A few short thoughts about the present Israeli conflict, and related matters

Your comments especially welcome

Hi all. I am no great Foreign Policy Analyst, nor do I feel obliged to write here things like “it was awful what happened to Israel on October 7th”. Of course it was, but you already know such things and don’t need to hear them from me.

But here are a few thoughts bouncing around my head that might be less commonly heard, anyway. As usual when I’m not sure what to think, when I’m really “thinking out loud” here, your comments at the bottom are especially welcome. I’m just a guy trying to understand the world.

1. Does the US citizenry matter?

I had this thought even more so with Ukraine, but am having it again with Israel, that here the US is becoming significantly involved in a major conflict, with shockingly little effort made to convince the American people that it should be our fight. Perhaps this parallels the fact that we are really not, now, a republic, we are an administrative state where 99.9% of the decisions are made by unelected names you’ll never know anyway. The government of the US and the people of the US are two quite different entities, and the former has increasingly little interest in consulting or convincing the latter about anything.

2. Otherwise terrible leaders supporting Israel?

Like many of you I suspect, I'm really not sure what to make of what has been rather straightforward support of Israel from Western leaders. As a rule I think these leaders have shown themselves to be corrupt, self-interested, and terrible people, who are not at all interested in doing what is best for the world or their people. So what are they really up to here?

But perhaps they are behaving better than their usual selves here, perhaps. I think especially of some conversations I've had with quite "progressive" Germans, and whatever other faults they may have had, these people were sensitive to the horrors of the holocaust. So I can imagine some thinking that goes something like "we don't know much, but there is this one horrible thing that we are never supposed to let happen again, and now the world seems to be filled with people who want it to happen again. No." Maybe.

3. Israel in a lose/lose situation

I watched Tucker Carlson's most recent interview. I saw some people ridiculing it, I guess as silly isolationism or something, but I thought it was fine. And one point it makes is that it's really hard for Israel to know how to "win" this conflict. Even if you could, let's say, somehow push literally all the people of Gaza into Egypt, what happens then? Well probably they just start launching rockets at you from Egypt now.

Israel is hated with a religious hatred. If they could kill all the people trying to kill them then sure, that might work, but those people blend with the general population and (although I know this is cliché as regards terrorism, it is sometimes true) the damage you cause in trying to get them all might galvanize more people to their cause. In fact on a worldwide scale anyway that seems to be exactly what is happening. I don't want to say "you can't kill an ideology with bullets", because we've seen some historical examples where that sometimes works. But a decentralized religiously-motivate network of terrorists who obey no civilized rules of armed conflict is a difficult problem.

By the way, the area of the Gaza Strip is something like 1/3 the area of Ingham County, Michigan, where we live. What a remarkably small area to draw the attention of the world now.

4. Maybe we just shouldn’t be there

I tend to think that most of the places (in the Middle East) where we are worried about our own soldiers being attacked are places we probably shouldn't have soldiers anyway. Unfortunately now that they are being attacked/threatened we probably don't want it to look like the bad guys drove us away, so we're going to fortify these positions even more strongly. Oy.

5. WWIII

The ways in which this conflict could balloon into something apocalyptic on a global scale are obvious, and yet our leaders seem to prefer "tough guy" talk to actually trying to deescalate the situation. On a perhaps related note, I am not at all confident in the ability of the US to long fight a major conflict (after the USS Carney event, there was some nice Twitter discussion about just how rapidly US Navy ships might run out of defensive ordinance in a hot conflict). To make perhaps my most controversial comment in this piece, as a friend on Twitter said recently, unfortunately many people are not going to realize the US empire is done until we take a serious clobbering somewhere.

6. Tearing down posters

To think again domestically for a moment, why are people tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children? They’re doing it because the Left knows well the power of “taking up public space” for your cause, so they aren’t going to let you do that. They know the power of the default, they know that most people are more influenced by the general appearances of things than by argument. (You can have your thinktanks as long as they get to keep the culture, to say it another way.)

This is parallel to… they don’t like homeschooling, but keep it in your home, they will mostly leave you alone. But start trying to influence the public school curriculum and they’ll sick the FBI on you.

7. AI comes of age

A few of the accounts I follow on Twitter have done a great job pointing out that many of the photos and videos circulating from the present conflict… are not in fact from the present conflict. A fair number of them have actually been clips from video games, the graphics (especially at “night”) being so good now that many people can’t tell them apart from real video. And many others have been from other, past conflicts, these more easily identified because if you can find that someone shared the same photo five years ago, obviously it didn’t happen yesterday. But with the easy ability of “AI” to generate a brand new fake image… oy. What that photo appears to show means nothing, whether you trust the source that gave it to you means everything.

8. May peace prevail

Some friends in Lebanon a while back sent along a note that the locals they work with there are especially sensitive to the threat of war and long for peace. One hopes that desire may prevail in the land.

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