Mr. Reich is correct, Trump Republicans must not reward Putin’s aggression period!
Trump’s only strength
He plays on your weaknesses!
(The opposite of Bravery is Fealty to a dictator wannabe!) What has happened to THE HOME OF THE BRAVE? The GOP has become a herd of sheep.
It’s indefensibly deplorable that members of their own party were receiving Death Threats because they didn’t vote for Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House! Then they voted unanimously for MAGA Mike Johnson! Heather Cox Richardson noted that Mike Johnson’s 2018 campaign accepted money from a group of Russian nationals, and he has said he does not support additional funding for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression! Not one Republican representative abstained or voted against the new Speaker of the House. I think we should start calling them the Marshmallow Party! Or maybe the Domino Party in a perfect line behind the treasonous cult leader.
To the 76 million who voted for Trump, how does it make you feel when you are aligned with racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry!
It used to make your stomach turn if you had any decency. What changed? Think about all the fallen soldiers that gave their lives to protect our Constitution and our Country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died defending us!
Are you also saying now that they were losers and suckers like the FPOTUS?
Think long and hard about whether you would rather live in a free country, where we the people pick our leaders, the present U.S., or a country with an autocratic form of government which is led by a Dictator, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations, typically favoring loyalty over competence in their governments and have a general distrust of intelligentsia. Elites in personalist dictatorships often do not have a professional political career and are unqualified for positions they are given. Sound familiar? And your rights and freedoms that you have now are relinquished.
Your most important right, the right to vote would mean nothing!!!
Agree with all of your comments. But if Israel is such a wealthy success, why do they need our aid. Why are they the #1 recipient of our foreign aid? It seems wrong when so many around the globe are literally starving to death. And is Israel critical to the US politically or is it our greatest liability?
I agree with all your observations & every point you make.
I really want to stay away from this conflict, an only slightly different, but even more troubling, version of a conflict I've seen repeated over & over during my life.
I am convinced the Hamas attack on Israel was plotted by Russia & Iran to divide the West & deflect Western attention & support from Ukraine in its existential struggle against Russia. It's having its intended results, unfortunately.
What I fail to understand is why Joe Biden (a pretty clear minded individual, despite Republican attacks on his mental acuity) cannot see how blindly supporting the Israeli government as they murder innocent civilians on their quest for revenge against Hamas is abjectly wrong.
The simple fact remains innocent lives taken in the name of revenge is always wrong. There is no middle ground.
The suffering of civilians is so incredible, it's worse than 911 where it was limited in time and scope. The intense bombing of Gaza has been going on for weeks and it looks like there are few to NO options for the Palestinans. What really worries me is how many more people will grow up with hate because of their oppression and loss of families. It's so horrific for everyone but especially the Palestinians.
The ONLY moral compass thru this entire mess is simply STOP FIGHTING. There is no reason for humans in 2023 to engage in war.
I won't take sides. The only side I take is with the citizens in each country who are being punished by having their quality of life torn to shreds. We, as modern human beings can no longer afford to live like this. This warring negativity affects all of Humanity...
Too bad the UK and US had no moral compass when we destroyed Iran’s fledgling democracy in 1953 so we could steal their oil. Or when we launched a devastating war against Iraq based on a blurry image of a building in a field somewhere (could have been Kansas) that “housed weapons of mass destruction.” We need to clearly acknowledge how we have contributed to the current instability in the Middle East.
Right on all counts Robert! What Israel needs is new and uncorrupted leadership. And what is needed in Gaza right now is an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid. Too many people are suffering and dying already!
As often happens, I wake up in the middle of my night to urinate. Sometimes, I go back to bed, too often I begin to doomscroll.
This morning, I tried to do some work, tried to play an online game but ended up doomscolling and then found you.
I have many reasons that I cannot focus. I suppose first is I have severe, chronic and persistent mental illness.
But these days I have another reason, I have family in Israel. In fact, I have hundreds of family in Israel. Some of them live there, some of them were there to celebrate the holidays with my uncle, who is 95 and not in good health and may not live another year.
For my family that lives in Israel, this is the most dangerous time since the creation of the state of Israel over 75 years ago.
I just read a New York times article that says there is a gathering feeling that Biden's support of Israel will cost him the 2024 election. That would be a shame for him but, if any of the current people who are running for President on the Republican side, win, a tragedy for the United States. I hope that I am wrong but I believe it is true.
Meanwhile in five hours, i will go to "feedback" session and tell people who are charged with ending homelessness in Illinois about how I think the current plan is working and what should be in the new plan.
I think they will fail. I think, in part because of that failure, I will become homeless. I hope I am wrong. I believe i am right.
I think that what I do, and for that matter what they do, will not end homelessness.
Still you have told me that I should act, as though I did not believe that. I have promised someone that I would try. This is me trying.
Every action has a reaction. When we support authoritarian regimes and their autocratic rule, we lose our humanity and open the door to justified retribution. Cause and effect.
If you're like me, you're feeling alienated and disconnected from seemingly everybody. We are being presented with either/ors on both sides, and each side is rationalizing its violence. Worse, we are hearing retelling of history that is corrupted by self-interest, or at best, is without context. I'm pretty fed up with what I am hearing, and I am saddened by the awful suffering. Neither side wants to hear straight talk, admit guilt, or retreat from tribalism.
The Geneva Convention and UN are there because our Grandparents suffered,fought and died for it. Simple, it’s time to make it work as it should along with the ICC. It’s the only civilising force humanity has.
I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.
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OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.
Oct. 28, 2023
Two horses wander through the rubble of buildings in Gaza in 2014.
Beit Hanoun, Gaza, after Israeli bombardment on July 26, 2014. Credit...Ali Hassan/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images
Share full article
By Benzion Sanders
Mr. Sanders is the Jerusalem program director of Extend, a group that connects Palestinian and Israeli human rights leaders with American Jewish audiences, and a former staff member of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group.
When my Israeli infantry unit arrived at the first village in Gaza, in July 2014, we cleared houses by sending grenades through windows, blowing doors open and firing bullets into rooms to avoid ambush and booby traps. We were told Palestinian civilians had fled.
I realized this wasn’t true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been lying on the sand floor of a shack, in a pool of blood.
That was my experience the last time Israeli troops entered the Gaza Strip in a large-scale way, when my special forces unit, attached to the 993rd Nahal Brigade, was one of the first to go in.
Like the invasion that the Israeli military has said is imminent, that campaign was precipitated by atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists. On June 12 of that year, Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers; soon after, Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager. The horrific exchange escalated into a larger conflict; ultimately some 70 Israelis and 2,250 Palestinians were killed over seven weeks. Then, as now, Israelis were told that we were going in to deal a decisive blow to Hamas.
As Israeli troops made incursions into Gaza on Friday and prepared for possible street-by-street urban combat, complicated by the presence of more than 200 hostages still being held by Hamas, I know firsthand the terror they can expect in an landscape of postapocalyptic bombed-out neighborhoods, where Hamas fighters could be lying in wait. There’s also the constant fear of coming under attack by mortars and missiles, and the possibility of a gunman emerging from the group’s underground network of tunnels.
Those three fateful weeks inside the Gaza Strip transformed me from a deeply religious, Modern Orthodox yeshiva student and West Bank settler into an activist with the movement opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, first with the antiwar veterans organization Breaking the Silence and now with Extend, a group that connects Palestinian and Israeli human rights leaders with American Jewish audiences.
All our casualties and the suffering brought on Palestinians in Gaza accomplished nothing since our leaders refused to work on creating a political reality in which more violence would not be inevitable. While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn’t change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror. A ground invasion is doomed to failure.
Even today, I remember how the ground shook from the constant explosions as we moved into Gaza at dusk at the start of the ground invasion on July 17. As we marched into the village of Umm al-Nasr, our Merkava tanks plowed through the fields next to us, and the aerial and artillery bombardments created relentless thunder and lightning — what we jokingly called the sound-and-light show.
Our main task over the two weeks I was in the northern Gaza Strip was to clear and secure a perimeter in urban areas to enable combat engineers to identify and demolish tunnels leading into Israel. We never wanted to stay stationary and become easy targets, so we would take up positions in a new house every night. Each house had to be cleared; in one, I found a Kalashnikov rifle with a combat vest and an explosive device. At one point, I listened in terror to graphic reports from our radioman of soldiers from my unit searching for body parts after a missile struck a nearby house they had taken over, injuring and killing some of my comrades.
The battle was unpredictable as we faced an enemy that used the complicated terrain to its advantage. It seemed that the Hamas fighters, like most of the civilians, had fled from our advance. Yet on the fourth day of the ground invasion, as we moved toward the Al-Burrah neighborhood in Beit Hanoun, a city in northeast Gaza, Hamas fighters suddenly came out from a tunnel behind us and killed four soldiers at the border fence.
As we withdrew from Beit Hanoun, we heard the roar of Air Force fighter jets overhead, followed by deafening explosions and towering plumes of debris and smoke rising from Al-Burrah. I later learned that in those moments, the airstrikes killed eight members of the Wahdan family, mostly women and children, whose home soldiers from my unit had occupied for days while the family was there.
At one point, I scribbled some thoughts on a piece of paper. I wrote that some members of my team had been tallying the number of soldiers killed and discussing whether this operation was worth the losses. “I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
That’s the lie they told us, and the lie that’s being repeated today: that we can decisively eliminate the threat of Hamas through a military operation. In the years since, Hamas has only grown stronger, despite our sacrifices and despite the death and destruction we had wrought on Gaza.
These periodic episodes of killing and destruction, which Israeli commentators and politicians cynically call “mowing the lawn,” have been a price Israel was willing to pay to avoid being pushed toward a two-state solution. We chose to “manage” the conflict through a combination of brute force and economic incentives, instead of working to solve it by ending our perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory.
Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.
Tragically, many of those who made this argument were also the victims of Hamas’s heinous attack on Oct. 7. They included a fellow member of my unit who also served with me in Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group. He was a security guard at a kibbutz attacked by Hamas and fought the terrorists for seven hours until he ran out of ammunition and was murdered.
I left his funeral last week crushed, knowing we had lost such a righteous soul. To me it’s clear. My friend not only fought against Hamas during his final moments to protect his friends and family; he also fought against Hamas during years of activism against the occupation.
My heart is broken but I am more resolved than ever to continue his legacy.
Mr. Reich is correct, Trump Republicans must not reward Putin’s aggression period!
Trump’s only strength
He plays on your weaknesses!
(The opposite of Bravery is Fealty to a dictator wannabe!) What has happened to THE HOME OF THE BRAVE? The GOP has become a herd of sheep.
It’s indefensibly deplorable that members of their own party were receiving Death Threats because they didn’t vote for Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House! Then they voted unanimously for MAGA Mike Johnson! Heather Cox Richardson noted that Mike Johnson’s 2018 campaign accepted money from a group of Russian nationals, and he has said he does not support additional funding for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression! Not one Republican representative abstained or voted against the new Speaker of the House. I think we should start calling them the Marshmallow Party! Or maybe the Domino Party in a perfect line behind the treasonous cult leader.
To the 76 million who voted for Trump, how does it make you feel when you are aligned with racism, xenophobia, islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry!
It used to make your stomach turn if you had any decency. What changed? Think about all the fallen soldiers that gave their lives to protect our Constitution and our Country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died defending us!
Are you also saying now that they were losers and suckers like the FPOTUS?
Think long and hard about whether you would rather live in a free country, where we the people pick our leaders, the present U.S., or a country with an autocratic form of government which is led by a Dictator, or a group of leaders, who hold governmental powers with few to no limitations, typically favoring loyalty over competence in their governments and have a general distrust of intelligentsia. Elites in personalist dictatorships often do not have a professional political career and are unqualified for positions they are given. Sound familiar? And your rights and freedoms that you have now are relinquished.
Your most important right, the right to vote would mean nothing!!!
There has been a dearth of clear thinking. Thank you for an intelligent response to this horrific tragedy
Agree with all of your comments. But if Israel is such a wealthy success, why do they need our aid. Why are they the #1 recipient of our foreign aid? It seems wrong when so many around the globe are literally starving to death. And is Israel critical to the US politically or is it our greatest liability?
I agree with all your observations & every point you make.
I really want to stay away from this conflict, an only slightly different, but even more troubling, version of a conflict I've seen repeated over & over during my life.
I am convinced the Hamas attack on Israel was plotted by Russia & Iran to divide the West & deflect Western attention & support from Ukraine in its existential struggle against Russia. It's having its intended results, unfortunately.
What I fail to understand is why Joe Biden (a pretty clear minded individual, despite Republican attacks on his mental acuity) cannot see how blindly supporting the Israeli government as they murder innocent civilians on their quest for revenge against Hamas is abjectly wrong.
The simple fact remains innocent lives taken in the name of revenge is always wrong. There is no middle ground.
The suffering of civilians is so incredible, it's worse than 911 where it was limited in time and scope. The intense bombing of Gaza has been going on for weeks and it looks like there are few to NO options for the Palestinans. What really worries me is how many more people will grow up with hate because of their oppression and loss of families. It's so horrific for everyone but especially the Palestinians.
The ONLY moral compass thru this entire mess is simply STOP FIGHTING. There is no reason for humans in 2023 to engage in war.
I won't take sides. The only side I take is with the citizens in each country who are being punished by having their quality of life torn to shreds. We, as modern human beings can no longer afford to live like this. This warring negativity affects all of Humanity...
Hamas is a shadow government and will not be deterred through attacks on the people of Gaza.
Like economic sanctions, the pain is only felt by the people in the street if Israel invades.
Too bad the UK and US had no moral compass when we destroyed Iran’s fledgling democracy in 1953 so we could steal their oil. Or when we launched a devastating war against Iraq based on a blurry image of a building in a field somewhere (could have been Kansas) that “housed weapons of mass destruction.” We need to clearly acknowledge how we have contributed to the current instability in the Middle East.
Right on all counts Robert! What Israel needs is new and uncorrupted leadership. And what is needed in Gaza right now is an immediate ceasefire and humanitarian aid. Too many people are suffering and dying already!
Sigh
Professor,
As often happens, I wake up in the middle of my night to urinate. Sometimes, I go back to bed, too often I begin to doomscroll.
This morning, I tried to do some work, tried to play an online game but ended up doomscolling and then found you.
I have many reasons that I cannot focus. I suppose first is I have severe, chronic and persistent mental illness.
But these days I have another reason, I have family in Israel. In fact, I have hundreds of family in Israel. Some of them live there, some of them were there to celebrate the holidays with my uncle, who is 95 and not in good health and may not live another year.
For my family that lives in Israel, this is the most dangerous time since the creation of the state of Israel over 75 years ago.
I just read a New York times article that says there is a gathering feeling that Biden's support of Israel will cost him the 2024 election. That would be a shame for him but, if any of the current people who are running for President on the Republican side, win, a tragedy for the United States. I hope that I am wrong but I believe it is true.
Meanwhile in five hours, i will go to "feedback" session and tell people who are charged with ending homelessness in Illinois about how I think the current plan is working and what should be in the new plan.
I think they will fail. I think, in part because of that failure, I will become homeless. I hope I am wrong. I believe i am right.
I think that what I do, and for that matter what they do, will not end homelessness.
Still you have told me that I should act, as though I did not believe that. I have promised someone that I would try. This is me trying.
Wish me luck
Give peace a chance with much love
Fred
You are absolutely correct Mr Reich. Hate and aggression will only fan the flames of more hatred and a swelling of the ranks of Hamas.
Every action has a reaction. When we support authoritarian regimes and their autocratic rule, we lose our humanity and open the door to justified retribution. Cause and effect.
If you're like me, you're feeling alienated and disconnected from seemingly everybody. We are being presented with either/ors on both sides, and each side is rationalizing its violence. Worse, we are hearing retelling of history that is corrupted by self-interest, or at best, is without context. I'm pretty fed up with what I am hearing, and I am saddened by the awful suffering. Neither side wants to hear straight talk, admit guilt, or retreat from tribalism.
The Geneva Convention and UN are there because our Grandparents suffered,fought and died for it. Simple, it’s time to make it work as it should along with the ICC. It’s the only civilising force humanity has.
GIVE THE TIMES
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OPINION | THE WORLD
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I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.
Share full article
OPINION
GUEST ESSAY
I Fought for the I.D.F. in Gaza. It Made Me Fight for Peace.
Oct. 28, 2023
Two horses wander through the rubble of buildings in Gaza in 2014.
Beit Hanoun, Gaza, after Israeli bombardment on July 26, 2014. Credit...Ali Hassan/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images
Share full article
By Benzion Sanders
Mr. Sanders is the Jerusalem program director of Extend, a group that connects Palestinian and Israeli human rights leaders with American Jewish audiences, and a former staff member of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group.
When my Israeli infantry unit arrived at the first village in Gaza, in July 2014, we cleared houses by sending grenades through windows, blowing doors open and firing bullets into rooms to avoid ambush and booby traps. We were told Palestinian civilians had fled.
I realized this wasn’t true as I stood over the corpse of an elderly Palestinian woman whose face had been mutilated by shrapnel. She had been lying on the sand floor of a shack, in a pool of blood.
That was my experience the last time Israeli troops entered the Gaza Strip in a large-scale way, when my special forces unit, attached to the 993rd Nahal Brigade, was one of the first to go in.
Like the invasion that the Israeli military has said is imminent, that campaign was precipitated by atrocities carried out by Hamas terrorists. On June 12 of that year, Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers; soon after, Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager. The horrific exchange escalated into a larger conflict; ultimately some 70 Israelis and 2,250 Palestinians were killed over seven weeks. Then, as now, Israelis were told that we were going in to deal a decisive blow to Hamas.
As Israeli troops made incursions into Gaza on Friday and prepared for possible street-by-street urban combat, complicated by the presence of more than 200 hostages still being held by Hamas, I know firsthand the terror they can expect in an landscape of postapocalyptic bombed-out neighborhoods, where Hamas fighters could be lying in wait. There’s also the constant fear of coming under attack by mortars and missiles, and the possibility of a gunman emerging from the group’s underground network of tunnels.
Those three fateful weeks inside the Gaza Strip transformed me from a deeply religious, Modern Orthodox yeshiva student and West Bank settler into an activist with the movement opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, first with the antiwar veterans organization Breaking the Silence and now with Extend, a group that connects Palestinian and Israeli human rights leaders with American Jewish audiences.
All our casualties and the suffering brought on Palestinians in Gaza accomplished nothing since our leaders refused to work on creating a political reality in which more violence would not be inevitable. While I believe in self-defense, fighting in Gaza taught me that if my government doesn’t change its approach from crushing Palestinian hope to committing to Palestinian independence, not only will this war kill an untold number of Israelis and Palestinians in addition to the thousands who already have died, but it also will not decisively end terror. A ground invasion is doomed to failure.
Even today, I remember how the ground shook from the constant explosions as we moved into Gaza at dusk at the start of the ground invasion on July 17. As we marched into the village of Umm al-Nasr, our Merkava tanks plowed through the fields next to us, and the aerial and artillery bombardments created relentless thunder and lightning — what we jokingly called the sound-and-light show.
Our main task over the two weeks I was in the northern Gaza Strip was to clear and secure a perimeter in urban areas to enable combat engineers to identify and demolish tunnels leading into Israel. We never wanted to stay stationary and become easy targets, so we would take up positions in a new house every night. Each house had to be cleared; in one, I found a Kalashnikov rifle with a combat vest and an explosive device. At one point, I listened in terror to graphic reports from our radioman of soldiers from my unit searching for body parts after a missile struck a nearby house they had taken over, injuring and killing some of my comrades.
The battle was unpredictable as we faced an enemy that used the complicated terrain to its advantage. It seemed that the Hamas fighters, like most of the civilians, had fled from our advance. Yet on the fourth day of the ground invasion, as we moved toward the Al-Burrah neighborhood in Beit Hanoun, a city in northeast Gaza, Hamas fighters suddenly came out from a tunnel behind us and killed four soldiers at the border fence.
As we withdrew from Beit Hanoun, we heard the roar of Air Force fighter jets overhead, followed by deafening explosions and towering plumes of debris and smoke rising from Al-Burrah. I later learned that in those moments, the airstrikes killed eight members of the Wahdan family, mostly women and children, whose home soldiers from my unit had occupied for days while the family was there.
At one point, I scribbled some thoughts on a piece of paper. I wrote that some members of my team had been tallying the number of soldiers killed and discussing whether this operation was worth the losses. “I think it could be worth it,” I wrote, “as long as we decisively eliminate the threat.”
That’s the lie they told us, and the lie that’s being repeated today: that we can decisively eliminate the threat of Hamas through a military operation. In the years since, Hamas has only grown stronger, despite our sacrifices and despite the death and destruction we had wrought on Gaza.
These periodic episodes of killing and destruction, which Israeli commentators and politicians cynically call “mowing the lawn,” have been a price Israel was willing to pay to avoid being pushed toward a two-state solution. We chose to “manage” the conflict through a combination of brute force and economic incentives, instead of working to solve it by ending our perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory.
Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.
For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.
Tragically, many of those who made this argument were also the victims of Hamas’s heinous attack on Oct. 7. They included a fellow member of my unit who also served with me in Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group. He was a security guard at a kibbutz attacked by Hamas and fought the terrorists for seven hours until he ran out of ammunition and was murdered.
I left his funeral last week crushed, knowing we had lost such a righteous soul. To me it’s clear. My friend not only fought against Hamas during his final moments to protect his friends and family; he also fought against Hamas during years of activism against the occupation.
My heart is broken but I am more resolved than ever to continue his legacy.