“To Jaw-Jaw is better than to War-War", an uncharacteristically pacific remark by Winston Churchill

Things seen today.

'Putin and Netanyahu are the two biggest threats to world peace.' 

I saw this somewhere on Twitter. Add 'discuss' and it would make a good history exam question. I tend to agree with it, but I'd add that George W Bush is responsible for more killing so far than either and his decision to say Ukraine and Georgia could one day join Nato lit the fuse that led to the war in Ukraine. None of the three had much compunction about breaking international law. Neo-con Victoria Nuland involved America with the protesters who seized power in Kiev in 2014 - an event that Peter Hitchens aptly likened to the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. She and Joe Biden, whose Ukrainian policy has been such a failure, are close behind. The only good thing I remember him doing is cold shouldering Netanyahu. 

'If Israel invades Gaza it will be one of the biggest crimes of war Israel has ever committed.'

'We have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.'

Gideon Levy, who writes for the left-wing Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, in an interesting interview a week ago.

'If Ukraine was unable to break the Russian defensive lines after four full months of effort, after six full months of preparation, after receiving over $46 billion in military backing, and considerable training and intelligence support, by what logic can supporters of additional aid argue that giving another multi-billion dollar package will succeed where all previous efforts have failed? There is none. There is no likely path to a Ukrainian military victory, regardless of how much money Congress allocates, how many tanks we provide, or how many artillery shells we produce. It is time to acknowledge this obvious on-the-ground truth and seek out other pathways forward.'

Retired US Lt.-Col Daniel L. Davis

'Of course they [American students] support Hamas. Palestinians are merely punching up — and that exonerates them of any moral culpability. Just as African-Americans cannot commit a hate crime, so Hamas definitionally cannot commit terror. Once you see the world in this way — as groups of the oppressed and oppressors, with the oppressed always justified in their resistance to the oppressors — the rights of individual Jews, or whites, or Asians, or even dissident non-whites are irrelevant. It’s all about “power structures” and “systems” and “context”. All morality is relative to privilege. There is not a trace of universalism among the woke left, not a single objective measurement of morality except what is justified in response to “oppression”.'

Andrew Sullivan