Well said. You accurately describe the US situation and the interplay amongst those who would wish us ill. While I find little cheer in your analysis, there is little to be found.
Before Mr. Netanyahu came to power, Israel's great historical leaders, whatever their political sensibilities, were acutely aware of this vulnerability the Yom Kippur War made manifest.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had seen at close quarters the peril to the homeland, defended, with unparalleled conviction and political will, the idea that there would be no peace or serenity for Israel if the Palestinians were not also recognized as a free and sovereign state.
At Camp David, Menachem Begin, who came from the right of the right, courageously made the choice of peace with Israel's main enemy, post-Nasser Egypt.
Ariel Sharon, who had realized the powerlessness of force during his controversial intervention in Lebanon, had, on the eve of the health accident that was to strike him down, decided to lead his country to renounce its colonial ambitions in the West Bank.
These men had foreseen and fully recognized, for Yitzhak Rabin at least, that Israel would only find peace on condition that it established a balanced relationship with the Arab states around it, and with the men and women of Palestine, based on mutual respect and the sharing of the benefits of peace.
The break in Israeli policy introduced in recent years by Mr. Netanyahu's successive governments is certainly not the sole cause of the new situation, but it has contributed mightily to it.
The Israeli Prime Minister and his government - built in a break with the secular, liberal tradition that has dominated Israel's domestic history since its inception - have seemed oblivious to this structural vulnerability of the Hebrew state, and have acted as if the Palestinian problem belonged to the past, and that there was no longer any reason to take into account the expectations or fear the initiatives coming from a Palestinian community that is divided, disqualified and, in its most extreme forms - those of Hamas - quite simply bought off by its enemy.
On a technical level, it is clear that Mr. Netanyahu, who is without doubt the least well-versed in military affairs of all the heads of government who have preceeded him in office since the creation of Israel, has not been able to maintain, between the political authorities, the IDF and the intelligence services, the close solidarity necessary for the constant mobilization of the security apparatus on the right issues. In the short term, these shortcomings have had serious consequences.
However, the main issue is political. Mr. Netanyahu seemed to imagine that the establishment of peaceful and cooperative relations with Israel's Arab neighbors - an excellent ambition in itself, and one that will prove highly useful tomorrow in the necessary quest for appeasement - could have the indirect, but in his view precious, power to absolve Israel from seeking a balanced and respectful agreement with the Palestinians, respectful of their deepest expectations and aspirations.
What's more, with the Abraham Accords having enabled the Arab states to abandon the Palestinians to their sad fate, the Israeli government felt free to embark on a creeping but brutal and determined relaunch of its settlement policy in the West Bank.
Israel's policy has changed, but it would be unfair to attribute to the Hebrew state the monopoly of the new brutalization of the world from which the horror of October 7 emerged. Everywhere, the forces committed to moderation, cooperation and peace have been defeated. That the Palestinians have been increasingly and suicidally tempted to take refuge in a kind of political nihilism cannot, alas, surprise us. Could a population with no future, and therefore no hope, be tempted by moderate parties with nothing to offer?
The United States, too, bears its share of historical responsibility for arming the trap, having given little encouragement to European efforts in favor of a peace process based on the quest for a two-state solution, and having, at Donald Trump's instigation, swung over to the crime-pusher camp by breaking the Paris agreements with Iran and endorsing the transfer of its embassy to Jerusalem.
Europe, for its part, lacked neither lucidity nor imagination in its obstinacy to support the only model capable of transforming long-standing adversaries into partners, but it proved incapable of withstanding the shock when President Trump decided to sound the charge against any solution based on balance and common sense - strength of analysis, weakness of will.
How, in these conditions, can we fail to see that it is today the ideological heirs of the assassins of Anwar el-Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin who together hold the pen of the tragedy that is being written before our eyes?
What can we do to help peoples in distress chart the right course? In the short term, we must ensure that a legitimate counter-attack, aimed exclusively at destroying the aggressor's military means, avoids the two major pitfalls that everyone has clearly identified. Firstly, the risk of an uncontrolled escalation that could lead to a general conflagration. Behind Hamas, there is Hezbollah; behind Hezbollah, there is Iran; behind Iran, there are Russia and China.
In this respect, let us pay a fitting tribute to the composure and commitment of President Biden who, unlike his predecessor, is unquestionably putting the full weight of the United States behind moderation, de-escalation, the release of hostages and the right to life of civilian populations.
The second major risk is that of mass annihilation of civilian populations, used by some as human shields and by others as an outlet for the temptation of revenge, to use the worrying expression of the Israeli Prime Minister.
As the Prime Minister rightly pointed out, France is strongly committed to this essential issue. As well as issuing warnings, the European Union must shoulder all its responsibilities to work with humanitarian organizations to ensure the massive delivery of life-saving supplies to a civilian population in deep distress. Let's make these strong gestures the instrument for the return of the hostages.
There are times and places when it is criminal not to be there. Europe would never recover from remaining passive in such dramatic circumstances. All that remains is to build a future of peace. This is a daunting task, given the wall of distress and hatred that now separates Israelis and Palestinians. Today, it is both too late and too early to establish two states on Palestinian soil.
It is, however, time - indeed, high time - to start creating the conditions that will make this dual creation possible when the time comes. The first of these conditions is for Israel to put an end to its colonization policy and finally recognize that the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be achieved by exporting Western Palestinians to Egypt and Eastern Palestinians to Jordan.
The second of these conditions is to recreate, notably with the support of the moderate states of the Abrahamic Pact, an active, respected Palestinian authority capable of taking over in Gaza from an ashen Hamas and negotiating a status that respects Palestinian rights. Beyond the Middle East, good will exists, like that of Brazil, whose draft resolution France was right to support at the UN. It's up to us to join their efforts.
I would like to conclude by mentioning the essential role that the European Union must play in the service of peace in this tormented but close region. Europe, shattered and ruined, has rebuilt itself on a simple and powerful idea, the one that guided the Franco-German reconciliation: we can only find peace with our long-standing adversaries if we take their legitimate needs into account. It's up to Europe to convince Palestinians and Israelis of the relevance of its reconciliation plan, and it's up to France to convince our partners to rise to this historic challenge.
Brilliantly and forcefully stated regarding the US and Australia! The situation here in the US is worse than you state: it is a toxic, radioactive dumpster fire of a omnishambolic clusterfuck. Right now we must work to ensure Biden remains in office in 2024 because I fear if the Democrats lose, the entire world will suffer. It is amazing to me after all these years, that we have forgotten that appeasement leads to catastrophe. Yet, here we are. NATO failed to stand up to Putin’s little green men, Netanyahu played footsie with Hamas and other proto authoritarians and we are now in this mess.
The problem goes back even further to making bad strategic decisions regarding Iraq and Iran that haunt us to this day. The failure to understand real threats vs civil wars/national self determination movements in the 1950s-1970s haunt us as well.
Jean-Louis Bourlanges, president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the National Assembly, gives the French view on the situation:
On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided, by thirty-three votes to thirteen, to create the State of Israel, while taking care to propose the parallel establishment of a Palestinian state which, following the war that greeted the UN decision, never saw the light of day. This solemn vote committed the international community to both the inalienable right of the Jewish people to live in a free and sovereign state, and the nagging problem posed by the indefinitely deferred emergence of its Palestinian twin. Israel was born, Ishmael remained in limbo; the tragedy was taking its course in the heart of a Middle East torn apart by the Cold War.
On October 7, this interminable tragedy took a decisively new and exceptionally serious course: Israel found itself confronted with a paramilitary aggression of the first magnitude, led by Hamas determined to trample on all the principles, rules and customs governing relations between peoples, whether at war or at peace.
If words have a meaning, it is clear that the aggression carried out by Hamas is terrorist, constituting a generalized war crime, and backed by a discourse of a genocidal nature. Hamas uses the worst forms of violence against the population for the sole purpose of frightening and intimidating: this is terrorism. Hamas wages war only on civilians, the very definition and maximum extension of a war crime! The Hamas faithful do not hesitate to call not just for the disappearance of the State of Israel, but for the elimination of Jews as Jews! This is the very expression of a desire for genocide, a crime against humanity.
Faced with such an undertaking. Israel has an absolute right to defend itself. But the fundamental question, brutally highlighted by Hamas's bloody initiative, is how to ensure Israel's long-term security. And it is on the answer to this question that our short- and medium-term reactions, and those of the Hebrew state, must depend. How can a state of 20,770 square kilometers, populated by less than seven million Jews, the spearhead of a human community of nearly thirteen million people, hope to live sustainably in peace and security in the midst of a presumably hostile environment of more than one and a half billion Muslims?
The wrong answer to this question, but also the most tempting, is of course the wall, the cordon sanitaire, supposedly able to shield the heavily militarized Hebrew state from all the threats around it. The combination of Israel's demographic weakness and the general spread of short- and medium-range weapons of destruction has gradually created a situation of extreme security vulnerability for the Hebrew state. Not even Israel's nuclear weapons can ensure the survival of a state that concentrates its entire population in such a small area.
In order to define France's policy, that of the European Union and, more generally, that of the international community in the face of this terrible situation, we need to analyze, without blinkers or prejudices, what has changed on the Middle Eastern scene in recent years. As Archbishop Vesco of Algiers rightly said: "Hamas's barbaric violence is without excuse, but it is not without cause."
Democracy is messy. Dictators look tidy and ordered until they are not. To paraphrase Mark Twain “the reports of democracies death are greatly exaggerated”. Democracy will get through this. My bigger fear is people destroying democracy cause they see threats everywhere that aren’t there.
“Misinformation” for example. Who decides what is allowed on the way to working something out? It takes a lot of words and discussion generally to reach a consensus. Trying to get to the truth can look messy.
As an example look at the Covid response I mean why were kids kept out of schools when they had almost zero risk from Covid? There were legitimate concerns raised about disruption key years of children’s education and growth yet it was censored as “misinformation”.
Many other examples that turned out to end up as consensus (eg Chinese lab leak is now accepted by Biden admin) should give everyone pause about who decides what is allowed and isn’t. If you think Biden is ok to decide that then what about if Trump decides next time? The default should always be free and open debate in a democracy.
I fear those of us who are willing to deny that democratic freedom by insiders more than those dictators any day.
Some quotes to say what I’m thinking better than I can:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance."
Events is that even Egypt doesn’t want Hamas to enter their territory and isn’t accepting even civilians fleeing. They know full well after decades fighting the Muslim brotherhood what they are up against. That to me shows that even Muslim countries don’t want this radical Islamic Jihad ideology. The whole Palestinian issue is likely a scapegoat/distraction for various regional government failings in the region is my conclusion.
Step one is recognizing that the US has only ever been *barely* a democracy and has never truly united. It is multiple nations crammed together in a system that no longer functions and can't because partisanship is self-sustaining, identity based, and highly profitable.
The USA is now the weakest link in the purported global alliance of democracies. Worse, Americans refuse to take a hard look at the systemic nature of their partisan conflict or step back to try and fix the thing - if that's even still possible.
An exploding nuclear device makes for a poor long-term partner. That's where the USA is. Hedge accordingly, or be surprised the way Israel was.
Canada, from a defence perspective, is in even worse shape. And no political party seems interested in doing what’s required to make a greater contribution to Western security. We (Canada) have done a lot for Ukraine, making important and timely contributions, but we MUST do more.
Well said. You accurately describe the US situation and the interplay amongst those who would wish us ill. While I find little cheer in your analysis, there is little to be found.
Before Mr. Netanyahu came to power, Israel's great historical leaders, whatever their political sensibilities, were acutely aware of this vulnerability the Yom Kippur War made manifest.
Yitzhak Rabin, who had seen at close quarters the peril to the homeland, defended, with unparalleled conviction and political will, the idea that there would be no peace or serenity for Israel if the Palestinians were not also recognized as a free and sovereign state.
At Camp David, Menachem Begin, who came from the right of the right, courageously made the choice of peace with Israel's main enemy, post-Nasser Egypt.
Ariel Sharon, who had realized the powerlessness of force during his controversial intervention in Lebanon, had, on the eve of the health accident that was to strike him down, decided to lead his country to renounce its colonial ambitions in the West Bank.
These men had foreseen and fully recognized, for Yitzhak Rabin at least, that Israel would only find peace on condition that it established a balanced relationship with the Arab states around it, and with the men and women of Palestine, based on mutual respect and the sharing of the benefits of peace.
The break in Israeli policy introduced in recent years by Mr. Netanyahu's successive governments is certainly not the sole cause of the new situation, but it has contributed mightily to it.
The Israeli Prime Minister and his government - built in a break with the secular, liberal tradition that has dominated Israel's domestic history since its inception - have seemed oblivious to this structural vulnerability of the Hebrew state, and have acted as if the Palestinian problem belonged to the past, and that there was no longer any reason to take into account the expectations or fear the initiatives coming from a Palestinian community that is divided, disqualified and, in its most extreme forms - those of Hamas - quite simply bought off by its enemy.
On a technical level, it is clear that Mr. Netanyahu, who is without doubt the least well-versed in military affairs of all the heads of government who have preceeded him in office since the creation of Israel, has not been able to maintain, between the political authorities, the IDF and the intelligence services, the close solidarity necessary for the constant mobilization of the security apparatus on the right issues. In the short term, these shortcomings have had serious consequences.
However, the main issue is political. Mr. Netanyahu seemed to imagine that the establishment of peaceful and cooperative relations with Israel's Arab neighbors - an excellent ambition in itself, and one that will prove highly useful tomorrow in the necessary quest for appeasement - could have the indirect, but in his view precious, power to absolve Israel from seeking a balanced and respectful agreement with the Palestinians, respectful of their deepest expectations and aspirations.
What's more, with the Abraham Accords having enabled the Arab states to abandon the Palestinians to their sad fate, the Israeli government felt free to embark on a creeping but brutal and determined relaunch of its settlement policy in the West Bank.
Israel's policy has changed, but it would be unfair to attribute to the Hebrew state the monopoly of the new brutalization of the world from which the horror of October 7 emerged. Everywhere, the forces committed to moderation, cooperation and peace have been defeated. That the Palestinians have been increasingly and suicidally tempted to take refuge in a kind of political nihilism cannot, alas, surprise us. Could a population with no future, and therefore no hope, be tempted by moderate parties with nothing to offer?
The United States, too, bears its share of historical responsibility for arming the trap, having given little encouragement to European efforts in favor of a peace process based on the quest for a two-state solution, and having, at Donald Trump's instigation, swung over to the crime-pusher camp by breaking the Paris agreements with Iran and endorsing the transfer of its embassy to Jerusalem.
Europe, for its part, lacked neither lucidity nor imagination in its obstinacy to support the only model capable of transforming long-standing adversaries into partners, but it proved incapable of withstanding the shock when President Trump decided to sound the charge against any solution based on balance and common sense - strength of analysis, weakness of will.
How, in these conditions, can we fail to see that it is today the ideological heirs of the assassins of Anwar el-Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin who together hold the pen of the tragedy that is being written before our eyes?
What can we do to help peoples in distress chart the right course? In the short term, we must ensure that a legitimate counter-attack, aimed exclusively at destroying the aggressor's military means, avoids the two major pitfalls that everyone has clearly identified. Firstly, the risk of an uncontrolled escalation that could lead to a general conflagration. Behind Hamas, there is Hezbollah; behind Hezbollah, there is Iran; behind Iran, there are Russia and China.
In this respect, let us pay a fitting tribute to the composure and commitment of President Biden who, unlike his predecessor, is unquestionably putting the full weight of the United States behind moderation, de-escalation, the release of hostages and the right to life of civilian populations.
The second major risk is that of mass annihilation of civilian populations, used by some as human shields and by others as an outlet for the temptation of revenge, to use the worrying expression of the Israeli Prime Minister.
As the Prime Minister rightly pointed out, France is strongly committed to this essential issue. As well as issuing warnings, the European Union must shoulder all its responsibilities to work with humanitarian organizations to ensure the massive delivery of life-saving supplies to a civilian population in deep distress. Let's make these strong gestures the instrument for the return of the hostages.
There are times and places when it is criminal not to be there. Europe would never recover from remaining passive in such dramatic circumstances. All that remains is to build a future of peace. This is a daunting task, given the wall of distress and hatred that now separates Israelis and Palestinians. Today, it is both too late and too early to establish two states on Palestinian soil.
It is, however, time - indeed, high time - to start creating the conditions that will make this dual creation possible when the time comes. The first of these conditions is for Israel to put an end to its colonization policy and finally recognize that the solution to the Palestinian problem cannot be achieved by exporting Western Palestinians to Egypt and Eastern Palestinians to Jordan.
The second of these conditions is to recreate, notably with the support of the moderate states of the Abrahamic Pact, an active, respected Palestinian authority capable of taking over in Gaza from an ashen Hamas and negotiating a status that respects Palestinian rights. Beyond the Middle East, good will exists, like that of Brazil, whose draft resolution France was right to support at the UN. It's up to us to join their efforts.
I would like to conclude by mentioning the essential role that the European Union must play in the service of peace in this tormented but close region. Europe, shattered and ruined, has rebuilt itself on a simple and powerful idea, the one that guided the Franco-German reconciliation: we can only find peace with our long-standing adversaries if we take their legitimate needs into account. It's up to Europe to convince Palestinians and Israelis of the relevance of its reconciliation plan, and it's up to France to convince our partners to rise to this historic challenge.
Brilliantly and forcefully stated regarding the US and Australia! The situation here in the US is worse than you state: it is a toxic, radioactive dumpster fire of a omnishambolic clusterfuck. Right now we must work to ensure Biden remains in office in 2024 because I fear if the Democrats lose, the entire world will suffer. It is amazing to me after all these years, that we have forgotten that appeasement leads to catastrophe. Yet, here we are. NATO failed to stand up to Putin’s little green men, Netanyahu played footsie with Hamas and other proto authoritarians and we are now in this mess.
The problem goes back even further to making bad strategic decisions regarding Iraq and Iran that haunt us to this day. The failure to understand real threats vs civil wars/national self determination movements in the 1950s-1970s haunt us as well.
Jean-Louis Bourlanges, president of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the National Assembly, gives the French view on the situation:
On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided, by thirty-three votes to thirteen, to create the State of Israel, while taking care to propose the parallel establishment of a Palestinian state which, following the war that greeted the UN decision, never saw the light of day. This solemn vote committed the international community to both the inalienable right of the Jewish people to live in a free and sovereign state, and the nagging problem posed by the indefinitely deferred emergence of its Palestinian twin. Israel was born, Ishmael remained in limbo; the tragedy was taking its course in the heart of a Middle East torn apart by the Cold War.
On October 7, this interminable tragedy took a decisively new and exceptionally serious course: Israel found itself confronted with a paramilitary aggression of the first magnitude, led by Hamas determined to trample on all the principles, rules and customs governing relations between peoples, whether at war or at peace.
If words have a meaning, it is clear that the aggression carried out by Hamas is terrorist, constituting a generalized war crime, and backed by a discourse of a genocidal nature. Hamas uses the worst forms of violence against the population for the sole purpose of frightening and intimidating: this is terrorism. Hamas wages war only on civilians, the very definition and maximum extension of a war crime! The Hamas faithful do not hesitate to call not just for the disappearance of the State of Israel, but for the elimination of Jews as Jews! This is the very expression of a desire for genocide, a crime against humanity.
Faced with such an undertaking. Israel has an absolute right to defend itself. But the fundamental question, brutally highlighted by Hamas's bloody initiative, is how to ensure Israel's long-term security. And it is on the answer to this question that our short- and medium-term reactions, and those of the Hebrew state, must depend. How can a state of 20,770 square kilometers, populated by less than seven million Jews, the spearhead of a human community of nearly thirteen million people, hope to live sustainably in peace and security in the midst of a presumably hostile environment of more than one and a half billion Muslims?
The wrong answer to this question, but also the most tempting, is of course the wall, the cordon sanitaire, supposedly able to shield the heavily militarized Hebrew state from all the threats around it. The combination of Israel's demographic weakness and the general spread of short- and medium-range weapons of destruction has gradually created a situation of extreme security vulnerability for the Hebrew state. Not even Israel's nuclear weapons can ensure the survival of a state that concentrates its entire population in such a small area.
In order to define France's policy, that of the European Union and, more generally, that of the international community in the face of this terrible situation, we need to analyze, without blinkers or prejudices, what has changed on the Middle Eastern scene in recent years. As Archbishop Vesco of Algiers rightly said: "Hamas's barbaric violence is without excuse, but it is not without cause."
Democracy is messy. Dictators look tidy and ordered until they are not. To paraphrase Mark Twain “the reports of democracies death are greatly exaggerated”. Democracy will get through this. My bigger fear is people destroying democracy cause they see threats everywhere that aren’t there.
“Misinformation” for example. Who decides what is allowed on the way to working something out? It takes a lot of words and discussion generally to reach a consensus. Trying to get to the truth can look messy.
As an example look at the Covid response I mean why were kids kept out of schools when they had almost zero risk from Covid? There were legitimate concerns raised about disruption key years of children’s education and growth yet it was censored as “misinformation”.
Many other examples that turned out to end up as consensus (eg Chinese lab leak is now accepted by Biden admin) should give everyone pause about who decides what is allowed and isn’t. If you think Biden is ok to decide that then what about if Trump decides next time? The default should always be free and open debate in a democracy.
I fear those of us who are willing to deny that democratic freedom by insiders more than those dictators any day.
Some quotes to say what I’m thinking better than I can:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
- Benjamin Franklin
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance."
- Woodrow Wilson
The most telling part of the Israel
Events is that even Egypt doesn’t want Hamas to enter their territory and isn’t accepting even civilians fleeing. They know full well after decades fighting the Muslim brotherhood what they are up against. That to me shows that even Muslim countries don’t want this radical Islamic Jihad ideology. The whole Palestinian issue is likely a scapegoat/distraction for various regional government failings in the region is my conclusion.
Step one is recognizing that the US has only ever been *barely* a democracy and has never truly united. It is multiple nations crammed together in a system that no longer functions and can't because partisanship is self-sustaining, identity based, and highly profitable.
The USA is now the weakest link in the purported global alliance of democracies. Worse, Americans refuse to take a hard look at the systemic nature of their partisan conflict or step back to try and fix the thing - if that's even still possible.
An exploding nuclear device makes for a poor long-term partner. That's where the USA is. Hedge accordingly, or be surprised the way Israel was.
Canada, from a defence perspective, is in even worse shape. And no political party seems interested in doing what’s required to make a greater contribution to Western security. We (Canada) have done a lot for Ukraine, making important and timely contributions, but we MUST do more.