Archive for May, 2024

No one in Israel’s government has a decent vision for “the day after”

Thursday, May 23rd, 2024

During the first few days after the Hamas 10/7 massacre with its raping, pillaging, plundering, and hostage taking, the world (for the most part) rallied to Israel’s cause, just as it did to ours in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

No one knew what to do. No one knew what the Israelis would do. But everyone knew Israel had to do something in response to the worst day for the Jews of the world since the Holocaust when Auschwitz had patented industrialized murder.

The far right Netanyahu government, deciding its mission was to destroy Hamas down to the last soldier, attempted to do just that. Now, Gaza has been reduced to a rubble reminiscent of the apocalyptic bombing of Dresden and more than 35,000 innocent civilians have been killed; parts of the Gazan Strip are in deep famine, with about 1.1 million people starving, according to the IPC classification; much of the world has turned on Israel; Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has asked ICC judges for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant and high ranking Hamas leaders for crimes against humanity (which the Biden administration decried as “false equivalence”); and Hamas still lives and continues to hold Israeli hostages — a condition that has cracked wide the once unified Israeli public opinion¹. And I won’t even mention the college campus protests that rocked the U.S. over the last few months.

The entire world wants to know when and how this will end — and what will happen on what the world now calls “the day after?”

Clearly, since the massacre of 7 October, the vast majority of Gazans, who had nothing to do with the barbaric slaughter, have been walking through fields of blood. Israelis, initially united in their quest to destroy Hamas, are now not so sure. Seven months following the slaughter, Israel’s IDF says it has eradicated 75% of Hamas’s military capability, but that four battalions remain in Rafah. In traditional warfare, this would constitute victory. But not here. According to David Ignatius, writing this week in the Washington Post, “Hamas appears to have decided not to stand and fight but instead to melt into the population as a guerrilla force. This will be a continuing headache for Israel…”

And then, there are those hostages.

During the attack of 7 October, Hamas took 252 hostages who hailed from more than 40 countries including Israel, America, Thailand, the Philippines, and Uruguay. The following month, the two sides struck a temporary ceasefire agreement that saw 105 civilian hostages released from Hamas captivity, including 81 Israelis, 23 Thai nationals, and one Filipino. Now, six months later, 125 are still unaccounted for, mostly Israelis,  and 37 are presumed dead, but Israeli and American officials estimate privately that the number of dead hostages could be much higher.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his coalition treat the hostages as unavoidable collateral damage, much like the tens of thousands of Gazan dead.

It is obvious that this is a situation in dire need of a solution, but is there one?

Writing in the Washington Post on 15 May, Loveday Morris, Shira Rubin and Hazem Balousha described a major flaw in Israel’s battle plans:

It was last December when the Israeli military declared victory in the Jabalya refugee camp, saying it had broken Hamas’s grip on its traditional stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip.

“Jabalya is not the Jabalya it used to be,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of Division 162, said at the time, adding that “hundreds of terrorists” had been killed and 500 suspects arrested.

Five months later, Israeli forces are back in Jabalya. Ground troops are pushing into the densely packed camp, backed by artillery and airstrikes — one in a string of recent “re-clearing” operations launched by the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas, whose fighters have rapidly regrouped in areas vacated by the IDF.

As one U.S. official told the Post’s Max Boot, “The Israelis are showing how not to do counterinsurgency.”

Someone who does know how to do counterinsurgency is General David Petraeus (now retired), who implemented “the surge” in Iraq in 2007 and 2008.

The surge was highly successful. It worked, because Petaeus and his team changed strategy, which had centered on fighting insurgents and then retiring to a base camp. This was not working. Max Boot reached out to Petraeus about Israel’s strategy, which has pretty much paralleled that of the U.S.’s unsuccessful efforts prior to the surge. Petaeus replied via email, which Boot quoted in his column of 13 May. According to Petraeus, Gaza is:

“vastly more challenging than Fallujah, Ramadi, Baqubah and Mosul combined, but the correct approach is a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign that features the traditional tasks of Clear (areas of Hamas terrorists), Hold (keep the civilians secure from Hamas reinfiltration), and Build (provide ample humanitarian assistance, restore the basic services to the people, and then rebuild the many damaged and destroyed areas so that the population can return).”

Petraeus believes Israel’s IDF is fine at “clearing,” but absent when it comes to “holding” and “building.”

Israel seems to have no plans at all for rebuilding bombed out Gaza, which is now unlivable. Without such plans, its seven month war may have killed a few thousand Hamas militants and destroyed many miles of Hamas’s tunnels, but it has left a bruised and battered Gazan population out of which will grow new and improved terrorists even more dangerous than the ones they’ll replace. Israel’s current government is totally unequipped to prevent this from happening.

Last week, according to reporter Bar Peleg of Haaretz, right wing Israeli settlers in the West Bank wounded a Palestinian truck driver by hitting him in the head with a stone, believing that his truck, along with another, was carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Footage from the scene indicates that the activists stopped the two trucks on Wednesday near the Givat Asaf settlement, unloaded their cargo, deflated their tires, and set them on fire. They left the stoned driver lying in the middle of the road. Police arrived and arrested nobody. IDF soldiers, who have no policing authority in the West Bank and must defer to settler police, tried to give aid to the drivers, but were later attacked by the settlers. The settlers are backed by far right ministers in the government, who are settlers themselves.

These are the people Benjamin Netanyahu has hitched his wagon to.

Right now, the only thing we know for sure about the plan for the day after is that there isn’t one.

____________________

From The Guardian, 13 May: In an Israeli opinion poll published on Channel 11, a public broadcaster, a week before the invasion of Rafah, 47% of those asked supported an end to the war in Gaza in return for the release of the Israeli hostages, while only 32% were against. Even after the Israeli war cabinet unanimously rejected Hamas’s offer – the mainstream media described Hamas’s acceptance of the deal as fraudulent – 41% of those surveyed wanted Israel to accept it, while 44% were against it.

What do college students really think of the war in Gaza and the campus protests?

Wednesday, May 8th, 2024

They’re ambivalent.

College protests against Israel’s war in Gaza are dominating headlines. But only a sliver of students are participating or view it as a top issue, according to a new Generation Lab representative survey of 1,250 college students.

Generation Lab is a data intelligence company studying and measuring attitudes and views of American youth on current issues and policies, such as key social, political, economic, and health trends. The firm works with NBC News, the New York Times, and other leading media organizations.

In the survey released this week, the firm found that college students, on the whole, rank the war in Gaza low on a list of serious issues they care about, with only 13% saying the issue is important to them.

Digging deeper, the survey reveals only a small minority (8%) of them have participated in either side of the protests.

Moreover, three times as many college students blame Hamas for the current situation in Gaza than they do President Biden. Specifically, 34% blame Hamas, while 19% blame Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, 12% blame the Israeli people, and 12% blame Biden.

The survey also found an overwhelming majority (81%) of students support holding protesters accountable, agreeing with the notion that those who destroyed property or vandalized or illegally occupied buildings should be held responsible by their university.

A majority (67%) of the surveyed students also say occupying campus buildings is unacceptable and 58% agree it’s unacceptable to refuse a university’s order to disperse.

The student demonstrations—which have included on-campus encampments and building takeovers—have been met with suspensions, expulsions, arrests, police force and canceled commencement ceremonies.

So far, Columbia University and the University of Southern California have cancelled graduation commencement exercises. A protester disrupted graduation ceremonies at Northeastern University, but the event went on, anyway.

This senior class is the same class that lost its high school graduation ceremonies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, many will once again get their college diploma by mail, although Columbia plans on holding small ceremonies at each of its four undergraduate schools and 16 graduate schools.

CNN interviewed one of the protesters, a senior, at USC. She was asked about the commencement cancellation, and replied, “A cancelled commencement is a small price to pay for Palestinian freedom.” Given that the Generation Lab survey found the war in Gaza ranked 9th on a list of important issues to college students, this comment seems remarkably hubristic.

The Generation Lab survey has a margin of error is +/- 2.7 percentage points.

Presented without (much) comment

On NBC’s Meet The Press this past Sunday, host Kristen Welker tried seven times to get Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) to say if he would accept the results of the upcoming election if Donald Trump lost. Scott, who is believed to be doing all in his power to become Trump’s running mate and Chief Sycophant, refused to do so. I give Welker points for a good try.

Ukrainian and Russian negotiators nearly ended the war three months after it began. This is the story of their failure.

Friday, May 3rd, 2024

On 16 April, writing in Foreign Affairs, Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko detailed a series of talks between Ukrainian and Russian representatives that took place between early March and late May, 2022, aimed at creating an agreement to end the fighting that had begun with Russia’s unprecedented invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. The talks involved concessions on both sides.

The world watched what it thought were pro forma talks that were never going to go anywhere. What the world did not know was how close the negotiators came to a deal that would have ended the fighting.

Charap is Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. Radchenko is Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Europe. These are not lightweights.

Charap and Radchenko argue that a war Putin expected to be a cakewalk was in its first two months proving anything but, especially when its troops were routed on their way to Kyiv and were forced to beat a hasty withdrawal, a withdrawal that did not allow them time to cover up the atrocities they had committed in Bucha and Irpin. Nevertheless, even before that, in mid-March, Putin suddenly became open to talking. He appeared to have abandoned his initial idea of outright regime change in favor of taking whatever he could get through diplomatic negotiation.

At the beginning of the talks, Russia’s two major demands were, first, Ukraine must agree never to join NATO, and, second, it must significantly reduce the size and capability of its armed forces. According to the Ukrainian negotiators, in addition to not being able to defend itself, agreeing to the Russian demands amounted to nothing more than Ukrainian capitulation. For their part, the Ukrainian negotiators insisted on a Russian withdrawal to pre-invasion lines, but showed openness on many other key issues, such as, through negotiations over the next fifteen years resolving the problem of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

But things changed on 31 March when Ukrainian troops arrived in Bucha and found the  mutilated, tortured, raped, and executed bodies of about 450 civilians lying in streets and mass graves. President Zelenskyy went to see the carnage himself, the first time he had left Kyiv since the invasion. His revulsion and anger were palpable, and his position hardened.

But the two sides continued talking.

The authors write:

By the end of March 2022, a series of in-person meetings in Belarus and Turkey and virtual engagements over video conference had produced the so-called Istanbul Communiqué, which described a framework for a settlement. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators then began working on the text of a treaty, making substantial progress toward an agreement. But in May, the talks broke off. The war raged on and has since cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

The Istanbul Communiqué of 29 March 2022 included ten proposals that Charap and Radchenko write, “would have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.”

Why did the talks fail and, if they had not, what would have been the result?

Given the Ukrainian army’s success in forcing the Russian army’s retreat from around Kyiv and the horrid discoveries in Bucha and Irpin, it would be easy to lay the failure of negotiations there, and they certainly had a great deal to do with it. But it’s more complicated than that, as proven by the two sides continuing to talk for nearly another two months.

Charap and Radchenko list a number of reasons, all logical, for the collapse of the talks:

  1. Ukraine’s early battlefield victories in defeating the Russian Army’s attempt to capture Kyiv, which gave Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy hope for actually winning the war;
  2. The 31 March discovery of Russian atrocities, war crimes really, in Bucha and Irpin that further hardened Ukrainian resolve;
  3. A provision of the agreement requiring Russia to agree to Ukraine’s entrance into the European Union in exchange for Ukraine’s agreement to remain neutral and never join NATO, a provision which Ukraine’s western allies refused to agree to;
  4. The western allies commitment at the time to do all in their power to bring Russia down, both militarily on the battlefield and economically through increasingly onerous sanctions, a position they pressed on President Zelenskyy (who did not need a lot of pressing); and,
  5. The requirement that Ukraine’s western allies guarantee Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, which would have created new commitments for the U.S. and its allies to ensure Ukraine’s security in the event of another Russian attack sometime in the future.

It is that last point, the one about guaranteeing Ukraine’s permanent neutrality, that concerns me. This happened once before, and the guarantee led to and precipitated World War I.

Let me explain by taking you back to the Netherlands, to Belgium, to the 1831 Conference of London, to the 1839 Treaty of London, and, 75 years later, to August 1914.

The Netherlands controlled Belgium from 1815 to 1830. In July of 1830, the Belgians revolted and proclaimed their country an independent kingdom. Fighting, of course, ensued. In 1831 at the Conference of London the major Europeans countries recognized Belgium’s de facto independence. For the rest of the 1830s, the Netherlands and Belgium were sporadically at war.

In 1939, in the Treaty of London, the Five Great Powers — Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom — officially recognized the independent Kingdom of Belgium and also pledged to guarantee Belgium’s permanent neutrality. This meant that if any country, including the five Treaty signers, violated Belgium neutrality, the other co-signatories would come to Belgium’s aid.

Despite the Treaty of London, Germany declared war on France and, taking the shortest route, invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914 on its way to Paris (which its armies never reached, just as Putin’s Blitzkrieg never reached Kyiv). That evening, Britain declared war on Germany, because it had pledged to do so 75 years earlier by signing the Treaty of London. Informed by the British ambassador that Britain would go to war with Germany over the latter’s violation of Belgian neutrality as guaranteed by the Treaty of London, German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg said he could not believe Britain would do this over a mere “scrap of paper.” But that scrap of paper is what turned a German rematch of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, into World War I, a war which killed an estimated 70–85 million people, about 40 million of whom were civilians.

The pledge of “guaranteed neutrality” is a wickedly heavy responsibility. In this case it would elevate Ukraine to the same standing as NATO countries all governed by NATO’s Article 5, which states that an armed attack on one member state is considered an attack on all member states. Essentially, Ukraine, without being a member of NATO, would have the same protection as every NATO member, the same protection Belgium had in 1914.

Would that be in the best interests of the wider international community? I think it would, but would such a deal deter Putin from further aggression?

Western leaders didn’t seem to think it would. Yaroslav Trofimov, writing for the Wall Street Journal, reported that on 9 April 2022, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson turned up in Kyiv —the first foreign leader to visit after the Russian withdrawal from the capital. He reportedly told President Zelensky that he thought “any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid.” Any deal, he recalled saying, “would be some victory for him: if you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.”

I also have a hard time imagining what would happen if, at some distant time, a future Russian leader even more rapacious and power hungry than Vladimir Putin — if that’s possible — were to come to power craving to wrestle Ukraine back into the bosom of mother Russia. In that case, the world might find itself thrown right back to 1914 all over again.

Meanwhile, President Zelensky’s position, which hasn’t changed since he walked through what he called the “genocide” in Bucha and Irpin, is to demand a full withdrawal of Russian troops from all Ukrainian lands conquered since 2014, including Crimea, and the prosecution of Russian officials suspected of war crimes.

Considering all of this complexity, when this war ends, and some day it will, if there is to be any negotiated settlement, the signatories would do well to remember the 1839 Treaty of London and its, at the time, unforeseen and tragic, consequences.