GAZA – Part 2

It’s one thing to read about World War II and the Holocaust. It’s just a story about something that happened a long time ago, as is all history. If you have visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, you may have a slightly better understanding of what actually happened, but even that experience is nothing like having lived through that period in our history, even if you were very young, as I was. What the Nazis did to the Jews, not only in Germany, but in every country they occupied, which was most of Europe, is so unimaginably horrific it would make the worst horror film you can ever imagine look like Barbie. And the worst part was that nobody, not the German people and not the rest of the world, did anything to stop them, at least not until the rest of the world was attacked by the Nazis or their allies, Italy and Japan.

In 1936, when the Olympics were held in Berlin and the Nazis refused to allow Jews to compete, the rest of the world left their Jewish athletes home, showed up and competed anyway. In 1938, while the Nazis were rounding up Jews, confiscating their property and sending them to ghettos and from there to concentration camps, British and French Prime Ministers Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier met with Adolf Hitler and signed the Munich Pact, which allowed Germany to annex Czechoslovakia, which they claimed would “guarantee peace in our time”.

After we had learned the true scope and horror of the Holocaust and the 6 million Jews who were enslaved, brutalized, used for experiments and murdered, the free world swore to “Never let that happen again.” However, in 1972, at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, a dozen athletes and coaches on Israel’s Olympic Team were taken hostage by a group of terrorists affiliated with Black September, a militant offshoot of the Palestinian group Fatah. Israel asked permission to enter West Germany and rescue the athletes and coaches. They were denied permission. The rescue was botched by the West Germans and the terrorists killed all of the Israelis they held hostage and then themselves.

Even today, when you listen to Israel’s allies and the United Nations talk about what is happening in Gaza, it’s all about telling Israel what it should or shouldn’t be doing to end this crisis. Declare a cease fire. Allow more humanitarian aid.  They are acting as if Israel were the aggressor in this war and not the victim. Hamas is the elected government of Gaza and nobody is telling them what they should or shouldn’t be doing to protect and help the people who elected them. Stop using its citizens as shields. Stop stealing th humanitarian aid intended for its starving and injured citizens. If I were Israel, I doubt I would see this as a very balanced approach to the problem. It wouldn’t surprise me if you felt the same way.

I can understand if you still have concerns about the collateral damage being done in Gaza (non-combatants suffering, being injured and dying), If so, please consider the following facts:

·         The collateral damage numbers are being provided by Hamas and have not been verified by an independent third party.

·         The single most important factor contributing to collateral damage in Gaza is that Hamas is using Gazan citizens as a shield and stealing as much as they can of the humanitarian aid being sent to help the citizens of Gaza and using that aid to support their soldiers

·        And, as a matter of perspective, the absolute, all-time, work record for collateral damage belongs to us, the United States of America, and Israel is nowhere close to breaking that record. Let me remind you. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in1941, which is how the United States got into World War ll, they attacked the naval base there. They did not attack the surrounding community. In contrast, when we ended the war, we did it by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, neither of which had significant military installations. It is estimated our bombs immediately killed more than 100,000 people and injured at least another 100,000 people, the vast majority of whom were non-combatant men, women and children; and those numbers don’t include the tens of thousands of people who died in the months and years that followed from injuries sustained during the bombing or radiation poisoning caused by the bombs.  We did that so that our troops would not suffer the high casualty rate that would have resulted if they had invaded Japan to end the war. And you know what? Nobody accused us of genocide or war crimes. Again, if I were Israel, I would likely see that as a double standard and find it both demeaning and unfair. You probably would feel the same way.

Given this context, it should not surprise you that the Jewish people in Israel might not have a lot of confidence in the rest of the world acting in Israel’s best interests at this particular time. It might appear to them that the “advice” coming from its allies and the United Nations is based more on keeping the conflict from escalating and possibly forcing them to get militarily involved, than on what is best for Israel and its people. If that is what they are wondering, now that you know the context, you really can’t blame them because that is exactly what has happened to them several times before; and it didn’t work out very well for them any of those other times.

Despite the fact that the Jewish people have been among the most persecuted people in all of recorded history, their culture and religion have survived for a very long time, as evidenced by the fact that we are currently in year 5794 of the Jewish calendar. Their continued survival was seriously threatened by the Nazis and continues to be threatened by persistent, and in some places escalating, anti-Semitism, especially among its neighbors. As I mentioned at the end of Part 1of this post, these threats have forced the Jewish State of Israel to become a warrior culture in order to secure the continued survival of the Jewish people. They have become a nation and a people committed to doing whatever they need to do to survive, regardless of what the rest of the world may think. In other words, they have learned their lesson and will no longer rely on anyone else to save them.

Make no mistake about it. Hamas and the people who lived in what was formerly called Palestine, who continue to support Hamas, are “the bad guys” and they need to be stopped. Israel and its Armed Defense Force (ADF) are “the good guys” and they will stop Hamas, regardless of the cost in theirs or anyone else’s lives. If the rest of the free world doesn’t want to get militarily involved, that’s OK, but they need to, at least, continue to support Israel and stay out of their way.

GAZA- Part 1

The war and suffering going on in Gaza right now is truly tragic. It has been going on for several months and the free world is starting to form judgments about the behavior they are witnessing. Unfortunately, much of the free world does not understand what it is seeing and is getting it all wrong.

Bad behavior is a social construct.[1] It is not about morality, or what is right or wrong. It is about how a particular group of people expect members of their group to behave. Therefore, you can’t really judge behavior without understanding the context in which it occurs; and the people who are judging what is happening in Gaza right now either don’t understand the context in which what they are seeing is happening or they are just ignoring it. So, let me provide that context.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas soldiers crossed the border into Israel and brutally tortured, raped and murdered over 1000 innocent men, women and children who were attending a concert or lived nearby. Then they took a couple of hundred hostages, fled back to Gaza and hid in the tunnels they had built beneath hospitals, schools and residential neighborhoods. Why did they do that? What did they expect would happen? Did they think all the Jews in Israel would pack up and leave Israel out of fear? Of course, not. They knew exactly what would happen. It was the only thing that could happen. Israel would retaliate with a vengeance and they would unwillingly, but necessarily, injure and kill thousands of Gazan citizens in order to get at the Hamas soldiers who were hiding in the tunnels beneath those citizens and using them as a shield. It’s called collateral damage and is a consequence of war... always has been and always will be.

But, why would Hamas do such a thing, use its citizens as a shield knowing it would maximize the collateral damage? They are doing it because they hope and believe that the more Gazan citizens who suffer, are injured and die, the easier it will be for Hamas to convince the free world, especially the idealistic, younger generations in liberal leaning democracies, most of whom are Israel’s allies, that Israel’s determined retaliation is actually genocide and that the Gazan citizens are the victims. In fact, THAT WAS HAMAS’ PLAN from the very beginning. Hamas willfully and intentionally chose to start this war and sacrifice the safety and the lives of the people who elected them to govern Gaza in order to discredit Israel in the eyes of Israel’s allies. And that plan is working exactly as Hamas designed it, which makes Hamas, not Israel, totally and exclusively responsible for every single Gazan who has suffered, been injured or died since Hamas’ ruthless attack on Israel last October.

If you are still not convinced that Hamas wants to maximize the collateral damage caused by Israel, consider this. On November 20, 2023, Hamas agreed to an exchange where they released several Israeli hostages in return for Israel releasing several Palestinian political prisoners. Among the hostages released was one very brave young woman who had been tortured and repeatedly raped by her Hamas captors. Keep in mind that this is the only time Hamas has released hostages since this conflict began and it was within the first sixty days of the conflict. Why would Hamas do that? Think about that for a moment. There is only one possible answer to that question because there is only one possible response to hearing that young woman’s story. The Israelis would become even further enraged and would intensify their assault on Hamas in Gaza, which would result in increased collateral damage because Hamas was using the citizens of Gaza as a shield. .And that is exactly what happened because that is exactly what Hamas planned and deliberately chose to make happen.

Speaking of the  Gazan citizens, while they are clearly non-combatants and were not a party to this plan, they did elect Hamas to govern them knowing that Hamas’ reason for existing was to, and I’m paraphrasing here, eliminate the Jews from Israel and return all the land from the river to the sea to the Palestinians.  And the citizens of Gaza have continued to support Hamas as Hamas relentlessly fired rockets at Israel, sent suicide bombers to kill innocent Israeli citizens and rejected every proposal for a two-state solution because they believe there can only be one state and it must be an Islamic state. While I am not suggesting the citizens of Gaza deserve or are to blame for what is happening to them, what is happening to them is the consequence of their having made a bad decision to begin with by electing Hamas to govern them and not doing anything to correct that mistake once it became apparent that Hamas was much more interested in destroying Israel than governing Gaza.

As to the Hama’s claim that the land occupied by Israel belongs to Islam and the former Palestinians, all you have to do is remember the story of Moses to know that claim is nonsense.  Moses led the Jews out of Egypt and into what is now called Israel almost 2000 years before Christianity became a religion and 2600 years before Islam became a religion. The Jews kept getting kicked out of Israel because theirs has never been a warrior culture, but Israel was always their “promised land.” It was given back to the Jews after World War II by the victors of that war and one of the things the Jewish people learned from that war, and the Nazi Holocaust that brutally murdered 6 million Jews, was that if Jews were to survive as a tribe and a religion they needed to become a warrior culture.

Given this context, it should be clear who is behaving badly in Gaza. It is unquestionably Hamas. Even if you accept this conclusion, I can understand if you still have concerns about how Israel is responding to the urging by its allies and the United Nations to declare a cease fire and allow humanitarian aid to reach the suffering citizens of Gaza. It is as if their friends are telling them, “We support you but you must show more compassion for the innocent people of Gaza who are suffering and dying without water, food and medical care” and Israel appears to be insensitive to their appeals and determined to keep pushing their attack on Hamas forward.

Again, you need context to understand Israel’s behavior and that is what I will provide in the Part 2 of this post.

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[1] How Bad is Bad, June 26, 2017 - https://behavingbadlytheblog.blogspot.com/2017/06/

EXTREME EXTREMES

Both major political parties in the United States have their political extremes. The liberal Democrats have the progressives to their left and the conservative Republicans have the reactionaries to their right. That is not a bad thing in and of it self because the political extremes have an important role to play in the deliberative processes of government. They frame the discussion on any political issue at any given time much the way buoys frame the channel on our waterways. Sometimes the channel is narrow and sometimes it is wide. But if you know anything about ships or sailing you know that the safest course for a ship or boat to follow is in the middle third of the channel no matter how wide or narrow it is. You also know that if you are steering that ship or boat you will steer toward one side or the other of that middle third of the channel depending on which way you are going. And you certainly know that the most dangerous course to follow is along either edge of the channel because it is far too easy to be pushed out of the channel by forces beyond your control (i.e. the wind, the current, mechanical failure, etc.); and if that happens you will very likely run aground or wreck on a reef and sink. 

These same maritime principles apply to the deliberative processes of government. The safest course for the Ship of State to follow is in the middle third of the channel framed by the political extremes. And yes, it will steer to one side or the other of that middle third depending on which was it is going. And, as in the maritime example, the most dangerous course for the Ship of State to follow is along either edge of the channel framed by the political extremes because it can be pushed out of that channel far too easily by forces beyond its control (i.e. war, economic collapse, civil unrest, etc.) where it will most certainly end in disaster.

Unfortunately, the political extremes today have lost sight of their role. I believe this is primarily an educational problem. We have stopped teaching our children how our government was designed and intended to work. We have also stopped teaching them how to think for themselves. This knowledge vacuum has been filled with the ever present, competitive, win-lose, business model.  As a result, the political extremes now believe theirs is the only course that can and should be followed by the Ship of State and they seem to be prepared to scuttle and abandon the Ship of State if they don’t get their way.

Someone needs to enlighten today’s political extremes regarding their role in the deliberate processes of government;  and if they choose not to accept that role they should be removed from the political process and replaced with people who share their views but understand  their role and are willing to accept and respect it. It’s too bad none of our political leaders appear to have the guts to confront the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Marjorie Taylor Greene.