Israel Caves ... a Little
April 5: Relief-worker deaths inquest … New Gaza relief … Trump criticizes Israel … No Labels bows out …
The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution this morning calling for (someone) to hold Israel accountable (somehow) for possible war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. It’s the first time the council has voted on the conflict since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, because the last thing a human-rights council wants to do is rush into anything until after 33,000 people are dead and after more than 100 people have spent six months as hostages.
As part of the resolution, the Human Rights Council also called for an end to arms sales to Israel. Which, adorable.
The resolution sent shockwaves throughout the diplomatic world until diplomats remembered that the Human Rights Council is sort of like the UN of the UN in that the UN can ignore it while making decisions, which will then in turn be ignored by the world.
Pres. Joe Biden, however, said yesterday that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to implement new steps to protect civilians and aid workers. “He made clear,” the White House said, “that U.S. policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel’s immediate action on these steps.”
If you thought that sounded almost like a threat to impose conditions on U.S. arms sales, you’re not alone. Even Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) — who is close to Biden, followed Biden in the Senate, and probably follows him into the bathroom — said “I think we’re at that point,” referring to conditions.
But some people weren’t happy about possible conditions. So let’s unpack some stupid, shall we?
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) said something stupid yesterday, and the reason I wanna unpack it is that he packed a lot of stupid into a seemingly carry-on-sized sentence. “In this war against Hamas–no conditions for Israel,” he wrote.
First of all, Fetterman’s eliding the central point of the criticism: That it’s not a war against Hamas. It’s a war against buildings and children and women and Gaza. Is Fetterman saying that anything Israel chooses to call a war against Hamas is okay? Or does he just not get that Israel is warring against civilians a lot more than it’s warring against Hamas? Either way, Fetterman’s clearly got way more than 3.4 fluid ounces of stupid in there.
Plus, NO conditions for Israel is against the law. America’s not allowed to sell weapons to just anybody. Which means (a) we’re obliged to ensure our killing machines are killing the right people in the right ways, and (b) Fetterman’s carrying so much stupid he’s going to have to check it and pick it up at the baggage carousel if he ever returns to sanity.
Israel, meanwhile, is working hard to avoid having the death of seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers become a turning point in international sentiment.
An Israeli inquest released today found that the IDF believed it was targeting Hamas military operatives Monday when it launched those air strikes. Two military personnel have been fired as a result of what the inquest called “a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification.”
Allegedly, the IDF identified two gunmen and “assumed that the gunmen were located inside the accompanying vehicles.”
What today’s report apparently doesn’t tell us is why the mistaken identification was made. The cars were clearly marked. The IDF literally knew WCK was in the area and even knew their routes.
WCK has demanded not just a transparent investigation, but an independent one. This inquest is neither. For one thing, no one’s even addressed what role, if any, was played by the Israeli AI we learned about yesterday.
An AI known as Lavender created a kill list of 37,000 people. The application that identifies when those targets come home at night — making them easier to kill — is called Where’s Daddy?, which someone obviously thought was hilarious.
And there’s another aspect to the Lavender revelations. It pains me personally to say this, but…someone made a really good point on what’s left of Twitter. While I’ve been thinking about the current conflict, the involvement of AI also throws new light on some of what we were told in the early days of this conflict.
Israel said at the outset that civilian casualties — including children — were so high because Hamas uses kids as human shields and/or hides among civilians in hopes that the prospects of civilian casualties will deter attacks. While all of that might be true, we now have another possible explanation: Yesterday’s report that Where’s Daddy? prefers to order strikes when the targets are at home at night, because it’s easier.
But that might also make it harder to tell whether the gunmen you THINK you see are actually aid workers.
In a little-noticed IDF video released Tuesday, Chief of the General Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi blames the airstrike in part on the fact that it happened “at night during a war in very complex conditions.”
So, again, if Israel has been taking steps to minimize civilian harm, why strike at night? There’s no claim the IDF suspected an imminent attack. So was this the work of Where’s Daddy? Were the gunmen the IDF thought they saw from Lavender’s kill list?
Sounds like we need an independent inquiry!
And here’s another development, reported by Haaretz, that I haven’t seen in U.S. media and that might be relevant. The IDF is decreeing some areas as “kill zones.” Enter one, and you’re fair game. Whoever you are.
But even though the IDF can’t always know once you’re dead whether you were Hamas, if you die in a kill zone, you get counted as part of the Hamas fatality totals. (Vietnam flashback, anyone?)
And there’s another report that got buried by the WCK attack. After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, when Israel began its military response, Israeli officials set up a detention center at the Sde Teiman IDF base to hold arrested Gazans for processing before they were released or sent to real prison.
Detainees at Sde Teiman are handcuffed. Twenty-four hours a day.
One prisoner at the base hospital attacked a medical worker. So now all prisoners at the hospital are also shackled by their hands and feet. Twenty-four hours a day. (They refer to the leg shackles as handcuffs, too, though it’s not clear whether they’re literally handcuffs.)
Some prisoners are so restricted in their movements that they don’t have access to bathrooms. So they’re fitted with diapers, into which they must pee and shit.
They’re also kept blindfolded. And they “eat” through straws.
And now, a doctor at the hospital has written to Israeli officials about the conditions there. More than half the hospital’s prisoners are there, the doctor says, to get treatment due to injuries caused by the constant shackling.
Here’s the line from the letter that you’re not likely to forget: "Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event.” Routine event.
JESUS CHRIST SOME GOOD FUCKING NEWS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE After Biden’s call with Netanyahu yesterday, and in the wake of mounting outrage about the dead WCK workers (but not prisoner amputees), Israel’s security cabinet last night agreed to open a crossing on the border between Israel and northern Gaza that will allow for humanitarian aid to go into Gaza there for the first time since the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israel’s port at Ashdod will also now be used to bring in humanitarian aid, Israel decided last night.
Israeli officials also authorized more relief trucks to enter Gaza every day from Jordan via Israel.
Netanyahu reportedly got on the phone with Biden prepared to offer these concessions — after months of rejecting U.S. demands.
All of which tells us that Netanyahu was full of shit when he said Israel was doing everything possible. What it tells us about our own politics is less clear.
Yes, Biden’s critics have said he could have won concessions like these all along. And maybe he could have. But maybe not?
Public opinion has turned away from Israel amid the daily chronicling of new horrors emerging from Gaza. But maybe if Biden had pushed too hard too early, before we knew everything we know, public opinion would have turned against him — and maybe that leads to the represidenting of D4FRFP1 Donald Trump.
But then you can argue that maybe Biden should have done more to lead the American people to this moment beforehand, before 33,000 people were dead. Which, fair. But maybe he couldn’t? Or maybe he did, with exactly the same rhetoric some dismissed as disingenuous because the U.S. kept arming Israel.
But what you can’t argue is that the left, The Squad in Congress and others, were wrong. They were right all along. As usual. And as usual it just took time and the emerging obviousness of the very consequences they warned about.
So it’s important to recognize that they were right all along, but also that people inflamed by Biden’s obstinance didn’t help things even a teeny tiny bit by insisting that Biden wants every Palestinian dead. That kind of thing discredited legitimate efforts to push Biden — and reshape our politics — to do the right thing.
As is so often the case, the political battle here was between sides that basically wanted the same thing; but one side was prepared to say so before it was politically acceptable, while the other side, Biden — rightly or wrongly — felt the need to wait until the political climate was more accepting. And he might not have been wrong. Maybe Netanyahu would’ve dug in his heels in even worse knowing that the American people weren’t backing Biden. Maybe Israel will only defer to Biden when it knows Biden is lagging the American people.
Which means, as is so often the case, that the mission for the American people was to change the climate, knowing that the sooner this happened, the sooner Biden and Netanyahu would follow. Which now seems to be happening.
In fact, Israel’s critics now include Trump himfuckingself. Trump yesterday declined to say he’s 100% with Israel and instead said Israel is “losing the PR war.” As for Netanyahu’s conduct of the actual war, Trump said, "I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it. … You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,”
So, if both Biden and Trump are now finally able to see or at least acknowledge what The Squad has been saying all along, who really screwed up here? That would be the so-called centrists who slowed down the process, who flung accusations of antisemitism at The Squad and progressives and other supporters of Palestinian rights and limbs. Like Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who called them “a cancer.”
Ready for Some More Good News?
Remember that hallucinatory period when D4FRFP Donald Trump was actually, no shit, the actual for-real president of this entire country? Yes? Well, do you remember one of the things he did was issue an executive order known as Schedule F to remove job protections from tens of thousands of federal workers who might stand in the way of his executive-branch batshittery?
Well, undoing Schedule F was one of Pres. Joe Biden’s first orders of business, and as of yesterday, now another bulwark against potential Trumpian autocracy has been established.
Who are the heroes taking this brave stand, you ask? Ladies and gentlemen, Americans everywhere, newsfuckers of all stripes, my heart swells to introduce to you…the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
On Thursday, the OPM stood athwart the barricades and declared to Trump-world, “Thou shalt not pass!” By which, I mean that the OPM issued a new federal rule.
The rule bars officials from reclassifying career civil servants (the bureaucratic heroes known as “the deep state”) as political appointees, which would make their wholesale removal much easier. Which is how Trump likes his political purges: Wholesale but also easy.
Yes, the rule can be undone, but rule-making is an extensive process. Lots of rules!
It would take months and it would involve exactly the kind of boring, minute, bureaucratic attention to details and laws and procedures that Trump and his lazy-ass, impulse-control-failing minions hate.
To that point, Trump didn’t even issue Schedule F until 2020.
Campaign Watch
PRESIDENT No Labels, the made-up third party that was made up to represent a made-up constituency, is withdrawing its fictional candidate from the 2024 presidential race because the casting department couldn’t find the right person to play the role.
National Director Joe Cunningham said yesterday that a candidate to run against Pres. Joe Biden and D4FRFP Donald Trump “never emerged.” Although the group won ballot lines in at least 20 states, they said they’re dropping their efforts to field a candidate in November.
No Labels had floated a number of names of ostensible centrists, including some of the most reviled and/or ridiculed and/or generally unloved people of either party, including former Govs. Nikki Haley (R-SC) and Chris Christie (R-NJ) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Two of them, I should note, literally just ran for fucking president.
Allegedly, No Labels founding father former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said before his death that the threat of Trump "is actually more serious than the long-term fight against partisanship and ideological extremism that No Labels has been involved in." Let the record show that No Labels has consistently been on the wrong side of said long-term fight. But at least they got it right this time.
SCHOOL BOARDS Across the St. Louis, MO, area on Tuesday, 13 far-right candidates for school board were on the ballot. Their parties and political action committees have been winning races there for the last few years and rolling back policies and programs dedicated to ensuring people aren’t left out because of their ethnicity, origins, religious beliefs, genitalia, gender, or orientation.
All 13 candidates were endorsed by a local radio host, Marc Cox, who rails against the “woke agenda” in public schools. All 13 lost. Some of them lost to candidates backed by teachers unions. (h/t)
And just to twist the knife, several districts also passed public-school funding initiatives. Happy Friday, glorious newsfuckers!
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, former President.
"They refer to the leg shackles as handcuffs, too, though it’s not clear whether they’re literally handcuffs."
Yeah... that's a translation issue.
In Hebrew, the word for Handcuffs is not hands specific. It more accuratly translates as shackles.
Translating Ahzikim to handcuffs is probably due to handcuffs being the most common way of shackling a person.
But it can also be a money issue — with Israel trying it's best to be as grossly capitalistic as the U.S. — they may be literally handcuffs used on legs.