Letter to Biden on Gaza

It is wonderful that a temporary pause was taken on Israel's destruction of Gaza in order that some prisoners be swapped.  This should continue.  But humanity also demands that Israel's brutal assault on Gaza not be continued.  Palestinians must not be expelled from any part of Gaza, which is their homeland under international law.  US should not be sending more weapons to Israel until Israel complies with international law, which it has not been doing since US recognized Israel in 1948--despite the immediately preceding ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians--and before that had been resolved.  Now we are faced with a second ethnic cleansing of even larger numbers, and genocidal statements and plans from Israeli leaders.  

Israel must withdraw from all occupied territories and remove all sea blockades from Gaza.  That is the minimum that international law requires. Until then, Israel should not get another dime from USA. As long as it is occupying another nation, Israel does not have a right to self defense against that nation being occupied.  

A preferable outcome to the 2-state-solution would be the elimination of all ethnic discrimination in all of Israel and Palestine as one nation, with right of return for Palestinians at least as comprehensive as that for Jews.  International law does not yet demand that, though most Palestinians and many Israelis and other Jews understand that approach is the best one, and possibly the only achievable one at this time.  The idea of an ethnic state is fundamentally an antiquated and terrible one, and even moreso if it is built on the backs of millions of displaced people with nowhere to go.

Palestinians and Self Defense

The LAW according to Tayab Ali

Gaza is occupied…

Israel is the occupying force…

The occupation is likely to be unlawful due the purpose and time it has been in place… 

Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group- not a State but a non-State actor…

Israel has been in an ‘aggressive state’ over Gaza for decades as an occupier…

The occupied have the right to resist and repel occupation in international law (Geneva Convention additional protocol) as they are in a defensive position…

Palestinians have the right to self defence - which must comply with international law…

Israel does not as an occupier have the right to self defence under article 51 of the UN Charter as it is already in a position of occupation and attacking a non international armed group from within the occupied territory and not a State…

The statements made by Netanyahu and others is evidence of an intention to commit Genocide. 

Article 25 of the Rome Statue makes aiding, abetting or in any other supporting (including encouraging) international crimes a criminal offence in itself.

Documents written by International Lawyers

*****

These points make it clear there is no legal justification for Israel's latest scorched earth genocidal attack on Gaza.

Even if Hamas illegally attacked Israel on October 7, that still does not justify it.

Also the clock did not start on October 7, but no later than the Nabka of 1948, when Israel ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from the land they were stealing.

Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby

It's preposterous to believe Jack Ruby murdered Oswald because Jack Ruby "loved his country."

It was obviously a "hit" (and Ruby was a nightclub owning protege of mobster Meyer Lansky, so he knew something about hits) in the grandest of mob traditions, to keep Oswald from talking.

Talking about what?  That is the only question.

It appears that not long after his final move to Dallas to work at the School Book Depository, Oswald was talking to Jack Ruby about making a hit on Governor Connally.  The Dallas Police knew about this because conveniently they had an informant right there as it was happening.

This is completely consistent with my theory that Oswald was both a CIA asset and FBI informant.  The assassination of Kennedy involved many kinds of actors (former CIA--Dulles himself, CIA, FBI, Mafia) and they were all spying on one another throughout this process.  Each organization didn't want to be the one left holding the bag.

Oswald was doing a sting on Ruby (trying to get Ruby to pay for a hit)  and others connected with Dallas Police were spying on Oswald and Ruby.  Ruby himself was an FBI informant as well (from a longstanding alliance between FBI and the Mafia).

Or at least that's what Oswald may have thought he was doing.  In reality, Oswald was being moved into position as Patsy for the JFK assassination.  And Ruby had said enough already to have sufficient motivation to be sure that Oswald never went to trial, a key part of the whole operation.  The top dogs like Dulles and LBJ needed someone with the means and strong motive to kill the patsy before he could do much talking.

I believe Ruby was very deep in the conspiracy himself, acting as Lansky's man in Dallas.  He had already gotten one or more talented shooters from his mentor Lansky in Miami for JFK, but needed another to handle Connally.  In the end, Connally was not shot (though, contra the single bullet theory, it's possible someone tried...perhaps from the book depository...I'm not thinking Oswald who failed the paraffin test, couldn't have been going down the central stairwell without having been seen, etc).

BTW, at this time a primary organized crime syndicate in the USA was the National Crime Syndicate, which included Jews like Lansky and Ruby as well as Italian Catholics.  Lansky was dubbed 'The Accountant' for his skill in making the most profit from casinos.

LBJ and Zionism

 Lyndon Baines Johnson was a friend of Jews.  This was clear during World War II, when Johnson personally helped Jews escape from Europe.  As a congressman, he enabled the immigration of Eric Leinsdorf, who became the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

There was much good in this, and LBJ's anti-racism led to his work in getting the Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed.

But LBJ was also a notorious womanizer, and one of his most famous girlfriends was Alice Glass, who became the wife of the publisher of the Austin-American Statesman, who was a big backer of Johnson.

Johnson had a falling out with Alice after he started sending troops to Vietnam.  But before long, another girlfriend became much more important in his life.  She was Mathilde Krim, an ardent Zionist who had assisted emigration of Jews to Israel from Europe, then briefly lived in Israel herself before marrying the president of United Artists and moving to Los Angeles.

The Krims and especially Mathilde became a private counselor to Johnson on Israeli affairs, and stayed at the White House during much of the 1967 war.

The Scofield Bible

Christian Zionism relies on a translation of the bible by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, a follower of Dispensationalism, known as the Scofield Bible.

It included a number of new elements emphasizing The End Times, The Rapture, and The State of Israel.  These were inventions of Scofield not actually found in the original Bible.

Scofield went on tours funded by wealthy European Zionists, making his Bible popular among white Evangelicals.

Holocaust Survivors on Zionism

[Copied from Professor Kallas on X]

Rudolf Vrba was a heroic antifascist Jew.

He was a survivor of  Majdanek and Auschwitz. He escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 in order to warn the Jews of Hungary about the Nazi extermination programme. Here is part of his testimony about Zionism.

1 “The Zionist movement of Europe played a very important role in the mass extermination of Jews. Indeed, I believe that without the cooperation of Zionists it would have been a much more difficult task….

The Zionists said that we are not Czechoslovaks or we are not Germans, we are not French, we are Jews and we must, as Jews, go back to our country, to Israel or to Palestine and found our state …

Then came the Nuremberg Law, which was a law, issued by a nominally civilized state [Nazi Germany], which said that Jews do not belong to Europe, but to Palestine. …

So, on one platform, Nazism and Zionism had something in common: they both preached that Jews don’t belong to Europe but to Palestine. ...

And naturally, the Germans said: ‘You see the Jews may not trust us but they will trust you’, to the Zionists, ‘because they have seen that they have always told them actually the truth: that you belong to Palestine, that you are a foreign element here.’ …

And so the Jewish councils were preferably selected from well-known Zionists. And, because the well-known Zionists became respectable, many Jews who were respectable anyway became Zionists. So they formed Jewish councils from a Zionist core, fortified by respectable members of society: top lawyers, top business people, top economists and that was the Jewish councils. ...

They were promised by the Germans or by the local fascist government to be protected from any discrimination because they are needed for administering of the Jewish affairs. …

So you had here already a Zionist clique enforced by money of big Jewish businessmen who would be prepared to go along with the discrimination against the masses of the Jewish population which were neither rich nor Zionist, and in other words did not belong to the clique. …

So I didn’t trust them in spite of the fact that the Nazis gave them the right after the Nuremberg Laws. I considered them plain fascists and I considered them from the very start as despicable creatures who deal with the fascists and take profit out of it in order to be exempted from discrimination conducted against the others. …

So I didn’t trust the Nazis any more or any less than the Jewish Zionist councils. Indeed, I realised that the Zionists and the Nazis are approximately identical enemies of mine who have got both one thing in common, to get me out from home with 25 kilos to an unknown place and to leave my mother completely defenceless at home. …

The young people, the core of resistance, is always 16 to 30. Every soldier knows that they are the best material for fighting. … I was flabbergasted by the fact that the Zionists who pretended to be the protectors of the Jews, the first thing which they agreed to was to let go away a potential core of resistance who could in the last resort protect the families with force if necessary. …

2 I am a Jew. In spite of that – indeed because of that – I accuse certain Jewish leaders of one of the most ghastly deeds of the war.

This small group of quislings knew what was happening to their brethren in Hitler’s gas chambers and bought their own lives with the price of silence. Among them was Dr. [Rudolf] Kastner, leader of the council which spoke for all Jews in Hungary…

While I was prisoner number 44070 at Auschwitz – the number is still on my arm – I compiled careful statistics of the exterminations … I took these terrible statistics with me when I escaped in 1944 and I was able to give Hungarian Zionist leaders three weeks notice that Eichmann planned to send a million of their Jews to his gas chambers. … Kastner went to Eichmann and told him, ‘I know of your plans; spare some Jews of my choice and I shall keep quiet.’

Eichmann not only agreed, but dressed Kastner up in S.S. uniform and took him to Belsen to trace some of his friends. Nor did the sordid bargaining end there.

Kastner paid Eichmann several thousand dollars. With this little fortune, Eichmann was able to buy his way to freedom when Germany collapsed, to set himself up in the Argentine…

3 Why did Doctor Kastner betray his people when he could have saved many of them by warning them, by giving them a chance to fight, a chance to stage the second ‘Warsaw [uprising]’ which Eichmann feared? …

Could it be, therefore that the defeatist mood of Doctor Kastner was reinforced by the memory of words used by Doctor Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel, when he addressed a Zionist convention in London in 1937? He said:

I told the British Royal Commission that the hopes of Europe’s six million Jews were centred on emigration. I was asked: ‘Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?’ I replied: ‘No.’ The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world … only a branch will survive … They had to accept it. … If they feel and suffer, they will find the way – Beacharit Hayamim [‘When the Messiah comes, all the dead will be revived’] – in the fullness of time … I pray that we may preserve our national unity, for it is all we have.

‘Only a branch will survive …’. Did Kastner, like Hitler, believe in a master race, a Jewish nation created of Top People for Top People by Top People? Was that the way in which he interpreted Doctor Chaim Weizmann's somber oration and was he right in so doing? If so, who was going to select the branch? Who was going to say which grains would form the heap of moral and economic dust, destined to await the coming of the Messiah? …

My family, presumably, formed the dust which was to be swept into the ovens by the Nazis who used Jewish leaders as their brooms …”

Read his book "I escaped from Auschwitz " to find out more. 

Another heroic antifascist Jew was Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Here what he said about Zionism:

“During the war it never even entered any of our minds that the Zionists were deliberately remaining passive in regard to the physical destruction of the Jews in order to additionally justify the founding of the State of Israel… But today, even acknowledged historians speak out loud about the way that some of the Zionists living in Palestine exploited the Holocaust politically! … The first Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion believed that the worse it is for the Jews in Europe, the better for Israel. He put that into practice… Ben Gurion washed his hands of the Diaspora… As early as a Mapai party conference in December 1942, he said that the tragedy of the European Jews did not ‘directly concern’ them. Those were the words of a leader who was willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Jews to the idea of a Jewish state. I’m not saying he could have saved thousands of people, but he could have fought for those thousands of people. He did not do so. I don’t know whether this was deliberate.”

Last but not least, Primo Levi was an author and an Auschwitz survivor. He wrote: 

"As for Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ‘Fascist’ is a definition I can accept. I think even Begin would not deny it. He was a student of Jabotinsky, who represented the right wing of Zionism, who called himself a Fascist and was one of Mussolini’s interlocutors. Yes, Begin was his pupil. That is Begin’s history…. The Holocaust is Begin’s favourite defence. And I deny any validity to that defence."

We can go on and on.

What's important now is to expose the fascist Zionists who dare to use the memory of the victims of the Holocaust to justify the ongoing Holocaust of Palestinians while historically themselves were either collaborators with the German Nazis or in the best case, indifferent to fight against them unlike so many Jewish antifascist partisans who fought against the Genocidal Nazi Empire alongside other antifascist partisans. 

Debunking the Beheaded Babies story

https://x.com/propandco/status/1725228347574145285?s=20

The heart of the debunking is that IDF would not share photographic evidence, claiming disrespect for the dead.  Then 2 days after the original claim, an Israeli official (reported in CNN) could not confirm that babies were beheaded.  The White House confirmed that Biden had not seen or independently confirmed beheaded babies.  And Haaretz only reported one baby dead, circumstances unknown.  Also, the damage at the Kibbutz, including blown up concrete buildings, is far more than Hamas could have accomplished, it was almost certainly blown up by IDF to prevent Hamas from taking hostages.

Still, once reported, the story keep being reported, despite denials and lacking evidence in the public domain.

Similar situation wrt the hospitals that supposedly housed Hamas command centers.  The few photos we've seen of this are laughable compared to the virtual reality diagrams and simulations Israel developed.  They look more like the weapons and communication devices of the hospital security staff.

Some interesting revisionism

Self-described (converted that way from hard knocks)  anti-Zionist cautions that we must be conscious not only of motivations but effects.

It's a very intelligent and well informed essay, worth reading and re-reading perhaps despite it's clear Revisionist POV (socialist idealist).  The author suggests some harmony with Marxism-Leninism but perhaps only a re-imagined M-L.

The title suggests the essay (written in 1977) was written by Moishe Postone under a pseudonym and published in Germany.  I'm not sure if this is correct, it is not listed in Wikipedia as one of Postone's works.  However Postone does look like an interesing "post M-L" theorist I think I'd like to check out some more, possibly in the same nature as the essay above: it's so full of facts and ideas despite my feeling that the author is still fundamentally wrong somehow.

Here's where I think the error is:  I think it's ludicrous to believe we can analyze effects, except perhaps in a millenial perspective.  Even 2000 years later, it's all about ideals, perceptions, and preconceptions.  Were the Jews losers for having lost their (and others') homeland under Roman (and earlier) empires and facing frequent pograms?  Or were they winners from having settled and grown into nearly every country in the world, often occupying the upper levels of respect and remuneration in many if not most places as well?  (I say winners, and that Jews were critical to the success of USA and Europe. Since 1948, and due to Zionist myopia, the Jewish mind power that used to drive Western innovation has faded, as has the West itself--and this is not entirely coincidence.)

I would not myself want to be involved in the hijackings that Palestinian groups carried out in the 1970's, understandable though they might be.  Retrospectively it's hard to say they made any difference at all.  Israel was going to do what they did, and nobody was going to stop them.

Were the Hamas attacks of October 7 of the same overtly terrorist nature?  Absolutely not.  They hardly seem aimed toward civilian terror outside Israel, or atrocities and massacres at all (and such allegations have not been well established in my view).  By all sources at least 300 IDF forces were killed.  My sources further say the attack was aimed at several bases around the Gaza perimeter, and the key goal of Hamas was to capture hostages to be used in prisoner exchange (while this is a war crime, it is not genocide, and it does merely reflect the greater detentions of Israel).  Israel has a well known policy not to allow hostages to be taken, even at some cost in civilian casualties.  And indeed it seems like much if not most  of the civilian deaths were from friendly fire, though I am also discontent at how poorly this has been established (though claimed as fact by many people on my twitter).  But the reverse has not been established either, despite the much greater ability of Israel to do so.  It looks likely to be a cover up, suggesting my sources have the story basically correct.  Here's one recent thread.

So of course I do not denounce the Hamas attacks.  And I don't know where this will all lead, but it remains my belief that the Zionist Entity is a temporary phenomenon.  In the millennial perpsective then, 1000 years from now, all Palestinian attacks and even terror may appear not only justified but successful.  So I don't judge them either.

My likely more passive strategies hardly matter.  Palestinians would best be making their own choices, not necessarily the Hamas leadership and auxilliaries, but how can this be imagined when they are not even permitted to make their own choices if those choices are opposed to the existence of Israel, as all sane minded people should be?  "Democracy" is not only trivially necessary it is trivially impossible.  Hence there is little democracy in the oldest democratic republics of the world.  What the West and Israel clearly want is a captured client-democratic process such as the one that originally existed in the Palestinian Authority.  Not actual sovereignty for the Palestinians.

It does seem to me that Palestinians do have a strong will to fight Zionism and reclaim their state.  It has reached the point where it seems many would rather die than be displaced further, resulting in some of the civilian casualties.  That is understandable.  Others may simply be unable to move as 'requested' by Israel.

What Jews would Palestinians "allow" to remain in the reclaimed Palestine?  The essay author says some say '20 and others say '48. But any plausible settlement would allow all Jews currently in Israel/Palestine to remain in a restored pre-48 Palestine, and I believe the 2017 Hamas Charter says as much.  The goal is a state without any discrimination.  And as is often claimed, many Jews may leave under the threat of losing their discriminatory advantages of a state that persecutes, steals from, and murders other ethnicities, but perhaps not as many as Zionists would imagine.  People often change their stripes when material circumstances dictate, which is why material circumstances should be organized without discrimination in the first place.

Another difficulty arrises from the return of Palestinian properties.  Generally in cases of theft, material changes or "improvements" don't count, it all has to be given to the rightful owners.  It is hard to imagine all this happening, but it's far from impossible.

Update: The essay now does appear to be written by Postone.  He was educated in none other than Frankfurt, where the essay was published.  Though he seems to find more (but still limited) value in Marxism-Leninism than other Frankfurt School Marxists, so he's a kind of post-Frankfurt along with post-M-L.  He taught at University of Chicago, which refused him tenure in Sociology but finally accepted him in History.  Ironic that first 4 letters in his surname are post.

Genocidal statements

Genocide is the crime of the intended destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.

Normally, intent has to be inferred by actions, which are listed in the Genocide Convention.

1. Killing

2. Causing serious bodily Harm.

3. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or part

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births

5. Forcibly transferring children to another group

However, in the case of Israel, we have both the actions (all of those proscribed except #5) AND the clearly expressed intent.

Letter to Congress

[Boilerplate:] 

I am a constituent and I have been horrified at the loss of life in Palestine/Israel over the past week. Over 10,000 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis have been killed and many more are at risk every day this conflict continues. 2.2 million people are under siege in Gaza, almost half of whom are children. Every human life is precious and President Biden and Congress must act to save both Palestinian and Israeli lives. I urge you to support the Ceasefire Now Resolution introduced by Representative Cori Bush and Representative Rashida Tlaib as the only way to prevent more bloodshed is de-escalation and an immediate cease-fire.

[Original from me:]

The time for the supposed "two state solution" came and went in 1967 when Israel refused to relinquish conquered Palestinian and Syrian territories, and soon began settling them.  The idea of a "Jewish State" which discriminates against all other people in housing and other crucial matters was an ethnic supremacist and fascist one from the beginning, so it is no surprise that Zionist Israel more and more resembles Nazi Germany, with concentration camps (or open air prisons) for the out groups, checkpoints, starvation protocols applied to Gaza, and the use of terror and carpet bombing instead of gas chambers to accomplish ethnic cleansing and genocide (carpet bombing using US supplied weapons is also quite efficient in Israeli time and effort).

The clock didn't start on October 7, 2023.  It didn't even start in 1948 when Zionists ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians in order to steal their land and build the Zionist fascist state of "Israel", creating the ongoing Palestinian Issue ever since. There were many previous incidents of Zionist terror, and longstanding Zionist claims and threats from the beginning of Zionism have to be understood as a looming threat over the sovereignty of the Palestinian people even prior to and certainly ever since the British Mandate.

The only solution that should really be acceptable to everyone now is the creation of a new government in the whole area of Israel/Palestine with equal rights and non-discrimination for people of all ethnicities who have legitimate claims to live there.  That includes the now millions of Palestinian refugees and Gazans.  They should have the same rights as everyone else in getting their property back.

Only then will there be at least a shred of justice for those who suffered from the catastrophe caused by the Ethnic Supremacism known as Zionism, and until then there will never be peace.

The many Jews I most respect have always been critical of if not opposed to the Zionist idea of Israel as a "Jewish" supremacist state, including Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Aaron Mate, and Tony Greenstein.  Sadly many other Jews fell for Zionism after the horrors of the holocaust were revealed and also due to brilliant Israeli propaganda.  The majority of every group are fools.  But future generations can and seem to be learning.  I completely reject the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.  If anything it is Zionism itself which is antisemitic by attacking a different set of Jews, including more and more Jewish youth, not to mention all true Jewish leftists, and calling them names such as Self-Hating.

Hamas

I've already told many people I'm not inclined to denounce Hamas.

For one thing, Hamas and indeed all Palestinians have the right of violent self defense against Israel, which has:

1) Stolen their entire country.

2) Stolen their homes, their communities, and their livelihoods.

3) Murdered and terrorized them since before the violent creation of Israel--itself through a terror based ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people, and through many episodes later, including the 1967 war (and refusal with withdraw to internationally agreed borders afterwards).

4) Threatened an important religious landmark, important to 1.8 billion people.

Given that the Palestinians are a nation of people under apartheid, occupation, and siege, they have a right to self defense by violent means.

The perpetrators of that apartheid, occupation, and siege have no such primary right.  They have the responsibility to end their apartheid, occupation, and siege first.  Once that has been done, they will have the right of self defense.

So, firstly, I denounce Israel and Zionists.  I cannot denounce Palestinians, including Hamas.  I do not denounce Jews and Judaism, perhaps all of my most favorite anti-Zionists are Jewish, many of the same are also among my favorite anti-Imperialists, and Jews are among my favorite experts in other fields.  

That a majority of Jews may or may not be known as Zionist today means little to me, the majority of any group of people are fools, and Zionism has always been built on the slickest lies that were particularly salable to Jews after the Holocaust and may take some outside knowledge to debunk.  So I don't see Zionism as a peculiar weakness of the Jews as such, but it was something that happened to many Jews which could happen to many other nations, and historically has, as it once did to the forward and objective thinking Germans once who fell for Naziism.  The siren call to ethnic supremacism should be understood as fundamentally evil, but the creators of Zionism disguised it for the gullible as left and liberal and Zionism was there at just the right time(s) and the world is filled with such gullible people of all kinds, not just Jews and Zionists (and Zionism has become part of much of Christianity and White Man's Rule as well).

I further understand that what the west calls Hamas for simplification purposes, may include other militant sectors, some perhaps even left or communist.  I'm not sure about the dynamics, but I do believe multiple political identities exist(ed) in Gaza, and some or all may have had collaborating militant groups.

Were Hamas successful in bringing the destruction of the Zionist Entity, I'd prefer to see a Communist identity, or even a liberal one, than an Islamic one.  But it is not my choice.  Those who win decide.  And though I'd prefer the fully political dismantlement of the Zionist State with a Communist State, or a Liberal State, I'm not doing it either way.  It's for the people doing these things, or not, not mine, someone who lives elsewhere in comfort and (comparative) safety and "freedom" (except bodily choices, recreational drugs, etc, and subject to various penalties for criticizing the powers that be--so I hate to call this "freedom" except in quotes though I well understand it could be worse, and sometimes is worse though in different ways in other countries).

And if I'm asked what Hamas had in mind, presuming they'll be stuck with another defeat for the Palestinian people just like before, I'd say perhaps they thought with the US tied down in Ukraine, and other things, this was their best opportunity for success (and maybe it will be so, ultimately most likely if somehow the US decides to give up the effort at some point).

All else being equal*, I'd certainly prefer that Hamas win than the 10-40 times more murderous AND apartheiding, occupying and besieging power.  Even though I may, myself, find still find this hard to imagine, as I did many other things, South African Apartheid among them, it is not impossible, exactly, and worth wishing for rather than against.

So I'd simply prefer not to say anything against Hamas, even though I'd say it's fair to say that I prefer political and non-violent methods performed by Communist organizations.  I know Palestinians have already tried these methods too.  And since I am not doing those things myself, it depends on those there, what they have been doing, what their plans are, etc., about which I have little information (though I do have a recently released video by a Hamas leader, that's in public now fwiw).

And that includes not predicting or even presuming that Hamas will fail.

(*An astute observer will notice the qualification has quite a lot of importance here.  It's easy to imagine a swift Israeli Mowing-The-Lawn "victory."  It's harder to imagine a Hamas victory without something like world war.  And that's why I dislike being forced to simplify this statement, or even being held to rationalize the trade-offs.  I don't like world war, nor the prospect of nuclear winter, but at some point a world war may be "needed" by nations-as-they-exist to re-balance power relationships which have been quite warped for awhile.  I'd point out that the US is due for internal dissolution within 40 years anyway, so why not just wait.  And I'd say that to Palestinians in Gaza too.  But I'm the guy with a suburban home and a luxury car, not the one living in a prison which I could barely concieve.)

A related talk by Finkelstein a few days ago:

https://www.youtube.com/live/x6dJMvZi5Zw?si=64eNt5McgZ9JiIxB

Finkelstein points out the insanity of insisting Hamas must be destroyed rather than negotiated with.  Israel has inflicted far more than 10 times as much death and other crimes.  By that principle then Israel must therefore be destroyed rather than negotiated with.

In days, Israel killed more far children than had been killed in all the wars in the world in several previous years, including Russia in Ukraine.

He explains proportionality, the value of the target vs the value of nearby civilians.  And he describes this as insanity, and that if a leading expert finds it complicated to determine the 'proportionality' of dropping two 2000 pound bombs on a refugee camp in which hundreds of children are killed, it's insane.

Sustainable Population

I've been going with the variously proposed 500 million (though one friend thinks that's inadequate for the technological society we need to get into space, I disagree with the goal of needing that in any time in which it couldn't be developed better by smaller population).

But that's cornucopian compared to other estimates I've been hearing.  This author comes up with 35 million by two methods of estimation, and 10 million by another, favoring 35 million as our best (largest) sustainable.

It's pointed out that even before the use of fossil fuels, humans were causing deforestation and extinctions locally.

Anyway, almost regardless of numbers, if the best sustainable is so small we're not going to get there without some kind of collapse.  He suggests (but underlines, he does not predict) that we could "tumble" down in decade long stretches of slow collapse.  That sounds overoptimistic to me.  There will be big large collapses, though likely not just one.  I predict.

Anyway, he says it's hopeless to achieve such a goal politically.  The best we can do is be helpful to those around us.

I can hardly argue with that, but sometimes I still do (I argue for my two couples per child rule).

Bertrand Russel on Palestine

…. The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

(Read to the public shortly after his death)