Not long enough to find your son’s favorite blanket

The bombardment of Gaza has been going on for ten days. I’ve collected several comments about war that have been waiting patiently in my browser tabs. I start with a tweet from Omar Baddar, a political analyst for the Middle East, who summarizes the situation well.

1) Status quo: occupation/apartheid is violence against Palestinians 2) Then Israel escalates through evictions/beatings/shootings 3) Then some Palestinians respond w/violence 4) Then Israel "responds" w/massacres If u start reporting at #3, you're misleading your audience.

And it sounds like Biden also started at #3. Jacqueline Alemany of The Washington Post tweeted:

Scoop: the Biden admin has approved the sale of $735 million in precision-guided weapons to Israel, raising red flags for some House Dems more open to questioning DC’s support of Netanyahu, suggesting the sale be used as leverage.

Sarah Kendzior responded:

This week in Gaza, Israel’s “precision-guided weapons” have hit and destroyed: * Hospitals * Homes * Media offices * Schools * Electricity and water infrastructure In response, the Biden admin offers even more US money for Israel to to check off its war crimes wish list.

Mark Sumner of Daily Kos summarized the attack as of last Saturday. He concluded with:

Asymmetric warfare isn’t a new phenomena. For millennia, small groups of militants defied empires from Persia and Greece, to Vietnam and Afghanistan. The response in most ancient cases was simple and disproportionate. You kill one of ours, we kill a thousand of yours. Then we burn down your city, sell the survivors into slavery, and salt the fields. The end. Except it never was the end. More recently, that kind of disproportionate response has not only been frowned on internationally, it’s also become blindingly clear that, after thousands of years of trying, it still doesn’t work.

A couple days ago Mary Louise Kelly of NPR spoke to Shibley Telhami, a professor at the University of Maryland. Telhami said:

You know, if there is a political winner in all this, it is probably Benjamin Netanyahu - not that he expected this level of escalation and losing control as he had, particularly in terms of what's happened inside Israel. But clearly, politically, he's the winner because, in fact, his opponents were - appeared on the verge of putting together a government without him for the first time as he's facing major legal trouble and, this time, even with the support of one of the two Arab parties in the Israeli parliament for the first time. He is not only distracted from his own legal trouble, but he's prevented his opponents from forming a coalition government.

On the Palestinian side, Hamas controls Gaza. Before this latest violence the residents were angry because they saw no end in sight. In firing rockets into Israel Hamas is capturing that anger and actually doing something. Netanyahu gains from the violence. Hamas gains from the violence. And the people, especially the Palestinians, pay through trauma and death. Leah McElrath retweeted the poem Running Orders by Lena Khalaf Tuffana, who McElrath identified as a Palestinian American. Here’s the beginning and end:

They call us now, before they drop the bombs. The phone rings and someone who knows my first name calls and says in perfect Arabic “This is David.” And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies still smashing around in my head I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza? They call us now to say Run. You have 58 seconds from the end of this message. ... It doesn’t matter that 58 seconds isn’t long enough to find your wedding album or your son’s favorite blanket or your daughter’s almost complete college application or your shoes or to gather everyone in the house. It doesn’t matter what you had planned. It doesn’t matter who you are. Prove you’re human. Prove you stand on two legs. Run.

Emily Hauser of Dame Magazine tweeted a thread in reaction to the White House issuing a statement about Biden commemorating Eid, the holiday at the end of Ramadan.

Statements are not enough, are never enough, but if you're new to the Israel/Palestine beat, let me assure you that this @WhiteHouse statement is remarkable & I'd venture unprecedented. I'll break down why, below, but first: This American-Israeli Democrat thanks you @POTUS. The statement: * acknowledges that Eid celebrations everywhere are made manifestly less joyful by Palestinian suffering * does NOT center Israel (!) * acknowledges the somehow-never-acknowledged fact that Palestinians ALSO deserve security, which is a (quiet) rebuke of Israel ... I'm absolutely certain that blowback from Israel/Israel's US apologists has started in the time it's taken me to write this thread! And the ground is littered w/ good Presidential statements that were ultimately to no discernible good end (*cough*Obama*cough*)! And yet: Wow.

From a couple days later Hauser quoted a White House tweet:

Today the President spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, and condemned these indiscriminate attacks against Israel.

And Hauser responded:

I was off Twitter for Shabbat & didn't see this until now. These @WhiteHouse tweets are an absolute retreat from the tiny steps forward in yday's statement. Participation in politics requires encouraging small steps & calling out bad ones. This is terrible.

In response to the tweet by Alemany about US arms sales to Israel, quoted above, Yousef Munayyer tweeted: Israel gets $3.8 billion a year to buy US weapons and to invest in its own arms industry. That allows Israel to be a major arms exporter, selling arms to horrible regimes, such as Myanmar.

The US is so deeply complicit in Israel's war crimes, not just because our govt finances them, but it does so more than for any other country and with the fewest restrictions. Our govt also fails to enforce our own existing laws regarding arms exports when it comes to Israel. ... Most Americans do not know about this and would probably be horrified about it all, especially since we are enabling war crimes and crimes against humanity, but for too long our elected officials have not demanded transparency and instead only ensured impunity for Israel.

David Rothkopf tweeted a few thoughts he is able to keep in mind simultaneously. Here are some of them:

* Israel is a powerful state that has systematically deprived Palestinians of their most basic human rights, seized their land, and imposed new laws and policies that are the immediate cause for the current conflict. * Hamas is a terrorist group sponsored by Iran. * There is no justification for the indiscriminate killing or wounding or terrorizing of innocents on either side in the current conflict. * Launching thousands of rockets at Israel is wrong and Israel has a right to defend themselves against such attacks. * Israeli bombing of residential towers, refugee camps and other areas in which the likelihood of civilian casualties is high and not warranted by the military targets that may also be hit is not an appropriate, nor under international law, legal...or moral...tactic. * Israel is an apartheid state. Apartheid states are not democracies. * Palestinian leaders, notably Yasser Arafat, squandered real opportunities to achieve a lasting two-state solution to the problem. * Netanyahu, who like Trump is a corrupt, narcissistic, ethno-nationalist demagogue, will do anything to survive politically even if it is to the detriment of Israel. However, should he be replaced, the situation is not likely to improve dramatically. * There's currently no sign of the leadership the Palestinian people deserve on the horizon. That said, right is right and wrong is wrong. The powerful abusing the weak, the imposition of apartheid, violating human rights, racism, corruption, and using terror as a tool are all wrong and we should vigorously oppose them regardless of the perpetrators.

Christopher Wiebe tweeted:

Absolute shocker that Jared Kushner’s “Vision for Peace” in the Middle East did not work. Read “Hiding in Plain Sight” by @sarahkendzior if you really want to get glimpse of Kushner’s soul (spoiler: he doesn’t have one and you were conned).

Kendzior replied:

Yes in addition to his own kleptocratic practices he did corrupt and vicious acts for other people’s gain (Netanyahu, MBS, and various oligarchs among them) with the longer term aim of rearranging the world order so his criminal cult could profit further.

Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast tweeted:

good to remember that the major reason many hardcore christians are such passionate defenders of israel is because they believe that jews are necessary to usher in the great tribulation, wherein 2/3 of jews will perish and the other 1/3 will be converted to christianity israel is well aware of this but has aligned itself with the christian right anyway (because they think it’s absurd)

Biden came to Dearborn, Michigan yesterday to see the new electric truck Ford is announcing. During the visit there were large of protests from Dearborn’s large Arab community. Kaitlan Collins tweeted that Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian, had a little discussion with Biden. From the photo she is looking him right in the eye. Later, she said:

I hope my president, our president, speaks up & speaks truth about what exactly is happening because I know they know.