Nowhere To Run, Nowhere To Hide

A couple of days ago, Biden told a story of his first visit to Israel as a young senator. Golda Meir was prime minister (1969-1974) and after their meeting in her office, she told him that Israel had a secret weapon: “We have nowhere else to go,” said the former Milwaukee resident and naturalized U.S. citizen. Israelis still feel they have nowhere to go— and Uganda still wouldn’t be an option— but they have a helluva lot more options than Palestinians do. Aliyah is immigration by Jews to Israel. The opposite is yerida— Jews leaving Israel for another country. For one reason or another— from the wars to economic opportunities, something like 750,000 Israelis have moved to other countries, primarily the U.S., the EU, Russia, Canada, the U.K. and Australia.

The other day, I met a guy from Bangladesh named Ali. He’s been living here for 9 years and is a naturalized U.S. citizen. He married his childhood sweetheart but he’s been unable to get her the right to move to the U.S. from over two years, an unrelenting battle against bureaucracy. I don’t think Israelis even need visas to come to America anymore.

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Sarah Dadouch’s report was titled As bombs fall and border crossings close, Gazans have nowhere to run. Desperation can be a very potent weapon. Gazans can’t go anywhere.

There is a huge Palestinian diaspora:

• Jordan- 3,240,000

• Israel- 1,650,000

• Syria- 630,000

• Chile- 500,000

• Lebanon- 402,000

• Saudi Arabia- 280,000

• Egypt- 270,000

• USA- 255,000

• Honduras- 250,000

• Guatemala- 200,000

• Mexico- 120,000

• Qatar- 100,000

• Germany- 80,000

• Kuwait- 80,000

• El Salvador- 70,000

With another half million scattered throughout the rest of the world. Gazans can’t go anywhere.They’re stuck in an overcrowded, open-air prison— no one gets in or out. There is hopelessness and desperation. The Likud would like all Palestinians to leave “Greater Israel,” even if it takes many generations. Hamas reacted savagely to that this past weekend. Many on the Israeli right see that tragedy as an opportunity for some ethnic cleansing. On Tuesday, in the buildup to a ground invasion Hamas seems to be relishing, Israeli general Ghassan Aliyan said to the Gazans: “You wanted hell— you will get hell.” Israel’s Air Force and navy have been pounding Gaza for 5 days, wantonly. Dadouch wrote “Israel has pounded Gaza with airstrikes for four days, killing more than 900 people, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Residents bracing for a ground assault say they have nowhere to go. More than 260,000 people have been displaced… a number it said is expected to rise…

The siege and the incessant bombardment has disrupted every facet of life in Gaza. More than 2 million people live in the strip, which is twice the size of D.C. but has three times as many people. Eighty percent of residents live in poverty, and over 90 percent do not have access to clean water.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advised Gazans on Sunday to leave immediately “because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

But Israel has closed the Erez Crossing, Gaza’s lone pedestrian pathway into the country. Rafah— the only functioning crossing with Egypt and the only way out for Gazans— has been hit repeatedly by the Israeli military, including again on Tuesday, forcing its closure.

Analysts say the Egyptian government is probably worried about the domestic consequences of a mass influx of Palestinians. In his first comments on the conflict Tuesday, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said national security is his top priority, “and I will not neglect it under any circumstances.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s siege order cut off what little water, electricity, food and fuel Israel allows into the strip, where people have lived under a crippling blockade since 2007.

In the U.S., as the drumbeat for war pounds, the barrage of Israeli propaganda is overwhelming, not just on Fox News but everywhere. On Tuesday, MSNBC was like Likud Central, as they conflated the “right of Israel to defend itself” with collective punishment for Gazan civilians (a war crime). Speaking of which… this might be a good time to read Anne Applebaum’s essay for The Atlantic, There Are No Rules. “The ‘rules-based world order’ is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works,” she wrote.

“This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago. Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them— avoiding civilian casualties, for example— or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them… The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have— and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.”