Warrants for Blogging Against Humanity

These are welcome, but also - long overdue. Why has it taken this long? Surely it would have been a lot better all around had this happened before the Rafah incursion.

Anyways, more pressure on stopping Israel's military campaign is obviously welcome. And the people who are outraged by it (like Biden) will have their most powerful weapons taken away - and that is the appeal to defend Israel. Because you see, these warrants are not being issued for "Israel" - they are for "Benjamin Netanyahu" and "Yoav Gallant".

No one likes Bibi. Us anti-war folks obviously hate him. The normally non-fascist liberals who reflexively defend Israel hate him- i.e. they love Israel but the hate Bibi. The sycophantic centrist "Vote Blue No Matter Who" crowd hate him - even as Biden burns what is left of his reputation to defend him. Progressive Israelis hate him. Right-wing Israelis hate him. Centrist Israelis hate him. Everybody hates this guy.

Here's an article about his poll numbers in Israel. And here is one about how Americans view him. Dude is not popular.

It's weird that Biden is defending him. This is not going to get the same leeway that he gets when he says blatantly and obviously false bullshit in order to support genocide. In those cases, Biden casts himself as defending Israel. That's still popular (although it is now a lot less so). This is defending Netanyahu - a position favoured by very few people. That said - it is also completely unsurprising.  All that talk of Biden "losing patience" or becoming "increasingly frustrated" with Netanyahu are of course just bullshit. It's been very obvious for a long while now - that Biden values Israeli leadership far more than he values international law.

Will these warrants end the war? Probably not. As Netanyahu himself noted - "the Hague will not stop us." But it should make a difference. 

As I noted in my previous post, the war ends when domestic support for it falls below a critical threshold. Once the countries expending immense resources and losing their military personnel lose enough public support, the war will end. And having war crimes warrants out for the leaders of these countries will contribute to a loss of public support.

Blogging the Endgame

Eventually the military campaign in Gaza will end. Even the US occupation of Afghanistan came to an end - but hopefully it won't take two decades. Anyways, let's game out how it can end.

There's the hopeful dreams of the brain geniuses like Sullivan and the Israeli government who believe that this time is different and you can defeat terrorist ideology by bombing the fuck out of the civilian population the terrorists recruit from. This theory is what we call "fucking stupid and shockingly inhuman" - it's the type of thing that transcends mere racism and psychopathy and enters into the realm of actual evil. 

Obviously not going to happen - BUT, we need to keep this scenario in mind anyways. The reason for that is that any conclusion to the military campaign will have to be signed off on by the US and Israeli governments, so they need to have some sort of outcome that they can vaguely claim meets their goal. This might sound like it's hopeless - it's pretty obvious that there will never be conditions that could reasonably be characterized as any sort of victory for Israel and the US. Fortunately though, both the governments of Israel and the US have proven that they do not give a shit about facts or reality. They just make bullshit claims that are clearly not true all the time. That said, some sort of fig leaf to hide the abject failure of Western leadership would go a long way to getting to an end to the violence.

IOW, obviously the US and Israel are not going to "win" the war - but they are going to have to be able to claim that they did.

How about Hamas? Can they "win" the war? Yes and no. In the practical sense - they have already won. There is no scenario where Hamas is weaker and less influential after the conclusion of the "war" than they were at the beginning. This is exceptional - most wars only have losers - all sides are worse off than when they started - it's just that one side will be more worse off. And in that framing - also the US and Israel are way worse off now than they were at the beginning. Both countries have their international reputations in tatters. The BDS movement has gained enormous momentum. The default reflexive "Israel is right and everybody else is wrong" reaction is far less widespread than before. On October 6, these guys were plotting their victory lap for normalizing regional relations without addressing "The Palestine Issue" at all - and now that's clearly never going to happen. So Hamas has already achieved many big goals. It has come at immense cost to Gazans, but Hamas is a terrorist organization so it's hard for me to believe that they see this as that big of a deal.

That said - also no, Hamas cannot "win" the war. Hamas, even now that it has achieved living legend folk hero status, is really just a gang. A bunch of thugs with assault rifles and homemade rockets. Israel has cutting edge military technology, the best in the world thanks to support from the US. Their most successful attack ever was the terror strike on October 7th - and as much as that was a horrific and brutal assault, it did not actually threaten Israel's existence - and would have been stopped had Israeli leadership not been high on their own sense of hubris and racial superiority.

Hamas has been launching rockets nearly non-stop for seven months and these have done basically nothing. There have been a couple terrorist gunmen conducting attacks within Israel, but these have killed a total of five Israelis - and one of those was killed by the IDF. Hamas does not have the military capacity to actually threaten Israel so long as Israel doesn't literally abandon the Gaza fence on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War despite having detailed battle plans from Hamas, plans they knew Hamas was training for in the months before that date. And still - even with an abandonment of defense and a year of planning, Hamas managed to kill 1,139 people and take 230 hostages. Israel has been doing more than that on a weekly basis for seven months now. Hamas is nowhere close to the threat that it is being portrayed as. And it certainly is not capable of destroying Israel. Not even in their wildest dreams.

So how will this end? Just like how most of these things end - the domestic political support for it gets exhausted. Whether this be in the US or in Israel. It doesn't matter about support in Gaza, Hamas is not accountable to Gazans, so they don't need support there. Ironically though, Hamas is more popular in Gaza than Biden is in the US and way more popular than Netanyahu is in Israel.

I don't know much about Israeli domestic politics. I do know that Netanyahu was in trouble before this began, with corruption investigations and weekly large scale protests against his fascist attempts to consolidate power. Polling seems to indicate that his position has not improved and most Israelis want him gone - a sizable chunk of them wanting him out immediately as opposed to at the end of the war. This is one timer on the genocide campaign.

Biden's re-election campaign is the other. I don't know what his advisors are telling him, but I am sure he knows now that his "Bear Hug" strategy has not helped him. They don't call it this anymore and they don't even pretend that it's a thing. The idea was so ludicrously stupid from the beginning - and after the million odd times that Netanyahu has shit all over US demands, it's quite clear that it is not a thing and that pretending it is will hurt Biden's chances even more.

Summer is usually a slow time in the political cycle. All the important people are on vacation - so everything has to wait until Labor Day, when the campaign begins in earnest. Summer is also going to be unbelievably deadly in Gaza. They have no electricity, so there is no A/C. There is no fresh water getting into the strip. June through August will see daily highs in the mid 30's and an average of zero rain days.

I have to believe that there are some non-idiots on the Biden team. Someone has to know that if the situation continues as is into the summer, then shit is going to be unbelievably bad. Sadly, there's been no evidence that such a non-idiot exists. It's either that or it's full on embracing the genocide - that when they were acting indignant when questioned about how many Palestinians have to die, they were really just trying to not give their honest answer. "All of them".

Must do More to Protect Civilians and Increase the Amount of Aid Getting Through

Barak Ravid is reporting that the Israeli plan for the Rafah crossing does not include allowing any food through. Which has been the case since the IDF took it ten days ago. No food is passing through.

On the mitigating side - the magical 1/3 of a billion dollar floating pier is now operational. The initial shipment arriving is described as "as much as 500 tonnes of aid". This is 25 trucks. It is not clear if this shipment has actually been delivered or distributed. For reference, aid agencies are saying that they need 500-600 truckloads at a minimum in order to address the starvation crisis. OTOH, Israel insists that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza - that there is no hunger there and suggestions otherwise are blood libels - but also, no independent international media organizations are allowed in to have a look. Also, just ignoring the international aid agencies that are on the ground and saying that there is famine - or calling those aid agencies Hamas or Nazis. Here is one of the zillions of ludicrous bullshit articles of faith that the US State Department has been repeating for months. Israel apparently needs to do more to protect civilians and increase humanitarian aid - but at the same time, the US believes that Israel has gone to extraordinary measures in order to get civilian protection and facilitating aid to the levels they are at now (i.e. zero). Also, Israel insists that this is the case - they are the "most moral army in the world" because they already do so much to protect civilians and facilitate aid deliveries. Now we all know where the lie is. Of course Israel is not doing shit to protect civilians and facilitate aid, but that batch of lies is the basis for US foreign policy. Israel is already doing an excellent job at protecting civilians and facilitating aid delivery, but also they must do more, and also Israel says they are doing as much as possible - already an extraordinary amount that has never been matched by any army throughout history. The obvious answer then - there must be a Ceasefire Now. If more must be done to protect civilians and facilitate aid - but Israel is not capable of doing more in this regard - then they must not be allowed to continue their military campaign. It's either that or you are okay with man-made famine and ludicrous levels of civilian deaths.

Biden Paused a Shipment of Bombs!

And as his spokespeople would like to remind you - only one shipment of bombs was paused. Everything else is still going forward as per schedule.  

This is after they have determined that US weapons were likely used  to commit war crimes. And that Israel likely impeded humanitarian aid before. But it's all cool now - Israel is now totally abiding by the law.

Despite the fact that the intensity of the bombing is as high right now as it ever was previously. Despite the fact that less aid is getting through now than almost any time previous. It's been a week now with essentially zero aid getting in to Gaza.

Facts do not matter to the genocidal assholes running the US government. It's just pure racist bullshit now pushed to genocidal extremes.

It's Worse. A Lot Worse. But That Does Not Change the Perpetual Observation About Gaza

It's going to get worse.

It's closing in on a week now - where the IDF has sat on the Rafah crossing and denied any aid from entering the territory. The expulsion orders now cover a third of a million refugees - sick, injured, starving, being forced to relocate yet again. I can't imagine that the full blown famine in northern Gaza has eased up. But this is still not rock bottom. The people running Israel are now even more fully committed to this genocidal mission they have appointed themselves. The people with any power to stop it are using all of that power to ensure that it continues as long as possible.

The IDF has moved back into the Jabailya refugee camp in Gaza City to retake areas they "cleared" months ago. And this isn't the first time they've had to move back into some of those areas. Hamas is still launching rockets. Israel said that 50 of their soldiers were injured in fighting yesterday. And we're supposed to believe that Hamas has been weakened.

It's getting worse for Israelis too. Not just the police crackdowns on protests and demonstrations inside Israel, but also their standing in the world. Israel's reputation has plummeted all around the world. The campus protests and encampments in the US have now spread to many other countries. The BDS movement has never been stronger and they have won concessions on multiple fronts.

And that's not going to change. People are not going to shrug off the genocide and pretend it never happened. And as conditions continue to deteriorate in Gaza, more and more people are going to be pushed over their personal lines.

I was hopeful for a moment. When Biden said that he was suspending arms transfers to Israel - he had acknowledged that US weapons almost certainly were used to kill civilians and that he was holding back a shipment of bombs and shells. But then, genocidaires just gotta genocide. Biden is still fully supportive of this insane and impossible task of "destroying Hamas" with bombs and guns and tanks and apparently tens of thousands of murdered civilians. Apparently, that is his plan to "win" peace - kill enough people and maybe they will learn their lesson.

That's where we're at folks. Endless killing in pursuit of an impossible goal, using methods that make the goal less and less achievable. And they can't turn it around - they need to "destroy Hamas" because otherwise they would be admitting that the horrors inflicted on Gaza have been for nothing. So it is going to get worse. And after that, it will continue to get worse.

They Think You're Stupid About Blogging

The National Security Memo 20 report is out. We're all supposed to be like "oh, the US is finally acknowledging that US weapons have been used to kill civilians and that Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law. BUT - no, this report is more insulting to your intelligence than the months on end where they insisted that there is no evidence of Israeli war crimes.

This stupid fucking Administration is saying that Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid. Right now they are saying this. Just fucking preposterous.

Israel is invading Rafah right now. There is only one functional route for aid to get in - the Rafah crossing. That crossing is now an IDF outpost. Aid agencies are reporting that zero aid has entered Gaza in three days.

The report would have been less insulting if it read "fuck you, we're going to do whatever we want and you can go fuck yourselves."

The Labour of Blogging

Quick question for the UK media - we've had quite some time rightfully kicking Keith for his "I do believe they have that right (cutting off food, water, power, the necessities of life)". His attempt to weasel out of it ("I meant right to self-defense") and his defenders like Emily Thornbury ("in that short period of time") have opened them up to a very important line of questioning and it seems like no one is taking it.

Look, I agree that the cheerleaders for the Gaza genocide should be held accountable for their racist bullshit - but more important than that is stopping the genocide as soon as we can. Labour leadership now recognizes that what Israel is doing is indefensible, they are merely trying to cover their asses for defending it earlier. So get them on the record now as saying that what Israel is doing is indefensible. Why aren't the interviewers asking that question? If I had one question for Keith it would be:

Is Israel committing war crimes now?

Maybe I would preface it a bit:

There's been a lot of confusion over what you meant when you said that you believed that Israel had that right. I would imagine that you would want to be very clear about your position in order to prevent such confusion from happening again. So here is a very simple question that is also very important at this moment. Is Israel committing war crimes now?