The Basque terrorist organization ETA, by the way, willingly laid down the arms and disbanded. Fifty years of domestic terrorism. An act of terror that pretty much brought democracy to Spain by murdering the dictator’s successor. Another act of terror that almost destroyed that very democracy. Decades of atrocities, nationhood still not achieved – but they did finally manage to do the right thing.
What I’m saying is, if Hamas cares about the civilians in Gaza, it can lay down the arms today. It’s been done. It’s not impossible. Let’s stop applying the double standard and putting the responsibility for the possible deaths of civilians in Gaza on Israel.
Clarissa's Blog 
If I understand your post right, are you blaming Israel for possible deaths of civilians in Gaza? Or Hamas? Your last sentence is a bit confusing, it sounds like you are saying we need to put the blame on Israel.
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Sorry, grammar mistake. I’ve corrected.
The larger point, though, is that in every conflict, either between people or between groups, the responsibility belongs to both sides. Possibly in different proportions but there are no blameless angels versus horrible demons. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily hard to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong in a conflict. In the war between the Allies and the Nazis, obviously the Nazis were the bad guys. But the Allies had made terrible mistakes, too.
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“… the responsibility belongs to both sides …”
No, it doesn’t.
It also belongs to what Adam Smith would refer to as “the hidden hand”, which in this case means the hidden factions that are the economic backers of the fight.
In fact, the responsibility primarily belongs to these hidden factions, because without them, these would be disputes over borders that could remain settled over the long-term by dividing up troublesome wholes until they’re not-so-troublesome fragments.
Yet this isn’t happening for Gaza or the West Bank.
It’s the Colin Powell doctrine again, but with an economic flavour: when someone breaks the economy of a thing you’d rather keep at a distance, you get to own it as well as all of its unwanted produce, regardless of what you would otherwise want.
Perhaps it’s advantageous from certain economic standpoints to have a readymade broken thing at which people can direct their hate?
I wonder.
But it’s a problem also in the management of warfare, where nobody really wants to talk about Adam Smith or factional warfare with distant backers (or bankers).
It all appears it gets rather too close to the truth.
“Both sides” is a concept that doesn’t really work as a realistic model, certainly not in an age of 4G+ warfare.
Occasionally you get to see one of the fingers wriggling loose of the sock puppet it’s controlling.
So it’s this thing that Biden said: “… ‘sending money to Ukraine’ is a figure of speech …”.
Biden wasn’t supposed to make a certain kind of link before, and now he’s trying to back out of it.
There will be no laying down of arms except when the pay-outs become so princely that the biggest “corn cobs” up the backside of the “revolution” can fund their retirement.
What was all of that nonsense with Yasser Arafat back in the 1990s with VAT receipts paid by Israel but a way to pay him off?
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I’m sorry, this kind of Marxism 1.0 bored me back in the USSR and it bores me even more today.
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Please do tell how the Allies are responsible for Germany invading Poland.
Does rape fall under your definition of conflict?
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
With this kind of ignorance of very basic facts, maybe tone down your response.
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That comment asking the question is me, I forgot to input my name.
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These things can be seriously weird. Catholics and Protestants (very similar types of Christians) fought for decades but now nobody minds their country being invaded by Muslims. Same in Catalonia (where I travel very often), they want to suppress anything Spanish (a very close nation in culture) and welcome North African Muslims even in mountain villages.
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“Catalonia…they want to suppress anything Spanish …and welcome North African Muslims”
IIRC it’s an old tactice of the independistes… the idea was to discourage/stop migration from Spanish speakers and bring in non-Europeans (esp North Africans). They would teach them Catalan and they would become Catalan patriots and finally push support for independence over 50%…. didn’t work out they didn’t care at all about Catalan independence and instead of becoming Catalan speakers they began a drive to get official status for Arabic.
Catalan and Quebec independence people have a lot in common…. (though overall Catalonia was doing what it needed for independence but in 20 or 30 years, they jumped the gun and… so much for that.
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// They would teach them Catalan and they would become Catalan patriots
What an insane idea. Most immigrants are people with rootless, international mentality, who couldn’t gather enough patriotism to stay in their home country. A receiving country would need to be exceptionally successful and strong as a nation state in order to cultivate some degree of patriotism in children of those immigrants. America can do it. Catalan and Quebec don’t have a chance.
I imagined myself as an immigrant to Catalan and Quebec, and why would I want to become a citizen of some suspicious, tiny and weak shard of land, if I could remain a part of a big, strong state of Spain / Canada? I would rather be big than make myself smaller, thanks.
Besides, being part of a big country prevents local politicians from going too crazy. Just today I read about this example:
// Scotland’s First Minister Humza Yousaf announced in a speech on Wednesday at the Scottish National Party (SNP) conference that his country was ready to accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
…
“At the Tory conference, the UK home secretary warned about what she described as a ‘hurricane’ of migrants coming to the UK, and other Western, countries,” he said.
“When I hear that dog-whistle language, it makes me shudder. It makes me resolve to work even harder for independence – so that Scotland’s immigration policies are decided here in Scotland – never ever again by extremist Westminster politicians.” //
The UK prevents Scotland from destroying itself, imo.
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“What an insane idea”
Well… it didn’t work so yeah…. Again Catalonian and Quebecois nationalism seem a lot like Norwegian/Slovak nationalism… which is just not a model that works in the modern world.
Quebec has been successful in creating some prestige for their own type of French (as recently as the 1970s they were deeply embarrassed by it and now they’re proud of it, a process similar to that of Spanish in the New World) but they weren’t suffering enough from centralised repression to really motivate pedal-to-the-metal nationalism. Same with Catalan, they’ve reinvented the language* but, despite the rhetoric, they just aren’t repressed by “the Spanish state” enough to incite real impassioned feelings and the real zealots tend to inpsire more push back than support.
*I’m told that in the beginning of the post-Franco Catalan cultural regeneration media language often felt like a direct translation of Spanish… which is no longer the case.
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Somebody said a long time ago that when people start adding “state” to the name of a country (the state of Israel, the Spanish state) that’s a way of saying you hate that country. Nobody says “the state of Canada”.
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That is an interesting point, however I can say that I refer plenty to Israel as “the state of Israel” and yet am a huge supporter of it.
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“The Trudeau regime …”
“The Biden regime …”
My mockery of The State has Groucho Marxist tendencies in the mode of Salman Rushdie. 🙂
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This reminded me how yesterday Latynina said she hopes that after Russia invaded, Ukraine would merge with Poland to make one big Poland. This was such typical Russian mentality – you’ve got to be big! And find somebody to manage you more effectively than you manage yourself. She’s a good person but this is one of those cultural differences that we have with the Russians that are impossible to overcome. The concept of a nation-state is just alien to their mentality.
Like, why even fight Russians to then go and cede your sovereignty to Poland?
I tried to discuss it with N but he didn’t get it.
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Why would Ukraine want to make one big Poland? Poles might be okay with that, but, jokingly, from a Ukrainian perspective, wouldn’t they want to create “one big Ukraine”?
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Right?
Russians, you know. They’ve got a really intense fixation on size as if it were a guarantee of anything. I mean, look at Luxembourg. Tiny! But a wonderful standard of living. Why not aim for that instead of trying to expand into the infinity.
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Luxembourg is in the middle of the EU. Maybe Russia should join the EU.
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And the NATO. Given how pro-Russian the NATO is, it totally makes sense.
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“intense fixation on size as if it were a guarantee of anything”
Compare very small South Korea a cultural superpower vs vast China…
OF course modern russia wants nothing to do with South Korea and has been talking up North Korea… have you seen the funny video with Skabeeva trying to talk about how normal North Korea is (while being shadowed and told what to say?)
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I’ve never heard Skabeeva’s voice in my life, but I believe you. These people are very abject. It’s sad to observe.
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“Why would Ukraine want to make one big Poland? Poles might be okay with that”
I don’t think so. I think the model wanted by Poland (and presumably Ukraine) is similar to say Sweden and Norway, sovereign countries with established borders and similar though separate languages with citizens of one having very close to citizen rights in the other.
There is no desire in Poland to try culturally and linguistically incorporate tens of millions of people or trying to recalibrate from a monolingual to a bi- or tri-lingual state especially if one of the languages is russian which attracts all the wrong kind of attention from russia. (And I’m sure Ukrainians are sane and not interested in anything of the kind either).
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“This was such typical Russian mentality – you’ve got to be big! And find somebody to manage you more effectively than you manage yourself.”
The concept of a nation-state isn’t alien to my mentality, and my country is hardly big. 🙂 Yet, despite its size, Israel has a great measure of sovereignty and is a regional power.
I do not see Quebec or Scotland as being capable of becoming powerful actors with any degree of true sovereignty in most crucial matters.
Haven’t we been discussing the diminishing power of nation states in the new world of ‘liquid modernity’? Parts of countries would be even less capable of protecting their interests than existing bigger countries. What would be left are EU bureaucracy and mini-‘Scotlands’ functioning as local municipalities. I do not see this as a positive development.
Also, when Jews arrive to Israel, they return home to the only Jewish state in the world surrounded by hostile millions of Muslims. When people immigrate to Quebec, they want to improve their financial situation and have no reason to care about small nationalisms of some disgruntled, alien to them natives.
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But that’s exactly it, you’ve got to create a narrative on par with “the only Jewish state surrounded, etc.” Something like “Quebec is an Island of Europeanness in America”
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Quebec, by the way, doesn’t even try. O was very open to the possibility of integrating but everything was done to make it impossible.
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The fact is that Hamas does not care about human lives, whether they are civilians or not. The will never lay down arms, they are a death cult.
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They’re about the same as ISIS.
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Something very telling is that NOBODY seriously wants to bring Palestinians to their territories. Not Egypt, not Iran, not Jordan, not Saudia Arabia, not the Gult states, NOBODY. People who are so pro Palestinian really need to start thinking a bit more critically and try and figure out why that is the case.
Hint: Might be because most of these people are radicalized and it would take a generation to de-radicalize them.
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“NOBODY seriously wants to bring Palestinians to their territories”
Two issues:
The official version is that Palestinians have to stay in Palestine because if they leave Israel won’t let them back in and will take over the land.
A seldom mentioned reason is that countries that have let in Palestinians quickly came to regret it and got rid of as many as they could as soon as they could.
Egypt dislikes Palestinians probably more than Israel does and has repeatedly refused taking in role in the governance of Gaza.
They tried to kill the king of Jordan (twice IIRC) and tried to engineer a coup in Lebanon and in Kuwait openly sided with Sadam* during the first Gulf War.
A lot of time and effort has gone in to turning Palestinians into a troublesome population that no one wants (except to use as pawns and domestic political distractions)…
*Kuwaitis were widely loathed in the Arab world and Sadam at the time kind of had a populist thing going and had a lot of support in different countries for that reason… but siding with the invaders will not make you popular when the invaders are pushed out.
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