Pronounced Hair-Ron
Yikes, no. But two friends of mine in the throes of a spectacular mid-life crisis are traversing the Sahara in a Tesla as we speak and have sent me very detailed reports from the country, confirming what pretty much everyone knows - that Mauritania is one the worldâs worst shitholes.
But itâs pretty much what I could have imagined - Saudi Arabia without the oil.
Man, Iâm pro-Israel but saying âpeace is easyâ is definitely not the case. Iâve just elaborated why Palestinians are fucked - John Dolan five years back brutally outlined the unpleasant truth why âpeace isnât within reachâ
Gaza is a place thatâs basically been driven insane. Imagine a strip of land about 20 miles long and five miles wide, with the sea on one side and the IDF on the other, with 1.7 million people festering in some of the worldâs nastiest tenements, with no entertainment except the dream of getting a little payback on the people keeping you penned up.
And when Hamas sends a volley of these useless rockets, the IDF responds with very advanced, very lethal guided weaponry. So Israel wins? No, not at all. This is a new kind of war. We arenât talking about Stalingrad here. This is something new. If Israel used everything it has, wellâŠremember, Israel is supposed to have about 200 nukes. They could wipe Gaza out. They wonât. What theyâll keep doing is sticking pins in Gaza, driving them more and more insane, making sure these people have nothing to do except have lots of babies whose big ambition is to be a martyr for Hamas.
When your only requirements to having peace, a country and home to call your own and money on the ready to flood into your new country as a reward; is simply to recognize the existence of a place, in this case Israel, and renounce violence towards it and you cannot do that? My sympathies run thin. That is all that is required of the Palestinians. That has been the case for some 30-40 years. Renounce violence, recognize Israelâs right to exist.
Sorry, thatâs pretty simple. You got to just be overrun with hate not to accept such simple terms.
Imagine if thatâs all Hitler wanted? Recognize Germanyâs right to exist and for itâs neighbors to not do violence against it? Itâs so simple, it sounds down right silly that they cannot accept that. Itâs not that they canât stand to let the Jew win, itâs that they cannot stand to let the Jew even live.
Now if they accepted these very simple terms and Israel and the world reneged on their promises, I could see their point. But they wonât accept the fact that Israelis/ Jews have a right to live. Until they do that, screw 'em. They are victims of their own stupidity. Stupidity is difficult to reward.
Well, then Hamas needs to step up their game if they want to keep up tactically. You shoot rockets at a country, they are going to respond with force and lots of it⊠Seriously, what do they expect?
Hamas should ask their friends in Iran for more advanced weaponry if they want to keep up. Whether or not Hamasâs rockets suck is irrelevant. They shoot them randomly into Israel in order to kill people for the hell of it. They may not be great rockets, but they are not firecrackers either.
I understand the thesis that Gaza has problems, but the idea that Gaza is an open-air prison/tenament is just not true.
Remember, I used to LIVE in Gush Katif. I know Gaza. I used to ride my bike there.
There is plenty of work to be had:
There are luxury malls:
https://www.bridgesforpeace.com/2017/02/another-luxury-mall-opens-doors-gaza/
There is so much plentiful food, they are as fat as Americans:
So much so, that Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are big business there:
There are plenty of beach front luxury hotels:
Heck they even had a water park until Islamists burned it down for letting men and women commingle:
In sum, itâs not a great economy. But its really no different than any surrounding Muslim nation without a bunch of oil.
I thought they called it:
Boy, tar, chiba, dragon, chope, He, sugar, scat, horse, china, etcâŠ
I do like me some Shawarma⊠That shit is good, like I could only eat that and be happy goodâŠ
Thatâs whatâs required of some of their leaders. The question then becomes, what do they have to gain (and lose) if there is peace?
To gain?! Wow, everything. So many people have promised them so much shit itâs not even funny.
To lose? They donât get to kill Jews no more. Apparently, they like that way too much to give up.
Iâm talking about the leadership. If our own politicians appear to be out of touch and self-serving, concerned only with their careers and re-election, then why would Palestinian leadership be any different? They send children to die after all.
Youâre conflating âsupportâ or âsympathyâ with âunderstandingâ. All players in the Middle East behave following an underlying logic and not one of them is âcrazyâ. You and me may find their logic, strange, repugnant or abhorrent but thereâs no point denying it exists. You may as well ask the Kurds and Sunni Arabs in Iraq âwhy they canât get alongâ
Nope. Their problem is that Palestinian Arabs were terrible fighters - they lost in 1948 when the odds were decidedly in their favor. Had they won, they pretty much would have done the same to Jews what the Turks did to the Greeks of Asia Minor.
But they lost. Usually, itâs not a big deal. Many ethnic/religious groups lost. Hell, Christians in the Middle East have been losing for the last 1300 years. If nascent Arab countries allowed them to integrate into their societies, âPalestiniansâ would have been just a smattering of old men with bitter memories in tea houses in Algiers and Tunis, just like Greeks of Asia Minor or French Pieds Noirs and the occasional angry youtube comment.
But they did not - they kept them in refugee camps to ensure theyâre constantly fucked over and that they present a constant threat to Israel, having nothing else to do and staying in the constant loop of bitter memories and powerless hatred. Coupled that with some spectacularly bad moves in Jordan, no wonder theyâre fucked.
Exactly what theyâre getting - Israel hitting Gaza and killing among other civilians, ensuring that more and more kids in Gaza see Hamas as the only option in life, not to mention some pictures of dead kids for the jihadis-to-be in suburbs of Paris and Brussels to push them over the edge, as the âPalestinian causeâ is the proverbial gateway drug.
You may shudder at the logic, but itâs there.
Well, thatâs in line with the above reasoning - keeping people fucked up with nothing to do.
Iâve seen Gaza from afar and it looked like a shithole. Iâm sure there are amenities for the wealthy, but you canât tell me that the majority of the 1.8 million people there arenât living in one big ghetto.
Well, thatâs not exactly true, although in general Arab countries have horrible economies, oil notwithstanding . From what Iâve seen, Lebanese economy is suprisingly resilient and if I remember correctly has the highest GDP in the Arab world for a non-oil country.
If Iâm remembering correctly⊠wasnât there no nation state named âPalestineâ in the 20th century?
What did the Jews really take? Besides some nice beaches and useless desert. Olive trees? They captured the whole Sinai peninsula in 1967 in a few days and then just gave it back.
There are dozens of Arab countries to live in. Let the Jews have their sliver of land damnit. They get screwed with everywhere else they go. They arenât going back to the chambers.
Not to mention Arabs losing in 1967 when they had a decided advantage over Israel. If 6 countries declare war on you and you end up kicking their ass and taking their land thatâs as fair a hand as you can get.
Using human targets to get your way these days does not drum up much support, sympathy or understanding from me. I think the word stupidity fits. Not meaning all Palestinians, I donât know them like that, but their leadership, is a ship to nowhereâŠ
And of course, the normal circus is to criticize Trump at every corner is totally en vogue right now, but telling the PLO to go fuck itself is not a bad move in my book.
âAct right or no moneyâ is not unreasonable.
Israel is perhaps the most legally established country in history. The land was granted to them by the UN. The original agreement was a 2 state solution, one Arab one Jewish. The Arabs did not accept, but the Jews did.
The Palestinians could have had their own land from the very beginning but they hate Jews so much that the cut their nose to spite their face. Tough shit, says I.
They arenât like us, at all, in anyway. We donât raise our kids to hate Jews above all else in the world. They do.
Actually, things arenât that simple - if you read contemporary accounts from Ben Gurion everyone on both sides understood that the two-state partition idea was bullshit (as it is now, mind you) and that war is the only option with a winner-take all outcome.
If the Jews wanted to survive in Palestine, they had to fight. And win. But letâs not sugarcoat history and claim that âwe could have all had peace if only blah blahâ
If anything, the genesis of the future Israeli-Palestine problem was actually nicely outlined by Benny Morrisâ claim that Ben Gurion at the crucial moment shrank from pushing to the river Jordan and expelling the Arabs in the West Bank. After all, if youâre expelling someone do it thoroughly, an elementary lesson that every Ottoman general would have known.
Itâs not nice and it may offend modern sensibilities but thatâs how history plays out. One side wins, other side loses. And you donât win by holding hands and singing.
Read up on the history and the genesis of the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.
The only real roll of the dice when the outcome was up for grabs was in 1948, bitter fighting notwithstanding.
I didnât say us, I said our leaders.
So whatâs the solution now? The PLO is a thinly veiled terrorist group determined to shit stir from now until doomsday. The Israelis are just stuck with them forever?
Honestly, from a substantial number of books Iâve read about 1967 (Tom Segev 1967 comes to mind) itâs a very controversial issue. Like many Arab leaders, itâs hard to separate bluffing from delusional bravado when it comes to Nasser. Egyptians were caught with their pants down in the Sinai, thatâs a fact. And from contemporary accounts it seems that, uncharacteristically there was a lot of emotion running in the IDF HQ - IIRC correctly, Rabin had a nervous breakdown of sorts after PM Eshkol famously hesitated in ordering an attack on the Egyptians, which later proved a blessing in disguise.
But Nasser wasnât an idiot - he knew how to play the two superpowers - he has seen under his watch how the Israelis routed the Egyptians during the Sinai War, so he realized that he wouldnât be able to threaten seriously Israel in a conventional manner. It seems, based on several analyses Iâve read, that he was more interested in securing Egyptian preeminence in the Arab word, especially after the Algerians strengthened their ârevolutionaryâ credentials after the Algerian War.
And itâs not a coincidence that the only (temporarily) successful Arab military action against Israel, Operation Badr was had a very, very limited and specific scope and was done under the aegis of the smartest Arab leader, also a Egyptian - Sadat.