I'd rather ignore Israel, one feels so hopeless to effect any change in the situation; Israel can't even be discussed on this continent, the way it can be in the pages of Ha'aretz.
I must recommend Gwynne Dyer again, and I'm pretty sure it's his "Ignorant Armies" (2009) which discusses terrorism and its history in close detail. Dyer point…
I'd rather ignore Israel, one feels so hopeless to effect any change in the situation; Israel can't even be discussed on this continent, the way it can be in the pages of Ha'aretz.
I must recommend Gwynne Dyer again, and I'm pretty sure it's his "Ignorant Armies" (2009) which discusses terrorism and its history in close detail. Dyer points out the one kind of terrorism that routinely succeeds, that JL missed here: state terrorism.
Dyer's examples are painful: Dresden. Nagasaki. Hiroshima. In all three cases, there was very little military value to the target. (Hiroshima had a fair-sized military base, but an atomic bomb? No.) The purpose was to make the enemy stop by making them afraid of dead civilians. Dyer did not distinguish that from a pub-bombing, save in scale.
Terrorists often fail because they are amateurs with poor funding. When professional military, with budget, apply terrorism at scale, that can succeed. (Japan surrendered, though only after the President stated clearly that they would destroy city after city after city.)
Please note that the subsequent Cold War has had nation-states frightened into not fighting with each other, because nuclear bombs would then cause mass civilian casualties, has always been called "The Balance of Terror". We are still too afraid of our own mass civilian casualties to risk putting an end to the war in Ukraine - Putin is still exercising that same State Terrorism.
I understand the feeling on Israel. I generally consider Haaretz to be my guiding light on Israel, and am depressed to realize that its opinion pages would be heretical here.
On state terror: I made a deliberate decision not to get into it at all here. It's mostly for two reasons — time and space. This piece took me the entire week to piece together, and led me to me reading/re-reading ~3.5 books. I deliberately left my copy of Slaughterhouse 5 on the shelf because I knew I'd never publish this thing on time. And then there's the fact that this dispatch hit about the maximum length that Substack (and email in general) allows safely.
So this dispatch had to be very specifically about the terrorism of non-state actors. But you're right that it's part of the story!
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan collapsed into total surrender. Today Germany and Japan are hallmarks of progressive, liberal democracies - so there's that. The only option is for Palestinians to reject the theocratic genocidal maniacs in Hamas. Palestinian civilians will pay a terrible price for Hamas' action and I am genuinely horrified at what has and will continue to unfold in Gaza. Unlike other conflicts mentioned - there are two people in one territory here. Any absolutist rejection of the other is doomed to fail because neither people have anywhere to go. Combatants will either win outright or exhaust one another into a settlement. This can go the way of Sri Lanka and the destruction of the Tigers - or it can go like Northern Ireland and a cautious process toward peace. I hope its the latter, though after the events of last Saturday doubt it.
I would join with you in that advice to Palestinians, if I thought there was a 50/50 chance of the world pouring in massive development monies and step-by-step handholding with the process of building democratic institutions. The way we did with Japan and Germany.
No sign of that in Iraq or Afghanistan, just enabling corruption to hold 'em down another year, for 20 years. The notion of Israel doing it, then, is just bad comedy.
I'd rather ignore Israel, one feels so hopeless to effect any change in the situation; Israel can't even be discussed on this continent, the way it can be in the pages of Ha'aretz.
I must recommend Gwynne Dyer again, and I'm pretty sure it's his "Ignorant Armies" (2009) which discusses terrorism and its history in close detail. Dyer points out the one kind of terrorism that routinely succeeds, that JL missed here: state terrorism.
Dyer's examples are painful: Dresden. Nagasaki. Hiroshima. In all three cases, there was very little military value to the target. (Hiroshima had a fair-sized military base, but an atomic bomb? No.) The purpose was to make the enemy stop by making them afraid of dead civilians. Dyer did not distinguish that from a pub-bombing, save in scale.
Terrorists often fail because they are amateurs with poor funding. When professional military, with budget, apply terrorism at scale, that can succeed. (Japan surrendered, though only after the President stated clearly that they would destroy city after city after city.)
Please note that the subsequent Cold War has had nation-states frightened into not fighting with each other, because nuclear bombs would then cause mass civilian casualties, has always been called "The Balance of Terror". We are still too afraid of our own mass civilian casualties to risk putting an end to the war in Ukraine - Putin is still exercising that same State Terrorism.
I understand the feeling on Israel. I generally consider Haaretz to be my guiding light on Israel, and am depressed to realize that its opinion pages would be heretical here.
On state terror: I made a deliberate decision not to get into it at all here. It's mostly for two reasons — time and space. This piece took me the entire week to piece together, and led me to me reading/re-reading ~3.5 books. I deliberately left my copy of Slaughterhouse 5 on the shelf because I knew I'd never publish this thing on time. And then there's the fact that this dispatch hit about the maximum length that Substack (and email in general) allows safely.
So this dispatch had to be very specifically about the terrorism of non-state actors. But you're right that it's part of the story!
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan collapsed into total surrender. Today Germany and Japan are hallmarks of progressive, liberal democracies - so there's that. The only option is for Palestinians to reject the theocratic genocidal maniacs in Hamas. Palestinian civilians will pay a terrible price for Hamas' action and I am genuinely horrified at what has and will continue to unfold in Gaza. Unlike other conflicts mentioned - there are two people in one territory here. Any absolutist rejection of the other is doomed to fail because neither people have anywhere to go. Combatants will either win outright or exhaust one another into a settlement. This can go the way of Sri Lanka and the destruction of the Tigers - or it can go like Northern Ireland and a cautious process toward peace. I hope its the latter, though after the events of last Saturday doubt it.
I would join with you in that advice to Palestinians, if I thought there was a 50/50 chance of the world pouring in massive development monies and step-by-step handholding with the process of building democratic institutions. The way we did with Japan and Germany.
No sign of that in Iraq or Afghanistan, just enabling corruption to hold 'em down another year, for 20 years. The notion of Israel doing it, then, is just bad comedy.