Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Thursday, March 9, 1944. Bombing of Tallinn.

The Soviet Air Force destroyed 53% of Tallinn, Estonia.

In terms of World War Two destruction, this isn't particularly remarkable, but it is well remembered in Estonia to this day, where the day is marked.

This is not to excuse areal carpet bombing in the Second World War. . . by anyone.  All of it, to my mind, fits into the category of war crimes. And predictably, the bombing of Estonia resulted in increased Estonian resolve to resist the Soviets.

President Roosevelt authorized Dr. Stephen Wise and Dr. Abba H. Silver of the American Zionist Emergency Council to announce: “When future decisions are reached, full justice will be done to those who seek a Jewish national home.”

The 5th Marine Regiment took Talasea in an unopposed operation in New Britain.

On Bougainville, Japanese counterattacks against the Army's 37th Infantry Division failed to make significant gains.

The Japanese 33d Division reached the location of the headquarters of the British 17th Division.  Gen. Cowan initially refused to believe the news.

The Red Army took Starokonstantinov.

The USS Leopold was sunk by the U-255 in the North Atlantic. 28 of 191 men survived.


Argentina's President Ramirez resigned and turned over the miltiary government of Argentina to Edelmiro Julián Farrell, who would in turn yield to Juan Peron shortly after World War Two.

Pedro Ramirez had come to power via a coup. The fascist leaning dictator had strong connections with Germany, having been trained in Imperial Germany in the early 1910s, and having married a German wife.  He participated in the coup of 1930, after which he had been sent to Italy to observe the Italian Army. In the 1940s he organized the Argentine  Milicia Nacionalista, later called the Guardia Nacional, and authored a program for a state ruled by the militia. In 1942, Ramírez  hewas appointed War Minister by President Ramón Castillo, and began to reorganize the Argentine Army.  During that time, modeling things after what had happened in fascist states in  Europe, the Guardia Nacional joined with a political party to form the fascist "Recuperacion Nacional".  He participated in the May 18, 1943, coup after being dismissed from his post.

Last prior:

Wednesday, March 8, 1944. Battle of Imphal begins.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

The Palestinians and the Hard Economic Realities.

According to a relief official who was interviewed on Face the Nation, 80% of Gazans rely upon relief food daily.

80%.

This is the hard fact of this conflict that nobody wants to address.  Palestinians are wards of the outside world, with nearly half unemployed, and 80% relying upon some species of the dole.  They're trapped inside of Gaza behind closed borders. They have nothing to do, survive on the donations of others, and are encouraged to view themselves as horribly oppressed people by some of their suppliers. They have developed, in my view, a victims' culture in which everything is somebody else's fault, including the realities of reactions to their violence.

Those who suggest that, effectively, the Israeli's simply ignore what happen to them are also ignoring this.  

People who live in the conditions that Gazans do specifically, and Palestinians in the Middle East do in general, turn to violence.  It's not because they're Muslim.  They do it for the same reason that people in American inner cities do, or Catholics in Northern Ireland did.  Underemployed, unemployed, bored, but given handouts, it's easy to sit around and brood all day.  And with time on your hands, joining a militia that promises to steal from somebody else, such as Hamas, MS-13, Vice Lords, or Barrio Azteca looks attractive.

So, at the end of the day, this needs to be addressed or there will not be peace.

Much of the advice being given out right now is pretty much shortsighted.  If Israel just backs off, Hamas will come back, claiming that Israel was afraid of it.  And the entire situation will repeat.

As hard as it sounds, Palestinians in Gaza need to be made to get a job and get off the dole.  The extra hard part of that is that there are too many of them there to make that work in the current environment.  City states can work, taken Monaco as an example, but they have to have an open border with their larger neighbor and something the world wants.  In the case of Monaco, it's gambling.  For Andorra, it's tourism.  Others have port shipping, banking and even unique manufacturing.  Gaza has none of that, and it's not going to as long as this is going on.

And it's never going to have it as long as its financiers just fork over money, and as long as the Palestinians harbor delusions of driving the Israeli's into the sea.

Getting over those delusions requires hard facts to be conveyed by their backers, and Iran, which is a major one, isn't going to do that as its equally delusional.

And to make the city livable, some of them are going to have to move, at least temporarily, and probably permanently.

And there's no reason to believe that we are anywhere near this suggestion yet.

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

Reality and platitudes.

 Years ago, mostly on neo-hippy cars, I'd see bumper stickers that said; "Free Tibet".  The same cars would be festooned and bedecked with all sorts of liberal stickers, such as "Save the whales" and the like.

In the real world freeing Tibet would take a military effort of gigantic proportions, if not an outright nucelar war.

You can choose to deal with reality, but anyway you look at it, reality is going to deal with you.

There's a lot of unrealistic thinking going on regarding the current Hamas Israel War outside the country.

One thing that we're seeing a lot of are pleas that Israel not do anything that harms average Palestinians.  More sophisticated thinkers, which most of these people are not, would argue the law of proportionality, which is that a violent armed effort against you does not invite a disproportionate response.

To put it uncomfortably for Americans, the Japanese attacking a U.S. Navy installation at Pearl Harbor does not invite murdering thousands of people through a nuclear device.

Having said that, nations, like people, have a right to self-defense, and Hamas clearly intends to murder the Jews in Israel.

They have to address that, and therefore they have to address Hamas. That means they have to go into Gaza and that action will kill civilians no matter what.

The real world.

I'm glad that I'm not the one who has to try to balance the moral scale here.  Some will argue that the solution is to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza, but that would be wrong.  Some would argue that the solution is to resume the administration of Gaza to preclude it from reviving as a terrorist enclave.  Is that wrong?

And in terms of right and wrong, it's interesting how the appeal is largely from people in Christian societies regarding a largely Islamic society.  Overall, concerns that the response will be disproportionate came from Christians, Christian influenced people, and Jews.  There isn't very much Islamic concern about proportionality.  Rather, it's "we've been occupied . . . " which is an accusation against an Israeli punitive action by a terrorist intervention done on their behalf, which they seem reluctant at best to disavow.  On the ground, Islamic societies aren't doing anything obvious to make this better.  They aren't opening their borders to Palestinians impacted by the war. Iran is threatening to "become involved" in the war which they went a long ways to helping bring about.

None of this is a reason not to be concerned, let alone to pray for peace, but it's also not a excuse to consider the grim realities of this sitaution.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Prayer for Peace in the Holy Land

The Diocese of Cheyenne is asking Catholics in the Diocese to pray for Peace in the Holy Land, and has issued this prayer.

Pray for Peace in the Holy Land

Lord God, merciful and strong,

     who crush wars and cast down the proud,

     who extend mercy and tenderness to all,

we pray to you for the Holy Land, for the people of Israel and Palestine

     who are under the grip of unprecedented violence,

     for the victims, especially the children and their families.

Be pleased to grant healing for the wounded, the release of hostages,

     protection for the innocent, and eternal peace to the dead.

To all those affected by war, grant healing, consolation, and the grace to forgive.

Almighty God,

     guide the minds of world leaders to act with wisdom, prudence, and justice,

     and to promote the common good.

Lord of Justice, help us to commit ourselves to building a fraternal world

     so that these peoples and all those suffering similar conditions of

     conflict, instability, and violence may walk together as sisters and brothers.

Help us to be peacemakers by practicing justice, dialogue, and reconciliation.

O God of Peace, who are peace itself,

     grant that those in conflict may forget evil and so be healed.

Help those who have experienced violence to forgive their enemies,

     as Christ taught us and after his example on the cross.

We pray that the whole of humanity may be reconciled as one family,

     without violence, without absurd wars, and with a fraternal spirit,

      and live united in peace and concord.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ Your Son, who lives and reigns with you

in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.


Saturday, October 14, 2023

The Palestinian Problem and its Wilsonian Solution.

Lex Anteinternet: Wars and Rumors of War, 2023, Part X, Declarations

October 15, 2023

Hamas v. Israel

Egypt has completed a concrete barrier to block Palestinian entrants from Gaza.  Their border is very small, so they will be able to enforce it.

Qatar has refused to take Palestinian refugees.

Why have I linked this in, well to demonstrate part of the problem.

Bernie "I knew Lenin when he was just a baby" Sanders has called Gaza an "open air prison".

It isn't, but if it is, the guards aren't just Israeli, they're also Egyptian, and quite frankly, the Arabs in general.  

Nobody wants the Palestinians, as by this point, to put it charitably, they're acclimated to living off the dole and are inclined to violence. They're like the residents of Northern Ireland at one time, on spades.

We went into the complicated history of what is now Israel the other day, but to unfairly summarize it, the problem was created by this.

Ottoman Palestine.

Jewish immigrants legally started migrating to the region when it was an Ottoman province, and then when it was a British League of Nations Mandate.  When the Jewish population became noticeable, in a region we might note that not only had an Arab population, but an Armenian population and a Greek population, the Palestinians began to worry and demanded that it stop.  They turned to violence in the 1930s/

Prior to this time, it isn't as if it was an independent country and indeed, as the map above shows, is borders weren't really what they are now.  Israel had been an independent kingdom in ancient times, but it had been conquered by numerous ancient empires and kingdoms during its history.  Rome put an end to Israel, as we discussed the other day, until 1948.  Like much of the pre World War One Arabic Middle East, it was ruled under Ottoman rule by various tribal families.  

The period after the Great War was transformational due to the high levels of Jewish immigration, and World War Two made a push towards a restoration of Jewish Israel inevitable.  After over a millennium of being murdered for no reason whatsoever, the Jewish people wanted a homeland of their own. And, by that time, they had the population base in Palestine to demand it.

The Palestinian Arabs simply couldn't accommodate themselves to the thought, and the non-Palestinian Arabs couldn't either. They made a bad bet.  Had the Palestinians imply gone along with it, quite frankly, by now the demographic impact of their higher birth rate would mean that Israel would have a majority Palestinian population. But they didn't, and in becoming refugees they became wards of the world.

Today, inside the Palestinian Authority, they suffer high unemployment, particularly in Gaza, which is an unnatural economic unit. The Arabs, and Iran, support them, but they've largely gotten over Israel by now and they don't want the Palestinians in their country. They'd rather back them economically than let them in.

But, if there's a solution to this, they probably need to.

Following World War One, largely due to Woodrow Wilson's view of how the world should work, everything pushed towards nation states.  Due to the Great War, Germany and Russia were pushed out of Poland. Finland, the Baltics States, and the various Slavic states that hadn't been independent, became independent.  Ireland became independent.  Colonialism started to become a dirty word.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed and Middle Eastern kingdoms, imperfectly drawn, sprang up. 

And populations were somewhat moved.  

After World War Two, this was very much the case again, although mostly due to the Soviet Union seeking to redraw is territory on ethnic grounds.

None of this is pleasant, but the solution to this may be here.

Israel isn't going to go away, and is not going to let itself become an Arab dominated state.

The Palestinians aren't going away either, but their territory, and they aren't getting Palestine back, isn't viable.  They've never, moreover, really had any sort of independent state in the first place.

They are also a Mediterranean people, which means that they are largely a Sunni Muslim (some are Christians, but they're disappearing as a demographic as Islam is hostile to them and for that matter the Israelis aren't keen on them either) Arab coastal people.

Qatar is a coastal, Sunni Bedouin Arab nation.  So is Saudi Arabia. So is Kuwait.  So is Dubai.

All of these countries have a labor shortage.

A solution, and perhaps the only one, is to resettle the Palestinians in those countries.  Not in one country, which will create all kinds of problems, but across them.  

They will not mix in immediately, but they would in fairly short order.  

Jews whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine, Poland, etc., 75 years ago do not look back and wish romantically that they could reclaim lost occupations and lands. Frankly, in 75 years, if this was done, Palestinians wouldn't either.  For that matter, in a fairly short period, they'd be fairly mixed with the local Arab population in any event, their identify less of a thing, and their futures better.

Of course, nobody is proposing this, even though many are secretly thinking about it.  Simply pushing the Palestinians out of Gaza has come up as an Israeli solution before.  The Egyptians fear a lot of Palestinians heading their way, and they cannot accommodate them.  That Qatar would reject their entry at this point shows that a lot of Arab states have this on their minds.

And the Palestinians, clinging to a pipe dream, probably wouldn't want to do it either.

Related threads:

Hamas v. Israel. Some observations, and How did we get here?






Friday, October 13, 2023

People seem shocked to learn that Egypt isn't letting Gazans in.

Which means that they've never been paying attention. Egypt has always strictly controlled access of Palestinians from Gaza.

They don't want Hamas in either.

Wednesday, October 11, 2023

And a further note.

 It's through actions like these:

Palestinian terrorists recording a video with a kidnapped Israeli boy they are holding hostage in Gaza, letting young local Palestinian kids abuse him. To keep the conflicting going, they wan't spread the hatred to the next generation.
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that the Palestinians have made it almost impossible to sympathize with them.

Yes, they lost their land in 1948, but then they also threw in with an effort that promised to conduct mass expulsion if not genocide in part.  And by electing Hamas, they've elected a group that is genocidal and brutal in its ideology.  It'd be childish if not so murderous.  

This is why, although we'll deal with it in another post, that this war promises to probably result in the ultimate tragedy for the Palestinians, or at least the greatest one since 1948.  Israeli occupation of Gaza, which is coming, is likely to be transformational, and probably put to an end Palestinian aspirations in that quarter. That may be lacking in justice itself, but in an age of easy video access, the well will be dry for sympathy with the Palestinians, and frankly the other Arab nations are not going to shed any but crocodile tears for them.