In which the pond goes into the heart of reptile evil, and comes across more than a few weevils ...

 

Will Higgins trolling of the media, aka The Australian, aka Dame Slap, in the Lehrmann matter - "the horrific championing of this individual in the media all year" - see the lizard Oz and Dame Slap take up the Toowoomba matter?

Who knows, and if they do the pond will be automatically red carding all and sundry...

When last sighted Dame Slap was quoting Bertolt Brecht - always with the comedy - and doing her own brand of terra nullius. We came, we took it, and sucks boo ...

Luckily the pond red carded that, what with red cards being handy for NZ thugby union players and every reptile under the sun.

Meanwhile, the reptiles led with an inflammatory and appalling headline that made the pond think the entire rag should be red carded ...

The pond could have accepted into the heart of hell, given the recent news, available to all the reptiles, and here on the BBC ...

Desperate times and for a moment in pure blindness ... per this WaPo headline ...

And yet the reptiles kept up the "pure evil" demonic line in the lizard Oz digital edition ...

So we're back in the dark ages of the axis of weevils ... and a lot of good that did the planet ...

The Graudian at least managed a little balance, the suffering of Jewish victims and the suffering of Palestinian victims ...

... while the NY Times managed to be its usual bland self in the face of the horrors of war ...

... but "into the heart of evil", a designation of all Palestinians in Gaza as Satanic? That's beyond depraved even for the lizard Oz ...

The pond did read that link offered by Anon to that Vice story News Coverage of Israel and Palestine Makes Me Ashamed to be a Journalist ...

It's well worth the read, and there are days when spreading reptile poison makes the pond ashamed to be a blogger, especially when the pond is forced to go into the heart of the evil ...

Luckily the pond's hits are coming down, the incessant numbing of reptile attacks seems to have wearied passersby, so the pond can begin with the poisonous bile of guest reptile Milner ...

The pond had sworn off the gloating, but there's only the Major looming in the wings, and besides this gloating is only puffed up to toad proportions by some very large snaps ... still, best get on with it and get it done and dusted ...

Yes, it certainly wasn't Queensland's finest hour, but then the state is notoriously racist ... so that result was always to be expected, and reading this Milner you can see why.

Then came the visual padding, which remarkably managed to drag in Churchill, and so the pond and the reptiles must do it, because the Milner did, showing hearts and minds were back in the 1940s and keeping India in the empire ...

Then it was back to the gloating, and sundry snide innuendoes, and the pretence that this was somehow about improving the lives and livelihoods of Aboriginal people, when really it was all about politics, naked, unseemly politics ...

Cumulatively, the effect was as nauseating, as no doubt was intended ...

Enough already, and the pond looks forward to the referendum proposed by Captain Spud. 

Oh wait, he's already back tracked on that ... and as for delivering truth and then treaty, in your dreams comrade Milner ...

And so to Major Mitchell. The pond goes there reluctantly, but some days require a trip into pure, undiluted evil, and this is one of them ...

Of all the people to quote, mad Matt Taibbi, followed by a blithe snap of human suffering ...

Then the Major began to puff up with righteous indignation ...

What is clear is that the hospital blast is a bit like the alleged source of Covid, a convenient form of distraction, used by both sides as propaganda ... and yet the analysis remains inconclusive, at least if you prefer to read the Beeb three days ago to reading the Major, and discover the blast is still contested in Gaza hospital blast: What does new analysis tell us?

What the new analysis doesn't tell us is that if you're dead, you're dead for a long time, and an analysis isn't much help for an unholy mess ...

The pond isn't going to waste time speculating on something it knows nothing about, and a bit like the Major can't know anything about, reliant as he is on secondary and even worse, tertiary sources of the tabby cat kind ... all that the pond knows is that a hospital blew up and people died ...

Then came a snap of a propagandist at work, and naturally the Major was right on side ...

Ah, some relief, and a chance for a little light comedy amid the horrors of war, and what a relief to have the Major mention Lord Downer and even feature a snap of the sage ...

The pond had been looking for a chance to tell the croweater response to Lord Downer ... and it was Rebecca Whitfield-Baker in the Sunday Snail, tragic remnants of a tabloid, that scribbled ...‘With all respect, Mr Downer you’ve got it wrong on subs’: Politicians, industry hit back ...He may be political royalty but Alexander Downer has missed the point of the AUKUS subs plan, SA leaders from across the political spectrum say.

The pond doesn't link to reptile rags, so here it is ...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke at the White House state dinner expressing his gratitude for the relationship Australia has with the United States.

Political and defence industry heavyweights have shot down claims by former foreign minister Alexander Downer that the AUKUS nuclear-powered subs should not be built in Adelaide.

Australian Industry and Defence Network chief executive Brent Clark said any move away from the AUKUS pact would be disastrous.

“I think it would be a catastrophic outcome for Australian industry, and for the nation as a whole … quite clearly, there is absolutely no impediment to South Australia having the capacity and capability,” he said.

“The simple reality is there is no logical reason why we cannot build the nuclear submarine here … we have the industrial base and the workforce that can do it.”

However, he agreed with the assessment by Mr Downer that time was of the essence.

“Where I think Mr Downer is correct is, if we don’t start moving, then we will be incredibly late and then that does beg the question ‘Is it too late and should we just buy them?’,” Mr Clark said.

"Our concern is that we are taking too much time to get going … while we have had a plan articulated by Government, we haven’t seen the rubber on the road.”

Mr Downer, a South Australian and longtime critic of the deal, said his preference was for the purchase of overseas-built submarines, arguing it was too costly to build here with better ways to create industry and grow local jobs.

“The reality is, it will never happen because it is so much money and is such a complex project,” Mr Downer said.

“I find it depressing that politicians aren’t levelling with people, that they are not being honest with the public … (they are) not telling us where the money is coming from and how the debt will be serviced.

“Not only will it cost us 30 or 40 per cent more to build the submarines in Adelaide than it would to buy off-the-shelf but when will they ever be built? Not in my lifetime?”

Premier Peter Malinauskas said “the complexity of this endeavour is not something to be feared”.

“A more complex economy means a more resilient one, with capacity to deliver more meaningful careers and a higher standard of living,” he said.

“Australia’s ambition to develop a nuclear-powered submarine building capability is not borne out of some state-specific industry policy, but rather a need to protect our sovereignty.

“Mr Downer’s comments fail to acknowledge that a central premise of the AUKUS pact is the establishment of a new, fourth AUKUS production line of nuclear-powered submarines.

“The fact is, there is simply not enough capacity in either the US or UK supply chains to supply Australia with nuclear-powered submarines on an ongoing basis; if Australia doesn’t invest in our own ship and submarine-manufacturing capacity, our sovereignty will be forever dependent on the generosity of other nations.”

Opposition Leader David Speirs agreed, saying: “Building nuclear-powered submarines in Adelaide is a generational opportunity to transform SA’s economy.”

SA Liberal senator Simon Birmingham added: “The challenge of building the nuclear-powered submarines is great but the rewards to our national security and industrial capabilities can be even greater.”

However, Australia Defence Association executive director Neil James said Mr Downer had got it right.

“The reality is that building the submarines in South Australia may mean we won’t get them in time … it is more important for Australia to get the submarines quickly than it is for them to be built in SA,” he said.

Becky did her best for the locals, but Tom Minear, scribbling for Victorians via the HUN, saw the chance to gloat ...

Alexander Downer labels Anthony Albanese’s AUKUS submarine project a ‘white elephant’

Anthony Albanese has arrived home to a rude surprise, after a senior Liberal figure declared the plan all but impossible and US navy bosses faced questions about their own sub-par performance.

The Australian’s Washington Correspondent Adam Creighton analyses the contrasting confidence over whether AUKUS legislation will pass through Congress. Mr Creighton said senior officials in the Biden administration are confident all relevant legislation will be passed. “But if you talk to analysts on the ground in Washington, they say that when push comes to shove the US is going to be unwilling in a few years’ time to part with what would be about 10 per cent of its submarine fleet,” he told Sky News host James Morrow. The Washington correspondent noted that much of the nation’s submarine fleet is undergoing maintenance and is behind schedule. “It remains to be seen over the next … few months,” he said.

If Anthony Albanese opened the newspapers on Saturday morning, having arrived home after four days in Washington DC, he would have received a rude surprise.

Australia’s longest serving foreign minister Alexander Downer, in an interview with The Australian, declared the AUKUS submarine plan the Prime Minister had been trying to shore up in the US would become “the greatest white elephant project in the world”.

“The submarines will never be built in Adelaide because the cost will be prohibitive and the technological challenges are too great,” the South Australian Liberal elder statesman said.

“Some government in the future will make the obvious decision and not go ahead with the Adelaide build.”

To make matters worse, while Downer was pushing to solely focus on buying American nuclear submarines – instead of eventually building our own – Albanese had returned without any guarantee the US Congress would approve the sale in the first place.

Indeed, when the Prime Minister was discussing the pact with Joe Biden at the White House, lawmakers on Capitol Hill were challenging US navy chiefs over how they could hand over at least three Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s.

“We can throw all the money we want to at the problem, but if you don’t have the people there in the yards to build these submarines, I don’t care what else we do, this enterprise fails,” Republican Rob Wittman said.

Democrat John Garamendi was similarly sceptical, saying there had long been “a problem in the submarine section of the Department of Defence”, before questioning whether the $US3.4bn spending boost Biden proposed on the eve of Albanese’s visit could fix it.

“Using AUKUS as the reason for this … (is) in my view disingenuous,” he said.

Biden put the money on the table and Albanese spent hours with members of Congress for the same reason: a growing number of mostly Republican members have recently threatened to block the Australian submarine sale unless the US speeds up production.

Roger Wicker, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been leading the way. While he welcomed the extra cash, he has warned the US navy needs 66 nuclear submarines now but has 49 – a number projected to drop to 46 by 2030 because only 1.2 Virginia-class boats are made each year instead of the two funded by Congress.

Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the incoming chief of naval operations, acknowledged last month that 2.2 vessels had to be built each year to meet America’s needs and its AUKUS promises.

The navy and the Biden administration are confident that is achievable, but only time will tell. Wittman said on Wednesday he was concerned America’s two shipbuilding firms were losing thousands of workers even as they hired thousands more, while an executive at one of the companies acknowledged the same day that the supply chain remained “very fragile”.

Solving workforce, training and supply chain issues will be even more difficult in South Australia, where construction of the SSN-AUKUS submarine is still years away from starting.

Albanese has not shied away from this, comparing the $368bn “whole-of-nation effort” to the “scale, complexity and economic significance … (of) the creation of the Australian automotive industry in the post-war period”.

But even before Scott Morrison revealed the pact more than two years ago, there were significant doubts in Washington DC about whether Australia had the capacity – both in financial and human capital – to handle such a challenge.

Hudson Institute senior fellow John Lee, who was the senior national security adviser to former foreign minister Julie Bishop, said before Albanese’s DC visit that Australia’s progress on AUKUS initiatives – such as the development of submarine infrastructure including an east coast base – had been “painfully slow”.

He cautioned Australia would have to “overcome the free-rider problem that justifiably concerns US lawmakers in both parties”, especially given defence spending under Albanese would “barely rise, if at all” according to current budget forecasts.

This goes to the core of Downer’s critique. Can we afford to build our own nuclear submarines, with all the extra costs that come with doing so from scratch, and even if we can, is it worth the money or is it “just pork-barrelling at its worst”?

If we can’t, AUKUS is dead. A straight-up submarine purchase is not on offer – the US and the UK agreed on the basis that the pact would be a rising tide that lifts all boats, to borrow a phrase. Australia needs its own production line to live up to its end of the bargain.

Albanese, after his meetings on Capitol Hill, said he was struck by the bipartisan support for AUKUS. He said his key point to lawmakers was this: “Australians always pay our way. We pull our weight. We do our part. We always have. We always will.”

Fine words. But in China, they are taking action. According to the Pentagon’s latest report on China’s military power, Beijing is operating 60 submarines including 12 nuclear-powered boats. Even as older submarines retire, a massive expansion of its industrial base will grow its undersea force to 65 by 2025 and 80 by 2035.

Anthony Albanese lands in Sydney with partner Jodie Haydon. Picture: David Swift/NCA NewsWire

Anthony Albanese lands in Sydney with partner Jodie Haydon. Picture: David Swift/NCA NewsWire

By then, Australia might have one or two second-hand Virginia-class vessels. That is Biden’s intention, although as he admitted while standing next to Albanese, he cannot secure the deal with a “personal guarantee”.

Instead of a future Australian government walking away from AUKUS, as Downer suggests, a future American administration could make the decision for us.

Meanwhile, the pond eagerly awaits the return of the bromancer for some final words on the matter ... will he deem his dream of AUKUS and the subs a waste of time and energy,  or will he join Lord Downer, and do a backflip and denounce AUKUS, the subs, and the bromancer of a year or so ago?

While the pond waits with baited breath (get the snail killer handy), it was back to the Major for a final gobbet of pure evil ...

Talk about a completely distorted account of 1948-49, and here the pond must revert to The New Yorker and a story by David Remnick, In the Cities of Killing (paywall) ...

There's plenty in there about the suffering of Jewish people because of recent events, but there's more nuance than the Major could ever dream of, because Remnick talked to both sides...

The pond will only offer a sampling selected and designed simply to irritate the Major, and oddly enough, once again Churchill scores a mention...

...yet who would prevent another march of folly? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had always fancied himself his country’s Churchill and kept a framed portrait of Britain’s wartime leader near his desk, next to one of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. In speeches against appeasement, Netanyahu quoted his hero on the “confirmed unteachability of mankind.” But Churchill, for all his flaws, did not bring a collection of messianic zealots into his cabinet; he did not lead a country while being under criminal indictment; he did not leave the security of the state vulnerable to bulldozers and armed men on motorcycles.
Netanyahu has been heckled by reservists and vilified in the press. A poll published in the newspaper Ma’ariv six days after the massacre showed that forty-eight per cent of Israelis preferred that Benny Gantz, a phlegmatic retired Army general and a centrist politician who was brought into a new unity government, lead the country; only twenty-nine per cent preferred Netanyahu. The same paper also reported that eighty per cent of Israelis wanted Netanyahu to take responsibility for the security failures on October 7th, as leaders of the I.D.F. and the Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, had done. Netanyahu, who cannot bear to express repentance or regret for his government’s failure, or even to show compassion for the bereaved—something that, many Israelis noted, Biden was able to do—is unlikely to step down or step back...

...In Netanyahu’s first term, I spoke at length with him in Jerusalem, and even interviewed his father, Benzion, a reclusive scholar of the Spanish Inquisition whose sense that Jewish history is in perpetual danger of coming to an end exerted a powerful influence on his son. “The Jewish people have had a history unlike any other people’s because they lacked the elements of national survival,” the Prime Minister told me. “On the other hand, they didn’t perish completely. They perished mostly. They were about ten per cent of the Roman Empire at the time of the birth of Christ, so by any calculation they should be about a hundred and twenty million and not twelve million. . . . What happened after the worst catastrophe in our history is that we somehow amassed the national will to reforge a vital center for Jewish life here in Israel.” Netanyahu’s sense of the state and of himself as its unillusioned guardian was clear: “You have to protect yourself. This is what the Jews didn’t have. They didn’t have the means to protect themselves against evil, the baser impulses of mankind. And they paid a price unlike any other people. We now have the means to protect ourselves.”
In 2005, Ariel Sharon, a Likud Prime Minister known as the Bulldozer, defied much of his right-wing constituency by evacuating the Israeli settlements in Gaza. The aim of disengagement was to yield a rough peace and make Israel more secure, but the following year Hamas rose to power, winning legislative elections and, after a military confrontation, ousting the Palestinian Authority from the Gaza Strip. There have been no elections since.
Although the occupation had, in the Israeli view, ended, Gaza remained under siege and blockade, and a spiral of violence deepened the immiseration of daily life. In December, 2008, following a period of Qassam rockets and counterraids, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, which killed at least a thousand Palestinians, devastated civic infrastructure in Gaza City, and left many thousands homeless. In 2012, Israel responded to Hamas rocket fire with eight days of air strikes; at least eighty-seven Palestinian civilians were killed. In 2014, after Hamas abducted and murdered three Israeli teen-agers, Israel commenced a seven-week assault, killing more than fourteen hundred Palestinian civilians....

...As the Israeli right solidified its hold on power, some in the country came to view its draconian anti-Palestinian policies with repugnance. Yair Golan is a retired Army general in his early sixties; he is graying yet as trim as a blade. He was an infantry commander during the second intifada, and then led the Judea and Samaria division, in the West Bank. But he grew increasingly disgusted with the military’s treatment of Palestinians, and he did not keep his views to himself. A speech that he delivered seven years ago at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Kibbutz Tel Yitzhak caused a furor. Golan, who was then the deputy chief of staff of the I.D.F., warned that Israeli society had grown callous to “the other,” and said, “If there is something that frightens me in the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying horrifying processes that occurred in Europe, particularly in Germany, seventy, eighty, and ninety years ago, and finding evidence of their existence here in our midst today, in 2016.” He referred to an incident in Hebron in which an I.D.F. sergeant was filmed shooting a Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli soldier but had already been subdued and was prostrate. “There is nothing easier and simpler,” Golan said, “than behaving like a beast, becoming morally corrupt, and sanctimonious.”

Although Isaac Herzog, now Israel’s President, praised Golan for his “morality and responsibility,” Netanyahu blasted Golan’s reference to the Holocaust as “outrageous,” and there were countless calls for the general’s resignation. In the end, he walked back his comments somewhat, but his disenchantment was such that he joined Meretz, a political party to the left of Labor, vowing to battle the annexation of the West Bank...

...As we sat together, Golan talked about the depths of the Israeli failure. About officials who thought that by “shrinking the conflict” they could maintain the status quo indefinitely. About the complacency engendered by high fences and a security system overly reliant on “startup nation” technologies and the Special Forces. About the failure of Netanyahu and his intelligence and military bureaucracies to heed warnings of imminent danger, in Gaza and beyond. About the moral deficits of a government obsessed with protecting its Prime Minister from criminal prosecution and indifferent to the corrosive effects of the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. All these factors helped open the way to the October 7th massacre, he believed, and to a war being led by an untrustworthy leader.
“When you have a crisis, like Pearl Harbor or September 11th, it is a multidimensional crisis, a multidimensional failure,” Golan said. Netanyahu, who in 2009 was elected for the second time, after Operation Cast Lead, “made a terrible strategic mistake,” Golan went on. “He wanted quiet. So, while Hamas was relatively quiet, Netanyahu saw no need to have a vision for the larger Palestinian question. And since he needed the support of the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, he appeased them. He created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the over-all perception that the best thing to do was to annex the West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas.”

Golan was referring to a strategy of Netanyahu’s, deployed over the past fourteen years, that is known as the “conception.” Its aim was to weaken the Palestinian Authority, which sought territorial compromise, by bolstering its enemy Hamas. While refusing to engage the P.A. and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in any serious negotiations, the government permitted hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar to stream into Hamas’s coffers and increased the flow of work permits for Gazans with jobs inside Israel. It wasn’t that Netanyahu cared one way or another about the poor of Gaza; it was, in his view, a matter of strategic guile. But, as Golan’s old boss Gadi Eisenkot, a former I.D.F. chief of staff, told Ma’ariv last year, Netanyahu carried out this strategy “in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states.”

One aspect of Netanyahu’s Churchill complex is his colossal self-assurance, and he was unflinchingly confident in his “conception.” As he reportedly put it in a Likud meeting, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. . . . This is part of our strategy.” Last December, he told an interviewer for Saudi television, “I think my record speaks for itself. The last decade in which I led Israel was the safest decade in Israel’s history. But not only safe and secure for Israelis, also safe and secure for the Palestinians.” It was a litany of bad faith, deception, and delusion, with disastrous consequences.

“I commanded Judea and Samaria from 2005 to 2007,” Golan told me, referring to the West Bank. “The most frustrating thing to me is the inability of anyone to envision how these two peoples can live together. We are not going anywhere. And they are not going anywhere. Occupation is not a solution. Our peoples should both be led by sensible majorities, but both peoples are being led by their extremists. This is the challenge of Israel.”
In the West Bank and elsewhere, Bahour told me, “all the attention now is focussed on stopping the bombing in a small, intensely overcrowded place that is fifty per cent children. The entire civilian infrastructure is being torn up. I don’t know how anyone—an Israeli or a Jewish American or anyone—thinks this assault will make Israel safer. They are doing just the opposite. Ironically, what Hamas did could have the effect of saving Netanyahu, of keeping him in power. Everyone knows that the day that this war stops he will be out of government. So now he is someone with nothing to lose, much like the people in Gaza. And people with nothing to lose lash out.”...

...The task of holding in one’s head multiple thoughts—multiple facts—was nearly impossible, particularly in the face of sloganeering and the allure of militancy. There is the thought that Israeli settlers, many of them armed, have stepped up their daily violence against Palestinian villagers, egged on by ministers in the Netanyahu government. That, though Israel is well armed and has powerful allies, it is also the size of New Jersey and faces multiple enemies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—whose leaders speak regularly of the elimination of “the Zionist entity.” That the unemployment rate in Gaza is forty-five per cent, the water barely potable, electricity and food in short supply, the health-care system in ruins. That antisemitism has, yet again, grown in breadth, intensity, and violence. That contempt for Palestinians is practically a norm in the current Israeli government, as when Smotrich, the finance minister, spoke at a memorial service in France and, standing in front of a map with Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan melded into “Greater Israel,” declared, “There is no Palestinian history,” or when Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, told journalists, “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.” That many thousands of Palestinians have already been killed in the recent air strikes and well over a million have been internally displaced. There will be no end to it anytime soon: the funerals, the recriminations, the threats, the fear, the assaults...

...In Mosab’s poem “The Wounds,” he writes:
If, when the rocket fell, I had moved my head a bit
to watch a bird on a tree or to count
the clouds coming from the west side,
the shrapnel might have cut through my throat.
I wouldn’t be married to my wife,
father of three kids, one born in America. . . .
I look around me, relatives circle my bed.
I watch them as they chat. I imagine them praying round my coffin.
 As I was finishing this piece, Mosab messaged me, describing the nightly bombings in his neighborhood. A ground assault was imminent. “Any moment I may not be in this world,” he said.

Meanwhile, contra the Major, Cameron Stewart had his doubts in the lizard Oz, and expressed them at some length, and the pond only details them at length in the hope that they irritate the Major...

This is a military campaign so full of unknowns that it could deliver anything from a clear military victory to Israel to a further humanitarian catastrophe for Gaza to a regional war that engulfs the west. The stakes could barely be higher for all involved, so let’s examine the key questions which remain unanswered as Israeli troops advance into this densely packed enclave of just over two million people.
The most critical question is whether it is possible for Israel to destroy Hamas and its estimated 15,000 fighters without also incurring an horrific civilian death toll?
Although more than 700,000 civilians in northern Gaza are believed to have fled to safer zones in the south, following warnings by Israel to do so, there are still many civilians who cannot or will not leave their homes in the north and who will potentially find themselves in harm‘s way.
With Gaza’s densely packed urban landscape, Israeli forces will need to fight building by building, some of which will house innocent families while others will harbour terrorists. Hamas fighters will do their best to blur the two and invite Israeli mistakes in the heat of battle. They have concentrated their arsenals and command posts near civilian housing and have constructed tunnels and command centres under schools, hospitals and mosques. Israel’s initial ground offensive appears to be on a smaller scale than was expected which is likely to reflect pressure from the US on Israel to narrow the scope of ground operations and therefore civilian casualties. But even so, it is difficult to imagine that any successful ground campaign against Hamas will not also incur a very large civilian death toll.
Even if civilians avoid the crossfire, how will they access water, food and medicine during this ground conflict if it goes on for weeks or for months? Only a trickle of aid has reached Gaza since Israel closed its borders after the Hamas terror attacks of October 7. The situation for the population is already desperate and that lifesaving humanitarian supplies could be impossible to deliver during the heat and chaos of a ground war?
A large number of civilian deaths, on top of the more than 7000 alleged since the conflict began, would be a humanitarian catastrophe and would also be politically dangerous for Israel inviting widespread international criticism – even from Israel’s staunch allies.
The second big question is whether Israel can actually destroy Hamas to such a degree that it is no longer a viable fighting force. Israel will most likely be able to inflict severe casualties upon Hamas, killing numerous fighters and commanders. But at what point will Israel consider Hamas to have been destroyed? And for how long? Hamas is as much an ideology as it is a fighting force. Will it be able to one day rebuild even if it is largely wiped out by this operation?
The third big question is whether this Israeli ground offensive leads to a regional war. The Arab world is already furious at Israel for what it sees as a disproportionate Israeli response in Gaza to the Hamas attacks on Israel of October 7. Will the sight of Israeli tanks driving through Gaza and the further deaths that inevitably come with that, be enough to pursue Tehran to order Iran-backed Hezbollah to open a second front against Israel from southern Lebanon? Will it lead to a general uprising by Palestinians in the volatile West Bank, a third intifada. Or will it encourage Iranian-proxy forces in Syria and Iraq to step up attacks on US troops stationed there, inviting further US military responses?
A regional war would be the worst possible outcome. It would involve Iran in the conflict with uncertain but potentially highly dangerous outcomes. If Hezbollah launched a full-scale attack it would invite an Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It may even lead Israel to launch air strikes against targets of Iranian soil. It could force the US to take more tangible military action to support Israel which would be fighting a war on two fronts. Australia, as an ally of the US and Israel, could potentially become involved in some way.
The final big unanswered question is what will Israel do with Gaza when it decides that it has destroyed Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since 2007? What entity controls Gaza post-Hamas? Israel will be seen as a hostile power by the people of Gaza and it does not seem feasible that it would want to reoccupy the territory permanently. It may seek to install the more moderate Palestinian Authority as the governing entity in Gaza, but the PA, which controls the West Bank, is widely seen by Palestinians as corrupt, weak and too close to Israel. Or will Israel ask its allies to try to broker some sort of deal where United Nations peacekeepers take control of Gaza? These are just a few of the ‘unknown unknowns’ – to use Donald Rumsfeld’s term – which lie ahead for Israel, Gaza and the region. But what is known – beyond any doubt – is that we are now watching a desperately dangerous moment in the Middle East.

And so to end with another reader contribution ... though it does pander to cynicism and despair, and it produced many comments at the maker's blog, here ...