A tentative tiptoe into tepid non-Thucydidean, non-Euclidean waters ...

 

The pond finally felt up to tackling a reptile, but only because it was the hole in the bucket man, the last reptile the pond paid attention to before an unfortunate detour, and only because the pond came prepared.

Please, before or after reading Henry's attempt to fix the situation in Gaza, read the post immediately below, which reprints an Haaretz editorial. 

It shows more empathy, awareness and understanding of the situation than you might scrape from the grovelling of an apologist for a fundamentalist theocracy intent on ethnic cleansing.

And so, with that to hand, to proceed to the grovelling, which began with this enticing proposition:

Aid funds can’t be left in hands of terrorists
Rather than denouncing Israel the government should work with it to devise an alternative to UNRWA that doesn’t sustain terrorism.

Actually the pond doesn't mind a bit of denouncing, because there is much to denounce - see the Haaretz editorial's denouncing - but for some reason, the reptiles decided the best way to lead off was to show mighty militarism.

 If they'd been thinking a little, they might have shown aid flowing, Benji's government showing compassion, but instead they ran this caption ...

Israeli soldiers inside a compound of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Gaza Strip

Accompanied by this example of macho militarism:

On second thoughts, how could the reptiles show Benji showing compassion? Absurd. Best to show the only source of humanitarian aid for Gaza neutered ...

Then it was on with our Henry's blather, though this time there's no Thucydides here ...

Earlier this week, in a vote that united Benjamin Netanyahu’s staunchest supporters with many of his greatest critics, Israel’s parliament overwhelmingly approved legislation that would curtail the operations in Israel, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the UN Relief and Works Agency.
The decision comes after revelations that yet more terrorists – including Fateh al-Sharif, the head of Hamas in Lebanon, and Hamas commander Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who was involved in the rape and murder of the young men and women attending the Nova music festival – were long-time UNRWA employees. But those revelations merely highlight a fact that has been obvious for some time: that UNRWA is part of the problem, not of the solution.
The severity of the issues became apparent in the organisation’s early years. Established in 1949, UNRWA was one of the agencies set up to help address the vast population movements, involving some 50 million people, that occurred in the wake of World War II.

An influential report by Sir John Simpson had concluded that repatriating large numbers of refugees was unrealistic and ought to be “ignored in any future program of international action aiming at practical liquidation of refugee problems”. Rather, international assistance should facilitate the refugees’ resettlement in host countries.

By golly, he really does make it obvious. The lizard Oz's resident expert suggests resettlement. And think of the real estate opportunities!

Then there was more blather, but please, remember to read that Haaretz editorial before or after reading that guff.

In only two instances were geographically specific entities created to deliver that assistance: Korea and Palestine. In both cases, the entities were intended to be strictly temporary. The UN Korean Reconstruction Agency’s mandate was terminated in 1958, when South Korea, which was still in ruins, assumed the burden of refugee resettlement. And UNRWA’s mandate was meant to be terminated by that time too.
Because “sustained relief operations inevitably contain the germ of human deterioration”, said UNRWA’s establishment report, “every effort should be made to transfer relief administration to (host) governments no later than 1 July 1952”. To that end, the agency was to concentrate on works programs that would promote the refugees’ integration into their new homelands.
However, those programs never got off the ground. As early as 1950 the Soviet-aligned Congress of Palestinian Refugees denounced the works program as “a project prepared by the Imperialists”, whose goal was to deprive Palestinians of their “right of return”. By late 1951, UNRWA’s 12,000 Palestinian employees were, the agency reported, on strike “against making any improvements in (refugee) camps in case this might mean permanent resettlement”.

At this point the reptiles slipped in an audio visual offering featuring Jennings of the fifth form:

The pond only notes it by way of inert screen cap - always the best for a dog botherer's offering - but our Henry, bolstered and comforted by Jennings' audio visual presence on Sky News (Au), immediately broughtJennings of the fifth form in to the argument, a form of cross promotion, and a way to keep the readership within the tent.

It was captioned thusly, providing much more information than the pond ever needed to know:

Strategic Analysis Australia Director Peter Jennings discusses Israel banning UNRWA from operating in the country over staff links to Hamas. “The problem is that the organisation has allowed itself to become compromised over decades of allowing themselves to get too close to Hamas,” Mr Jennings told Sky News host Chris Kenny. “The evidence is pretty compelling.”

Please read the Haaretz editorial immediately below this ongoing gushing of guff:

The Palestinians’ objections were understandable. After all, wrote journalist David Hirst, they had been assured by their leaders that “all you have to do is eat and sleep – the Arab armies will get your country back for you”. In the meantime, declared the General Union of Palestinian Students, since “the people of Palestine have been wronged, it is the duty of humanity” – that is, of the West – to “provide them with tranquillity and ease”.
The result, UNRWA reluctantly recognised, was that “the relief given by the Agency is considered a right” that could not be made conditional on any form of work. The agency therefore abandoned its public works program in 1957, refocusing on delivering ongoing welfare payments, schooling and health services.

That suited the host countries, which, with the partial exception of Jordan, refused to accept the refugees as permanent settlers. Fearing they would cause turmoil, the host countries’ security services kept the refugees, and especially the burgeoning population of UNRWA schoolteachers, under tight control, curbing their nascent militancy.

Hmm, that's going to make things tricky, as clearly the Israeli government doesn't accept that Palestinians can be permanent settlers in Palestine, Gaza, or the West Bank. Whatever, wherever. 

Instead they must be reduced to roaming camel herders, starved of rations and sent hither and yon, suffering eternal punishments of the kind the long absent lord dreamed up in the Old Testament, a smoting and a smiting and a cleansing from the earth.

Lebanon, to take but one example, was regarded as less repressive than Egypt was in Gaza; but in his memoirs, Ahmed Kotaish recalls that his school principal was “publicly whipped and deported for raising the Palestinian flag in front of the school”.
However, the situation changed dramatically in the 1970s. In 1969, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser brokered the Cairo Agreement between the Lebanese Army and the Palestine Liberation Organisation that placed the UNRWA-run camps under the authority of the PLO instead of the Lebanese state. As well as contributing to Lebanon’s eventual collapse, the agreement effectively put the PLO in charge of UNRWA’s provision of services, with UN General Assembly resolutions 3237 in 1974 and 31/110 in 1976 then giving the PLO unprecedented standing in UNRWA’s supervision.
At the same time, Israel, having occupied the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war, was far more liberal than Egypt and Jordan had been, granting Palestinian organisations freedoms of expression and association they had never previously enjoyed.

All that opened the road to the unchecked infiltration of UNWRA by the PLO and its splinter groups, including, in later years, Hamas. Initially, UNRWA treated that as a grave concern, with Commissioner-General Laurence Michelmore and his successor John Rennie noting that it raised “basic questions of authority”.
However, Olof Rydbeck, the Commissioner-General from 1979 to 1985, viewed the agency’s symbiosis with the Palestinians as a way of inducing the Arab states to provide UNRWA with supplementary funding, ensuring its continued expansion. While UNRWA instructed its senior staff to “adopt terminology which will ‘discourage’ (the) total identification of UNRWA with refugee camps”, Rydbeck forged so close a partnership with the PLO that Yasser Arafat (who publicly denounced UNRWA as an imperialist tool) addressed him, in their personal correspondence, as “Dear Brother”.

Ah, there's nothing like "Dear Brother" to stand as an indictment in the world of our hole in the bucket man. Why it's way worse than dear comrade, and it offers no hope for dear sisters.

At this point the reptiles again interrupted with another audio visual entertainment, which was captioned thusly:

Labor and the Greens have criticised Israel over its banning of the United Nation’s Palestinian refugee agency. Almost the entire population of Gaza has relied on UNRWA for food, water and medical aid since the October seven attack. On Monday, Israel's parliament listed the UN Relief and Works Agency as a terror organisation. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has joined other international voices in calling on Israel to reconsider the ban.

Naturally the hole in the bucket man took umbrage at this ... fancy getting agitated about a little ethnic cleansing and genocide in a gulag.

Then in the manner of the reptiles, the hole in the bucket man introduced a systematic set of lies, misrepresentations and distortions to press his point. Please, read the Haaretz editorial below for a corrective:

Matters came to a head when Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to the discovery that UNRWA’s Vocational Training Centre in Siblin was a well-equipped military base. Israel and the US protested but Rydbeck, with the support of the Arab states and the Europeans, made purely cosmetic changes – and, in an ominous precedent, got away with it.
There have, since then, been countless commitments to reform, including, most recently, after a review chaired by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna. The reality, however, is that under the current Commissioner-General and his predecessor, who resigned amid allegations of pervasive corruption and mismanagement, they have had no effect.
As the fact that dozens of UNRWA facilities in Gaza have been found to house military assets shows, UNRWA’s staff systematically ignore violations of its regulations. Nor is it possible, after the latest disclosures, to deny that UNRWA provides the salaries on which many terrorists rely.

Um, that's if you believe the propaganda put out by a fundamentalist theocracy intent on ethnic cleansing. But the argument is broader than that. It's that the Palestinians herded into a gulag and deprived of any meaningful way to interact with the world, are just useless welfare bludgers.

But the damage is broader than that. By acting as a caretaker for generation after generation of so-called refugees, most of whose parents and grandparents were born in their current place of residence, UNRWA has converted refugee status into an inheritable entitlement well worth preserving. Having thus encouraged Palestinians to permanently depend on welfare, it has sown the very “germ of human deterioration” its establishment report decried.
Today, compared to the UN High Commission for Refugees, which copes with populations perpetually exposed to violence and starvation, UNRWA has 8.6 times as many employees per refugee served, reflecting its uniquely generous funding.
Much of that funding sustains the terrorism that has repeatedly plunged the region into devastating wars. If Western governments genuinely want to advance the cause of peace, it is high time they worked with Israel to devise a credible alternative.

The current government of Israel is interested in devising a credible alternative? 

You have to be able to live in a special land above the Faraway Tree to be able to cultivate that level of delusion. They've done nothing but limit aid, and make it as hard as possible to relieve the suffering of civilians in Gaza. They're not interested in being humanitarian, or saving the hostages, they're interested in a savage form of revenge. 

Please read the Haaretz editorial below, a genuine cry of anguish at what is happening and what is being done ...

And now to lighten the mood. 

The pond could have gone with the obvious, the MM attempting to get into a garbage truck, and stumbling in a way that almost brought him to grief, so that he might move all the trash out of the garbage can that is the United States (or so he calls it) ...

But instead the pond decided that a "womyn" angle formed a nice touchstone for the anxiety currently abroad in the patriarchy. 

You might have seen in it in stories such as this recent WaPo distillation:

Like it or not, you might have also read William Kristol in The Bulwark, under the engaging header of what a lunatic might do to health care in the US, Polio in Every Pot; Smallpox in Every Garage:

Charlie Kirk is upset.
Of course, Kirk is often upset. He’s a minor MAGA celebrity, and a precondition for being a MAGA celebrity is that you’re upset with today’s America. And a key element of your job is to make other Americans upset—far more so than they have actual reason to be—about the country in which they live.
What’s Charlie particularly unhappy about now? That women may be lying to their husbands—for their own good. (Can you believe it? Who’s ever heard of such a thing!?)
What are they lying about? Their vote.
Charlie is deeply concerned—he said yesterday in an interview with Megyn Kelly—that women may “undermine their husbands” by letting them think they’re with them, side-by-side, seated comfortably on the Trump train. But then, in the dark and dangerous secrecy of the voting booth, some of these women might go ahead and vote for Kamala Harris, even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.”
Betrayal! Subversion! Feminine wiles! The poor husbands of America, wool pulled over their eyes! It’s terrible.
Charlie seems to have been particularly provoked by an excellent ad from the organization Vote Common Good, featuring Julia Roberts. A buffoonish husband, having apparently just voted, instructs his wife: “Your turn, honey.” As the woman enters the voting booth, the voiceover reminds us that this is one place where she still has the right to choose, that women can vote for whomever they want, and that no one else need ever know.
The wife votes for Harris. Afterwards, the husband can’t resist asking in a slightly creepy and characteristically male way, “Did you make the right choice?” The wife answers, “Sure did, honey.”

Kristol has more fun with the horror, and there's no doubt it's a disaster, a catastrophe:

... but at this point the pond would like to cut to the chase and show Jesse Waters enduring the full horror of patriarchal betrayal, thanks to Media Matters, Jesse Watters says his wife secretly voting for Harris would be “the same thing as having an affair”.

Roll the transcript:

JESSE WATTERS (CO-HOST): I don't believe these fake stories that you're saying on television about these guys, that they say that they voted for Trump and now they're voting for Harris because of their daughters. That is such a lie, Harold. I know you and I've met your friends and none of your friends strike me as that lame. And if I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that's the same thing as having an affair. That, to me --
JEANINE PIRRO (CO-HOST): Oh my god.
HAROLD FORD JR. (CO-HOST): Oh my gosh.
TYRUS (CO-HOST): Let him finish! Go, Jesse.
WATTERS: That violates this sanctity of our marriage.
TYRUS: Preach on it, yes.
WATTERS: What else is she keeping from me? What else has she been lying about?
PIRRO: Why would she have to lie to you?
TYRUS: Roll the credits.
PIRRO: Have you threatened her? Why would she lie to you?
DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): Oh, they want me to tease.
WATTERS: Why would she do that and then vote Harris? Why would she say she was voting Trump, and then voting Harris, and I caught her and she said "I lied to you for the last four years."
PIRRO: So you admit you intimidate people.
WATTERS: It's over, Emma! That would be D-Day.

Only on Faux Noise, only in the GOP, only in a world where women have to take it, like it or not.

As a bonus, here's Jesse at another place:

..The pundit was making fun of a record-breaking "White Dudes for Harris" fundraising call on Tuesday’s episode of The Five when he questioned why “any man would vote Democrat,” claiming that it would have to be because of “mommy issues.”
“It’s not the party of virtue, security — it’s not the party of strength — it’s definitely not the party of family. And to be a man and then vote for a woman just because she’s a woman is either childish — that person has mommy issues — or they are just trying to be accepted by other women,” Watters said. “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Don't ask for the name of an actual scientist. This is Faux Noise.

As for the transition, presumably this happens in American public schools across the land, where the pond understands that there are operating theatres available to turn every male child female trans on a daily basis, cutting off genitalia without a note from parents and sending them home with stitches and a pack of tampons.

No need to ask if there's a Freudian in the house, or to start talking castration theory, just remember that these days a walk in America is a walk in the valley of the weird, or as an American correspondent assured the pond, the looniest of loons.

And so to end with a return to the garbage can motif, courtesy of a different Jennings, somewhat advanced beyond the fifth form:

It would also be remiss of the pond not to catch up with the latest media storm in a teacup down under, but that's easily done by referring to the immortal Rowe:

As always it's in the detail:

Will Gina sue? The pond can't imagine why. She's posing in a way that a long line of women have done ...