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Gaza Postmodern

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 31st January, 2024

One of the first declarations of intent was reported from an unnamed official.

The unnamed defense official told Israel’s Channel 13 that the Palestinian territory, home to more than 2 million residents, would be reduced to rubble. “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”

There have been plenty of others. In November the Agriculture Minister and Security Cabinet member Avi Dichter announced that, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” That is, the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.

The Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, lays out the rationale to LBC interviewer Iain Dale.

But the clearest call for ethnic cleansing of Gaza came from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. On the 31st of December, he told Army Radio,

If in Gaza there will be 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs and not 2 million the entire conversation on ‘the day after’ will look different.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-780229

It’s an ambitious policy, but it would forestall any accusations of Israel’s being an apartheid state, because there could be no majority of Palestinians in areas under effective control by the Israelis.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made similar calls for “voluntary emigration,” which brought a rare rebuke from the US State Department. But Netanyahu has not offered such a direct rebuke.

For months, Netanyahu has bucked US requests to begin planning for who will govern the Gaza Strip after the war, ostensibly recognizing that his far-right coalition partners would reject proposals that do not include Israel’s reoccupation and resettlement of Gaza — which the security establishment and Washington oppose.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/likud-minister-slams-smotrich-ben-gvirs-unrealistic-call-for-gazan-emigration/

In a video posted on the 8th of January, Shlomo Karhi, the Israeli Minister of Communications, restated the aim of “voluntary emigration” of the population of Gaza. On the 1st of January, Netanyahu told an internal Likud meeting that, “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.” These reports were subsequently denied.

It’s not all doom and gloom when discussing these issues, though, as this comic turn by a Channel 14 news anchor shows.

Mass population expulsion is enabled by ensuring that the current population has nowhere to live, and no infrastructure to depend on. For this part of the policy, so often discussed by representatives of the Israeli government, including many Ministers, Israel needs only its own resources, and the steady supply of munitions from the United States. It has been, and continues to be, put into effect, as can be seen in the following videos.

From 20th December, land clearing in Northern Gaza.

And from the 22nd, some tunnels are destroyed (Requires Telegram Tg). Any buildings above them are collateral damage. And on the 30th (Tg).

Israeli slapstick from 3rd of January.

From the 6th of January, having a casual smoke.

It was getting dark on the 8th of January, so the scene was lit up with flares so that every moment could be caught on video.

Going for a record in Khan Yunis; 18th January.

This one from 21st of January generates a lot of excitement in the English speaker recording the event.

The following is a relatively subdued effort of the IDF. A couple of adjacent buildings, the surroundings of which have been bulldozed, are demolished in a single explosion. The buildings are those of the University of Palestine, a private university, and the last higher education institute left in Gaza, until now. The demolition can be seen embedded within this video from a press conference.

Lee’s questions about the context in which this demolition takes place can be asked equally pertinently about every such demolition shown above. There is no threat, and, if we are to believe the Israeli insistence that they will retain security control of Gaza, there is not even any remote future military justification.

Attention is now turning to the Philadelphi Corridor; that is, the buffer zone along the Egypt-Gaza border. The Gaza Strip is not part of Israel. The Corridor is the border between Egypt and Palestinian Gaza.

The IDF had controlled that zone under terms set out by its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt until it withdrew from Gaza in 2005…

The Egyptian army in agreement with Israel increased its forces at the border both in 2005 and in 2021 to prevent weapons smuggling, [head of the State Information Services (SIS) Diaa Rashwan] explained.

“Egypt has full sovereignty over its land, and has complete control over its entire northeastern borders,” he added. “Israel’s continued marketing of these lies [that Egypt has not controlled smuggling] is an attempt to create legitimacy for its attempt to occupy the “Philadelphi Corridor” or “Salah al-Din Corridor”, in Gaza along the border with Egypt, in violation of the security agreements and protocols signed between it and Egypt,” Rashwan stressed.

He also reminded Israel that Cairo also considers any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai as a “red line” that should not be crossed.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-783285

The last point is the most relevant. If Israel is to “encourage emigration,” the only avenue open to it is the Philadelphi Corridor. Egypt has made plain that it will not let the Gaza Strip empty into Sinai. As of mid-December, “hundreds of thousands” of refugees had crowded into Rafah and adjacent areas of the Corridor. If Israel takes control of the border, it has the option to punch holes in the wall, and encourage refugees to flow into Sinai. Hamas did it in 2008, so that Gazans could stock up with difficult-to-obtain supplies in Egyptian Rafah. Since then, Egypt has done its own land clearing.

Between 2013 and 2015, Egypt also evicted thousands of people from their homes and destroyed more than 3,000 structures along its side of the border to create a buffer zone, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/2023/12/14/world/middleeast/gaza-border-rafah-egypt.html

Passage through the wall, should it eventuate, would be a one-way ticket. It would also end the Peace Treaty, which has held between Egypt and Israel since 1979. The speculation comes in the wake of the withdrawal of one of four divisions of IDF troops from Gaza for R&R and training. The IDF estimate that fighting will continue through all of 2024, despite claims that “the [Hamas] battalion frameworks have been dismantled” in Northern Gaza, and that “the Khan Younis Brigade is gradually disintegrating as a fighting force.” Rifts are opening in the war cabinet. The particular issues are not as important as the facts that the rifts are public. Cracks come through pressure. If the war is conforming to the press releases there is a strong incentive to maintain cohesion. Talk about a regionally destabilising takeover of the Egypt-Gaza border is a way to “explain” why Hamas has not yet been broken despite all of its dismantling and disintegration.

Since this post was first drafted, more details have come to light. The split in the war cabinet, alluded to above, was made public by Gadi Eisenkot, a former IDF Chief of Staff, and a member of the Benny Gantz led National Unity alliance. Gantz and Eisenkot are both members of the war cabinet, which Netanyahu pulled together to pursue a unified approach to the war. Eisenkot’s son was killed in fighting in December.

Eisenkot revealed the he had argued himself hoarse (literally) in an October 11 cabinet meeting to forestall a preemptive strike against Hezbollah. About the course of the war, he had this to say.

“Those who say that there was a major blow and demolition of the capabilities in the north of the strip are telling the truth,” Eisenkot told told Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 News on Thursday evening. “Those who talk about an absolute defeat and lack of will and ability do not tell the truth. This is why there is no need to tell tall tales.”

Even this may have been optimistic. The CNN report is from 20th January. On the 16th, the Institute for the Study of War, a pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine military think tank, published its update on the situation in Gaza.

Palestinian militias are likely re-infiltrating into areas of the northern Gaza Strip where Israeli forces previously conducted clearing operations. CTP-ISW has observed renewed militant activity in several neighborhoods across the northern part of the strip in recent weeks, as Israeli forces have transitioned to less intense fighting there. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed on December 31, 2023, that it withdrew five brigades from the northern Gaza Strip and said that it would transition to targeted raids with its remaining forces. CTP-ISW assessed on January 2 that the IDF transitioning to this new phase of operations will very likely enable Hamas to reconstitute itself militarily.

In this environment, Israel’s demolition activities carry some risks. On the 22nd of January, Israeli soldiers who were rigging buildings for demolition were attacked with RPGs or other anti-tank weapons. The attack triggered the demolition charges, killing most of the IDF soldiers in the vicinity. Reports vary from 21 dead to 24, the number Netanyahu announced.

On the 28th of January, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Israel Struggles to Destroy Hamas’ Tunnel Network.

As much as 80% of Hamas’s vast warren of tunnels under Gaza remains intact after weeks of Israeli efforts to destroy them, U.S. and Israeli officials said, hampering Israel’s central war aims.

The bottom line is that Hamas still has significant operational capability. It seems that Israel is incapable of destroying Hamas.

Building Hamas

First published on NewCatallaxy.blog on 15th December, 2023

On the 8th of October, an angry article appeared in The Times of Israel.  For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces, or so ran the headline. One has to read some way into the article to discover that it was not only Netanyahu-led governments that followed the policy of “propping up Hamas.” Presumably, The Times of Israel is part of the extensive opposition to Netanyahu, but that does not diminish the seriousness of the charges.

What was the point?

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

That’s it in a nutshell. Remember that Fatah, the party originally of Yassar Arafat, and now of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, was and remains a secular party, originally influenced by National Liberation ideology and its Marxian leanings, whereas the group carefully cultivated by the Israelis to split the Palestinians is an Islamist organisation springing from the Muslim Brotherhood, not that anyone in the West needs to be reminded of the ideology of Hamas. Hamas’ constitution demands the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, and the creation of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.” Hamas’ ruling Gaza is a guarantee of perpetual armed conflict between Israel and Gaza. In the limited wars of 2009, 2012 and 2014, around a dozen Israeli and 2000 Palestinian civilians were killed. Israeli figures who maintain this policy refer to these outbreaks, cynically, as “mowing the grass.” It is just the price that must be paid, in this fallen world, to stymie efforts towards a two-state solution. And the price is paid mainly by Palestinians.

It isn’t as though the dependency relationship between Hamas and successive Israeli governments has not been widely known, and criticised by many within the Israeli establishment. In 2018, Mehdi Hasan and Dina Sayedahmed at The Intercept published a short video and accompanying article in the Blowback video series, called Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas To Bombing It. Israeli support for the fledgling organisation of Sheik Ahmed Yassin began in 1978, long before the official creation of Hamas in 1987 at the time of the First Intifada. Yassin was later assassinated in an Israeli airstrike.

Earlier still, in 2014, the Washington Post published a story How Israel helped create Hamas, covering much of the same ground.

Egypt lost control of Gaza to Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war… In 1966, Nasser had executed Sayyid Qutb, one of the Brotherhood’s leading intellectuals. The Israelis saw Qutb’s adherents in the Palestinian territories, including the wheelchair-bound Sheik Ahmed Yassin, as a useful counterweight to Arafat’s PLO.
“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” one Israeli official…said in a 2009 interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Higgins. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

Yassin’s organisation Mujama al-Islamiya, approved by the Israeli authorities in Gaza, set up a network of schools, clinics, kindergartens, a library, and later, the Islamic University of Gaza. Such activities, in contrast to the increasingly corrupt Fatah, won great support for Mujama; support which transferred to Hamas. Up to this point, Israeli authorities might be forgiven for not appreciating the potential dangers. But the Washington Post report includes this ambiguous gem.

Israel jailed Yassin in 1984 on a 12-year sentence after the discovery of hidden arms caches, but he was released a year later. The Israelis must have been more worried about other enemies.

Hasan’s report at The Intercept refers to a number of Israelis who, by the mid-80s, were warning about the dangers of the policy regarding Yassin. One of them, Avner Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew, had been responsible for religious affairs in Gaza up until 1994. In 2009 he was interviewed for the Wall Street Journal, presumably the one mentioned in the Washington Post article. He said, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” and called it an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years previously. (See this item at Huffington Post.) According to Hasan, Cohen wrote a report in the mid-80s, urging that the policy be abandoned.

Yet a blind eye was turned to Yassin’s development of an armed force. By 2006, Hamas was in a position to win the election against Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Over the course of 2006 and 2007, Hamas fought against the PA, and drove them out of Gaza, realising the hopes of many in Israel to split the Palestinians, not only politically, but territorially.

Despite this seeming policy triumph, it seems that in the nine years since Operation Protective Edge the grass grew pretty high.

BUK + flechettes = contradiction

First published at New Catallaxy blog 23rd September, 2023

In CL’s report on the NYT’s unusual scraps of integrity in reporting on the Kostiantynivka (aka Kostyantynovka) market-place attack, the new standard story is revealed.

But evidence collected and analyzed by The New York Times, including missile fragments, satellite imagery, witness accounts and social media posts, strongly suggests the catastrophic strike was the result of an errant Ukrainian air defense missile fired by a Buk launch system.

The attack appears to have been a tragic mishap.

Readers will recall that a BUK missile is purported to have downed MH17. In this case, a BUK missile was fired from North-West of Kostiantynivka, presumably at an incoming Russian ground-to-ground missile or Lancet-like drone. The problem with this story is the flechettes.

One of the earliest rounds employed by the US is the Beehive, developed in 1957, apparently developed from lessons learned in the Korean War as a counter to massed infantry attacks on artillery positions, and used in this capacity during the Vietnam War. The designation of the round is APERS-T – anti-personnel-tracer. In a brief search, I have seen no reference to flechettes in any other capacity than anti-personnel.

The Ukraine’s legacy Air Defence missile systems included the S-200, S-300 and early model BUK systems. The range of the BUK is less than that of the S-200/300. It operates in ranges between these and the point defence Pantsir. The Russian Air Force knows comprehensively the capability of these systems, especially the S-300 and the BUK, and fears them. Because of these systems, all high altitude airborne attacks on Ukrainian facilities have been conducted with stand-off missiles.

There have been a number of reports of Ukraine using modified S-200 systems in ground-attack roles. The S-200 is less effective in AD than the S-300, and Ukraine presumably has stocks of the older missiles. Their range makes them preferable to the BUK for adapting to ground-attack roles.

Searches for such information will turn up a number of references to Russia’s purported use of S-300s in ground-attack. These are dubious. Russia still deploys S-300 systems in AD roles in Donbas, and Ukrainian drone operators are constantly hunting for them. But Ukraine fires S-300s at incoming Russian missiles, a considerable proportion of which evade the S-300s, and we have the memorable example of the AD miss which killed the Polish farmers.

What such searches do not turn up are references to the use of BUK systems in ground-attack.

The missile that struck the Kostiantynivka market carried an anti-personnel warhead. The missile was fired from North-West of the city. Ukraine regularly attacks civilian areas in Donetsk city with artillery and missiles, sometimes carrying clusters of small anti-personnel mines known as Petals, but Donetsk city is pretty much south of Kostiantynivka. Horlivka, a city under Russian control, is more or less to the south-east, as is the town of Niu (or New) York, around which fighting is taking place. On the front lines, Russian positions are being accurately peppered with cluster munitions from nearby artillery. A 152mm anti-personnel round would be more precisely targeted and have greater effect against Russian troops, one might reasonably suppose.

So, which “personnel” were being targeted? Was it a terror attack against Donbas civilians in, say, Horlivka, one which would have gone unreported in the West? One which turned into a “tragic mishap”? Or was it a terror attack that was precisely on target?

This story popped up in searches for information about flechettes. Many of the bodies found in graves outside Bucha had been killed by flechettes. Someone was using such rounds at that early stages of the conflict. Despite the loud protestations of The Week, bodies with flechette wounds do not testify as to who fired them. The only ones now known to have employed them are the Ukrainians.

More Tangling of the Web

First published at New Catallaxy blog on 20 September, 2023

Softly, as in an morning sunrise, General Mark Milley let it be known that the infamous Chinese spy balloon, whilst it definitely was a spy ballon, definitely did not phone home with any intelligence information, and definitely had blown off course.

See, for example, the RT story. If you’re concerned about Russian propaganda, try these versions.

Notice that Milley is still talking about the motor. The particular motor on that aircraft can’t go against those winds at that altitude. Show us the body, General Milley. After all, the corpse was recovered from the Atlantic after the triumphant shoot-down, so details of the propulsion and guidance mechanisms must be known to the eagle-eyed U.S. military and intelligence establishments.

If we give ourselves over to complete tin-hat fantasy for a moment, we might imagine that there was no motor or rudder. That the only manoeuvring system that might have been employed was like that developed for the Loon project. So, news stories like the one referred to in the RT item would have been complete fabrications.

In April, anonymous officials told NBC News that the balloon made “multiple passes” over US military sites to intercept electronic communications, before it “increased its speed” in an attempt “to get it out of US airspace as quickly as possible.” 

Worse, still, we would have to imagine that the Chinese Government’s version was accurate; that it was a civilian research balloon that had blown off course. Fortunately, we know that such a notion is absurd. Better get those tin-foil hats off now. Phew!

Back in the real world of high quality, dis- and mis- and mal-information free journalism, the Oz reports exclusively on the newly discovered aspects of a Russian atrocity in Ukraine: the Russian missile attack on a civilian market in Kostyantynivka.

Unfortunately, at virtually the same time, the New York Times, normally so reliable (see the missile attack report above, for example) suffered a disinformation attack, probably as a result of Russian hackers.

Again, we can be confident that the NYT suffered a momentary lapse of reason, because pro-Russian sources adduced within hours the same evidence (notably the reflection of the missile in the roof of one of the cars) to conclude that the missile was Ukrainian.

Let’s just be grateful for the quality of Australian reportage.

Consciousness & Time: Part 1

Vulcans, zombies, and desert islands

Imagine, for the moment, that at some time in the 1850s a Royal Navy vessel, operating to the south of Samoa, in running from a cyclone, finds a large uncharted desert isle.  Inhabitants are nowhere to be found, but inhabitants there were, at least the analogy of William Paley’s Watchmaker, because the island is replete with the artefacts of a much more technologically advanced civilisation than that of the explorers.  There are buildings of peculiar construction and materials, and most mysterious of all, in all of these buildings are large “moving picture” frames. At one moment they will display scenes as from a play, though switching rapidly between characters who, while speaking, fill the whole frame.  At the next, they might display scenes in strange cities of similar construction, filled with self-propelled vehicles moving at dizzying speed. In the skies are machines that fly. Again, they might show scenes from exotic landscapes, or views from the heavens onto the country far beneath, presumably  from the flying machines. The people are heard to speak in a strange language, and music, often discordant, accompanies every scene.  The people represented in these frames display a moral degeneracy as astonishing as the engineering itself.

Continue reading “Consciousness & Time: Part 1”