Hamas & Palestinian factions agree to Gaza ceasefire plan. A formal agreement is set to be signed today, Thursday, in Egypt, with Hamas officially approving the deal. The agreement includes the immediate opening of five crossings to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, adjustments to the Gaza withdrawal map, and the release of 20 Israeli captives alive in the first phase. The deal is guaranteed by the U.S., Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, ensuring that attacks will not resume as long as both parties adhere to its terms.
But, after all, this is basically the same agreement as in January, with release of Israeli captives in phases. You’ll remember how quickly Israel broke that deal. The only good, possibly, will be getting some food and medicine in Gaza. (Remember, again, that Israel let in very little last time.)
Netanyahu, and most Israelis, want to commit genocide. The polling and their own statements are really clear on this. The vast majority of Israelis don’t want to stop till all Palestinians are dead or gone, whether from Gaza or the West bank.
That means the only way a deal like this can work is if Trump will cut off all military supplies in order to enforce it if Israel breaks it. Odds of that? Pretty close to zero, I’d guess.
Rarely have I wanted to be wrong about something more than this, however, and I pray I am. The counter-argument is that Israel is, in fact, exhausted economically by the war, reservists are increasingly refusing to call up, and Israel has become a pariah nation and thus it is time to declare victory, at least for now. May that argument prove correct.
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mago
The chances of Israel honoring the agreement are somewhere between zero and nothing given their track record. It’s Lucy and the football again. This is less cynicism than realism. I’d like to be proven wrong.
elkern
With Jared Kushner in charge, what can go wrong?
Technically, I don’t think Israel – or Israelis – really care about killing or evicting all ‘Palestinians’. IMO, the important thing for them is to eliminate the /idea/ of Palestine. They’d be glad to retain a permanent underclass of 10-15%, but only if those people subsequently self-identify as ‘Israeli’, not ‘Palestinian’. And, technically, this is still ‘genocide’, as the goal is to eliminate the genus ‘Palestinian’.
Of course, it’s far easier to kill people than it is to (reliably) change their minds. Tragically, Ashkenazi Jews know this, because they managed to maintain their Jewish identity for centuries while living as ‘permanent underclass’ in various (Eastern?) European countries.
The other problem with my attempt to generously interpret Israeli intent toward Palestinian people is that there are numerous verses in the Pentateuch (Torah) where God explicitly instructs the Jews to kill all the former inhabitants of the land ‘between the River and the Sea’. This admonition becomes more important as Israel demographics and politics are increasingly dominated by religious Zionists.
someofparts
Apologies here, but it didn’t even occur to me to take this seriously.
Honestly I am so confident that all of this will be a big ole nothing burger that I, who am extremely risk-averse, would almost be willing to bet on it.
This is stage four my friends. The disease has metastisized into every last cell of the body politic. All I hope for now is that we don’t try to keep it alive with radiation.
Mark Level
I also have a hard time feeling any optimism, and it’s not just Jared, it’s Tony Blair’s bloodstained hands too . . . I did a little research on Harper’s archive, Blair was linked to the Goldman-Sachs (& others) theft of billions from Malaysia some years back (he had a $15K biweekly payment from one central malefactor) and ties to the genocidal Paul Kagame who ruled Rwanda for at least 25 years after being implicated in the killing of the Rwandan & Burundian leaders that started the Hutu genocide of Tutsis (his own group.) He came to power on the backs of the murdered, hooked up with big Western Imperialists like B.liar, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, who gave him a Clinton Initiative Award.
On the other hand, Nima had both Richard Woolf and Michael Hudson on his podcast, 2 very well-informed commentators, who differed strongly on the matter, link here if interested– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p7IaxBbyWU
Woolf was the far more optimistic of the 2. He claimed that Trump is tired of being dragged down with too many commitments, e.g. he & Elon’s best bud, the lunatic, chainsaw-weilding Millei in Argentina has NOT received any of the US Treasury million$ promised to him for crashing that economy, Woolf thinks Trump knows he’s got too many draining commitments, including the escalation of the Ukraine War to full-on Germany-France-UK-NATO war on Russia with missiles shot deep into Russia or shooting down Russian planes straying too near the Euro-Slugs, Baltic Slugs (I can’t even call them chihuahuas anymore) territory. Hudson strongly disagreed, first giving an account of his early career in the 70s working for the Nixon admin when there was open anti-Semitism among the “white glove” Banking Institutions (at one firm he worked at, a black man was hired before any Jews were), then discussing in detail the nexus of billionaire bipartisan Zionist donors and how all politicians are bought off, etc. His insights were cut off suddenly by “internet problems,” coincidentally or not and Nima and Richard had to finish without him. He did emphasize that the entirety of the World has now turned against the Zionist Entity, but that does not mean they will suddenly abandon their goal since 1948 of total extermination/ removal of the indigenous people.
Oh and to elkern. The Torah is horribly cruel frequently but the Talmud is far worse. That states explicitly that gentiles are worth less than dogs, and can be killed without reproach if they frustrate any of the Chosen People. Even Jesus knew this, remember Matt 15-26 when he almost didn’t help a gentile (Canaanite) woman with a sick child saying, “Would you take your child’s bread and toss it to the dogs?” Of course he was the Christian cleaned-up version in the New Testament so he did heal the child anyway.
Dan Kelly
‘Hudson strongly disagreed, first giving an account of his early career in the 70s working for the Nixon admin when there was open anti-Semitism among the “white glove” Banking Institutions (at one firm he worked at, a black man was hired before any Jews were), then discussing in detail the nexus of billionaire bipartisan Zionist donors and how all politicians are bought off, etc.’
Thank you for all the info and springboards to further reading/listening you provide, Mark. I singled out the above Michael Hudson quote because it is thoroughly contradicted by a piece Phil Weiss wrote back in 2012 in which he cites information provided by Eric J. Weiner in his book ‘What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street’ written in 2005:
‘I’m reading a great book, What Goes Up: The Uncensored History of Modern Wall Street, by Eric J. Weiner, published in 2005. A lot of the uncensored history in Weiner’s oral history is his chronicle of the fall of the old patrician order on Wall Street and the rise of Jewish bankers and traders in the ’60s and ’70s.
A delicious anecdote involves maybe the greatest stockpicker of our time, Warren Buffett, who at 21 wanted nothing more than to work for the Wall Street firm of Graham Newman but was rejected because he was not Jewish.
The son of a Nebraska congressman, Buffett started dabbling in the stock market as a teenager. His life changed when he read The Intelligent Investor (1949) by Benjamin Graham. Buffett has called the book the best book ever written about the market. It advised studying the underlying value of companies and betting against the market’s swings. This theory has make Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway the greatest legend of modern American stockpicking.
When Buffett read that book, its author Benjamin Graham (1894-1976), a London-born Jew, was a professor at Columbia Business School and co-proprietor of Graham Newman, a small investment house on Wall Street.
Warren Buffett transferred from the University of Nebraska to Columbia Business School in order to study under Graham. But when he graduated and tried to work for Graham, the investor repeatedly put him off. For religious reasons.’
https://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/wall-street-firm-slammed-the-door-on-young-warren-buffett-for-religious-reasons/
So Weiner says ‘the Jews’ became nearly all-powerful 15-20 years before Hudson even hints that they may have some power. And fascinatingly this ’15-20 years before’ just so happens to be soon after JFK was killed. Michael Collins Piper, among many others, has argued forcefully that Zionists and ‘Israel’ killed Kennedy.
Failed Scholar
I’m cynical enough at this point to think that if this ceasefire holds, it’s because something worse (for the AmeriZioNazis) is happening behind the scenes.
Mark Level
Thank you to Dan for sharing a wider set of information. I neglected to mention one detail of Hudson’s which you may have seen by now, he said that since Jews were shut out of the bigger banks they instead set up brokerage services and got into financial trading that way. (Also I said white-glove bankers, I think the term might actually be white-shoe? The WASP Elites had a lot of weird fashion preferences and it seeped into the language. Others do this too, think of the Irish talking about the “lace curtain” set in their society, or even “white lace curtain”. Interesting that white got valorized so much, we don’t even need to ask why.)
The Weiner book sounds good, certainly, and obviously it makes sense that since Jews were shut out of many working options across Europe for centuries (e.g. the military in many countries, couldn’t own land for farming in some, etc. locked into some more basic service industries, e.g. Schneider (Tailor) becomes a German-Jewish name) their trading economy which goes back to ancient times came to the fore. Wealthy Jews funded many Kings in Europe, sometimes to their long-term detriment, sometimes not (the Balfour declaration, not by a king but still powerful).
I think Hudson’s claims are true and credible for one part of the market, and appreciate you zooming out to the larger picture so we see more of how Jews worked around the discrimination they faced– nowhere near as bad overall as what blacks, Native peoples or many others faced in the racist US, but pernicious and harmful nonetheless.
Dan Kelly
‘I think Hudson’s claims are true and credible for one part of the market, and appreciate you zooming out to the larger picture so we see more of how Jews worked around the discrimination they faced.’
Thank you Mark.
I was wrong on the timeframe as it’s not 15-20 years but more like 10.
elkern
I suspect that Israel will accept [temporary] imposed peace in Gaza, but will turn toward the more complex task of de-Palestinianizing the West Bank.
Jorge
Ah, the most important topic: ethnic minorities in the US slowly becoming white. The most fascinating is how Asians became white between WW2 and the early 60s. Until WW2, Asian Americans were forced to live in ghettos, relegated to certain jobs, etc.
As to financial discrimination: one of the giant Swiss banks required that all directors be Catholic. I think it was UBS but am not sure; cannot find such a morsel on the Internet now.