Israel Continues to Deal with the Hamas Attack
(Permit me to add to my prior posting on Jackspotpourri that the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, quoted by me extensively, is usually very liberal is not as popular as other Israeli papers with some of the Israeli public for that reason. It does not hesitate to criticize Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition which includes many Orthodox supporters, intent on restoring the biblical borders of Israel, and who don’t read Ha’aretz.)
To read about how Israel’s usually effective security services and military failed to stop the Hamas invasion last weekend, check out https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKKZGhLdnBZmHVnWLjrsKpQwJbKRkntFqvblWtmHkvrmFSVZjbfMgBBwBsTbHBhBtHfL or just Click Here.
I have not seen this material referenced on TV in the extensive coverage of the Hamas invasion I see there, so be sure to visit this link. Based on my military service in Europe many years ago, where I was involved in electronically intercepting precisely the kind of communications that the Israelis were ignoring or misinterpreting 67 years later, I can vouch for many of the details in the article.
When I was in the Army, my old outfit’s Latin
motto was 'Vigiles Salutis', which actually translates as
‘Health Police,’ but we dumb soldiers took it to mean that we were ‘saluting vigilance.’ The
Army was never big on Latin translations. In any event, the
Israelis incorrectly believed they were sufficiently vigilant as to Hamas
activity in Gaza. They were not. Here’s
a copy of my old outfit’s crest, which was also used at the base where its
skills were taught. (I still have a couple of such pins that we wore on our
caps.)
The article draws me to conclude that technological advances will never replace human beings in these situations. The fanciest systems possible are worthless without trained people to understand, operate, supervise, and monitor them on a continuing ‘hands on’ basis, 24 hours a day. Hamas proved that it is easier to cripple such systems than to take on teams of trained old-fashioned foot soldiers with artillery, tank, and overhead air support. Coordinating this combination is a tougher task than merely dropping bombs on targets. The Israelis may have overestimated their technological advantages, particularly in the area of intercepting communications.
Again, responsibility rests with the Israeli government whose negligence has thus far caused well over a thousand deaths. (The Oct. 8 editorial in Ha’aretz, included in our last blog posting, explained the basis for this negligence.) There is no one to whom the head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu, can pass the buck for the miliary and intelligence failures described in the link provided several paragraphs above. The government’s military and intelligence leadership reports to him and responsibility for their failure is his. When the smoke clears, he must resign.
I believe that appointment of some of the opposition party in the Knesset to a new coalition government in the interim is insufficient so long as it includes far-right participants, whose stubbornness regarding Palestinians in the West Bank apparently misdirected the use of Israel’s military and intelligence resources, opening the door to the Hamas attack.
President Biden’s remarks on Wednesday urged Israel to observe the ‘rules of war’ in responding to the Hamas attack, and not totally ignore them as Hamas has done in personally attacking, capturing, and killing civilians in entirely non-military circumstances. I suppose this means not to kill perhaps hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza as the city and its environs are bombed into rubble, or left to perish as electricity, water, and supplies of food and medicine are indefinitely blockaded. Many Israelis, after the way Hamas behaved toward civilians, would not object to either course of action.
Right now, the Israeli Army, poised to enter Gaza, may be intent on pursuing a thorough and costly bloody purging of the place of Hamas operatives, which would involve many thousands of deaths and casualties among innocent civilians, … or hoping that the threat of their doing that might result in the freeing of hostages and lead to a solution. Such a solution might eventually involve depopulating a levelled Gaza if some place in the Arab world would be willing to accept its civilian population, but certainly, Israel will never again allow a threat like Hamas to exist there. The Israeli government has told the Gazan civilians to evacuate the northern half of Gaza so it appears they are ready to move into Gaza to eradicate Hamas, possibly by the time you are reading this.
It is coming down to two issues: (1) How to
rescue the hostages, and (2) Avoiding the deaths of thousands of Palestinians
who live in Gaza. Doing this within the
‘rules of law’ will be difficult, because one side, Hamas, has chosen to ignore
them.
I feel it must be accomplished within the context of a broader two-state solution, including the West Bank, as originally intended, providing mutual respect on the part of Israelis and Palestinians, a solution both sides have presently abandoned with disastrous results. But this would take a long time to bring about, and ‘time’ is something the present situation does not provide.
For an opinion that reluctantly suggests that the Israelis will go into Gaza, and destroy Hamas, regardless of the number of civilian casualties and the loss of hostages held there, check out Marty London's blog on evaluating this alternative by CLICKING HERE or visiting https://londonsbh.blogspot.com/
Some Jews in Israel, and elsewhere, may count on prayer to the Creator of All Mankind to provide a solution. That didn’t work in forestalling the Holocaust, so don’t expect it to work in the present situation either. But if prayer makes you feel better, go for it.
* *
(It is a black eye for democracy that (1) the choice of Hamas to be Gaza’s leadership, and (2) the choice of right-wingers intent on absorbing the West Bank into Israel proper enabling Benjamin Netanyahu to remain as Israel’s Prime Minister, were both arrived at through democratic processes, at their respective ballot boxes.)
JL
* * *
Which brings us to something
lighter, but not totally unrelated.
A Good Word for Monarchies
Democracies run the risk of legitimately electing the wrong people to office. Some people, therefore, feel that democracy’s often broad and inclusive bodies of voters will include many who are ignorant of issues, gullible to specious arguments, and ready to vote on the basis of emotion, personal bigotry, or greed. Therefore, democracies are dangerous.
Remember that democratic elections put Adolf Hitler in power, chose Hamas to govern Gaza, and frequently elect candidates whose agendas are not in the best interest of those who voted for them. For representative democracies to work, therefore, there must be some kind of check on such unfortunate excesses in democratic governments. A two-house legislature, as we have in the United States, is an attempt at this, where the Senate is a supposed check upon the supposedly more democratic House.
An alternative is an autocracy, run by a dictator, even though there still might be some sort of representative legislature. But there’s no control over a dictator! That is not good.
A better kind of autocracy might be one that strictly limits the one who is in charge, so that not just anyone can rise to the position of dictator, even through democratic means. They might require that the one in charge be drawn from a particular family, based on heredity. That’s called a monarchy and the one in charge is called a king or queen.
If a monarch is required to respect what a democratically elected legislature does, that can work out well, as it does in some European countries, like Great Britain, Belgium, Denmark, or the Netherlands. These are called ‘constitutional’ monarchies when all of this is documented in something like a written constitution. The UK doesn’t even have one, but the monarchy and the ‘parliament’ there certainly know their respective limits. Their last dictator, Oliver Cromwell, seized and held power in the name of ‘parliament’ almost four centuries ago, when beheading was still the usual way of changing rulers. Monarchs are also good for tourism. People like a little pomp and ceremony.
 |
| Parliament replaced King Charles I in 1649 and installed a dictator, Oliver Cromwell, who called himself the Lord Protector. This was how government was changed it in those days. Today, beheading is only a tool used by Arab terrorists. |
Getting rid of a royal family, however powerless they might be, is difficult and sometimes messy. The Russians succeeded in doing this by killing their Tsar in 1918 and replacing him with more traditional dictators, first Lenin and then Stalin. Such dictatorships often call themselves ‘democratic republics’ but that’s just a scam to fool dumb voters. The ‘third world’ is filled with them.
Are monarchies a better choice when combined with a representative democracy, with the rules for the monarch and the elected government carefully set out in some document? That usually serves as a deterrent to the rise of a dictator, but not always. But it’s something to think about.
Who would
you suggest as our ‘royal family’?
Taylor Swift if she ever gets married and has kids?
JL
|
|
|
|
* * *
Trivia Quiz # 12 – Some Like it Hot!
The following cities are all very close to the equator. Can you name the ones north of the equator and the ones south of it?
Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia
Singapore
Quito,
Equador
Kinshasa,
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Bogota,
Colombia
Jakarta,
Indonesia
Note: This will be the last Trivia Quiz for a while, at least until the turmoil in Israel is resolved.
Answers to Trivia Quiz #11 - Football Teams and States
(We know teams sometimes are based elsewhere than their name suggests, such as the Giants and Jets playing their home games across the river in New Jersey, but for the purposes of this quiz, we stuck with the teams’ names. And the District of Columbia, for the purposes of this quiz, is a State.)
1.
How many teams are in
the National Football League? - 32
2.
In what States are
there three NFL teams? Name them. - New York (Jets, Giants, Bills), Florida (Dolphins, Jaguars, Buccaneers), and California (Rams, Chargers, and 49ers.)
3.
In what States are
there two NFL teams? Name them. – Pennsylvania
(Steelers, Eagles), Ohio (Bengals, Browns) and Texas (Cowboys and Texans).
4.
How many States in
which there is an NFL team do NOT also have a major league baseball
team? – Five. (Nevada, Louisiana,
North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee.
5.
What two teams (it’s a
tie) have won the most Super Bowls? - The New England Patriots
and the Pittsburgh Steelers, six
each.
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on
Jackspotpourri
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells
and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I
think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that you are now reading, but without the illustrations, colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
JL
*
* *
No comments:
Post a Comment