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Dolores Brandon

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Oct 11, 2023, 11:01:06 AM10/11/23
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May I suggest listening to the Brian Lehrer show 10.10. 23
As someone who is neither Jewish, nor of Palestinian heritage the Palestinian Perspective inparticular
as articulated there is was for highly instructive. I cannot locate the name of the Palestinian journalist
who provides that perspective but his pov is premised on deep historical knowledge taking us back to the colonialism of the 19th C 

https://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl
Rep. Dan Goldman; The Palestinian Perspective; How Chronic Illnesses Lowered US Life Expectancy; Climate Change and Your Job


On Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 1:17 AM <clios...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
"Brian D'Agostino" <bdagost...@gmail.com>: Oct 10 09:59PM -0400

Dear psychohistorians,
 
For the last three days, I have been on alert for something worth reading
or listening to about the war in Israel-Palestine. I imagine there is good
stuff out there, but I haven't been able to find it. In this context, I
commend to you this article in today's* New York Times *by Thomas Friedman,
hardly a quality source in my opinion but the best I have been able to find
on this timely and important topic. Interspersed with the usual war
propaganda is some worthwhile information and analysis. The article is
entitled, "Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/israel-hamas-.html?searchResultPosition=2
I have copied and pasted it below:
 
<https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>
 
 
Brian
 
 
https://bdagostino.com/
 
 
 
*OPINION <https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion>*
 
*THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN*
 
*Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment*
 
Oct. 10, 2023, 5:58 p.m. ET
[image: image.png]
*Spokesman’s Office, Israeli Communications Ministry*
 
 
 
Top of Form
 
Bottom of Form
 
 
*By Thomas L. Friedman <https://www.nytimes.com/by/thomas-l-friedman>*
 
Opinion Columnist
 
 
I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis
and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian
suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets
hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing
massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened
last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and
children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case,
parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”
 
 
The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the
massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in
the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first
victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole
in his temple.
 
 
While I have no illusions about Hamas’s long-established commitment to the
destruction of the Jewish state, I am nonetheless asking myself today:
Where did this ISIS-like impulse for mass murder as the primary goal come
from? Not the seizing of territory, but plain murder? There is something
new here that is important to understand.
 
 
Since I can’t interview the Hamas leadership, I’m drawing on my experience
in the region, and here’s how I see it.
 
 
While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I
think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-first-israeli-government-delegation-holds-jewish-prayer-service-in-saudi-arabia/>
that
appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers
had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to
attend international conferences in late September and early October, and
it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.
 
 
But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that
unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different
emotional reactions in both worlds.
 
 
It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi,
who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were
conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of
Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional
Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the
Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.
 
 
For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate
expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a
century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern
democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able
to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home
of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that
touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.
 
 
But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many
Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim
Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that
picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their
noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — *even
Saudi Arabia —* and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.
 
 
As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to
prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the
surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.
 
 
I have no idea whether the Hamas leadership saw that particular picture,
but they have been fully aware of the ongoing evolution it reflects. I
believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also
seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an
Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead
to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi
Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/07/world/middleeast/saudi-israel-gaza-war.html>
to
promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to
force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the
Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back
from Israel.
 
 
The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling
coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: You will never
be at home here — no matter how much of our land our gulf Arab brothers
sell you. We will force you to lose your minds and do crazy things to Gaza
that force the Arab states to shun you.
 
Pay attention: Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West
Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its
onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were *not* part of the
Israeli-occupied West Bank.
 
 
“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel,
liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving
disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me. For Hamas,
“Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said. In one kibbutz alone,
Be’eri
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-09/ty-article-live/at-least-700-israelis-killed-2-000-wounded-over-130-held-hostage-in-gaza/0000018b-1298-d2fc-a59f-d3990eb50000?liveBlogItemId=1813605680#1813605680>,
at least 108 people, including children, were just gunned down.
 
 
So how can America best help Israel now, besides standing behind its right
to protect itself, as President Biden so forcefully did in his speech
today? I think the U.S. needs to do three things.
 
 
First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as
it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to
do — and how can I do just the opposite?
 
What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade
Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make
America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We
are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy
Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the
murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to
permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.
 
 
Hamas and Iran absolutely do not want Israel to refrain from going into
Gaza very deep or long.
 
 
Nor does Hamas want the U.S. and Israel to proceed instead as fast as
possible with negotiations to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as part
of a deal that would also require Israel to make real concessions to the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has accepted Israel as part
of the Oslo peace accords.
 
 
But for Israel to do what is most in its interests, not those of Hamas and
Iran, will likely require some very tough love between Biden and Netanyahu.
One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a
Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the
more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he
could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked
closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and
Netanyahu knows it.
 
 
Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are “good
Palestinians” ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to
nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents:
What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.
 
 
That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally
and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an
issue in the last five Israeli elections.
 
 
Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser,
wrote in an essay
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-08/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-must-smash-hamas-topple-it-from-power-then-what/0000018b-0f67-d3a8-afeb-8f6f0fc10000>
in
Haaretz on Sunday: “For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has
sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza,
undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto
cooperation with Hamas,
<https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians/2023-10-08/ty-article/.premium/hamas-wanted-to-avoid-cash-for-restraint-trap-that-doomed-pa/0000018b-0bd1-dae9-adcb-abffca0a0000>
all
designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure
that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial
compromise in the West Bank.”
 
 
Lastly, I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything
it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists
of Hamas — and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they
enter the fight.
 
 
But Netanyahu’s side of the bargain is that he has to reconnect himself
with liberal democratic Israel, so the world and the region sees this not
as a religious war but as a war between the frontline of democracy and the
frontline of theocracy. That means Netanyahu has to change his cabinet,
expel the religious zealots and create a national unity government with
Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid.
 
 
Unfortunately, Netanyahu is still prioritizing his coalition of zealots,
whom he needs to protect him from his corruption trial and to complete his
judicial coup that would neuter the Supreme Court of Israel. That’s really
messed up.
 
 
And it is a very important reason Israel was caught off guard in the first
place. Netanyahu was so wedded to this personal agenda that he was ready to
divide Israeli society like never before — and splinter his own army and
air force in the process — to get control of the courts.
 
 
I promise you that if and when there’s an inquiry into how the Israeli Army
could have so missed this Hamas buildup, investigators will discover that
the Israeli Army leadership had to spend so much time just keeping its air
force pilots and reserve officers from boycotting their service to protest
Netanyahu’s judicial coup — not to mention the time, attention and
resources they had to devote to preventing extremist settlers and religious
zealots from doing crazy things in Jerusalem and the West Bank — that they
took their eyes off the ball.
 
 
America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it
faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst,
of its society, and unless that government is ready to try to forge
compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.
 
 
 
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist. He joined the
paper in 1981, and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven
books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book
Award. @tomfriedman <https://twitter.com/tomfriedman> • Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/thomaslfriedman>
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Brian D'Agostino

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Oct 11, 2023, 9:14:13 PM10/11/23
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Thank you, Dolores, I listened to the Lehrer interviews with both Rep. Daniel Goldman and the one with Palestinian journalist Rami G. Khouri.  They are a little more than half an hour each.  Here is Khouri's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rami_George_Khouri  I found both interviews informative and enlightening.  However, I had already heard most of the points that Goldman made, since this viewpoint is being articulated 24-7 in the mainstream US media, while Khouri's points are rarely given a hearing.  This provincialism in the news Americans receive leaves us/them poorly equipped to understand what is going on in the world.

Brian D'Agostino

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