End the war, free the people

With internecine war a third party might make gains, but the main combatants are always losers. A military victory becomes a public relations defeat; and the public relations win, a military loss. This is what we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To talk of "war crimes" is almost meaningless when the real crime is war itself.

When governing becomes a private business

In every sense that matters, the would-be self-perpetuating political leaders of Israel have already lost the current war with Hamas. They have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by outdoing Hamas in every despicable fashion. And now their brazen and unfettered self-indulgence is naked for all the world to see. At a time when negotiations for a ceasefire and the return of any surviving hostages might be making some viable progress, in large part courtesy of Qatar's intermediation, the Israeli Government has closed the Qatari news agency in Israel, Al Jazeera, branding it as a mouthpiece for Hamas. This was a unanimous Cabinet decision, and it may well be "the first time Israel has ever shuttered a foreign news outlet". (CBS news report)

Police presence at Columbia University

Well, now that this has happened... and I think it was unavoidable and even appropriate... one of the first questions I'd like answered is whether any of the persons occupying Hamilton Hall are not registered Columbia students.

This should not be construed to mean I endorse Israel's brutal and largely unrestrained retaliation in Gaza. Indeed, I do not. But I also think that the protests sweeping American campuses today lack much of the legitimacy that drove the Anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Again, I am not at all saying that the lives of Palestinians don't matter. Of course they do. And what is happening in Gaza is every bit as unconscionable as the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that murdered, brutalized, and kidnapped Israeli civilians, including many women, children, and senior citizens. But US troops are not on the ground in Israel; and there is a valid argument to be made that what is happening in Gaza began as a defensive action, regardless of the fact that it is now clearly an offensive action and highly excessive.

A hot mess

Residing in Israel and observing what might well be a rapidly widening conflict... and watching the current political season in the USA, where a loathsome character like Trump is running a campaign that portrays him as an incarnation of Jesus Christ... I cannot help but wonder when the world will wake up and realize that religion is no panacea. And it is also not just an opiate, as Marx described it. Religion is, and has always been, a hot mess.