In which the pond does one of its notorious cut and pastes for the dog botherer, then finds some light relief with the Bjorn-again one ...

 

Very disappointed. The pond looked high and low for signs of a new Weekly Beast and couldn't find any. with the venerable Meade apparently deciding to go MIA. 

The pond understands, the desire to do the occasional bunk from herpetology questions, but still ...what a cowardly custard, flinching in the face of interminable reptile fire. 

Instead the pond had to settle for Katharine Murphy asking a gimme, bleeding obvious question: Dutton’s strongman persona matches our grim times – but has he fired up his opponents as well?

Well duh ...

...This is all quite the brew. It’s a handy time to be a demagogue, riling up your own people, seeking new recruits. Right on cue this week, Big Daddy Dutton, self-styled guardian of public safety, rolled into Canberra thundering about dark days, vulnerabilities and threats.
Big D isn’t a new persona for Australia’s opposition leader, of course. Apart from that very brief, surreal, interlude in 2018 when he wondered out loud whether or not he should smile more, Peter Dutton is a tub-thumping law-and-order populist, ready to roil, ready to rumble.

Apart from enjoying the notion of "Big D" - the pond was astonished to discover that a Kuwaiti rapper also used the handle - worse was to follow...

The reptiles seemed to be offended that they had to show Albo getting down with jolly Joe at the top of the digital edition ... and so the echoing Chamber and simplistic Simon had to dress it up with a talk of malaise, spinning an old reptile platter that doesn't matter, coming to you via the Big D ...

There was also a dose of TG bashing and Dame Slap in her usual rage about the ABC, but even worse was on hand, because the dog botherer had decided to go on a "war of civilisations" jag.

With mass starvation the new form of collective punishment, the pond was very over the reptiles blathering on about the wonders of Benji and so decided to do one of its notorious cut and pastes ...

The reptiles led with an inflammatory snap ...

The pond had already had enough of breaches of Godwin's Law, what with holey Henry setting the pace yesterday (the pond did enjoy that nickname), so the time was right to note the pond's source for its cut and paste.

It was Raja Shehadeh under the header The human suffering that the people of Gaza have endured in the past three weeks is beyond comprehension, and it landed in the pond's letterbox recently as part of the NYRB's 23rd November 2023 issue, though it could also be found online here. (paywall).

Just to set the tone, here's the opening couple of pars ...

We were waiting for the plumbers who had promised to come early on the morning of Saturday, October 7, to our house in Ramallah when the news broke of Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel. When they arrived, they were a team of two. The younger man couldn’t stop watching the video clips Hamas was posting. I could see him smile every time a new one arrived of Palestinian gunmen tearing down the walls and gates that have hemmed in Gaza for the last sixteen years. There’s an inevitable euphoria as the imprisoned anywhere break their chains and escape their incarceration.

The older plumber was more somber. He was fifty-five—a decade and a half younger than me. Like me he has lived through several wars and uprisings. Yet we both agreed that this latest audacious attack was unlike anything we had seen previously. It proved both that no Israeli fortification will keep oppressed Palestinians at bay forever and that Israelis will never be safe as long as they keep 2.3 million human beings locked in an area of 141 square miles and the population of the West Bank confined in unconnected enclaves surrounded by Jewish settlements. The tragedy is that in the absence of any real political opposition, the present right-wing government will heed neither of these obvious conclusions.

What followed didn't have an exact bearing on the dog botherer's clash of civilisations carry on, deeply Islamophobic though it is, but the point of a cut and paste is to visit other worlds while the dog botherer rabbits on, and stray readers can deal with odd resonances as they find them.

The NYRB was careful to present an alternative perspective to balance the Shehadeh piece, but the pond didn't need to bother, because the entire lizard Oz has been one-eyed since the collective punishment began ...

Meanwhile, in another country ...

All of us living in the occupied territories have been feeling tensions rise over the past six months as settlers undertake continuous criminal attacks against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank. “A total of 1,105 people from 28 communities—about 12% of their population—have been displaced from their places of residence since 2022,” the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated. Those who fled gave “settler violence and the prevention of access to grazing land by settlers as the primary reason.” The settlers, who as of July held some 2,600 weapons issued by the Israeli army, were no longer restricting their claims to the 62 percent of our land claimed by Israel—called Area C—but were encroaching on areas, such as those adjacent to Nablus, that the Oslo Accords stipulate are under the direct control of the Palestinian National Authority. So much for Israel’s respect for agreements signed with its adversary.

There were other causes for despair. The siege of Gaza, underway since 2007, seemed interminable, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, had recently worked to reduce the few, hard-won rights of the 4,499 Palestinians in Israeli prisons. On October 18 the Knesset passed a temporary order allowing officials to make them sleep on mattresses on the floor to reduce living space requirements. Palestinian prisoners have also been denied family visits and telephone links with the outside world.

Looming large in the minds of Palestinian Muslims, too, was the slow but persistent effort by fanatic Israelis to carry out their rituals in the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, making us feel that there was nothing sacred left that we could claim as our own. It was this development that gave the Hamas attack its name: “Aqsa Flood.”

Israel was no longer offering Palestinians promises, however flimsy, for future resolution. The peace process was moribund; Israel felt secure in “managing the conflict” and preserving the division between Gaza and the West Bank. The Netanyahu government has made it abundantly clear that Israel claims all of geographic Palestine as its own. In September Netanyahu stood before the UN and announced, in the words of a subsequent press release, that “Israel can become a bridge of peace and prosperity, paving the way for a new Middle East.” He showed a map of the region in which Palestine was obliterated. “We must not,” he said, “give the Palestinian State a veto against a peace process.”

Israelis should have known that violence will erupt when people have no hope and no other options. It was to Hamas’s advantage that the Israeli government arrogantly dismissed the possibility that acting as supreme masters over the Palestinians could engender such a reaction.

It’s likely that Netanyahu had been hoping for a war. Indeed this one has so far temporarily saved him from the protests that have swept Israel in recent months, and on October 12 he formed an emergency unity government that included his center-right rival, the former IDF general Benny Gantz. Yet Netanyahu is likely well aware that this reprieve will be short-lived. An attack on this scale under his watch should have occasioned his immediate resignation, but as long as the war against Gaza continues he and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, will not only remain in office but have expanded powers. Perhaps by escalating the severity of the reprisals against Gaza he is trying to win himself more time.

Back to the dog botherer, dressing up the Islamophobia as a war of civilisations, though all religions have their barking mad fundamentalists, and the pond believes that right at this moment there's one -who thinks Noah invited dinosaurs on to the ark - currently installed as the Speaker of the US Congress ...

Yes, yes, but if we must talk of an enfeebled society,  what about event in another country ...

Palestinians, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, had good reason on October 7 to worry that in the hands of these extremists greater tragedies could be expected than in the past. “The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,” Netanyahu said that day. “We are at war and will win.” Later he threatened to turn Gaza into a “deserted island.”

Those fears have come to pass. The human suffering that the people of Gaza have endured since October 7 is beyond comprehension. On Monday, October 9, Gallant announced that Israel would impose a “complete siege” on the enclave: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” As a consequence of this policy, Gaza’s health care system is at the time of this writing “facing collapse,” as Doctors Without Borders has said, its hospitals “overwhelmed and lacking resources.” On October 21 the Guardian reported that, according to doctors in the enclave, 130 premature babies were in “imminent danger due to a lack of fuel.”

More than a million people in Gaza have already been displaced, many of them having fled after Israel ordered the entire northern population to evacuate. In its persistent attempt to prove to the local population that nowhere in the north of Gaza is safe, on October 19 Israel bombed a Greek Orthodox church compound where at least five hundred Muslims and Christians had taken shelter, killing eighteen people. Seeing a photo of the tent camp in the southern Gazan city of Khan Yunis newly built to house the refugees from the north, I thought of the images of Palestinians who ended up in similar camps after they were forced out of their homes in 1948.

A resident of the north named Lubna was among those forced to move south to Khan Yunis—which has itself in recent days been the target of repeated bombing. According to two Guardian reporters, alongside the bombing, the worst privation for her family is the lack of water. Gaza has been cut off from fuel supplies for two weeks now, so there is no power to run its desalination plants or water pumps. Even if more relief convoys get through from Egypt, Israel has prohibited them from bringing fuel, lest it be used by Hamas.

Each person gets under a liter a day, Lubna told them—significantly less than what the UN deems the “bare minimum for basic survival.”

By October 26 twenty-seven journalists had been killed since the start of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists: four Israeli reporters, a Reuters video journalist killed in southern Lebanon (by a shell fired from across the Israeli border), and twenty-two Palestinian journalists in Gaza. One of the few reporters left in Gaza is Jamileh Tawfiq, who like Lubna had to move to Khan Yunis from her home in the north. She told the Guardian that she was staying in an overcrowded, unhygienic UN compound. “No one knows what is going to happen next,” she said:

It feels as if they are trying to control our fates; they even made us leave our homes, not knowing if we can ever return. We’re trying to stay alive, but we don’t have hope any more. We are destroyed from the inside, and even if this ends, I don’t think life will ever be normal again.

The uncertainty, with no prospect for an end to the war anytime soon, must be torturous.

But if you're a war of civilisations man, surely you enjoy the torture, the mass starvation, the mass displacement, the collective punishment ... and anyone who demurs is some sort of traitor, guilty of the heinous crime of whataboutism, and never mind the mass starvation ...

Meanwhile, in another country ...

During his visit on October 18 President Joe Biden urged Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. “Like the United States, you don’t live by the rules of terrorists,” he told Israeli leaders. “You live by the rule of law.” After lengthy negotiations with Israel, on October 21 Egypt started allowing up to twenty trucks a day to bring medical supplies and other aid through the Rafah border crossing—only a small sliver of the relief that Gaza’s population needs. Before the war about five hundred trucks supplied the enclave each day.

Missing from the shipment was “the fuel needed to power hospitals, keep ambulances moving, or to pump water from the ground,” a spokesperson for the NGO ActionAid told another Guardian reporter:

We’re hearing stories every day of communities coming together to donate whatever fuel they have remaining to keep incubators going for newborns who are in a critical condition…. We’re urgently calling for a ceasefire and for the opening of humanitarian corridors.

But Israel’s army will surely find a way to proceed with killing thousands more fighters and civilians. Already the death toll from its bombardment of Gaza far exceeds that of its previous full-scale war with Gaza nine years ago.

Back to the dog botherer for another round of Islamophobia ...

Meanwhile, in that other country ...

Palestinian civilians in the West Bank have not been spared violent reprisal. In a twelve-mile stretch east of Ramallah, heavily armed settlers have been forcing communities of Palestinian Bedouins to flee entire villages en masse—what the humanitarian coordinator for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din has called “a silent annexation.” On October 20 Al Jazeera reported that “with checkpoints closed and roads too dangerous to pass,” Palestinian villages in Area C found themselves cut off from humanitarian groups. “They have no protection at all,” a spokesperson for the human rights organization B’Tselem told the network. This has made the settlers more brazen. A video from B’Tselem shows a settler entering the village of At-Tuwani in the South Hebron Hills, approaching a Palestinian man, and shooting him at point-blank range as Israeli soldiers look on.

Wars are usually harbingers of change. Yet this region’s previous wars have achieved no fundamental progress toward peace. Israel has continued to claim that it has no partner for peace and has not cultivated one. Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian National Authority, who has consistently opposed armed resistance and repeatedly called for a negotiated settlement, was recently belittled by a senior Israeli official close to Netanyahu as the “mayor of Ramallah.”

Just to make sure that the dog botherer was doing his best to lather up Islamophobia, the reptiles slipped in a snap ...

But the pond didn't rise to the bait - the reptiles' ongoing baiting and demonisation of Islamics over the years is notorious and too familiar to repeat here - and instead there was a final word from that other country ...

There is something self-deceiving about Israel’s determination to pursue only revenge against Hamas rather than peace with the Palestinians. For it will never be possible to destroy the Palestinians or force them to leave. The surrounding countries have taken firm positions against admitting Palestinian refugees: Egypt has so far refused to let residents of Gaza leave through the Rafah crossing, the only way into and out of Gaza that falls outside Israel’s control, while Jordan’s King Abdullah has insisted that there must be “no refugees in Jordan and no refugees in Egypt.”

But whether or not the borders open, Palestinians themselves have been determined not to let Israel engineer a second Nakba by ethnically cleansing them from Gaza. So far the Israeli army has had only mixed success in forcing the enclave’s northern population to move south. At least 700,000 people have fled to southern Gaza, but roughly 350,000 remain in Gaza City. It should be clear to Israelis that we are here to stay, and as my father, the lawyer Aziz Shehadeh, concluded after a life of working for peace, the only real victory is when we have mutual recognition and self-determination. —October 26, 2023

It was written back in October? But since then horrors have multiplied, tragedies exploded, unimaginable cruelty imposed and endured in the quest for a chimera ...

And all the dog botherer had to offer by way of noticing was this final gobbet ...

Meanwhile, over at The New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviewed historian Omer Bartov, the topic being How to Define Genocide ... (sorry paywall, but maybe soft)

New Yorker: You write in your piece, “My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action. On Oct. 7, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a ‘huge price’ for the actions of Hamas and that the Israel Defense Forces, or I.D.F., would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centers ‘into rubble.’ On Oct. 28, he added, citing Deuteronomy, ‘You must remember what Amalek did to you.’ As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to ‘kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings.’ ” Can you talk more about this focus on what leaders say?
Bartov: There’s a huge amount of that coming out from Netanyahu, who usually is more careful with his words. The President of the state of Israel, too, said it wasn’t just Hamas but all the people of Gaza who are responsible. The Minister of Defense spoke about “human animals”—and it’s not always clear if he means Hamas or Gazans. That’s the kind of language that has been used in several genocides, where you dehumanize a group constantly. The Hutu were doing that about the Tutsi, the Nazis obviously were doing it about the Jews, and so forth. And just recently, Avi Dichter, who is a Likud minister, was saying, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” That’s a reference to the Nakba of 1948—the expulsion of the Palestinians. That’s a clear intent of ethnic cleansing.
When you see this kind of verbiage constantly being put out by people—politicians, generals, and so forth—it makes you worry. First of all, it filters down to the soldiers. It incites people to more and more violence. It dehumanizes the population that they’re fighting, and it’s in a situation where you are attacking an organization that is deeply entrenched within very congested areas with numerous civilians. So all of that obviously makes you worry that this can become something more systematic.

And then there was this ...

New Yorker: Do you think serving changed your relationship to Israel?
Bartov: No. No. There were two things that affected me. One was the outbreak of the 1973 war. When I was in high school, in the early seventies, and I was in a kind of progressive high school in Tel Aviv, we were already protesting against the occupation and marching and saying, “Occupation corrupts.” There were peace feelers being put out at the time by Egypt, by Anwar Sadat. Moshe Dayan, the former Defense Minister, famously said, “Better Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh,” meaning, “Better to keep Sinai. We don’t need the peace. We are strong enough, because look what we did to them in ’67.” And then the war happened. Three thousand Israeli soldiers were killed, ten thousand were wounded. Members of my generation carry that sort of P.T.S.D. to this day. And, in fact, October 7th, I think, woke that in many of them. They were really sort of shaken twice over because of what happened in ’73.
And so, the first thing that I thought about was that war. There were many of us who thought that war could have been avoided. The leadership suffered from what I call the euphoria of power. And that’s exactly what has happened now. War taught me that there are wars that can be avoided. You think you can keep what you have because you’re strong enough to be able to keep it, and eventually it blows up in your face.
The second thing was that I served a little bit as an occupation soldier. I was a platoon leader, walking down the street with a line of soldiers behind me in the sun. People are hiding behind their windows looking at you, and they’re terrified of you. You are a little scared of them, too, because you don’t know if they’re going to throw some grenade at you or whatever. You feel that you have no business being there. You feel like, “Why am I there?” I really distinctly remember that sensation. Several generations of young Israelis have spent most of the military service as policemen, policing an occupied population. What does that do to the occupied and what does that do to the occupier? There’s a mutual dehumanization going on that ends up with such horrors as we saw and we are still seeing. It’s a slow process, but it is that kind of moral corruption that I think I started sensing already as a very young man.

After all that, the pond needed some light relief, and so looked below the fold to check the weekend offerings ...

Hmm, there was the Angelic one, offering a performance in the category "womyn who worry about men". 

The Angelic one has built up a steady following, up there with the suffering of Mary on some kind of Calvary hospital Canberra cross, but perhaps that should be a deferred pleasure, because Polonius must be tackled tomorrow, and he's walking the same path as the dog botherer ...

Instead the pond was drawn to the Bjorn-again one, always a guaranteed form of essence of distilled comedy and mangled data and statistics, and on a topic likely to be a source of delight for the pond readership ...

Usually around this point the pond would turn to the latest news from climate science ... there was the Graudian offering How big are the fires burning in Australia's north? Interactive map shows they've burned an area larger than Spain ...

Or perhaps WA government fails to back up premier's claim expanding gas industry will be good for planet ...

And of late vulgar youff has been bunging on a do, as if they think they might have to go living on the planet, School Strike 4 Climate: Australian students skip classes en masse to call for action.

Instead of any of that, the reptiles produced a masked figure designed to terrify Killer and the lizard Oz readership ...

It reminded the pond of another story featuring a mask, this one in the Graudian ...

And so on and on, and there's nothing like being an advanced economy with a high level of procurement skills, is there?

Relax, the Bjorn-again one has got it all sorted ...

Indeed, indeed, and here in Australia, we have already seen the astonishing benefits of hiring some decent consultants and going full robo digital ...

Sorry, the pond just had to slip in a few cartoons before doing the final Bjorn-again gobbet suggesting ways to ruin the lizard Oz business model by stripping rags of their few remaining ads ...

"As many countries face new threats in the future"?

Odd, verging on the peculiar, the pond would have thought that by now climate science would have been thought of as offering an old, familiar threat for the future.

Never mind, it's time to return to where the pond began, with the immortal Rowe grooving along to the sounds of the big D ...

Yep, we're all sentenced to the same fate, the sounds of the big D playing on your leg and in your head ...