patrick.net

I would like to see them use the F-35 for an attack role as they marketed it as stealth and also joint fighter and attack aircraft

think of all that US taxpayer money for the F-35 program since it started around the late 1990s

I guess they are holding back use of the F-35 for more demanding missions .. they should at least have F-35s deployed on the aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean

A similar number of Jews moved to Israel during the three years following the war, including 260,000 from the surrounding Arab states.

ad says

I would like to see them use the F-35 for an attack role as they marketed it as stealth and also joint fighter and attack aircraft

think of all that US taxpayer money for the F-35 program since it started around the late 1990s

I guess they are holding back use of the F-35 for more demanding missions .. they should at least have F-35s deployed on the aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean

More like, they are terrified to use the F-35 whose software causes it to crash during mild turbulence (Utah, East Coast - 2 crashes in the past few months)

Israel have been using F-35s for years.

Low tech inexpensive street fighting pitted against hi tech expensive tanks and vehicles is proving that the urban warfare may not favor Israel.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgNompyxOEM

Jews already had plan set in the 1880s to buy up land to create Isreal. They had a campaign for funds being sent from jews around the world.

The dog that isn't barking

The world is giving Israel far more leeway to destroy Hamas than it seems at first

Last week, the New York Times offered a long piece on why Hamas had chosen to attack Israel on Oct. 7 (aside from the sheer pleasure of raping and killing Jews).

As is so often the case, the simplest answer appears right: Hamas’s leaders felt marginalized as Israel moved towards peace deals with Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia. They wanted to remind the world that millions of Palestinians live in squalor and provoke a vicious Israeli counterattack.

So far, so good.

But near the end of the article was this paragraph:




Back in the day when I worked at the Times, we called this “burying the lede.”

Because, yes, Hamas has succeeded in dragging Israel back into Gaza. But the Israeli strike has not provoked the counter-counter-attack that Hamas wanted. At least not yet.

Where is the West Bank uprising?

Where is Hezbollah’s attack on Israel’s northern border?

Where are the million-person protests against Israel in Arab capitals?

Where are the jihadists mobilizing to find their way to Egypt and then to Gaza?

Where’s the Saudi promise of unconditional support for Hamas? Or the threat of an oil embargo if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire?

Of course, any or all of those moves might still happen - especially the Hezbollah attack. But Israeli airstrikes on Gaza began over a month ago. Its ground invasion started two weeks ago. It has already forced hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents out of the northern half of the territory so its soldiers can operate more freely.

And still, for all the angry words at Israel, and all the cease-fire demands, the loudest protests have come from the same coterie of Western progressives who have spent the last decade in a snit about climate change, with a brief break for Black Lives Matter.

For now, the Arab world appears content to let Hamas fight Israel alone.

Wall Street’s attitude is telling. The Standard and Poor’s 500 index fell about 5 percent in the three weeks after the attack, as investors wondered if a wider war was imminent. The index bottomed Fri., Oct. 27, just before Israel began its invasion.

But since then, it has rocketed higher, rising almost 10 percent. The snapback isn’t solely because concerns about the war’s broader impact have receded. Big investors increasingly believe the United States has controlled inflation. But if they feared a wider conflict or oil embargo were likely, stocks would not be rising this way.

Wall Street isn’t always right in its forecasts, but it is worth paying attention to, because its judgments are inherently apolitical.

In fact, arguably the most important question at this moment is why the Arab and Muslim world has not rallied more strongly to Hamas’s side.

The Saudi and Egyptian governments have their own reasons to want Hamas smashed. A powerful Hamas helps Iran, the Kingdom’s greatest rival, and threatens Egypt.

But maybe the reasons go beyond the usual cynicism of Arab rulers.

Maybe the butchery of Oct. 7 was just too much.

Maybe the years of ISIS’s cruelty, which was directed mostly against other Muslims and Arabs, have made ultraviolence and its broadcast over the Internet less acceptable to the Arab street. The captured pilot whom ISIS burned to death in a cage in 2015 wasn’t American or Israeli. He was Jordanian and Muslim, but the jihadis killed him in the cruelest way imaginable nonetheless.




Maybe Hamas would have been better served to attack and capture only Israeli military bases and leave its fighters to die heroically with their boots on. Maybe taking dozens of women and children as hostages wasn’t the best way to demonstrate the righteousness of the cause.

Instead Hamas chose to follow ISIS’s example.

And - again, at least for now - the world appears willing to let it suffer ISIS’s fate.

And - again, at least for now - the world appears willing to let it suffer ISIS’s fate.

Bombing is of limited utility and never won a war.

The Palestinians are trying to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible, and failing at killing them all.

Patrick says

The Palestinians are trying to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible, and failing at killing them all.

Or did you mean...

"The Palestinians are trying to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible, and failing at killing them AT all."

They were pretty successful on Oct 07.

Patrick says

Israel has made a huge mistake

The terms of this ceasefire couldn't be better for Hamas. Unless (and this is unlikely) Israel has reached secret side deals with Arab countries to destroy Hamas, it has made a terrible mistake.

How to suffer humiliating national defeat in three easy steps:

1: Sat., Oct. 7: Hamas fighters break out of Gaza, overrun Israeli army bases and villages, brutally kill over 1,000 Israelis - and bring almost 250 hostages back to Gaza.

2: Sat., Oct. 28: Israel invades the Gaza Strip, Hamas’s home territory. The invasion and air attacks kill thousands of civilians and stir worldwide outrage, but do not bring Israel close to its stated goal of destroying Hamas.

3: Friday, Nov. 24: Hamas agrees to release 50 hostages (but keep almost 200) over a four-day period. In return, Israel stops its invasion for those days and releases 150 Palestinian prisoners. But wait, there’s more: after the first days, Israel will continue the ceasefire for up to another week, as long as Hamas releases 10 hostages a day.

It is impossible to overstate how bad this deal is. The ceasefire - whether it lasts four days, 11, or much longer - is a disaster for Israel on every level.

Symbolically: By agreeing to a hostages-for-prisoners swap, Israel has implicitly agreed the Palestinian criminals in its prisons are no different than the civilians that Hamas’s terrorists grabbed from their beds and homes on Oct. 7.

Militarily/Tactically: The pause gives Hamas’s fighters a chance to rest after weeks of bombardment, rebuild their defenses, and rearm.

Worse, Israel has lost the chance to force the action. Hamas decides whether to keep the ceasefire in place by releasing more hostages; Israel has no choice in the matter.

Militarily/Strategically: By agreeing to a ceasefire only weeks only beginning a bloody invasion, Israel enables its critics to question if the invasion was necessary at all - especially because it has failed to capture any senior Hamas commanders and killed only one, the commander of the group’s “Northern Gaza Brigade.” Even the most fervent Israeli partisan cannot justify killing thousands of civilians to take out the equivalent of one mid-level general.

Morally: Most importantly, Israel has squandered what is left of the world’s sympathy for it. It should have told Hamas that the taking of hostages was a war crime and it would never agree to a ceasefire as long as Hamas held them. It should have drawn that line and stuck to it. It should have repeated over and over: As long as Hamas holds hostages, Israel views all of Gaza as a legitimate military target.

Now Israel has lost that moral clarity.

Israel cannot simultaneously claim Hamas is ISIS and be willing to swap prisoners with it. Once the ceasefire ends (again, on Hamas’s timetable), Israel will be stuck in the worst of all possible places. When it announced the ceasefire, the Israeli government talked tough, promising when it ended Israel’s “security forces will continue the war to return all the abductees, complete the elimination of Hamas and ensure that Gaza does not present any further threat to the State of Israel.”

In reality, though, Israel will face an impossible choice: to push deeper into Gaza - and face even more civilian casualties and worldwide outrage - or to pull back, without coming close to achieving its goal of destroying Hamas.

The deal is so terrible that it raises the question how the Israeli government could possibly have agreed to it. One possibility is that the Biden White House - despite its public support for Israel - essentially forced it to do so. Another, more hopeful, is that Israel has reached secret side deals with major Arab countries that will help it eliminate Hamas’s leadership - and quickly, in months, not years.

But the third is that Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is lurching through this crisis with only one goal - his own political survival. As pressure from inside Israel to release the hostages grew, Netanyahu buckled, instead of telling his people the truth - that allowing the hostages to be taken was his failure, and he would not compound it by making a terrible deal to release them, as innocent as they are.

No competent leader would have made the deal that Netanyahu just did. But then no competent leader would have allowed the Oct. 7 attacks to happen at all.

For the first time, I am seriously worried about Israel's future. As things stand, it has shown that it cannot protect its civilians yet has also managed to turn much of the world against it through its bombardment of Gaza.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Israel and Netanyahu have a secret plan. Maybe they have a pinky promise from Qataris that Hamas’s leaders will be shipped to Tel Aviv for speedy trial and even speedier execution.

I hope I’m wrong.

Because at this moment, things look grim.

I hope I’m wrong.

Because at this moment, things look grim.

By all accounts, Israel was putting the hurt on Hamas up until the cease fire with very little IDF casualties.

Even more surprising than Maher’s take is the audience’s enthusiastic applause and approval at his remarks.

Maher: And finally, new rule. I know it’s supposed to be that magical time of year, but maybe what we all really need right now is a good dose of realism. I see a lot of nativity scenes when I’m out, as you always do before Christmas, and I can’t help thinking about where that manger really is. It’s in the West Bank, on Palestinian lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

In 1950, the little town of Bethlehem was 86% Christian. Now it’s overwhelmingly Muslim. And that’s my point. Tonight, things change.

To 2.3 billion Christians, there can be no more sacred site than where their savior was born. But they don’t have it anymore. And yet no crusader army has geared up to take it back. Things change. Countries, boundaries, empires.

Palestine was under the Ottoman Empire for 400 years, but today, an ottoman is something you put under your feet.

The city of Byzantium became the city of Constantinople, became Istanbul. Not everybody liked it, but you can’t keep arguing the call forever. The Irish had the entire island to themselves, but the British were starting an empire and, well, the Irish lost their tip.

They blew each other up over it for 30 years. But eventually, everybody comes to an accommodation. Except the Palestinians. Was it unjust that even a single arab family was forced to move upon the founding of the Jewish state? Yes, but it’s also not rare. Happening all through history, all over the world.And mostly what people do is make the best of it.

After World War II, 12 million ethnic Germans got shoved out of Russia and Poland and Czechoslovakia because being German had become kind of unpopular. A million Greeks were shoved out of Turkey in 1923, a million Ghanians out of Nigeria in 1983, almost a million French out of Algeria in 1962. Nearly a million Syrian refugees moved to Germany eight years ago. Was that a perfect fit?

And no one knows more about being pushed off land than the Jews, including being almost wholly kicked out of every arab country they once lived in. Yes, TikTok fans, ethnic cleansing happened both ways.

In Fiddler on the Roof, the family is always moving to stay one step ahead of the Cossacks. But they deal with it. When they’re leaving Anatevka, they say, “Hey, it wasn’t so great anyway.”

Come on. Like other countries don’t have roofs you could fiddle on. Now, that’s not how they really felt, but they were coping. They coped because sometimes that’s all you can do.

History is brutal and humans are not good people. History is sad and full of wrongs, but you can’t make them un-happen because a paraglider isn’t a time machine. People get moved. And, yes, colonized. Nobody was a bigger colonizer than the Muslim army that swept out of the Arabian desert and took over much of the world in a single century.

And they didn’t do it by asking.

There’s a reason Saudi Arabia’s flag is a sword.

Kosovo was the cradle of Christian Serbia. Then it became Muslim. They fought a war about it in the 90s but stopped.

They didn’t keep it going for 75 years. There were deals on the table to share the land called Palestine. In 1947, ’93, ’95, ’98, 2000, 2008 and east Jerusalem could have been the capital of a Palestinian state that today might look more like Dubai than Gaza. Arafat was offered 95% of the West Bank and said no.

The Palestinian people should know your leaders, and the useful idiots on college campuses who are their allies are not doing you any favors by keeping alive the river to the sea myth. I mean, where do you think Israel is going?

Spoiler alert, nowhere.

It’s one of the most powerful countries in the world with a 500 billion dollar economy, the world’s second-largest tech sector after Silicon Valley, and nuclear weapons. They’re here. They like their bagel with a smear. Get used to it.

What’s happening to Palestinians today is horrible. And not just in Gaza, in the West Bank, too. But wars end with negotiation. And what the media glosses over is, it’s hard to negotiate when the other side’s bargaining position is you all die and disappear.

I mean, the chant from the river to the sea.Yeah. Let’s look at the map. Here’s the river. Here’s the sea. Oh, I see.

It means you get all of it. Not just the West Bank, which was basically the original UN partition deal you rejected because you wanted all of it and always have, even though it’s indisputably also the Jews’ ancestral homeland. And so you attacked and lost. And attacked again and lost. And attacked again and lost. As my friend Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”

Look at what Mexico used to own all the way up to the top of California. But no Mexican is out there chanting, “From the Rio Grande to Portland, Oregon.”

Because they chose a different path. They got real and built a country that’s the world’s 14th biggest economy now because they knew the United States wasn’t going to give back Phoenix any more than Hamas will ever be in Tel Aviv.

One of the leaders of Hamas says, “Save yourselves time and imaginary dreams. In a few years, Allah willing, you will have to discuss the situation in the region after Israel.”

I’m sorry, who’s the one with imaginary dreams? If I give you the benefit of the doubt and say your plan for a completely Jewless Palestine isn’t that all the Jews should die, what is the only other option? They move.

You move all the Jews. Okay, I got to warn you, there’s going to be some kvetching.

You move all the Jews and we do this with what? A fleet of trucks called Jew-Haul?

And to where are we moving this entire country? Texas.

Sure, they have room. And I guess we could put the wailing wall on the border and kill two birds with one stone. Or we could just get serious.