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Israel Has Crossed Its Rubicon

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Ted Rall

           A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. PR standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now it has painted itself into a corner.

Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israel—not its physical plant, but its current status as a privileged, funded, protected nation-state.

The damage inflicted thus far is so severe and thorough that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, at least several years. All or most of its 2.3 million residents, transformed into refugees, will be permanently displaced.

Nothing can change that. If a left-wing Israeli government were to come to power, unilaterally end the war and offer the Palestinians their own sovereign independent republic side-by-side with Israel, Gaza would need to be rebuilt at a cost of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. In the meantime, the Jewish state would have to provide long-term housing and public assistance for more than 2 million Palestinians throughout years of reconstruction. “You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the Associated Press. But where?

Assuming that a new regime could muster the necessary political consensus and address the ensuing security concerns surrounding a massive population of internally displaced people, Israel is a small nation of fewer than 10 million people with high unemployment and an aging population; it can’t afford such a massive undertaking or the demographics to quickly absorb 2 million traumatized Palestinians.

De facto, Gaza has been been ethnically cleansed. Gazans have been herded from the north, which has been flattened, to the south, against which IDF airstrike targeters and ground forces have recently turned their attention. The vast majority of the population of Gaza is now massed a few miles away from the Rafah border crossing to the Sinai Peninsula. All that remains is for the Israelis to expel the traumatized and radicalized Palestinians into the Egyptian desert.

More likely, Israel will open the gate. The Gazans enter the Sinai of their own accord. Where else can they go? There is no home to which they can return. This second Nakba will occur early next year.

Which will leave the ruins of Gaza desolate and dangerous. Spurred by legitimate public-health concerns, Israeli bulldozers will cart away the rubble and the tens of thousands of rotting corpses trapped underneath. Demining experts will have to find and disarm tens of thousands of unexploded bombs, a process that can require decades.

The end result: 141 square miles of prime beachfront property. Real-estate developers abhor nothing more than a vacuum along a scenic coastline. Sandals Gaza City will look smashing jammed next to Club Med Khan Yunis.

This was the thinking behind the Israeli intelligence officials who wrote a “thinking” memo that suggested that the situation be exploited as a rare opportunity to drive out all the locals so they could seize and annex the entire territory of Gaza. The revelations that Netanyahu’s government obtained Hamas’ detailed plans for the incursion a year ago, viewed a video on social media  that showed Hamas fighters training for the horror through repeated drills inside a mocked-up kibbutz (jihadi culture requires those about to stage a raid to warn their enemy in advance), Egypt warned Israel that Hamas was about to attack days ahead in advance, and that the IDF failed to respond for at least eight hours after Hamas breached Israel’s high-tech “smart fence” around Gaza (despite receiving an instant alert) prompts the cynic in me to wonder whether the Israeli government let October 7th happen on purpose.

What, Netanyahu and his colleagues may have asked themselves, are a few hundred or even a few thousand Israeli lives compared to the chance to get rid of half the Palestinians in Palestine, and join Gaza to Israel in the bargain?

If so, they miscalculated. U.S. officials have conveyed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel only has a few weeks left before losing international support and suffering a “strategic defeat.” Israel plans to continue for months.

The U.S. assessment is too optimistic.

The die is cast. Defeat is inevitable.

Public opinion is trending in favor of Palestine against Israel. By this point next year an appalled world, including a huge majority of American voters, will have witnessed the abject misery and injustice of the forced displacement of more than 2 million innocent civilians. Oceans of tents in the desert, screaming orphans and wounded ex-Gazans will fill high-definition social media and broadcast screens day after disgusting day. Public support for Palestine, already at historically record levels, will be so overwhelming that governments everywhere will find the pressure impossible to ignore. It will no longer be just the usual suspects in the Arab world who issue formal protests. From Tokyo to Ottawa to Paris to Rome, it will be politically untenable for any government to allow itself to be seen as complicit with the most outrageous war crime since the Vietnam War.

Eventually, the U.S. will have to ghost Israel. No more emergency war packages, no more $4 billion a year in military and other foreign aid. Even under a second Trump Administration, we might recall our ambassador.

Israel can’t see it yet. But it is well on its way to international pariah status at a scale which apartheid-era South Africa, its close Cold War ally which also went too far, could never have imagined.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

China: America’s Nefarious Enemy

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Ted Rall

Hawkish critics of China complain that the country spreads its influence around the world via its Belt and Road Initiative, which somehow makes it a threat or adversary or even an enemy of the United States. But China doesn’t invade or bomb other countries. It gifts them infrastructure and hopes to build good will. If only there was some way for the United States to do something similar and compete with them.

Burn After Reading: Why Classified Documents Don’t Matter

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Ted Rall

            The strange story at the top of the headlines—the current president and the most recent former president are both the subject of special-counsel investigations for taking home classified documents when they left the White House—rests upon two premises. One is patently false. The other is brazenly silly.

            Americans believe their nation exists in a terrifying state of endless peril. Propagandized by popular culture and the media, we imagine that we’re constantly teetering at the precipice of collapse or subjugation, surrounded by clever and ruthless fiendish enemies hellbent on undermining, attacking and ultimately destroying the United States and turning us into their slaves.

The era of great invading armies and empire-building is over. In our world, borders are largely settled so empires are built via economic influence rather than territorial gains. Bigger countries bump up against each other at the edges in search of incremental advantage.

Fewer nations in history have ever been less at risk than the U.S. in 2023. Buffered by vast oceans and bordered by vassal states, enjoying total command of the world’s oceans, the U.S. is uniquely impervious to invasion. No nation-state has launched a military attack on the mainland U.S. since the War of 1812—and we started that one. (In an attempt to buy time, warn us away from the western Pacific and to convince us to drop our oil embargo, Imperial Japan picked Pearl Harbor as a target because it was located on a remote American colony that was not yet a state. The Japanese didn’t think we would care as much as we did.) The danger to the U.S. is from within: right-wing counterrevolution, secession,  disintegration, environmental or economic collapse.

None of the “threats” we worry about—Russia, China, Iran, North Korea—want a war with the U.S., much less to invade. When U.S. adversaries saber-rattle, their motivation is to dissuade us from attacking them. To paraphrase Walter White in “Breaking Bad,” we are not the one who gets attacked. We are the one who attacks.

The hysterical reaction to the classified-documents idiocy rests on a cartoonish worldview derived from watching too many Bourne movies. In the fevered imagination of political-thriller scriptwriters, we would be totally screwed if the wrong Super Duper Important Document were to fall into the clutches of an Evil Enemy of America.

There is no such document.

When, if ever, has a classified document ever been so explosive that it represented a serious threat to national security? Almost certainly never. The exposure of classified material can lead to the theft of technology or the capture or murder of intelligence agents. And when such breaches have occurred, they have been inconveniences that required cleanups and workarounds. They were not existential dangers to the American nation-state. Nuclear launch codes are changed daily, so it wouldn’t even matter if a nefarious foreigner were to nick yesterday’s “gold codes” off the president’s desk.

The problem with classified documents is not the possibility that Donald Trump might, in the ridiculously overheated speculation by mainstream media outlets that ought to know better, sell them to the highest bidder. The problem is that there are too many of them.

Overclassification is wildly out of control. Publicly-available news articles are marked “top secret,” Should we impeach President Biden over keeping some of these next to his car? Description of foreign cultural practices, like wedding ceremonies, are marked “confidential,” so you can be prosecuted as a felon under the Espionage Act for mishandling one. The U.S. government has kept documents classified for a full century; in 2011 the CIA finally declassified World War I-era memos explaining how to expose invisible ink.

“Everything’s secret,” former CIA/NSA director Michael Hayden, remarked “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”

Get a grip, people!

There would be no effect whatsoever if 99.99999% of classified documents were to be posted to the Internet. Since that’s almost certainly the case about all the documents found in Biden’s garage and at Mar-a-Lago, it would be nice if both major political parties were to drop the posturing over the presidents’ sloppy record management and focus on real problems that affect real Americans every single day: climate change, healthcare for profit, high college tuition, the prison industrial complex, brutal and racist police, unemployment, homelessness, unaffordable housing.

Where would the money come from? We could start by abolishing the unnecessary agencies that churn out those zillions of useless classified documents.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

ANewDomain.net Column: Little Reportable Intelligence: With Friends Like the US Does Europe Need Enemies?

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Ted Rall

Here is my column exclusively for ANew Domain.net. Europe is pissed off at the NSA, but being American means never having to say you’re sorry.

What appears to actually be true, and exactly true to the extent that Clapper hasn’t said boo about it, is that the NSA tapped into the personal communications of the world’s heads of state, including close U.S. allies like German Chancellor Angela “Austerity R Us” Merkel, former President Felipe Calderón of Mexico and at least 35 other world leaders. NSA spies listened to Merkel’s private cell phone calls and read Calderón’s email. The 35-plus randoms, collected from eager-to-please U.S. government employees including State Department diplomats, appear to be personal phone taps. Yep, it’s another Snowden document.

With frenemies like the U.S., who needs terrorists?

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