants a peace, are getting harder to justify.

Back to the beginning

When I was studying journalism they told us the secret to knowing what was going on in most stories which had large organizations was to, "follow the money".

If you can do that, you are way ahead of the game. Not because everyone in gov't, business, or charity is crooked, but what the money is being spent to do is indicative of all sorts of things.

Which is why libertango cheered me immensely when he said follow the money. He's linking to a couple of very good points (and hopeful signs) about the general nature of the people Obama is appointing to important positions.

Some of which might be why Feinstein and Rockefeller (both of whom are complicit in vast numbers of Bush excesses. Rockefeller's note about his reservations isn't really worth much. It's a "cover your ass" letter, so he can say he had reservations. Well if he had 'em it was his job to make them known, but I digress).

Panetta, and an appointment to State; working for the new Secretary of, both worked in the Office of Budget and management. Not only do they know how to follow the money, they are intimately acquainted with various ways of hiding it.

Sigh

A different sort of idiocy

CUPE (a canadian union) is trying to ban Israeli academics from the univerities in Ontario.

At it's best it does nothing to make things any better. At it's worst, it makes things worse.

Those wacky flickr stats

The nature of search engines is such that things you never would have expected can be used to find things.

Flickr has such a search engine, and this photo:



Was found in a really odd search string. Usually I can figure out how it comes to be that some strange thing leads to a picture (often it's from the .exif data), but this one....

corset or squeeze or cinch or gasp or suck or breath or pull or tight or lace or truss or strap or ouch

Plum escapes me.

I'm trying to work back to see how far into that string someone went before they found it. Mostly it's,safe for work (with some really interesting images), but there are those which are a tad risque; or past risque, so I'd not follow it from work, unless you set your filter to "safe"

Then again, looking under "recent" and "most intersting" gets a radically different set of images, which are safe for work; at least right now, and for the first dozen pages.