Best things I read about the horrible events in the Middle East

This is the best article I have read on the crisis in the Middle East, from the US defence establishment's magazine Foreign Affairs.

An Israeli ground campaign has seemed inevitable from the moment Hamas breached the security perimeter surrounding the Gaza Strip. Washington has fully backed Israeli plans, notably refraining from urging restraint. In an overheated political environment, the loudest voices in the United States have been those urging extreme measures against Hamas. In some cases, commentators have even called for military action against Iran for its alleged sponsorship of Hamas’s operation.

But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only badly harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human costs on Palestinians but also threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel, Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement and mass killing of innocent Palestinian civilians.

Peter Hitchens as usual is good:

Israel’s critics have many good points as well as bad ones. The anti-Israel propagandists say truthfully that Israel’s foundation in 1948 was based on the cruel expulsion of Arabs from their homes, under cover of war. Defenders of Israel long tried to deny this. But Israeli historians, especially Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris, have shown beyond doubt that it is true. So what shall we do about this? Shall we make it a rule that nations which have displaced their original inhabitants should be dissolved, or forced to hand the land back? In that case what shall we do about the USA and Australia, both of which mercilessly cleansed their indigenous peoples, sometimes with actual massacres? Well, you might say that was long ago, though it wasn’t really.

But as it happens, the 1940s - when Israel came into being - saw several horrible events of this kind, in places other than Israel. In what are now India and Pakistan, uncounted numbers were slaughtered or forced from their homes when the country was partitioned in the last weeks of the British Empire. In Europe, a frightful, savage and often fatal campaign drove millions of Germans from their ancestral lands in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Most of these were women, children and the old, who could not be blamed for the deeds of Hitler. And the cleansing was authorised by the Great Powers under the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. They said it should be ‘orderly and humane’ but it was anything but. It was so shamefully cruel that it is little discussed, but it happened. Nearly 15 million were uprooted. More than two million probably died. Records were not kept amid the bloody chaos. And let us not forget that hundreds of thousands of Jews were ruthlessly ejected from all parts of the Arab and Muslim world. They were mostly forced to leave behind everything they owned. This cruelty was a response to the creation of Israel.

I agree with Ed West here:

I have happily avoided having too much of an opinion on the Israel/Palestine question for many years and could quite happily go many more without adding to the world’s abundance of viewpoints on it. Although I’m not Jewish, I endorse Martin Lewis’s view that I just wish for peace and an end to the suffering (I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen).

Like him I have suddenly started taking a keen interest in this tedious dispute.

This is by a journalist friend about Hamas killing Arabs.

This article from Vox is very well worth reading.

First, the Washington Post’s Noga Tarnopolsky and Shira Rubin wrote a lengthy dispatch on the many policy failures that allowed Hamas to break through. They find that, in addition to myriad unforgivable intelligence and military mistakes — especially shocking given Israel’s reputation in both fields — there were serious political problems. Distracted by both the fight to seize control over Israel’s judiciary and their effort to deepen Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Netanyahu and his cabinet allowed military readiness to degrade and left outposts on the Gaza border in the south unmanned.

“There was a need for more soldiers, so where did they take them from? From the Gaza border, where they thought it was calm ... not surprising that Hamas and Islamic Jihad noticed the low staffing at the border,” Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ military intelligence, said in comments reported by the Post.

Second, a columnist at Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper unearthed evidence that Netanyahu has intentionally propped up Hamas rule in Gaza — seeing Palestinian extremism as a bulwark against a two-state solution to the conflict.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” the prime minister reportedly said at a 2019 meeting of his Likud party. “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

These exact comments have not yet been confirmed by other sources. But the Times of Israel’s Tal Schneider wrote on Sunday that Netanyahu’s reported words “are in line with the policy that he implemented,” which did little to challenge and in some ways bolstered Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Schneider notes, “the same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.” Some Netanyahu confidants have said the same thing, as have outside experts.

Put together, these two pieces tell a larger story: that the strategic vision of Netanyahu’s far-right government is a failure.

More here about how Netanyahu wanted Hamas to win support from Palestinians as a way of preventing a two state solution. 

He has been a terrible disaster for Israelis, Arabs and the world, as bad as George W. Bush. More than that I cannot say.