This blog seems to do better without me. I get more hits when I don't post than when I do. Not sure what persons are looking at, if anything at all, as it is not the posts themselves they are reading. They come from an interesting array of places. The predominant hits are from the United States, France and Singapore. A few stragglers from India, Germany, Japan and Russia. But, the hits usually come in lumps of 300-500 from one place. Yesterday it was Singapore. Never any comments. I googled to see what to make of this spike in activity and the most likely culprit is spam traffic from bots. Anyway, thanks for the hits.
Gaza has almost completely taken over the news cycle. The world is helpless to do anything about it as Israel is carrying out what amounts to a "Nakba" on the Palestinian homeland with the full intention of occupying the northern part of the strip after the war is over.
In this sense it is no different than what Russia is doing to Ukraine. Yet, we see those who condoned Russia actively condemning Israel, and those who condemned Russia accepting Israel's over-aggressive behavior, albeit with caveats. Biden has warned Israel not to occupy Gaza and has said the US would sanction Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians, but has yet to call for a ceasefire like the UN is doing.
Meanwhile, we see that some individuals are getting tired of the war in Ukraine and are publicly offering compromise solutions. Former NATO Chief Rasmussen has suggested NATO accept Ukraine without the Russian occupied territories as a "stern warning" that Russia cannot block such efforts. Yet, such an action would essentially cede these territories to Russia, allowing Putin to claim victory.
Splitting a country has never resulted in long-lasting positive results. All we have to do is look at Israel to see this. The former Palestine Mandate was split apart when Israel chose to declare its independence from the British Mandate in 1948, leaving two separate territories for Palestinians, which were subsequently recognized by the UN. In 1967, Israel claimed these territories as well, although has treated them as separate homelands so as not to give the Palestinians a voice in their government, a scheme not much unlike Apartheid South Africa. Since then it has been constant conflict with Israel using ever more draconian methods to quell the unrest, including a concrete wall in the early 2000s to shut off what remained of these territories from the rest of Israel. Israeli settlers have occupied as much as 20% of former Palestinian homelands.
In Ukraine's case, Rasmussen is suggesting the Dnipro River. Everything West belongs to Ukraine. Everything east would be absorbed into Russia. While it may seem like a natural boundary, it is anything but. The former Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine included everything east of the Dnipro including Crimea. When these oblasts voted in a 1991 referendum for independence from the Soviet Union, they all voted to join Ukraine by overwhelming majorities. None voted to lag behind, not even Crimea where the greatest concentration of ethnic Russians resided. I suppose if they had a choice between Ukraine or Russia they may have voted differently, but no one wanted to be part of the Soviet Union anymore, not even Russia which also voted for secession that year.
Yet, the current Duma has proclaimed Russia the rightful heir to the former Soviet Union. In its maximalist view, Russia sees not just Ukraine but all the former Soviet republics as illegitimate countries, including the Baltic states, which were the first to secede in 1990. Putin shares this view and has written quite extensively on the subject. This anachronistic view, in equal parts Imperial Russian and Soviet, is why Russia cannot be trusted in any form of negotiations.
The same goes for Israel. Theirs is a "Biblical Maximalism" based on what its religious conservatives regard as the United Kingdom of Solomon and David that would take in much of the Levant, not just the Palestinian territories. These religious conservatives have gone out of their way in recent years to claim that the idea of Palestine is a false construct and that there are no real Palestinians. An argument Russians often use to discredit the existence of Ukraine.
In short, I condemn the actions Israel has taken in Gaza for the same reason I condemn Russia for its actions in Ukraine. Both are reprehensible and entirely unjustified and should be equally condemned by all countries who believe in self-determination. The horrendous actions of a single party, in this case Hamas, does not represent the entire Palestinian people, yet we see the Israeli Defense Force literally razing Gaza City to the ground, much like Russian military forces did Mariupol in an effort to root out the Azov battalion, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. We should look at these two special military operations in the same light.
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