F**king Mondays: Hamas Is Not Ukraine
The Middle East is in flames. Again.
Not a happy F**king Monday column today:
Israel is at war
I have been struggling to find a way to speak about the horrific attack on Israel over the weekend. It was the worst in Israeli history and has sent shockwaves around the world. "This could be a 9/11 and and a Pearl Harbour wrapped into one." IDF spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus said.
The images emerging from the conflict are deeply upsetting, particularly the ones of innocent civilians including women, children and even the disabled being killed, beaten and taken hostage by Hamas. There is no justification for Hamas’s mass murder of defenseless people and their actions are likely to set off a conflict that will see thousands of people die.
There are of course reasons for the unprecedented attack, and for long time observers of Israeli/Palestinian politics, this was an inevitability. The Israeli government has brutally occupied Palestinian territory for decades and is continuing to encroach on Palestinian land. Terrorist groups like Hamas grow because of this occupation, and their barbarism creates more extremism in Israel. The more the militants gain power on either side, the more likely conflict is to happen. And when conflict happens, the militants seize yet more power. It is a vicious cycle that has now escalated to a point where brokering a deal might now be impossible.
Another point: it is popular to paint Hamas as a resistance movement, but this is no longer the case. Like many resistant movements before it, Hamas has morphed into an extremist terrorist organization. Hamas openly seeks to murder all Jews and deliberately murders innocent civilians. If their goal was to force Israel to negotiate over prisoners and land, it is hard to see the logic. The sheer number of civilians targeted means there is no chance of a negotiation. The Israeli government will hit back with with an even greater force, and many thousands of Palestinians will die.
The scale of Israel’s response is something the international community will be monitoring closely given the potential consequences. Israel and Saudi Arabia have been trying to negotiate a normalization of relations, and Iran and Lebanon have deep ties to Hamas. If Israel goes too far, there will be no Saudi deal, and the conflict could become a much wider war. The US will be privately urging Israeli restraint, but it is unclear whether Benjamin Netanyahu will listen. His coalition government is made of self described fascists who are demanding the total destruction of Hamas and their control of the Gaza strip. One hopes cooler heads prevail, but the scale of Hamas’s assault makes this unlikely.
Unsurprisingly, Jews around the world are gearing up for a wave of antisemitic hate crimes. I’m in London at the moment, and they have already begun. One would think that the mass slaughter of Jewish civilians would elicit some sympathy for one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, but instead many are overjoyed by the spectacle of dead Jews.
Some people are also comparing the plight of Ukrainians to the plight of Palestinians arguing both are battling an occupying force. This analogy falls apart for a number of reasons. Firstly, Hamas crossed the border into Israel to launch its attack, and secondly, the Ukrainians aren’t deliberately murdering Russian civilians or taking children and disabled people hostage. Ukraine, it should be noted, immediately expressed its support for Israel with President Zelensky making the opposite comparison. “If the world unites whenever someone takes women hostage and condemns the children of another nation, terror will have no allies,” he said in a speech to NATO.
“The intentions declared are different, but the essence is the same. You see it in the same blood on the streets.”
We’ll be covering this more in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
Related reading:
Illiterate Twitter
Twitter was once the place to go for global news and debate. Now we have this:
(A reminder: I’m no longer posting anything on the former bird site. If you’d like to follow my social media musings, you can do so on Substack Notes.)
The cost of climate change
A study from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand has calculated how much climate change cost human societies per hour. Via the Guardian:
The damage caused by the climate crisis through extreme weather has cost $16m (£13m) an hour for the past 20 years, according to a new estimate.
Storms, floods, heatwaves and droughts have taken many lives and destroyed swathes of property in recent decades, with global heating making the events more frequent and intense. The study is the first to calculate a global figure for the increased costs directly attributable to human-caused global heating.
It found average costs of $140bn (£115bn) a year from 2000 to 2019, although the figure varies significantly from year to year. The latest data shows $280bn in costs in 2022. The researchers said lack of data, particularly in low-income countries, meant the figures were likely to be seriously underestimated. Additional climate costs, such as from crop yield declines and sea level rise, were also not included.
It is important that studies like this are carried out so that the financial argument can be made for dramatic policies to curb climate change. Given our lives are entirely dominated by financial markets, it makes sense that we understand the link between markets and the climate. It seems to me at least that we are more likely to work for change if we can tie it to our economic well being.
See you next week!
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As this tragedy unfolds, taking countless innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives at every turn, I can't stop thinking about the parallels to George W. Bush and Donald Trump. As we recall, W won the electoral college by only a few hundred votes in Florida, and was facing widespread protest his first year in office. He ignored an intelligence report stating that terrorists were likely to attack US targets with planes. And when 9/11 happened, he used it as a way to cement his strongman regime, silence all opposition (like the Dixie Chicks) and plunge the nation into a long war. Trump tried to do the same thing with Iran but thankfully failed. And now, in a matter of hours, Netanyahu went from facing massive civilian protests of his fascist regime and dismantling of Israel's court system to having the whole country on lockdown while plunging into a long war. The media speculates about an unprecedented intelligence failure, but I would not doubt once the smoke clears, it turns out he ignored intelligence reports of an impending attack. Now, Israelis are united are all against an external enemy that was let in the door rather than dissenting against their own sham leaders. The civilians of Palestine deserve to live in a safe, secure and politically recognized state as much as the citizens of Israel do. And as you've stated, both sides now seem committed to the genocide of the other. Terror only escalates. Look no further than Iraq, where the nation's youth still lose their lives fighting 1000 year old grievances, or America, where the Civil War continues to be fought (right now in the media and politics, but probably soon, in blood).
So true Ben. Wonder what others in The Banter community think. Saddened but not surprised to see anti-Semitic hate crime again coming to the fore in the UK (not that it has ever gone away). Some news sites even cowardly describe Hamas as militants. They are a terrorist group!