Further on “River to Sea”

June 15, 2024

Someone does not want this topic discussed

I have been blogging a lot about the Gaza war and issues arising from it. These pieces had been actually getting a little traffic out of search engines.

Most of the reads I get have come from people on my e-mail lists. These seem to have grown from word of mouth or people finding me by accident. I have reasons to believe I am being heavily throttled for some reason.

My advocacy for a tear down of the existing social order might have something to do with it. I am not able to buy an audience. I am not a ‘niche’ writer. I am not a brilliant and high output blogger.

But I always get a trickle of reads in from the search engines, often from strange and exotic places. I get less than I would expect from my home country of Canada. That had been increasing a little.

When I put out my piece discussing the slogan “from the River to the Sea” something odd happened. I got zero traffic from search engines. This is strange because the response from my lists, and my ‘shadow followers’ was very good.

Making sense of traffic stats from my platforms is always bewildering. Just because someone subscribes to an e-mail list does not mean they read everything from it. It seems a lot of these people are just here for my ‘geopolitical’ stuff.

People who use ‘anonymizer’ type browsers may not show up in traffic statistics. I sometimes get comments from people who are not subscribers and obviously did not show up in traffic stats. Thus I think I get more reads than I can see; a shadow following.

However, the zero browser traffic for the “River to Sea” piece was peculiar. I subsequently put out some posts on other subjects, which got a little traffic, maybe less than normal. Only after about two weeks did some traffic to that piece start to trickle in from the open net.

I have noted previously that it seems to be this slogan in particular which drives the Zionist thought police crazy. That is especially hypocritical because “river to sea” originates with the constitution of the Likud party. That is, the party of Netanyahu and you know what they want to see form the river to the sea.

I will see what happens when I put this one out. There is plenty to say about the topic yet, and I see a need to take it further.

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Interesting things have happened in Palestine these last two weeks. It is hard to pin down the details of it. However, this is a good indication that the elements are in motion, the situation is becoming even more intense.

Israel has locked Gaza down even harder. This is making it harder to get information out about what is going on inside the enclave. Israel is doing ever more vicious things.

It seems there have been three ‘tent massacres’ now, along the border with Egypt. There is a nine mile wide security corridor along this border, which Egypt has controlled but Israelis have closely monitored. There are, or were, tent encampments along this corridor.

These are full of women and children. They are there hoping the closeness of the Egyptian army will give them some protection, and they might be able to get into Egypt. They are also likely getting some hidden aid across this “Philidelphi” corridor.

The Israelis had announced they were going to take control of this corridor. The Egyptians said they would not allow that. The Israelis chickened the Egyptians.

The Israelis drove up the corridor from Rafah to the sea. There was a brief exchange of fire, in which one Egyptian soldier was killed. The Egyptians backed off.

The Israeli strategy has been to create such laneways all through Gaza, cutting off the parts from each other, and making raids out of them. It has not really been working for them, but now they have another ‘finger’, cutting Gaza off from Egypt.

Then the Israeli army wanted the tent camps moved away from them. They expressed this desire by firebombing these camps without warning, burning hundreds of people to death. It is thought they also wanted to send a message to the International Criminal Court about how much they cared for the proceedings against some of their top leaders.

The more the Zionists are losing the war, the more vicious they are becoming. They are losing against the Hamas forces. They opened their new corridor in the south, but they are losing one further north.

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Hamas is steadily closing off the Netzarim corridor, or ‘street ten’ as the Gazans call it. Its purpose has been to cut Gaza city off from the south of Gaza. Also, the American navy built a floating pier at the sea end of the Netzarim, for unclear purposes.

At least one American military person has been killed by Qassam brigade snipers while working on this pier. Now it has broken off and floated up the coast. This is strange, but has been portrayed as a mishap by western propaganda. More likely, the Qassams got at it.

The Israelis made a raid out of the Netzarim and using the half of this pier which is still there. American troops joined this raid, a sinister first for this war. These mighty forces freed four Israeli hostages, killed six others, and just incidentally, at last count, 270 civilians; men, women, children.

The Qassams are applying constant pressure on the Israeli army to close the Netzarim corridor. They seem to have plenty of ammunition and provisions. They would have tunnels underneath the corridor, impossible for the Israelis to find.

Israel has no solutions for the Gazan resistance’s tunnel tactics. Recently an Israeli team tried to clear out a tunnel. They were ambushed and most or all of them killed.

From this, Hamas boasts that they now have some Israeli soldiers as hostages. They are a little coy about whether these soldiers are actually breathing. With the Israelis, even dead bodies have some value as bargaining chips. That is, with the Israeli public, not the government.

The Israeli army is now using aid trucks as concealment in their raids. This has serious implications for aid workers, not to mention desperate people watching for aid trucks. The Israelis have no limits.

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The Israelis have now cut off Gaza from Egypt, in theory. It is well known there are at least twenty tunnels under the Philidelphi corridor. Some of them are big enough to drive trucks through.

These tunnels are what really enables Hamas to keep fighting. They also enable much of Gaza to stay barely alive.

The Egyptians deny there are any tunnels. They are always very duplicitous with the Israelis and their American and European allies. They are afraid to challenge Israel directly, but it has become clear that the rulers of Egypt really do hate them.

The Qassams make a lot of their equipment themselves. However, they clearly have a strong supply line from outside the strip. In addition, we have the interesting information that there are a thousand wounded Gazan fighters recovering in Turkish hospitals.

All this could only go in and out through Egypt. There are differences between the governments of Egypt and Turkey, but they have many common interests and have been working together in recent years.

They both dislike the religious, populist tendency of the Hamas coalition and Hezbollah. However, they have realized that, as with every other country in the area, their big enemy is Israel.

Egypt and Turkey have strong ground forces, navies, and substantial air defences. However, they cannot risk exposing their population to a nuclear attack from Israel.

They had pretended to be neutral toward Israel while screwing them every way they could. Yet they have come to seriously hate Israel. Now they do not hide their hostility.

The Turks keep making money from Israel by supplying petroleum and cement, which Israel is having a hard time getting elsewhere. Yet they also provide substantial aid to Hamas and Hezbollah. They emit fierce rhetoric against Israel.

Egypt joined the South African case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. This is a symbolic gesture but nonetheless a gesture; a message. Egypt fiercely rejects the Israeli idea that the Gazans should be transferred into Sinai.

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The Houthis in Yemen have less to fear from a nuclear attack. They have been through a war with Saudi Arabia, backed by the Americans, which has left them with nothing more to be destroyed. They finally defeated the Saudis with the rockets the Iranians gave them.

They have some proficiency with these rockets. They also greatly dislike Israel. Thus, they have made it dangerous to ship anything to Israel, which serious effects Israel’s economy.

They have also made it dangerous for the Navies of Israel’s friends to operate in the area. Lately, the Houthis claimed they had struck an American aircraft carrier. The Americans denied this.

Nonetheless, the carrier, the Eisenhower, has moved hastily out of the Red sea. Its crew have been forbidden to talk on social media about some delicate subject, or even to family. There is video floating around the net which seems to show an aircraft carrier on fire, with a hole in its deck.

A problem with the Houthis is they have limited reconnaissance capabilities and trouble verifying what they have hit. Their imaginations sometimes seem to run away on them. But they are a mouse that roars.

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Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon is also giving Israel a very hard time. They are responding to everything Israel does, while tying down much of the Israeli army in having to cover their northern border.

Israel has now had to evacuate two hundred thousand people from its Northern Areas. These people are never going back. That may be some comfort to the Gazans.

Hezbollah is steadily wearing down Israel’s air defense system in the north. Israeli planes are becoming afraid to operate over Lebanon. Thus the threat to Lebanon of another Israeli bombing campaign as in 1982, is declining.

Hezbollah is much better armed and supplied than Hamas. If Israel cannot beat Hamas, it definitely cannot take on Hezbollah. Nonetheless, some of the more delusional members of the Israeli government want to attack into Lebanon.

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Israel is clearly losing on all fronts of this war. Their casualties are much higher than they are reporting. This is shown by whistleblowing from Israeli hospital workers to independent media in Israel, such as Haaretz or +972.

As well, the Hamas information department keeps sending us “dumb Israeli soldiers” videos. The whole Israeli army should be nominated for a special “Darwin Award”. No wonder they are losing.

I am told Hezbollah has even better stuff. They have video of Israeli soldiers jumping around like crickets trying to evade a Hezbollah attack drone closing in on them. However, this is on Telegram, and I am not.

What is not so funny are the pictures of dead civilians of all ages and genders. These keep coming. The Israeli military seems to have cracked down on its soldiers bragging on social media about acting as badly as the Nazis did at their worst.

I do get sick of war porn and atrocity porn. But I will be seeing a lot of it in these times.

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The key implications of all this are as follows.

The front line states in the middle east conflict are now able to defend effectively against Israel and the United States. They can defeat Israel but are a long way from being able to force a surrender. For that, Israel will have to collapse internally.

There is an idea afloat that the Americans could stop the war with a phone call to Netanyahu. That is a delusion. The Israelis have enough ammunition to fight for awhile. Its leaders do not care much about the short term effects on the Israeli economy or public.

There is no will in Israel to stop the war. The Israeli public is in a very strange collective mind frame. They seem unable to believe they are losing the war. Yet they are becoming very pessimistic about the future. The ugly thing is that most of them seem to support the genocide.

Israel’s real war aim is not to defeat Hamas. They know they cannot. It is to eliminate the Gazan population if possible, or at least greatly reduce it. To do that they must cut off most aid coming into Gaza, and make life impossible there.

Thus, this is a war to the last Gazan. The Gazans can only try to survive long enough, with aid workers trying to get enough through the blockade, until the Israelis are finally forced to stop. This will likely come about when the Israeli army is routed in this attrition war.

This will come. There are increasing signs the Israeli army is running out of men and equipment, and morale. They are bringing older model armoured vehicles out of mothballs. Israeli soldiers also use social media to complain that the tactics of their officers are making them sitting ducks.

We should note that this seems to be how wars are won these days; through attrition. There is an old theory in military history that the way wars are fought depends on the technologies of the time. In some eras, technology favoured attack, in other times, defense.

We are in an era when drones, electronics, and precision guided munitions strongly favour the defense. Wars are won by attrition. This means; the side which can produce cheap yet sophisticated weapons will win.

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Thus there is little Gazans can do but try to survive as their army and its allies fight it out. They could hardly be in a worse situation.

It is not as bad yet for those Palestinians in West Bank and East Jerusalem, the ‘sixty seven’ territories, or for those inside ‘forty eight’ Israel. Their situation is worsening and could get just as dire.

Yet the Palestinians are not totally blameless for their situation. This statement might startle a few readers. Or, any committed supporter of Palestine. But it is a very important point.

There is a famous poem, “The Garden of the Prophet”, written by Khalil Gibran. He was exiled from his native Lebanon, and lived most of his life in New York City. It contains the following line.

“Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.”

It has taken a long time for the Palestinians to get to the position they are in. Their recent history is a strong argument against a pacifist response to aggression. Regardless of all the propaganda to make them out as crazy and violent people, this is what they have mostly used until recently.

Palestinians had four very tranquil centuries under Ottoman rule to condition them to a deferent attitude to those in control. The Ottomans dealt brutally with any challenge to their rule. However, they listened to their subjects and provided an efficient and stable government. This usually leads to a prosperous economy, which leads to complacent attitudes.

When the British mandate came, only a minority in Palestine warned of the peril from the new Zionist settlers, the need to demand their removal. Some fought, but the Zionists were much more aggressive “terrorists”; and better organized and funded. Most Palestinians thought that eventually they would reach an accommodation with the Zionists, who would become more moderate over time.

They were at a loss for the failure of the British and then the United Nations to listen to them. When the 1948 war began, they mainly did not fight back, even when the Irgun committed terrible atrocities against them. They fled to refugee camps and waited for someone else to do something about the Zionist terror.

This article is not going to provide a history of Palestine resistance or lack thereof. That is worth a blog post by itself. But in 1948 most of the Arab armies suffered serious leadership problems and were incapable of any action.

The Arab states told the Palestinians to defend themselves and tried to provide weapons and training. Few Palestinians joined the liberation army, for complex reasons. In the end, King Abdullah’s Jordan legion did most of the real fighting against the Haganah.

Many Palestinian leaders opposed any violence and tried to prevent people from joining ALA, Arab Liberation Army. With typical pacifist hypocrisy, they expected someone else to use violence for their benefit. The lunatic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem demanded full control over all resistance forces, but was universally despised.

The war ended with most Palestinians sitting in the refugee camps waiting for the United Nations or Arab states to make the ZIonists let them go home. That generation died of old age waiting. The Arab states learned that when Palestinian refugees arrive, they never leave. They also do little for themselves.

After the 1967 war, some resistance groups developed. However, these were lead by opportunist types, really looking for power for themselves. In the end, these groups were thoroughly suckered by Israel, giving away all advantages in exchange for nothing.

Real Palestinian resistance began when Israel invaded Lebanon. Honest and competent leaders created Hezbollah. They built a military force which drove the Israeli army out of South Lebanon. They showed Palestinians a model of a real resistance organization which could not only liberate, but offer good government.

Hamas modeled itself after Hezbollah. They encouraged the Israeli army to leave Gaza in 2005. Israel had the idea they would control Gaza by maintaining a blockade. This has not worked for them.

A new generation of Palestinians has learned to fight back. But this people has learned this very late. They are fighting with their necks already between the sword and the block.

People in western countries, including even Canada, should learn something from this. Most will not. Yet it should be clear that the people who have nurtured the state of Israel are the same ones who are destroying freedom in our countries. The connections are there and the methods are similar.

We all need to remove these kinds of people from their dominant position in our societies. We must do it before we find ourselves in our own access controlled containment zones, our own Gazas. This statement is not mere hyperbole or paranoia; the main faction among the oligarchies of the west really would like to isolate and reduce some parts of the population.

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Now, we shall see how well this post gets through the blockers. My previous “River to Sea” post got zero search traffic. My subsequent posts on other topics got a little traffic, but less than normal. All substack data and e-mail opens have been normal.

In the past few days, a little search traffic has come in for “The Reasoning Behind River to the Sea”. I will see how this piece does with the Googlers.