W.J. Astore
America as the Essential Nation for Trigger Treats
Some thoughts — more or less connected — on war in Gaza and Ukraine:
Israel is engaged in a “traditional” war of conquest. Like the Romans destroyed Carthage, Israel is essentially destroying Gaza using American-provided weaponry, together with hoary approaches like famine and disease.
What surprises so many is that ruthless wars of conquest aren’t supposed to happen. It’s 2023! We’re civilized people! Only dictators like Putin are ruthless! But, as many people have noted, Israel has already killed more children in two months than Russia has killed in nearly two years of war in Ukraine.
No — Israel and the USA are not civilized. The so-called rules-based order is might makes right. Thucydides defined Israel/USA policy 2400 years ago: The strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.
The Palestinians are being killed, starved, and shoved off their land because Israel wants it. The Hamas attacks provided the excuse for the final solution to the Gaza question.
But let’s be clear here: Wars of conquest are a feature of humanity throughout history. Look at the history of the United States and its conquest of Native Americans or its war of “manifest destiny” against Mexico. It’s a land grab.
Gaza isn’t primarily a religious war of Jews versus Muslims. There may be some Jews who believe it’s “their” land because the Torah says so, but many other Jews are against this brazen war of conquest. Religion isn’t the main cause here. The causes are greed and power, land lust and the pursuit of black gold (fossil fuels off Gaza). And vengeance.
The Biden administration refuses to place any conditions on massive weapons shipments to Israel. So much for “leverage.”
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Judging by the U.S. federal budget, America’s leaders are most addicted to violence and war, whether manifested against our fellow humans or against nature and the planet. Dangerously, in violence people often find a sense of purpose and belonging as well as scapegoats even as they embrace and empower leaders who promise them blood-soaked redemption.
It’s quite possible the historical Jesus was betrayed and killed because he rejected redemptive violence. Jesus seems to have taught redemptive peace, and that was an unpopular message among Jewish people 2000 years ago, who apparently were looking for liberation through military victory over the Romans, not salvation through the grace offered them by a peace-preaching prophet and rabbi who took the side of the marginalized and oppressed.
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The average age of Ukrainian troops is now 43. Young women are being actively recruited into the ranks. Men as old as 60 are being pressed into service. “Body snatchers” are illegally grabbing men off the streets and forcing them to the front. Does this sound like a winnable war for the “imperfect democracy” of Ukraine?
I continue to see a stalemated situation with little chance of a decisive military victory for Ukraine. Assuming the war continues, Ukraine will continue to be hollowed out.
Meanwhile, Russia has most certainly been weakened militarily by this war, and perhaps economically as well with the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines. Russia is less of a threat to NATO than it was two years ago, meaning that NATO has even less to fear from an alleged expansionist Putin. Given the quagmire faced by Russia in Ukraine, I doubt very much that Putin is contemplating an invasion of any NATO country.
Suffice to say I am against another $62+ billion for Ukraine and I am for diplomatic efforts to foster a ceasefire and settlement. Indeed, I think that if the U.S. stops military aid to Ukraine, Zelensky and Putin would likely find a way to end this war and all its killing and destruction.
Yet, the Biden administration is persisting in its plans to send scores of billions in more weaponry to Ukraine, with Senator Lindsey Graham still boasting Ukraine will fight and die to the last man (and woman?). If Biden’s war package is approved, U.S. aid (mainly military) to Ukraine will approach $200 billion in two years. That’s roughly $8 billion a month, double the monthly cost of the Afghan War. Yet Americans are told this is the price of freedom: massive shipments of weapons and other forms of aid so that Ukraine can kill Russians.
The Biden administration has embraced war in Ukraine as well as war in Gaza, essentially placing no conditions on massive shipments of U.S. weaponry to fuel these conflicts. Someone please tell me what is “progressive” and humane about Joe Biden’s policies.
I know freedom isn’t free; I had no idea freedom came at so high a cost in deadly military weaponry and dead bodies. I guess it’s true, then: America is the freest country in the world because we dominate the world’s trade in life-takers and widow-makers. Exceptional we are in our belief in war and weapons; essential we are to any country looking to add “trigger treats” to their arsenals of democracy.
It’s a wonderful life in Pottersville USA.
Bracing Views 
Just wanted to point out that the execution of Jesus was carried out by the Romans. The whole story of the betrayal of Jesus by the Jews was a fiction probably concocted by the early Christians to make peace with the Roman authorities. Pilate was no compassionate person who would have sought to avoid putting an innocent person to death. On the contrary, he was a butcher who was reprimanded by Rome for his cruelty. Blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus has been used as an excuse for ostracizing and murdering Jews. The excuse is they were guilty of the crime of deicide. If that were really the case then would have just stoned him like they did Stephen. No, Jesus was killed by the power elites of his time because he preached against their way of life. The Jews were not guilt of killing him.
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Yes, the Romans crucified Christ. However, if you believe the Gospels, Jesus was rejected by the Jewish establishment, who had an opportunity to save him.
In the larger picture, however, Jesus had to die. It was foretold. Only though the Son of God’s death and resurrection could humans be redeemed.
If anyone was to blame, it was none of us and all of us, because we are all sinners who can be saved only through God’s redeeming grace: His death on the cross.
Of course, I speak here from my understanding of Christian faith and dogma. I don’t speak here as a historian.
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That view of the Romans as the real killers of Jesus has been around for some time but it has seldom entered into the sermons and homilies of Christian congregations. John Dominic Crossan’s books on early Christian history deals with the issue of who killed Jesus and he emphatically blames the Romans. As is often the case, the obvious is the most difficult to comprehend, just as the genocidal acts of Israel’s leaders are treated with carefully modulated euphemisms and the clarity of their intentions plainly revealed in the many videos and photographs that verify this destruction.
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JESUS, GAZA, AND THE MURDER OF USELESS PEOPLE by Edward Curtin
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. It is because of him that we celebrate Christmas. But it is in spite of him that what we celebrate is the opposite of what he stood for.
The different stories of his birth, told by Mathew and Luke in the New Testament, which are the bases for Christmas, are not filled with sugar plum fairies and sleighs filled with useless, unnecessary consumer goods. There’s nothing about a Jolly Old St. Nicholas or baked ham or candy canes. No gifts to return in a frenzied rush that replicates their purchase. No credit card bills that come due in the new year. No “Jingle Bell Rock” with Brenda Lee or “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby.
Just a poor child’s birth to fulfill a prophecy that out of life would come death and out of death would come life. That hope was improbable but possible with faith.
These birth narratives, which tell of a nativity that concludes with the grown child’s suffering, public crucifixion, death, and Resurrection – a story that lives on with the suffering of so many innocents – are, as Gary Wills puts it in What the Gospels Meant, “. . . far from feel-good stories. They tell of a family outcast and exiled, hunted and rejected. They tell of children killed, of a sword to pierce the mother’s heart, of a judgment on the nations.” They are stories of rejection, massacre, and a desperate flight from death at an early age. They are not what most people now consider to be the essence of Christmas since a radical Palestinian Jew’s story has been almost totally erased by the glitz and greed of getting and spending to fuel an economy geared for war and killing.
Mathew and Luke’s birth narratives are replicated again and again throughout history, presently and most conspicuously in Gaza and the West Bank, as the massacre of the innocents continues under today’s King Herod, Benjamin Netanyahu, the client king of Washington, not Rome, while U.S. politicians, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who claims to be a defender of children and opposed to U.S. war policies, support this genocide with rhetorical justifications that the Trappist monk Thomas Merton called the unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience . . .
To the shock of so many of Kennedy’s early supporters, he claims, among other unspeakable assertions, that the Israelis have been the innocent victims of the Palestinians for 75 years, and they “could flatten Gaza” if they chose to, but instead have kindly used high-tech explosives “to avoid civilian casualties”; that they are not committing genocide intentionally. Indeed, his defense of the indefensible Israeli war crimes is widely shared by the compromised political leadership of both parties in Washinton, D.C., a place Kennedy is hoping to reach as the top of the heap, but he is contradicting all his talk about spiritual renewal and healing the divide, and it is especially galling and hypocritical as we try to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.
While the genocide of Palestinians is being documented every ongoing day now, the Gospel stories are different in that they were written after the fact and were not based on eyewitness testimony but are narratives of deep symbolic faith significance, historically wrong in places, but told to signify religious truths of the early Christian faith community.
Once there was a mother and father with their child on the run to safety in Egypt; today there are millions of Palestinian refugees on a bombed-out unarmed road of flight to nowhere but a dead-end.
Continued at https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/21/jesus-gaza-and-the-murder-of-useless-people/
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Not to be distracted by theological/historical interpretations, the larger point I believe you are making is that, despite considerable technical and material progress, humanity has made little moral or ethical progress — especially when it comes to large, abstract institutions such as governments and corporations. They may rename and rebrand periodically, but they are still up to all their old tricks, including wars of conquest and cutthroat capitalism. I agree that racial and religious rationalizations are secondary.
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Yes.
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Nonsense. You conveniently choose to ignore & disregard the horrible, inhuman atrocities that Palestinian Hamas perpetrated on 1200 innocent civilians, a number of which were from other countries, in Israel &’the kidnapping of 240 innocent civilians in Hamas’ surprise, unprovoked attack in October 7th, Apparently you consider such evil attacks & atrocities as acceptable. I do not! Shame on you.
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Bizarre. The thousands slaughtered on a regular basis by those who chose to “mow the lawn” (ie periodic bombing) by Israel; This took place in 2008 (years prior to Oct 7th) when 1440 Palestinians were killed. Such “facts” you are conveniently forgetting: in 2014 2310 Palestinians were killed and over the years since many thousands more with little respite. Calling Oct 7th “unprovoked” is not only ironic, it indicates a pathological loss of memory.
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Regrettably you choose to forget & overlook the opportunity Palestine had for peace & independent nationhood during the last 20 days of Bill Clinton’s presidency when sitting on the president’s desk was a Declaration of peace & recognition of Palestinian nationhood, side by side with Israel. It was late in the morning & finally Arafat, representing one Palestine. ( Please note that at that time there was no Hamas. Now there are two Palestine’s: one ruled by terrorist Hamas, & the other, ruled in the West Bank by corrupt Abbas who misappropriated funds given by other countries to aid the Palestinian people in order to reward the terrorists in Israeli prisons & the families of terrorists killed while committing terrorist acts.). As stated, Arafat arrived late in President Clinton”s office, declared that King Solomon’s temple was never built on the Temple Mount, that no Israeli planes could fly over Palestine & that all Israeli Jews were on illegal land. Arafat left the office, invoked the second Infitada & went to war against Israel. Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, Arafat’s advisor, urged Arafat to sign the document advising Arafat that if Arafat did not sign the Declaration of Palestinian independence, Arafat would never get a better deal & that if Arafat didn’t sign, Arafat would betray the Palestinians people. Also, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack signed the document. The leaders of Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, & Saudi Arabia urged Arafat to sign the document. Later Arafat regretted not having signed. This event is documented in special diplomat Dennis Ross’ book, “The Missing Peace.”. Dennis Ross worked to help bring both Israel & Palestine to a peaceful settlement. Dennis Ross was in President Clinton’s office & was a witness to what transpired. We must examine the causes of the conflict between Israel & Palestine, & not the effects & the results that are you specify. There were two other peace initiatives that Israel attempted to make with Palestine. Regrettably, Palestine has suffered from the fact that they have not had a true leader, a statesman, seeking genuine peaceful resolution of their conflict. Just think how many lives would have been spared & how much destruction could have been avoided if Arafat had signed the document declaring Palestine’s independence!
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I did mention the Hamas attacks. We all know about them. And apparently the death toll was overstated by Israel.
Israel has already killed more than 20,000 people in Gaza while displacing more than a million. Hundreds of thousands are beginning to starve. Are we to dismiss or excuse the Israeli conquest of Gaza because of the Hamas attacks that killed roughly 800 civilians?
Gaza has been reduced to a hellhole, a mound of rubble. It’s “nonsense” to dismiss that. Even shameful.
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How many times must Israel offer peace & nationhood to Palestine before Palestinian leaders finally accept peace & nationhood, instead of going to war to destroy Israel & kill all the Jews? That remains the burning issue! Had Arafat been a statesman,instead of a terrorist, & had accepted peace & nationhood during the last 20 days of President. Clinton’s presidency, there would have been peace & Palestinian nationhood. That is a fact. And we would not now be counting the thousands of deaths & all the destruction that you enumerate. This should not continue to be ignored.
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It’s good to know it’s all the fault of the Palestinians. I guess we should keep sending megatons of bombs and missiles to Israel so that Bibi’s government can wipe them all out.
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Regrettably you fail to see the impending tragedy for both people’s. It is too easy to blame, to play the blame game. I repeat the Palestinian people have never had a true leader who cares about Palestinians, who cares about peace, who cares about humanity, & that is a fact, that is the horrific tragedy!
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“Impending” tragedy? I see massive destruction and ethnic cleansing in progress right now. It’s not “impending.” And you appear to place all the blame on the Palestinians and the alleged lack of a “true leader.” What am I missing?
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There seems to be a compulsive need by apologists of Israel to blame the victims (Palestinians) for never having a leader. Do you not think that Israel has had a hand in preventing this?
It might be worth listening to an interview with Paul Rogers: (Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies and a leading voice on war and peace). Prof Rogers recounts the events leading to Oct 7th and the bombing of Gaza. Watch the interview:
Also see an interview with Avi Shlaim, who is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford Univ and grew up in Israel and served in the IDF. His brief (10 page) history of Israel & Palestine gives a helpful understanding of the issues including Palestinian leadership or lack thereof:
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/author/1584/avi-shlaim……After opening the link click on the Heading: “All That Remains”
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People have never been civilized. Since ancient times, the whole world has lived by the principle: he who is stronger is right. And events in Palestine once again confirm this postulate.
And as for the war in Ukraine. This is not a war between Ukraine and Russia, it is a war of Western countries against Russia. And the West, led by the United States, is losing this war. America has no chance of winning this conflict. America has not weakened Russia, but only strengthened it.
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