Meanwhile on the International front....

Two questions:

1) Is the bolded part what Israel's trying to do?

2) What would you have Israel do?

 

A good read in the NYT, about a swim team made up of teen-aged Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims at a Christian YMCA in Jerusalem.

Palestinian and Israeli Teens Swam in the Same Pool. Then Came Oct. 7.

If only the children could lead them...

 

Well … Israel should kill every member of Hamas it can put their hands on.

Just don’t harbor any illusions that the situation will change in any meaningful way. Israel is going to kill many terrorists, and radicalize many others to acts of terrorism.

Mostly I’m just cynical about it.

 

I'll quit being so Socratic (some might say "oblique" ... others might say "full of shit"). My first question was the biggie. At the moment Israel is not trying to win a war on terror; it's trying to survive. Yes, it's doing so from a position of strength ... but let it let something like this pass, and you can go ahead and start printing up some new maps of the Middle East.

 

So what's next? What's Israel's plan to eliminate Hamas? After more than a month, it still seems pretty vague to me. And I suspect to the Israelis as well.

 

This is a good guest piece in The Atlantic by Hillary Clinton. She, of course, says Hamas has to go. But even she is not really specific as to how to make that happen.

But how is Hamas going to be defeated -- beaten and decimated enough that it does go away, never to come back? Even Clinton is not really specific as to how to make that happen.

The region needs peace to break out, but Hamas is unlikely to let that ever happen, even at the expense of other Palestinians/Muslims.

 

Jesus Christ, I feel old.

 

I don’t know anyone who thinks Israel should “let it pass.”

But yeah - they’ve been at this since the day the country was founded; we had a 20-year dabble in it.

We should all know by now - you will never kill your way out of terrorism, and when it becomes an exercise in revenge for revenge’s sake ..

 

It’s a really weak tactic to intentionally turn “Please don’t kill civilians” into “Israel should let Hamas get away with it.” Something I’d expect out of Trumpland, honestly.

 

He is very unpopular there, but sure, go on and buy into that and ignore the reality Israel has faced throughout its entire history. I'm not saying revenge isn't a part of it, but to believe that is all that is going on is just a lack of understanding of the circumstances.

 

Word choice matters. You should know that.

 

The war has been going on for a little over a month. It's a bit much to start calling it endless. And I'm calling anybody an anti-Semite. In fact, I've stated many times that opposing Israel's actions does not make a person anti-Jewish.