This Black Hole Has a Cosmic Wingspan Astronomers have discovered a black hole emitting energy in jets longer than the width of 140 Milky Way galaxies. ......... about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.
Monday, September 30, 2024
30: New York City
The Only Patriotic Choice for President It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He’s proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities that he most lacks — wisdom, empathy, courage, restraint, discipline. ........... Those disqualifying characteristics are further compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president — his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental disinterest in policy, and his bizarre cast of associates. ............ As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence, and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. ............. Over the past 70 days, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a thoughtful set of plans to help American families. ........... Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which will benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the middle class. .......... Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to climate change and would continue Mr. Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish loyalty to fossil fuels. ......... As to immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants. Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system. ........... a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.
The Indictment of Mayor Eric Adams Did the mayor conspire with Turkish officials to funnel illegal foreign donations into his coffers in exchange for pressing the Fire Department to approve a new high-rise consulate in Midtown Manhattan despite safety concerns?
This Black Hole Has a Cosmic Wingspan Astronomers have discovered a black hole emitting energy in jets longer than the width of 140 Milky Way galaxies. ......... about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.
The Indictment of Mayor Eric Adams Did the mayor conspire with Turkish officials to funnel illegal foreign donations into his coffers in exchange for pressing the Fire Department to approve a new high-rise consulate in Midtown Manhattan despite safety concerns?
This Black Hole Has a Cosmic Wingspan Astronomers have discovered a black hole emitting energy in jets longer than the width of 140 Milky Way galaxies. ......... about 140 times as long as our own Milky Way galaxy is wide, and more than 10 times the distance from Earth to Andromeda, the nearest large spiral galaxy.
30: Palestine
What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today. ............. the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, that see their future as best delivered by a U.S.-led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, like climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea: brutal, authoritarian regimes that use their opposition to the U.S.-led world of inclusion to justify militarizing their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power............... China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance. ........... You have to see the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union — and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalizing relations........... And if Israel were allowed to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states. .............. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism. ............. the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese Army could seize control of Southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war
Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel the unfolding of an Iranian grand strategy to slowly destroy the Jewish state, weaken America’s Arab allies and undermine U.S. influence in the region — while deterring Israel from ever attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities — by using Iranian proxies to bleed Israel to death. ........... The Iranian strategy is exquisite from Tehran’s point of view: Destroy Israel by sacrificing as many Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary but never risk a single Iranian life. The Iranians are ready to die to the last Lebanese, the last Palestinian, the last Syrian and the last Yemeni to eliminate Israel (and distract the world from the Iranian regime’s abuses of its own people and imperialist control over Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria). .......... Netanyahu thought he could just tell the world that Israel was defending the frontier of freedom against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran and everyone would fall in line behind Israel. What would you do? But the only place in the world that that gets you a standing ovation is in the U.S. Congress. ........... Netanyahu’s strategy is a disaster. As a veteran U.S. military commander who has observed close up Israel’s war strategy in Gaza told me privately, anyone with two eyes in his head knows that the only way to defeat Hamas is a strategy of “clear, hold and build”: Destroy the enemy, hold the territory and then build an alternative local, legitimate Palestinian governing authority. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, has been: “Clear, leave, come back, clear again the same place, leave again, come back and clear again.”
Ex-PM Olmert, ex-PA foreign minister propose plan for two-state solution to conflict The two leaders agree to the territorial solution proposed by Olmert during his time in office based on the 1967 borders but with land swaps to account for Israeli settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; a Palestinian capital in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; and the administration of the Old City by a trusteeship of five states including Israel and Palestine. .......... They agree that an Israeli withdrawal and a Palestinian, technocratic governing council linked to the PA is necessary in the Gaza Strip and that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be prepared for elections within 24-35 months ............ An Arab peacekeeping force, called the Temporary Arab Security Presence (TASP) will be needed to “stabilize” the Strip, in cooperation with the Israeli military, to prevent terror attacks from Gaza. ......... “Finally, they agreed on the need of a donors conference to rebuild the Gaza Strip with a serious participation of wealthy countries”
Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. ........... He’s now, so far as we know, underground and has been since Oct. 7 and communicates with the outside world and his Hamas colleagues by runner and by written message because he doesn’t trust electronic communications. .......... And in Israeli jail, he decided with a great sense of determination — because he wanted to be a leader of Hamas and was committed to armed struggle — he learned Hebrew. And he learned it perfectly. He read Israeli papers. He watched Israeli television. He became incredibly familiar with and fluent in Israeli society, language, politicians. He read memoirs of security chiefs, prime ministers and all the rest. ............ One thing I heard from a lot of Israelis at different levels of Israeli society was that they feel he understands them, and they don’t understand him. He’s talked about using prison as a sort of study hall in the Israeli psyche. .......... It’s not a great literary novel, but if you want to know something about Yahya Sinwar, it’s very much worth reading. And it’s a portrayal of the making of himself — how he became this political leader, military leader, terrorist, strategist, what the roots of his politics and fury are. And they’re rooted in his family’s exile, obviously as Palestinians from where they lived originally in Palestine into the Gaza Strip. They’re rooted in his witnessing close at hand the 1967 war, which everybody around him thought was going to be a great victory. And a week later, it was a humiliation. Same thing in 1973. ............ You might imagine the leader of Hamas is somebody whose experience is waging war against Israelis, killing Israelis. But his experiences, at least before prison, appear to be in killing Palestinians. ............ he says to this dentist at some point that he’s ready to sacrifice 20,000; 30,000; 100,000 Palestinians in order to obtain —— ................. I think in jail, the most important thing that happened to him that helped shape events was the increasing awareness on a tactical level that the taking of hostages was effective. ........... Twenty years ago, you had a situation where members of Hamas came across the border, the fence, and kidnapped, in a raid, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. One. Brought him into Gaza. And for the next five years, while Shalit was in the hands of Hamas, Israeli society was obsessed with this case. ............. And finally, he was released for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. One of them was Yahya Sinwar. ........... So if you’re an Israeli, you are not seeing what’s going on in Gaza every night, not on Channel 12, not on 13 and certainly not on 14, which is the kind of Fox News station. You’re seeing military operations. You’re seeing the military spokesman taking an embed of some correspondents into the Philadelphi Corridor near Rafah. Much more, you’re seeing lots and lots — understandably — about the hostages, about internecine political battles, street demonstrations. .............. And, as you said earlier, if 20,000 or 30,000 or 100,000 Palestinians have to die for the liberation of Palestine — and the liberation of Palestine also in his view repeatedly means the elimination of what we now know as Israel — then so be it. ........... part of what distinguishes this part of the world is that there are political actors on both sides who are fantasists. Fantasists with guns ........... there was a conference sponsored by Hamas, sponsored by Sinwar, about what taking over would look like. And there were all kinds of speeches and very specific plans about what would happen on the day after Israel was eliminated and Palestine was liberated in their terms. What should we do about the Jews? Should we kick everybody out or kill them? Or should we keep the ones that are really valuable, who are doctors or advanced computer programmers? That conference of the hereafter took place — that was on the level of fantasy. ............ when he unleashed his soldiers on Oct. 7 ........ it was basically a suicide mission to spark something even larger, if possible. .............. we will have exploded Israel’s sense of the status quo. I think that was what it was about. ............. Remember, Oct. 7 was Oct. 7. That was an attack from Hamas. Something happened the next day, on Oct. 8, which is that Hezbollah began to attack northern Israel. .............. Hezbollah is a Shiite group, heavily militarized, infinitely more sophisticated than Hamas, infinitely better armed, and it obviously doesn’t have the sense of isolation. And in fact, in a relatively failed state of Lebanon, its power there is immense. .............. Americans old enough to remember even during the Reagan administration that Hezbollah killed hundreds of Marines. ......... what you have right now is a depopulated northern Israel ....... Israel has shrunk. In a strategic, geographic sense, Israel — already a tiny state — has shrunk. ............... I think Gallant also recognizes that the vaunted Israel Defense Forces proved that it was deeply flawed on Oct. 7 and that it is now exhausted. It’s suffered losses. Forget the criticism from abroad — that the idea that they’re now going to wage war in Lebanon is something that Gallant objects to. ..........
Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are Netanyahu has become an anti-system candidate. .......... But after Oct. 7, the topic in Israel is no longer judicial reforms; it’s security. ......... According to a new poll, 65 percent of the Israeli public define themselves as 50 shades of right wing and only 12 percent as left or center-left. So for every leftist in Israel, you have five to six right-wingers. ............. Israelis ceased to believe in the two-state solution, which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation, because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat, give or take, everything, including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada. ............... We saw that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn’t lead to a new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely but to more tense times of security. ................ The fact that this horrendous terrorist attack came from Gaza, which Israel ceased to occupy in 2005, and that only gave them time and money to actually create a monstrous terrorist army — it’s the last time unilateral withdrawals will be experienced in Israel. So we don’t have a left here. ................ Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves and withdrew from the international border. And Israel, at the same time, stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition. ........... So Israelis say, “Perhaps we should stay there as much as needed, pay the price and prevent the situation in which we are attacked. Perhaps the attempt to buy international legitimacy with the currency of territory doesn’t pay.” ..................... Gantz and Netanyahu voted exactly the same for the consecutive 91 meetings of the war cabinet, which means that there is a consensus in Israel of management rather than ideology. ............. Fatah was thrown from roofs in Gaza in 2007. But it’s not that Fatah wants Israel to exist. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” it’s not a Hamas phrase; it’s a Fatah phrase. When 72 percent of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank support the massacre of Oct. 7, it’s horrifying. .................... We all have a dream about two Western democracies living side by side in peace and harmony. Unfortunately, this is not the case. ................ And the grave mistake was, when President Clinton, it’s amazing to remember, came to Gaza as the president of the United States to stand alongside a mass murderer, Yasir Arafat, they wanted him to be Nelson Mandela. .......... Hamas is becoming more popular. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, is extremely, extremely unpopular. .............. yes, this is Smotrich’s ideological purpose. He doesn’t want, in the long run, the Palestinian Authority to exist, because it’s against his idea of sovereignty on every single inch of Greater Israel. .............. And the idea is shrinking the conflict — that, look, there’s no two-state solution, there’s no one-state solution, there’s no deal. Let’s just try to make the roads better, make more Palestinian roads that are not going to have checkpoints, push for economic development. It has some resonances with an old idea from Netanyahu, which is economic peace, which is different from actual peace. ............... No one wants to annex three million Palestinians to Israel. ......... prior to Oct. 7, no one thought that Israel would invade Gaza. .......... But it’s not the case with Lebanon. You can never cut the lifeline of Hezbollah, because Lebanon is connected to Syria and then Iran. So you can’t stop Hezbollah from getting more weapons and more soldiers. And you can’t eliminate Hezbollah. Plus, Lebanon is a country. It’s not like Gaza or the West Bank. It has more legitimacy in the world. It’s way more difficult. ................ “No, you Americans completely misunderstand this. Hezbollah is Iran. Iran is connected to China. It’s connected to Russia. Americans don’t understand countries with imperial pasts or even countries with current imperial ambitions. And it is, in a way, implacable because its ambitions here are ideological. It doesn’t care about the Palestinians.” ................. what we learned, the tragic lesson from the last decade is that peaceful periods do not equal a peaceful future. ..............
In North Carolina, Remnants of Helene Become an ‘Unprecedented Tragedy’ Thousands of people struggled to cope without basic necessities as authorities searched for the missing, and the overall death toll from the storm surpassed 100. ........... Magda Randolph, 72, who has lived in Asheville for 24 years, said she had never experienced a flooding event this powerful and wondered about the long-term impact........ “Our water system is greatly compromised. Our landfill got compromised,” she said. “It’s unclear what the quality of life is going to be like here for a while.”
Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers. ............ “There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.” ........... Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world ............ Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear. .............. “Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran” ............. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker. .......... Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause. .......... As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace. ............... So in their annual pilgrimage, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions. ..................... There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’” ................. Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing................ “The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem-solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.” ...... That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.
Iran Is Losing. That May Matter More Than Israel’s Mistakes. Israel’s inexcusable complacency on Oct. 7, 2023, allowed Hamas, a terrorist force with a small fraction of the military strength of the Israel Defense Forces, to kill more Israeli civilians than the vast armies of Egypt and Syria and their allies did at the height of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. ........... Israel’s stunning airstrike on Friday on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters near Beirut, which killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the fortunes of war have shifted against Israel’s enemies since Oct. 7. Hamas is losing. Hezbollah is losing. And most important: By extension, Iran is losing. ............. Even if Israel ultimately wins this war, it will have paid a dreadful price. .......... As of late last month, Israel claimed it has killed as many as 17,000 Hamas fighters and “dismantled” 22 of its 24 battalions, while losing fewer than 1,000 soldiers in action in almost a full year of war. ........... On Sept. 17, Israel reportedly orchestrated an attack in which thousands of pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah operatives. The next day Israel reportedly detonated hand-held radios that Hezbollah also used to communicate, and then executed a devastating airstrike on an in-person meeting of Hezbollah leaders, killing several of its senior officials............ In August, the Biden administration approved a $20 billion arms deal with Israel that will allow it to purchase 50 new F-15IA fighters from the United States (helping ensure its qualitative military edge for a generation). And there is currently a huge American naval buildup in the region. The American Navy is fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and attempting to deter Iran from launching fresh attacks against Israel.......... the West’s jihadist enemies: Defeat demoralizes them. It’s not that their resistance collapses entirely, but jihadism waxes and wanes depending on its battlefield success.
Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel the unfolding of an Iranian grand strategy to slowly destroy the Jewish state, weaken America’s Arab allies and undermine U.S. influence in the region — while deterring Israel from ever attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities — by using Iranian proxies to bleed Israel to death. ........... The Iranian strategy is exquisite from Tehran’s point of view: Destroy Israel by sacrificing as many Palestinians and Lebanese as necessary but never risk a single Iranian life. The Iranians are ready to die to the last Lebanese, the last Palestinian, the last Syrian and the last Yemeni to eliminate Israel (and distract the world from the Iranian regime’s abuses of its own people and imperialist control over Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Syria). .......... Netanyahu thought he could just tell the world that Israel was defending the frontier of freedom against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran and everyone would fall in line behind Israel. What would you do? But the only place in the world that that gets you a standing ovation is in the U.S. Congress. ........... Netanyahu’s strategy is a disaster. As a veteran U.S. military commander who has observed close up Israel’s war strategy in Gaza told me privately, anyone with two eyes in his head knows that the only way to defeat Hamas is a strategy of “clear, hold and build”: Destroy the enemy, hold the territory and then build an alternative local, legitimate Palestinian governing authority. Israel’s strategy in Gaza, he said, has been: “Clear, leave, come back, clear again the same place, leave again, come back and clear again.”
Ex-PM Olmert, ex-PA foreign minister propose plan for two-state solution to conflict The two leaders agree to the territorial solution proposed by Olmert during his time in office based on the 1967 borders but with land swaps to account for Israeli settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; a Palestinian capital in Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem; and the administration of the Old City by a trusteeship of five states including Israel and Palestine. .......... They agree that an Israeli withdrawal and a Palestinian, technocratic governing council linked to the PA is necessary in the Gaza Strip and that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be prepared for elections within 24-35 months ............ An Arab peacekeeping force, called the Temporary Arab Security Presence (TASP) will be needed to “stabilize” the Strip, in cooperation with the Israeli military, to prevent terror attacks from Gaza. ......... “Finally, they agreed on the need of a donors conference to rebuild the Gaza Strip with a serious participation of wealthy countries”
Israel vs. Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran — and Itself It’s been almost a year since Oct. 7. More than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza are dead. ........... He’s now, so far as we know, underground and has been since Oct. 7 and communicates with the outside world and his Hamas colleagues by runner and by written message because he doesn’t trust electronic communications. .......... And in Israeli jail, he decided with a great sense of determination — because he wanted to be a leader of Hamas and was committed to armed struggle — he learned Hebrew. And he learned it perfectly. He read Israeli papers. He watched Israeli television. He became incredibly familiar with and fluent in Israeli society, language, politicians. He read memoirs of security chiefs, prime ministers and all the rest. ............ One thing I heard from a lot of Israelis at different levels of Israeli society was that they feel he understands them, and they don’t understand him. He’s talked about using prison as a sort of study hall in the Israeli psyche. .......... It’s not a great literary novel, but if you want to know something about Yahya Sinwar, it’s very much worth reading. And it’s a portrayal of the making of himself — how he became this political leader, military leader, terrorist, strategist, what the roots of his politics and fury are. And they’re rooted in his family’s exile, obviously as Palestinians from where they lived originally in Palestine into the Gaza Strip. They’re rooted in his witnessing close at hand the 1967 war, which everybody around him thought was going to be a great victory. And a week later, it was a humiliation. Same thing in 1973. ............ You might imagine the leader of Hamas is somebody whose experience is waging war against Israelis, killing Israelis. But his experiences, at least before prison, appear to be in killing Palestinians. ............ he says to this dentist at some point that he’s ready to sacrifice 20,000; 30,000; 100,000 Palestinians in order to obtain —— ................. I think in jail, the most important thing that happened to him that helped shape events was the increasing awareness on a tactical level that the taking of hostages was effective. ........... Twenty years ago, you had a situation where members of Hamas came across the border, the fence, and kidnapped, in a raid, a young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. One. Brought him into Gaza. And for the next five years, while Shalit was in the hands of Hamas, Israeli society was obsessed with this case. ............. And finally, he was released for a thousand Palestinian prisoners. One of them was Yahya Sinwar. ........... So if you’re an Israeli, you are not seeing what’s going on in Gaza every night, not on Channel 12, not on 13 and certainly not on 14, which is the kind of Fox News station. You’re seeing military operations. You’re seeing the military spokesman taking an embed of some correspondents into the Philadelphi Corridor near Rafah. Much more, you’re seeing lots and lots — understandably — about the hostages, about internecine political battles, street demonstrations. .............. And, as you said earlier, if 20,000 or 30,000 or 100,000 Palestinians have to die for the liberation of Palestine — and the liberation of Palestine also in his view repeatedly means the elimination of what we now know as Israel — then so be it. ........... part of what distinguishes this part of the world is that there are political actors on both sides who are fantasists. Fantasists with guns ........... there was a conference sponsored by Hamas, sponsored by Sinwar, about what taking over would look like. And there were all kinds of speeches and very specific plans about what would happen on the day after Israel was eliminated and Palestine was liberated in their terms. What should we do about the Jews? Should we kick everybody out or kill them? Or should we keep the ones that are really valuable, who are doctors or advanced computer programmers? That conference of the hereafter took place — that was on the level of fantasy. ............ when he unleashed his soldiers on Oct. 7 ........ it was basically a suicide mission to spark something even larger, if possible. .............. we will have exploded Israel’s sense of the status quo. I think that was what it was about. ............. Remember, Oct. 7 was Oct. 7. That was an attack from Hamas. Something happened the next day, on Oct. 8, which is that Hezbollah began to attack northern Israel. .............. Hezbollah is a Shiite group, heavily militarized, infinitely more sophisticated than Hamas, infinitely better armed, and it obviously doesn’t have the sense of isolation. And in fact, in a relatively failed state of Lebanon, its power there is immense. .............. Americans old enough to remember even during the Reagan administration that Hezbollah killed hundreds of Marines. ......... what you have right now is a depopulated northern Israel ....... Israel has shrunk. In a strategic, geographic sense, Israel — already a tiny state — has shrunk. ............... I think Gallant also recognizes that the vaunted Israel Defense Forces proved that it was deeply flawed on Oct. 7 and that it is now exhausted. It’s suffered losses. Forget the criticism from abroad — that the idea that they’re now going to wage war in Lebanon is something that Gallant objects to. ..........
Every single Israeli I spoke to believes the real enemy for them is Iran.
............ And they don’t think it because they have a rich imagination. They think it because for years and years, the leadership of Iran has made it absolutely plain in its rhetoric — and in its actions — that its intentions, the reason for being, for the state, to some degree, is the future elimination of the State of Israel. It’s part of the national project. .............. they see themselves as locked in an ongoing multigenerational war against a patient adversary who strikes at them from all directions using all kinds of different clients and may one day — in fact, one day soon — have nuclear weapons. ............. by shattering the Israeli sense of security, by exposing the weaknesses of the Israeli military, or the degree to which it’s overextended — that it’s not some mythological institution that could fight on infinite fronts. By arousing the fury that you see in the West Bank, rather than a kind of terrible resignation, by arousing Hezbollah and, by extension, Iran, or the other way around, into action, by tripping off a set of events in which Iran, for the first time, directly sets missiles off toward Israel, well, in Sinwar’s mind, that’s an enormous victory. ............... Bill Clinton, remember him leaving a meeting with Netanyahu, and he said out loud, wait a minute, who’s the superpower here? ............... Barack Obama, whom Netanyahu loathed, extended himself to such a degree that Netanyahu made his cynical speech at Bar-Ilan University, hinting that he might be for a Palestinian state. It was all a sham. ........... and the MAGA-like rhetoric of Yair Netanyahu, the son, who sounds like somebody who’s just never off of Truth Social, going on and on about how the Israeli people, and particularly the media, are ungrateful ............. Any compromise is thought to be a betrayal of the Jews and Jewish history. And all of it informed by an intense knowledge of and feeling about everything from the inquisition to the Holocaust. ............. And I’m talking now about Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are vile creatures. They’re thugs. They’re not just annexationists and extremists. Their background — they were in trouble with the law. Ben-Gvir couldn’t serve in the military; he was in so much trouble with the law.Israelis Are Not Watching the Same War You Are Netanyahu has become an anti-system candidate. .......... But after Oct. 7, the topic in Israel is no longer judicial reforms; it’s security. ......... According to a new poll, 65 percent of the Israeli public define themselves as 50 shades of right wing and only 12 percent as left or center-left. So for every leftist in Israel, you have five to six right-wingers. ............. Israelis ceased to believe in the two-state solution, which would be achieved through a bilateral negotiation, because they saw what happened last time. In 1993, following the Oslo Accords, Israelis experienced an awful lot of suicide bombers. And following the Camp David summit in 2000, when Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat, give or take, everything, including half of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, we got the second intifada. ............... We saw that the unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 didn’t lead to a new equilibrium in which everyone can live happily and freely but to more tense times of security. ................ The fact that this horrendous terrorist attack came from Gaza, which Israel ceased to occupy in 2005, and that only gave them time and money to actually create a monstrous terrorist army — it’s the last time unilateral withdrawals will be experienced in Israel. So we don’t have a left here. ................ Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, evacuated each and every settlement, took out dead from the graves and withdrew from the international border. And Israel, at the same time, stayed in Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, in order to preserve its security in a bearable condition. ........... So Israelis say, “Perhaps we should stay there as much as needed, pay the price and prevent the situation in which we are attacked. Perhaps the attempt to buy international legitimacy with the currency of territory doesn’t pay.” ..................... Gantz and Netanyahu voted exactly the same for the consecutive 91 meetings of the war cabinet, which means that there is a consensus in Israel of management rather than ideology. ............. Fatah was thrown from roofs in Gaza in 2007. But it’s not that Fatah wants Israel to exist. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” it’s not a Hamas phrase; it’s a Fatah phrase. When 72 percent of the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria in the West Bank support the massacre of Oct. 7, it’s horrifying. .................... We all have a dream about two Western democracies living side by side in peace and harmony. Unfortunately, this is not the case. ................ And the grave mistake was, when President Clinton, it’s amazing to remember, came to Gaza as the president of the United States to stand alongside a mass murderer, Yasir Arafat, they wanted him to be Nelson Mandela. .......... Hamas is becoming more popular. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, is extremely, extremely unpopular. .............. yes, this is Smotrich’s ideological purpose. He doesn’t want, in the long run, the Palestinian Authority to exist, because it’s against his idea of sovereignty on every single inch of Greater Israel. .............. And the idea is shrinking the conflict — that, look, there’s no two-state solution, there’s no one-state solution, there’s no deal. Let’s just try to make the roads better, make more Palestinian roads that are not going to have checkpoints, push for economic development. It has some resonances with an old idea from Netanyahu, which is economic peace, which is different from actual peace. ............... No one wants to annex three million Palestinians to Israel. ......... prior to Oct. 7, no one thought that Israel would invade Gaza. .......... But it’s not the case with Lebanon. You can never cut the lifeline of Hezbollah, because Lebanon is connected to Syria and then Iran. So you can’t stop Hezbollah from getting more weapons and more soldiers. And you can’t eliminate Hezbollah. Plus, Lebanon is a country. It’s not like Gaza or the West Bank. It has more legitimacy in the world. It’s way more difficult. ................ “No, you Americans completely misunderstand this. Hezbollah is Iran. Iran is connected to China. It’s connected to Russia. Americans don’t understand countries with imperial pasts or even countries with current imperial ambitions. And it is, in a way, implacable because its ambitions here are ideological. It doesn’t care about the Palestinians.” ................. what we learned, the tragic lesson from the last decade is that peaceful periods do not equal a peaceful future. ..............
There is a square in Tehran in which there is a clock counting down to the year 2040, in which Israel would be eliminated.
And the intelligence in Israel says that they no longer see 2040 as the date but way earlier. So not tomorrow but maybe 2030, 2032. .................. Hezbollah is a very important ingredient in this scheme, because they got 200,000 rockets that will land here in Israel. ............... to build an army that is well equipped and well trained to fight the Iranian octopus — Hezbollah, the Houthis, maybe the threat that comes from terrorists who come from Jordan — and to prepare for the next war, which will come. ............... President Biden wants Israelis to stop the war when Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, is still on his feet, and most Israelis don’t want it. Biden still believes in the idea of two-state solution. Seventy percent of the Jewish Israeli population is against it. ................. the way to have a peace with the Middle East is not going through Ramallah. You can have peace with the moderate Arab countries based on interests against Iran. ............... Israelis and Saudis and Jordanians want Israel to defeat Hamas. They want Iran to be defeated. They want Hezbollah to be defeated. ................. They don’t want the world to end. They want Hamas to be eliminated. But the funniest thing I heard was from a senior figure in the United Arab Emirates. Remember that in the last government, there was a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood here. And he was furious. And I said, “Why?” I mean, finally, an Arab-Jewish cooperation. He said, “No, the Muslim brotherhood — the only place they are allowed to be in office is in Israel. You’re crazy.”In North Carolina, Remnants of Helene Become an ‘Unprecedented Tragedy’ Thousands of people struggled to cope without basic necessities as authorities searched for the missing, and the overall death toll from the storm surpassed 100. ........... Magda Randolph, 72, who has lived in Asheville for 24 years, said she had never experienced a flooding event this powerful and wondered about the long-term impact........ “Our water system is greatly compromised. Our landfill got compromised,” she said. “It’s unclear what the quality of life is going to be like here for a while.”
Why the World’s Biggest Powers Can’t Stop a Middle East War The United States’ ability to influence events in the Mideast has waned, and other major nations have essentially been onlookers. ............ “There’s more capability in more hands in a world where centrifugal forces are far stronger than centralizing ones,” said Richard Haass, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The Middle East is the primary case study of this dangerous fragmentation.” ........... Mr. Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah over more than three decades and the man who built the Shiite organization into one of the most powerful nonstate armed forces in the world ............ Whether full-scale war will come to Lebanon remains unclear. .............. “Nasrallah represented everything for Hezbollah, and Hezbollah was the advance arm of Iran” ............. China, a major importer of Iranian oil and a major supporter of anything that might weaken the American-led world order that emerged from the ruins in 1945, has little interest in donning the mantle of peacemaker. .......... Iran is cautious because it knows the cost of all-out war could be the end of the Islamic Republic; Egypt fears an enormous influx of Palestinian refugees; and Saudi Arabia seeks a Palestinian state but would not put Saudi lives on the line for that cause. .......... As for Qatar, it funded Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars a year that went in part to the construction of a labyrinthine web of tunnels, some as deep as 250 feet, where Israeli hostages have been held. It enjoyed the complicity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw Hamas as an effective way to undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and so undercut any chance of peace. ............... So in their annual pilgrimage, world leaders troop to the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations, where the Security Council is largely paralyzed by Russian vetoes over any Ukraine-related resolutions and American vetoes over Israel-related resolutions. ..................... There is no global consensus on the need for peace or even a cease-fire. In the past, war in the Middle East led to soaring oil prices and tumbling markets, forcing the world’s attention. Now, said Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, “the attitude is, ‘OK, so be it.’” ................. Mr. Netanyahu has shunned a serious American effort to bring about the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most important country in the Arab and Islamic world, because its price would be some serious commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, the very thing he has devoted his political life to preventing................ “The institutions that have guided international relations and global problem-solving since the mid-20th century are clearly no longer capable of addressing the problems of the new millennium,” Mr. Heintz wrote in a recent essay. “They are inefficient, ineffective, anachronistic, and, in some cases, simply obsolete.” ...... That, too, has been a lesson of the year since Hamas struck.
Iran Is Losing. That May Matter More Than Israel’s Mistakes. Israel’s inexcusable complacency on Oct. 7, 2023, allowed Hamas, a terrorist force with a small fraction of the military strength of the Israel Defense Forces, to kill more Israeli civilians than the vast armies of Egypt and Syria and their allies did at the height of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. ........... Israel’s stunning airstrike on Friday on Hezbollah’s underground headquarters near Beirut, which killed the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the fortunes of war have shifted against Israel’s enemies since Oct. 7. Hamas is losing. Hezbollah is losing. And most important: By extension, Iran is losing. ............. Even if Israel ultimately wins this war, it will have paid a dreadful price. .......... As of late last month, Israel claimed it has killed as many as 17,000 Hamas fighters and “dismantled” 22 of its 24 battalions, while losing fewer than 1,000 soldiers in action in almost a full year of war. ........... On Sept. 17, Israel reportedly orchestrated an attack in which thousands of pagers detonated in the hands and pockets of Hezbollah operatives. The next day Israel reportedly detonated hand-held radios that Hezbollah also used to communicate, and then executed a devastating airstrike on an in-person meeting of Hezbollah leaders, killing several of its senior officials............ In August, the Biden administration approved a $20 billion arms deal with Israel that will allow it to purchase 50 new F-15IA fighters from the United States (helping ensure its qualitative military edge for a generation). And there is currently a huge American naval buildup in the region. The American Navy is fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels in the Red Sea and attempting to deter Iran from launching fresh attacks against Israel.......... the West’s jihadist enemies: Defeat demoralizes them. It’s not that their resistance collapses entirely, but jihadism waxes and wanes depending on its battlefield success.
Sunday, September 29, 2024
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