Some more Hili news from Jerry

32 thoughts on “Some more Hili news from Jerry”

1. On 1948, I thought this was a great tweet:

   Billions of people will soon celebrate the birthday of a Jew born in Judea over 2,000 years ago, but don’t think Jews lived there before 1948.

   https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1729887606127858125

   1. +1

2. Meanwhile, there has been a terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Isn’t this a breach of the ceasefire?!

   Hamas has claimed the gunmen who carried out this morning’s Jerusalem shooting that killed three people were its members, as per a Telegram channel affiliated with the group.

   In a statement, Hamas said that “the operation came as a natural response to unprecedented crimes conducted by the occupation,” citing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

   The statement also called for “an escalation of the resistance,” news agency AFP said.

3. … if you want to see the truth about the man, read Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a scathing indictment of Kissinger’s diplomatic manipulations in SE Asia and South America.

   Or, for those in need of a quicker fix, there’s this:

   1. Machiavellian.

4. In Jimmy Carter’s book (White House Diary, I think – I’ve read three of his), he says that his decision to let the Shah into the US for medical treatment was because of relentless petitioning from Kissinger and David Rockefeller (who was the head of Chase Manhattan, where the Shah apparently had a boatload of money) to let him in. He finally relented, and that was the main thing that incensed the Iranian students that turned into the hostage crisis that tanked his presidency.

   Without Kissinger and the Shah, there would have been no crisis, no helicopter crashed in the desert, and perhaps no Reagan.

   1. Also, there was this exchange I remember well from a late-night show that Carter was on – I just can’t remember if it was Johnny Carson or David Letterman. Probably late ’80s or early ’90s.

      In any event, Carter had been on, and unlike most guests of his stature, stayed on when the next guest came on who IIRC was a popular comedian at the time but I don’t remember eactly who. In any event, the guy sits down and says something like, “I can’t believe I’m sitting next to Jimmy Carter! It makes me feel like I’m Henry Kissinger or somethng.” To which Carter immediately replied, “If you were Henry Kissinger I would not be sitting here.”

      I’ve never been able to find a clip of that. Does anyone else remember it?

      1. I couldn’t find that clip, but this one from Letterman shows what a great guy Carter is: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6hTOHuKNU4E

         1. Thx, that was a good one. Has anyone read that book? (I haven’t.)

   2. That rescue attempt was fraught with disaster at nearly every step. At that time my neighbor and good friend’s father, a USAF LtCol, was a CH-53 (Super Jolly Green Giant helicopter) pilot and was selected for that rescue mission. During training for the mission at Eglin AFB he crashed.

      If I recall correctly it was a single vehicle accident, a mechanical failure of some sort. I do recall that he managed an auto-rotation that allowed everyone on board to live, but he suffered serious back injuries that ended his flying career.

   3. And don’t forget that the Reagan administration made a deal with the Iranians to extend the hostage crisis until after the 1980 election. This would make a “weak” Carter look even weaker. Once Reagan won the election, the hostages were released on the day of his inauguration and he looked like a hero instead of a traitor (which he was). Nixon also extended the Vietnam war for political reasons. And then there’s W.’s Iraq war created for political reasons. There seems to be a pattern here with Republican Presidents… Trump also wants a war, but this would be waged against his perceived American enemies- the so-called “vermin” or “deep-state” whoever that is.

5. I can understand Israel’s desire to get as many hostages back as possible, but I doubt they will be able to get them all back (via exchanges). Hamas knows that hostages are it’s only bargaining chip, and, if they were to release them all, combat would just start again. (I wouldn’t be surprised, in fact, if they break the ceasefire by taking more hostages.) There will come a point where the pace of hostage releases become so slow that the government of Israel will have to conclude that there is no further value to ceasefires. It will be a decision met with howls of denunciation.

   1. Well stated, unfortunately.

   2. True indeed.

6. Israel’s ambassador to the UN made a powerful intervention:
   https://x.com/DrEliDavid/status/1729955036438913028

7. Jerry: first I want to say thank you for opening my eyes. Before Oct. 7, I skipped most of your posts that seemed to rail against (your perceived) anti-semitism of various types. It seemed a little over the top, not unlike the “racism” that CRT proponents see everywhere. But after Oct. 7, I have now been able to witness firsthand exactly what you’re talking about (witness it in the media – I’ve not yet witnessed this anti-semitism first-hand directly… but I don’t get out much).
   Now on to my question, which my well be stupid, because I don’t know much of the history in this region: why not a one-state solution? You’ve only barely touched upon that idea, dismissively. I imagine that most of the really bad, militant hatred against Israel is practiced by a small minority of Palestinians. I mean, this is true all over the world, and history: typically it is only small minorities that will take risks to act upon their beliefs. So, even if most Palestinians have been taught to hate the Jews, maybe only a small fraction of them will actually act upon that hate, act to hurt the Jews. I would think that the great majority are more concerned about their own welfare. And probably to no small degree, are envious of the welfare they see just across the border (or wall) in Israel, where people have cars, fancy appliances, not to mention running water and electricity. So what if Israel (after wiping out Hamas) simply offers all the Palestinians citizenship, and unifies the whole country? (the government would become secular, if it is not already) It would be hugely costly to the Israelis, in terms of re-building e.g. the Gaza strip, but if it meant peace in the long run, wouldn’t it be worth it? You’d have to convince the majority of Palestinians that with Israeli citizenship comes opportunity and peace and ultimately prosperity (and not least, running water and electricity). You’ve reported (and I’ve elsewhere read about) the arab population within Israel, and that Israel is basically multi-cultural, so why shouldn’t it work in the long run over the entire country, including Gaza and the West Bank? It seems you’ve said that a one-state solution would mean the end of Israel… please explain why you think that.

   1. First problem: with the Palestinians in the Gaza strip and the West Bank and those who are already Israeli citizens, the Jews would only be a bare majority (about 60:40). That would not be a stable state.

      Second problem: What fraction of the Palestinians would then be willing to die in suicide attacks if they could kill Jews? 10%? 30%? 1%?

      Even 1% would be 50,000 people. That would not be a stable state. It would be an endless repetition of Oct 7. All the evidence is that the Palestinian population of the unified state would not then live peacefully, many of them would do everything they could to destroy that state and turn it into a Muslim/Palestinian state.

      1. Agreed absolutely. Right now it is hard to envisage even a stable two state scenario with a Palestinian and Israeli state living peacefully side-by-side, not least because that would require the Palestinians to acknowledge the right of Jews to live in the area occupied by Israel. If the Palestinians cannot even accept that, it is hard to see them living peacefully alongside Jews in a single state.

         Even if they could, the creation of a single Palestinian/Jewish state would require both populations to set aside their national identities and I don’t see that ever happening. I’m struggling to think of an example where such a thing has happened in the past. I don’t think the merger of East and West Germany counts, given that was a reunification. It is far easier to think of nationalist separatists who want to break away from the states that they currently live in (in Scotland and Catalonia, for example).

   2. The Palestinians are a Jew-hating death cult. No Jewish polity can make peace with them as they are today. Richard Hananian argues, and I agree, that not enough Palestinians in Gaza have been killed yet as human shields for them to resign themselves to the futility of continuing to try to kill Jews. Only when they accept the futility of violent resistance will they be attracted to the idea of running water and fancy appliances through co-existence, and renounce their currently overwhelming support for Hamas and jihad who keep them impoverished. They aren’t there yet. (In this analysis, of course, efforts to pressure Israel into accepting military defeat in order to minimize civilian casualties work against this goal.)

      Multi-cultural states are not stable if one minority segment seeks dominance over (or perpetual resistance against, or secession from) the dominant culture instead of offering or accepting assimilation. (My philosopher friend Viminitz calls this love-making the differences out of them, although he uses a less family-friendly term that doesn’t necessarily imply love or even consent.) That’s why the United States worked until 1964. It was never multi-cultural with preservation of political division along sectarian lines but instead a melting pot albeit with one excluded polity. And that polity was still willing to fight, heroically, in America’s wars. America works even less well now because it has now, in addition, a large number of people who hew to a violent fanatical religion that, for the first time ever among immigrants and their native-born allies, hates the country it immigrated into, (as well as hating the Jews.) This would bedevil a unitary state in Israel 10-fold, because the Muslim minority in what would be Israel + Palestine is that much bigger (proportionately) in Israel than it is in America. If you want to see why Israel cannot accept a one-state solution, you need only to look to American college campuses and multiply by 10, metastasizing everywhere into everyday productive society and not just a fashion in the irrelevant universities.

      The other reality is that the state of Israel was founded under Zionism, a sanctuary homeland for the world’s Jews. Not all Jews agree with Zionism but I, a non-Jew, do. All Jews should be allowed, by Israel and if Israel wishes, to immigrate into Israel if they want to. If Israel becomes other than a Zionist state with no longer a Jewish majority, the Right of Return will, by democratic or totalitarian principles, be abolished by the non-Jewish majority. And then that enlarging non-Jewish majority can legislate the expulsion of Jews or push them into the sea, if it wants to, and as other Muslim-majority countries already have. You know, “From the River to the Sea . . .”?

      A two-state solution will not work either, for much the same reason a one-state solution won’t work. As long as you have neighbours on your border who spend all their time trying to kill you, the situation is not stable. And you can’t keep invading a foreign hostile state every few years because your allies won’t let you conquer it. The only two-state solution that might work would be a Palestinian state that has a large expanse of desert belonging to some other country serving as what historians call a glacis* between it and Israel, and moving the Palestinians forcibly into that new state. Maybe somewhere in the middle of Saudi Arabia. Or Yemen. Maybe they can find oil on it and get rich. But a Palestinian state on Israel’s borders? No way. Not after 7 October.
      —————
      * A glacis is an up-sloping open area below a castle wall up which an attacking enemy must advance while exposed to fire from the ramparts above.

      1. “But a Palestinian state on Israel’s borders? No way. Not after 7 October.”

         There already IS a Palestinian state on Israel’s border. It is called Jordan. It sits smack dab on 78% of Mandatory Palestine, and its population when created was 99%+ Levantine Arab, ie Palestinian. It is still Arab. It proudly declared for decades that “Jordan is Palestine, and Palestine is Jordan”.

         From 1948-1967 the so-called Palestinians who lived in the West Bank all held Jordanian citizenry and passports. Jordan rescinded these after 1967 to foment insurrection against Israel. This is the same Jordan whose army attacked Israel in wars of genocidal intent more than once.

         Jordan therefore owes an enormous moral debt to to Israel, the so-called Palestinians, and to the world. It is their obligation to absorb their citizens – give them the Right of Return, so to speak. And it is decades overdue that the world recognizes the responsibility of Jordan and finally starts talking about it. Imho.

         1. I’m hoping that a “Like!!” of your post will not be considered over-commenting.

   3. In addition to Coel’s point, that old saying that “It takes two to tango,” is a real problem in this case. To date the Palestinians have rejected every attempt at a peaceful solution of any kind, and at least two of the offers where good deals for both parties. Unless of course you consider allowing Jews to continue living in Israel to not be a deal breaker. So far throughout the entire history of the conflict the Palestinians in power, and most of the surrounding Arab countries, have considered that a deal breaker.

      You may be correct that a significant percentage of the regular Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza would accept a solution, possibly even the one state solution you are asking about. Problem is they are powerless. There are too many fanatics among them, including their leaders.

      And really, it is far from obvious that you are correct. Plenty of those common folk on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza celebrate and give out candy to the kids when Israelis are killed. Just look at the intensity and breadth of antisemitism on display since Oct. 7 among Muslim immigrants in Western countries, and how much support they have from those Westerners.

      I think it is reasonable to assume that at ground zero, where the schools teach hatred of Jews and that it’s heroic to kill them, where they celebrate in the streets when some Jews are killed, where what passes for a government has a program set up to pay the families of heroes that have died while killing Jews, for the rest of their lives, and where they’ve been doing those kinds of things for generations, hatred of Jews is spread more widely throughout the population than you may suppose.

   4. My response is that a one-state solution would spell the end of the Jews.

      1. This “experiment” (Jews living as a minority with Muslims) was tried for centuries in many Muslim countries. The best Jews could ever expect was to live as second-class citizens. Unfortunately, even this quiet though unpleasant life was often interrupted by pogroms against the Jews. Finally, virtually all Jews (almost a million) were either exiled or forced to flee for their lives from Muslim countries. Wikipedia has a whole article on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world

      2. Look at Lebanon, a modern experiment of Christians (a substantial minority) living with Muslims where neither group was a clear majority. It definitely didn’t work. Lebanon is a broken country and Hezbollah are taking over while Christians flee for their life.

      You do realize that most Palestinians don’t want a two state solution because they want Israel GONE. This is your solution, but with Jews in the minority, only the clueless would think that there would be peaceful coexistence. The Jews would be doomed and Israel as a Jewish state would be doomed.

      The “one state solution” has been tried, as I said in #1, and it was disaster for the Jews. That’s my response: it would lead to genocide.

   5. I enthusiastically recommend reading historian Benny Morris’s book, “One State, Two States.” It’s a history of the attempts at reconciling Jewish and Arab claims to the land. The last third or so of the book is Morris discussing all of the solutions that have been tried or proposed, and explaining their difficulties. (He ends up in despair, because there is no feasible solution.) What you’re suggesting here is what Morris would classify as a “binational” state–i.e., political parity for all inhabitants of the entire territory, one political state encompassing both the Arab and Jewish nations (“nations” in the sense of peoples, not political entities). The discussion of the problems with this idea goes on for many pages, but this is its essence:

      And, of course, there are the political-ideological obstacles. On the Jewish side, there is an insurmountable basic problem: Zionism set out to solve the Jewish problem by establishing a Jewish polity, inhabited and governed largely if not solely by Jews, a place where Jews could, at long last, not live as a minority in someone else’s house, by his leave. And Zionism achieved this in 1948: a Jewish-majority state. Sixty years on, Israel’s Jews overwhelmingly still want this—and refuse to share sovereignty in their state with another people, and certainly will fiercely resist any attempt to turn them into a minority in what they regard as their own land. And most Israeli Jews believe that this would be the end-result of the establishment of a binational state, given greater Arab birthrates and the potential mass return of Palestinian refugees.

      But from the Arab side, the rejectionism is at least equally comprehensive and deeply felt. The idea of sharing Palestine (as indeed, the sharing of any Muslim Arab land with non-Muslims and non-Arabs)—either through a division of the country into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab, or through a unitary binational entity, based on political parity between the two communities—is alien to the Muslim Arab mindset. Since the seventh and eighth centuries, when the Hijazi tribes swept out of Arabia and conquered the (largely Christian) Middle East and North Africa as far west as southern France, Muslim Arabs have been dominant, by law and by force, in their social and political environment, even when, as in the early years of the Islamic surge, the Muslim Arabs were in a minority. And, following the conquest of non-Arab areas, the Muslim Arabs have, in the long run, sought to attain a majority, through forced conversion, slaughter, and/or expulsion. From the eighth or ninth centuries, Muslim Arabs have been politically dominant in the Islamic world and have grown accustomed to that position; the notion of sharing power or being a minority in a non-Muslim Arab polity is alien to the Muslim Arab mentality. In the Muslim Arab world there have never been binational or bireligious political structures. There are only polities where Muslim Arabs are masters or, when in a minority, where they aspire to attain majority and mastery.

      Morris, Benny. One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (pp. 187-189). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

   6. Thank you all for your considered replies. Whoever implied that I was “clueless” certainly got that right. On this issue I’ve been learning a lot, thanks again. It’s quite a depressing situation…

8. Re the Red Cross and the hostages in Gaza

   Oh. Not good. Thanks for the news.
   I rebuffed the special appeal by the Canadian Red Cross for “humanitarian aid” to Gaza. I will have to look into the connection between the Canadian branch, which helps out with domestic emergencies like floods and forest fires, and the International Committee of the Red Cross which is the offender here. But it looks as if another humanitarian NGO has bitten the dust.

9. It’s very simple.
   The Hamas Charter is why the Two State or any compromise option is “dead in the water”.

   “Contrastingly, Mahmoud al-Zahar, co-founder of Hamas, said in 2006 that Hamas “will not change a single word in its covenant”. In 2010, he reaffirmed a major commitment of the covenant saying “Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy.”[18]”

   No proposal has ever been excepted and seemingly never will. It is strange that death and misery is the foundations to found a state on but it will not be the first or the last. Hamas and their charter is a death certificate of unknowns.

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Charter

10. “…What does Israel get in such a deal? Its hostages back, so the status quo is resumed.” – J. Coyne

    What makes me angry is that some German media have used the word “Geiselaustausch” (“hostage exchange”), with or without being aware that it wrongly suggests that the Palestinians exchanged for the Israeli hostages were hostages too. Had they been kidnapped by Israel? No, because they had been lawfully detained as criminals by Israel!

11. “Russian court bans ‘LGBT movement’: Russia’s Supreme Court has declared what it calls “the international LGBT public movement” an extremist organisation and banned its activities across the country.…”

    Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67565509

    “This is real repression. There is panic in Russia’s LGBT community. People are emigrating urgently. The actual word we’re using is evacuation. We’re having to evacuate from our own country. It’s terrible.” – Sergei Troshin

    How sad!

    1. Yes, it is sad. It seems to be part of Vlad’s upcoming re-election drive, which seems a little unnecessary given that he’ll undoubtedly be re-elected anyway.

12. You might’ve seen this already, but here’s one further example of the type of thing you’ve been posting about recently.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/news/brown-university-president-omits-reference-to-jewish-students-after-heckling-from-pro-palestinian-activists/

13. Another shocking example of woke antisemitism at universities—this time in Germany:

    “‘Heinous’: Bloodstained Palms Protest at Top Berlin University Over Gaza War Fuels Antisemitism Fears

    A group of pro-Hamas students at one of Germany’s top universities has staged several protests throughout the month of November, turning their campus into an ideological battlefield that has left Jewish students feeling under siege.…”

    Source: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/11/30/heinous-bloodstained-palms-protest-top-berlin-university-gaza-war-fuels-antisemitism-fears/

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