David Rothcopf Thread

David Rothkopf  @djrothkopf  (Twitter thread)

The sides are so deeply entrenched that having a reasonable discussion about what is happening in Gaza is nearly impossible. Part of the problem is the large number of "facts" that are stated by one side or the other that are either untrue or misleading. Let's debunk a few.

First, to place them in context, let my frame briefly my view. 

• What Hamas did on 10/7 was indefensible and horrific. Any nation would respond. Israel has a right and an obligation of self-defense. Removing the threat posed by Hamas is essential.
• Both Israeli and Palestinian innocents have an equal right to living secure lives and to controlling their own destiny. There is no justification for killing members of either group. The long term path to their security requires a two-state solution.
• In my personal view, both sides have an equal right to self-determination. The lives of the people of both groups should be equally cherished and protected. It is very important to distinguish between the people of Israel and Palestine and their leaders.
• The people of Israel and Palestine have been badly served by their leaders for many years in multiple ways that provide the context for the current crisis. The current crisis cannot be removed from that context no matter how it may suit either side to do so.

You can calibrate all that I am about to say against the above nutshell description of my views on this complex issue which I have studied closely for many years.  I am Jewish. I do not just acknowledge I actually celebrate Israel's existence. But I believe the rights of any nation to exist are conditional based on whether it derives its existence from the consent of the governed, respects and protects equally lives of all those within its borders, honors international laws and boundaries, etc.

• I am an American and I carry plenty of biases associated with that with me too. 
• I believe in the separation of church and state. 
• I believe in democracy. 
• I believe states are imperfect but should strive to perfect themselves.

That said, here are a few things I view as the big distortions and misconceptions that are distorting the current debate:

Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel. It is a threat. But it is small and weak compared to Israel. It can inflict damage as we have seen but whatever the malevolent aspirations of its leaders may be it cannot destroy or substantially weaken the state of Israel.

Israel cannot "eradicate" Hamas. It can eliminate its leaders. It can target and likely eliminate all those that took part in the 10/7 raids it can eliminate its stores of weapons. It can cut off its financial resources. But there are tens of thousands of members of Hamas. And to eradicate them all would produce such high civilian casualties it would likely lead to massive new recruitment of Hamas terrorists.

Suggesting Israel is culpable in setting the stage for Hamas' brutal 10/7 attacks is "blaming the victim." Hamas is culpable for its crimes. But Hamas was propped up the Israeli government. The conditions that left Israel vulnerable were created by the Israeli government.

The history of Israel's mistreatment of Gaza and Palestinians matters. The worsening conditions and prospects for Palestinians under the Netanyahu government matters. The prospect of a regional normalization accord between the Israelis and the Saudis that would have very likely papered over the problems of the Palestinians and weakened their leverage to achieve crucial political progress matters. Security in the future will depend on political progress that addresses grievances and issues raised in the past.

War is hell. I see plenty of folks saying Hiroshima and Dresden and the like prove that civilians have to die in "just" wars. Killing civilians, collectively punishing societies is against international law for a reason. 

• It is unjust. 
• It was unjust in Hiroshima
• it was unjust in Dresden
• it is wrong in Ukraine
• It was wrong in Syria
• it was wrong in Iraq. 

It is always wrong. It is never acceptable. There is no magic formula for acceptable civilian losses. They must always be avoided. Yes, it is hard when an adversary uses civilians as shields. But tactics must be adapted accordingly. Care must be taken. But also, the focus should in such cases be focus as suggested above on where the blows will be to greatest effect--against leaders, supply lines, flows of financial support.

We also should not forget the lessons of past such conflicts. In Iraq, the US estimated that each civilian killed resulted in 10 more new adversaries being recruited. Whatever the specific number, killing civilians is both wrong and undermines tactical and strategic goals.

Military action is essential to restoring stability. If a military solution could solve this conflict, it would be over. Israel is vastly more powerful than Hamas. It has punished Hamas frequently. It has imposed its will on the people of Gaza (and the West Bank) for years.

None of these steps have worked in making Israel more secure (as 10/7 proves) or solving the underlying problems. That can only be achieved by finding a lasting political solution that treats the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians equally.  The international community must make that its objective. (In so doing, it must recognize that Iran's malign influence and aspirations here must be contained. Iran is an existential threat to Israel. Its proxies are what could spread this into a regional war. The collaboration of Russia and Iran compounds the threat posed by those proxies. Defeating Russia in Ukraine, punishing the sponsors of the proxies financially, recognizing they are pulling the strings with Hamas, is critical to actually solving this problem. We must be realistic about this and we need to be resolute in addressing those threats. And, just as Hamas must effectively be removed from the equation in Gaza, so too must the Netanyahu government go. ASAP.

I could go on. The point is to solve this serious problem and to protect the lives of innocents we must be honest about the issues involved and see them for what they are and not for one side or the other tries to present them as. We require clarity to go with our resolve and our compassion. We can only hope that the urgency of this crisis helps us achieve that clarity.

      https://twitter.com/djrothkopf/status/1718627028126023941

David J. Rothkopf is an American foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator. He is the founder and CEO of TRG Media and The Rothkopf Group, a columnist for the Daily Beast and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors. 

Gaza Flashback

This is a flashback about Gaza from my old blog posted fourteen years ago in 2009. As you will see, much has changed since then. 

------------------

Here is a great story that NPR ran four years ago (now eighteen)  that caught my attention at the time. It describes a curious symbiosis between Israel and Gaza reflected in how automobiles were tagged in Gaza City. This was prior to Sharon's removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza, making me wonder if some of them may have had a surreptitious part in the story.
Much has changed since then, and not for the better as this little snapshot shows. 
The audio and transcript have since disappeared but here is what I captured at the time.

An Odd Hierarchy of License Plates in Gaza

The local government in Gaza issues a unique kind of license plate: one for stolen cars. Driving school owner Raeed el-Sa'ati decodes the region's vehicle license plates.

SIEGEL: Last week, as we were riding through the streets of Gaza, our interpreter, Hosam Arhoun(ph), pointed out something that is, so far as we know, unique to that isolated strip of Mediterranean coast. It's a kind of license plate. I thought he was kidding. We would be behind a car, and he would say, `See that pair of Arabic letters on the tag? That indicates this is a stolen car. And that one,' he said, `that's an official stolen car.'

Well, we dropped in on Raeed el-Sa'ati, who owns the Ekhlas Driving School in Gaza, to get more details. And he explained that Gaza license plates can be red for official, green for taxis, and white for private vehicles. The lower the number on the red plates, the higher the position of the official. The number 30 designates a truck.

All this is pretty conventional stuff for license plates. But then...

Mr. RAEED EL-SA'ATI (Ekhlas Driving School): (Through Translator) And then the cars which, written in Arabic, the letters M and F, it is the stolen cars.

SIEGEL: The stolen cars?

Mr. EL-SA'ATI: (Through Translator) And then there is these plates which, M-H-F--it is stolen cars, but working at the authority, means, aha, it is a stolen governmental car. There's also another kind, but this is the same plates; the numbers are different. The numbers which started with 25, it is a stolen car, but it is allowed to work as taxis. This is a very modern law in the world.

SIEGEL: As you can hear, our man Hosam could hardly stop laughing as he translated this.

It turns out this system is a legacy of the most efficient but embarrassing example of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the 1990s: auto theft. The Palestinian Authority took over Gaza, and the Israeli police were out, so Israeli car thieves fenced thousands of stolen cars into the Gaza Strip, about 15,000 of them, where they were then sold. Thousands are driven by Palestinian security and other officials. A lot of them are in that stolen taxicab category, vehicles that provide income while costing a lot less than a legal yellow minivan.

When their cars were stolen, the Israeli car owners would get reimbursed by their insurance, and they would go buy new cars. So in effect, Israeli insurance companies were paying for Gaza's used car trade. When the insurance companies sued, the Palestinian Authority settled, and the settlement cost was offset in part by much higher registration fees for cars that had been stolen. So to designate those cars, they were given special license plates. According to the Transportation Department in Gaza, the news is that the Authority has decided in principle to end stolen car plates. Everyone will pay the same registration fees. But since this may put a lot of self-employed taxi drivers out of work, no one is saying how long it will take to abolish the license plate that says, `This car was stolen.'

Thread from Israel

🧵

Exclusive: 100s of young party-goers have been killed or are missing feared kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas militants, who attacked a festival yesterday. Among them is Brit Jake Marlowe. Me & @natalielisbona spoke to witnesses who survived, relatives, friends

2. The witness accounts are frightening. At around 6.30am a rocket barrage started, the event was interrupted as everyone hit the floor. The problem was most people at this festival had no transport, they came on buses. They had no way to get to safety.

3. Those who survived, who were not killed or kidnapped left in a crucial window immediately after the rocket barrage before militants stormed the festival with automatic weapons and grenades. They described coming across cars of dead civilians riddled with bullets.

4. Those who didn't and couldn't  get out - which reportedly included a woman who had a broken leg and was in a cast so couldn't run - tried to hide as best they could. They furiously messaged friends and relatives for help, begging the military to intervene but no help came.

Thread from Breaking the Silence -- Another Palestinian Uprising

Breaking the Silence posted this thread.

Hamas's attack and the events unfolding since yesterday are unspeakable. We could talk about their cruel and criminal actions, or focus on how our Jewish-supremacist govt brought us to this point. But as former Israeli soldiers, our job is to talk about what we were sent to do

🧵

Israel's security policy, for decades now, has been to “manage the conflict”. Successive Israeli governments insist on round after round of violence as if any of it will make a difference. They talk about “security”, “deterrence”, “changing the equation”.

All of these are code words for bombing the Gaza Strip to a pulp, always justified as targeting terrorists, yet always with heavy civilian casualties. In between these rounds of violence we make life impossible for Gazans, and then act surprised when it all boils over.

We talk about "normalization" with the UAE and now Saudi Arabia, while hoping the world will turn a blind eye to the open-air prison we built in our backyard. Apart from the unfathomable violation of human rights, we've created a massive security liability for our own citizens.

The question Israelis are all asking is - where were the soldiers yesterday? Why was the IDF seemingly absent while hundreds of Israelis were slaughtered in their homes and on the streets? The unfortunate truth is that they were “preoccupied”. In the West Bank.

We send soldiers to secure settler incursions into the Palestinian city of Nablus, to chase Palestinian children in Hebron, to protect settlers as they carry out pogroms. Settlers demand that Palestinian flags are removed from the streets of Huwara; soldiers are sent to do it.

Our country decided - decades ago - that it's willing to forfeit the security of its citizens in our towns and cities, in favor of maintaining control over an occupied civilian population of millions, all for the sake of a settler-messianic agenda.

The idea that we can "manage the conflict" without ever having to solve it is once again collapsing before our eyes. It held up until now because only few dared to challenge it. These heartbreaking events could change that. They must. For all of us between the river and the sea.

Snapshots of Migrants in New York

Tom Watson posted this thread about the crush of migrants in New York.

I just took a walk over to the Roosevelt Hotel, ground zero of the so-called "migrant crisis" in New York. It's an easy set-up for news crews, an easy target for anti-immigrant protesters, and frankly, the current Mayor used it as an easy prop when he declared a crisis.

So I took a slight detour to walk around and briefly duck into the lobby to see for myself. Didn't take photos out of respect for the asylum seekers. There were no protesters. A few cops, which is prudent because of the outrageous threats against those temporarily housed there.

The first thing I noticed was the presence of children in the lobby, or tightly gripping their parents' hands at the entrances. I didn't wander around because I was probably not supposed to be there. But wearing a suit and tie (and being an old white dude), nobody stopped me.

This Times piece from a couple of weeks ago has some great photos that capture the setting of a once palatial railroad station hotel serving as a makeshift processing center.

The second thing I noticed is the rather vast corral of scooters, ebikes, and motorcycles lined up outside - the product not of immigration policy but our modern "gig economy" and the workforce of Uber Eats and Door Dash couriers. Yes, workforce! You see where this is going... And the third thing? Relative calm. Yeah there was some weed smoke (but where is there not these days?) Yeah the bikes block the street and the drivers do not - shall we say - obey traffic laws. But where are they not these days? And how come the vast NYPD doesn't enforce them?

But for a "crisis" it was rather mundane. Yet we're fed a constant barrage of angry, screaming, hateful mini mobs in Staten Island or on Vanderbilt Avenue. The truth is much quieter! Yes, there is a policy and budget challenge. No question. But New York is hardly falling apart.

Don't believe me? Head over to the Roosevelt Hotel.

[Reader advisory] This is a Disturbing Report from Syria

I'm noting this grotesque report from Syria for future reference. The link is passed along by Joshua Landis.

“They Buried Them Silently.” The Stations Of The “Death Journey” From Assad’s Prisons To Mass Grave“

They were carrying me and beating me on the ground in the halls of Tishreen Military Hospital. This lasted a quarter of an hour, after which they expected that I was finished, so they placed me with the dead. The bodies were placed on top of each other, so my share came on top of two bodies, then they placed two more on me, who were killed after me.”

It is the story of the detainee Muhammad, who comes from the Hama countryside and was detained for two years in Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International described as a “human slaughterhouse.”

Muhammad tells his story while he was transferred from prison to Tishreen Military Hospital, which is considered a station for sick detainees, who are transferred from prison to the hospital before being killed and buried in mass graves, according to what human rights reports documented.

Mahmoud continues his story by saying, “After about half an hour, I woke up and a shiver ran through my body, starting from my toes and gradually extending to the rest of my body. I moved a little and the two bodies fell on top of me and I started screaming in a voice that I had no idea where it came from.”

“They started hitting me on the head, stomach, kidneys and everywhere, and I would not stop screaming (..) After I left the prison, I told one of the doctors what had happened, and he said my heart had stopped, then it came back to life and began pumping blood again

Muhammad’s story is one of dozens of stories documented by the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons in Sednaya Prison, and included in a report called “Bury Them Silently,” which talks about the mechanisms of killing and disappearance in Tishreen Military Hospital between 2011 and 2020.

The report was based on 154 interviews with 32 detainees, doctors and nurses who worked in Tishreen Military Hospital, and others who worked in military intelligence, the military police, political security, and the military judiciary.

The report explains the structure of military hospitals in Syria, their importance to the security branches, the network of relations between them, and the distribution of responsibilities between them in torturing, killing , and burying detainees in mass graves.

Glasses...the first step towards “death”

According to the report, the bodies of detainees, who were killed under torture in prisons and security branches, in addition to sick detainees, are transferred to Tishreen Military Hospital, so that torture stations in hospitals begin.

The first stop is in a place called “Al-Nadara” in Tishreen Military Hospital, which is a place where sick detainees are received as well as the bodies of the deceased, whether they were sick or those who lost their lives in a detention center.

The report confirmed that the process of transferring detainees from detention centers to hospitals is accompanied by brutal attacks that reach the point of loss of life in many cases.

The report says that the “glasses” is “the first stop for a sick detainee upon his arrival to the hospital, and it is also the place where the bodies of detainees are collected before they are loaded and transported to mass graves.”

He added, “The bodies are placed at the outer door of the prison, and the detainees are forced to carry the bodies of their colleagues and place them in the vehicles prepared to transport them to the cemeteries.”

Sometimes there are patients among the corpses who are between life and death, and the assistant in the hospital kills them. Members of the National Defense Forces who are arrested on criminal charges are also brought in to assault the sick detainees and kill them before bringing them to the doctor.

Alternative ambulance station

The second station is the “Alternative Ambulance Department,” which is the second station for detainees who survive death in the “Al-Nadara” station.

It is an old, one-story underground warehouse adjacent to the main ambulance department. Its area is about 100 square meters and contains 30 beds, and the medical staff in it is between 30 and 40, including nurses and doctors.

Sick detainees are presented to the “alternative ambulance” department only as a routine procedure and are given painkillers at best, without being presented to the relevant departments.

One of the detainees says: “They took me to the emergency department in the hospital. An assistant and a regular conscript entered and showed me to a doctor who looked nothing like doctors. I later learned that he was a colonel or brigadier general.”

“He entered angrily and started shouting at them, ‘Why are you bringing him to me?’ I mean, we are bringing him to sign a death certificate for him. The assistant replied to him, ‘Sir, his soul has not yet returned.’”

After that, the doctor left due to the end of his shift, and “the recruit turned to the assistant and said to him: What do we want to do with him?” The assistant replied: Put him back on the glasses so that he will vomit and give us relief from him.

The goal of this section, according to the report, is to completely isolate the detainees from anyone, and deprive them of any opportunity to communicate with the outside world or get to know one of them in any way.

The medical staff in the department carries out torture on patients, as the medical staff allowed to enter this place are strictly loyal to the regime, and it can be said that the majority of them are from the Alawite sect, according to the report.

Transport station for mass graves

The third station is transferring the bodies of detainees who were killed under torture in prisons and patients who were liquidated in the hospital to mass graves, after a death certificate is issued to them by the “forensic medicine” team.

According to the report, the role of the medical team is to “legitimize the process of liquidating opponents and hiding their bodies,” by writing a report on the causes and manner of the detainee’s death.

But in reality, doctors do not examine or autopsy the bodies of deceased detainees, and the causes of death are almost always written as related to heart diseases.

The bodies of detainees who died under torture in prisons and branches and who are being liquidated in the hospital are collected in several places next to the detainees’ cells and in the hospital’s transport area, and are loaded from their collection places into transport vehicles to be buried in mass graves.

There are six large refrigerated cars in the hospital’s transportation area for transporting bodies, as well as closed Mazda cars that have been modified to become ambulances that move within Damascus and its countryside.

There are also Chevrolet cars belonging to the Forestry Foundation in the Ministry of Agriculture, in addition to 16 Mazda microbuses with a capacity of 14 passengers, old military sanitary cars, and modern sanitary cars with about 20 cars (donations from Japan and Korea before the revolution).

The report confirmed that the detainees in the prison were forced to carry the bodies of other detainees in cars to transport them to mass graves.

The report also confirmed that bodies were being “beaten, insulted,” and trampled in the hospital by security personnel, nurses, and nurses.

One of the detainees said, “The bodies were brought by dump trucks, and they were lifted and lowered like sand. After filming was completed and the records were organized, they were transported to the dump cars by a truck if the number was large.”

The bodies are being transported, accompanied by members of the military police and two security vehicles from Branch 227, to three mass graves in Najha, Al-Qutayfa, and Baghdad Bridge near the labor city of Adra.

A former worker in the machinery factory in Damascus Governorate says in the report that he was asked to dig a trench 10 to 15 meters long and more than 3 meters deep.

After that, cars containing more than 450 bodies arrived, and “a security officer asked me to shovel them and lower them into the ditch. The bodies lying on the ground were disrupting my movement. I tried to get around them so as not to crush them under the bulldozer.”

“But he waved his hand and ordered me to come forward and forced me to crush them under the wheel, and I started carrying the bodies with the bulldozer bucket and throwing them in the middle of the trench that I had dug.