Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part V

This is Part V on this topic.  Previously:

Preview:  GUERRILLA WARFARE - A brief discussion of guerrilla warfare, then you can watch the classic film on the Algerian war for independence from France:  The Battle Of Algiers.

Part I of this series is here.  It identifies and briefly discusses the following topics I think important to be aware of when confronting the Israeli-Gaza war.

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

Part II is here.  It looks at:

4. GENOCIDE

5. ZIONISM

6. ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

Part III is here.  It covers

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

9.  IGNORANCE

10.  GUERRILLA WARFARE]

11.  FACTORING IN WHAT'S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES

Part IV is here.  It focuses on Hamas.  Particularly the Hamas Declaration of 1988 and the update in 2017

PART V:  Is there any resolution?

The point of these posts was for me to get a better understanding of the context of the Israeli-Gaza war - more depth about the history, the players, the truth.  Posting what I found would share what I was learning with readers.  I wasn't looking for conclusions.   But I think I can at least make some observations, that could be thought of as tentative conclusions as of now.

Observation 1:  Resolution of the Israel-Gaza war will not come from the parties themselves

The parties here means Hamas and the Netanyahu government of Israel.  

Hamas wants to remove Israel from the land it now controls - West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself.  They want to install an Islamic State with the laws coming directly from the Koran.  See previous post that looks at the Hamas Declaration.  

Netanyahu has been truculently anti-terrorist most of his life and sees all Palestinians as either complicit with Hamas, or potential Hamas members.  In addition, prolonging the war delays his removal from office and potentially facing the consequences of his corruption trials.

Observation 2.  Killing every last member of Hamas Won't Solve Israel's problems

Netanyahu has said he has to root out every member of Hamas.  It's his justification for the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.  But the deaths and destruction the Israelis have wrought in Gaza is only sowing the seeds of future terrorism.  

The children who are experiencing this war are not going to say, "It's terrible, but we understand Israel needs to destroy Hamas."  There may well be many Palestinians who resent Hamas and who would feel oppressed in a Hamas controlled Palestine.  Some may even blame Hamas for the retaliation against Gaza.  But all will hold generational hatred for the people who have killed so many of their family members and destroyed their communities.  

Netanyahu's war may wipe out all the pre-war members of Hamas, but it ensures that every Palestinian has a lifelong animosity toward Israel and probably Jews as well. The survivors may not join Hamas, but they will support organizations that resist Israel's power over them.  They will never trust Israelis.  'Nakba' is still a rallying cry for Palestinians.  It refers to the forced expulsions of Palestinians in 1948.  The destruction of Gaza will be added to the generational hatred.  

Observation 3:  Netanyahu's war has used up any moral capital Jews may have still had as survivors of the Holocaust.  

Need I say more?  Netanyahu and his far right supporters in Israel have become morally equal to those who exterminated Jews in WW II.   

Observation 4:  Any lasting peace is now only possible post-Netanyahu and post-Hamas

And given Observation 2 there will be no easy path.  Israelis will have to radically change how they feel and think about Palestinians.  That will be very difficult.  Harder yet will be for Palestinians to trust Israelis.  

But there were reports of tens of thousands of Israelis in the streets calling for new elections and a cease fire.  

Mahmoud Abbas has formed a new cabinet in the West Bank.  I don't know the politics of the West Bank well enough, but he's been the leader for 20 years.  Probably new leaders need to take over before there is any meaningful change.  

Observation 5:  There has been conflict between Palestinians and Israelis since even before the State of Israel was created.  People have been trying to make peace for 70 years.  I'm not holding my breath for anything more than a temporary period of relative quiet until the next explosion.  

I have more observations on at least one more issue still being debated by people who range from totally ignorant to understandably biased to intentionally polluting the truth.  Those trying to bring more clarity to the issue are drowned out, attacked even, by those whose passions are amplified over social media, by Russian and Iranian trolls, by true believers of all stripes, and those using the destruction of Gaza as a righteous outlet of their own personal demons.  I agree that the war against Gaza that Israel is waging is horrific and should end, but then what?  

The topic I've begun working on, and which will probably be my next piece in this series, will look at the criteria for how to judge the claims of people to a section of geography in the world.  It's worth looking at, but my observations here suggest it's more an academic exercise than anything that will have any influence on anyone.  

Destroying Cities And Killing Civilians - Post-War Berlin Photos By Roman Vishniac

We met long time friends in Berkeley Wednesday at the Magnes Collection.  While looking at the pictures in the current exhibit, I couldn't help but think about Gaza and Ukraine.  

The photographer was: 

"Roman Vishniac (1897–1990), a Russian-Jewish modernist photographer, [who] lived and worked in Berlin from 1920 to 1939. On the eve of the Second World War, he extensively documented Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. After fleeing Nazi Germany, he found safety in New York City and became a US citizen in 1946. The Roman Vishniac Archive, which The Magnes acquired in 2018, also includes thousands of photographs taken after World War II in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East." [From the Exhibit and also the Magnes Collection website]

Some of the pre-war pictures were up, but the main exhibit was of pictures Vishniac took in Berlin in 1947.  That's two years after the war in Germany ended.  Much of the debris has been swept up and carted away, though some still likes in piles.  People walk, seemingly calmly, in front of bombed out buildings.  

 Berlin and Dresden were both bombed heavily in WWII by the US and British air forces.

On the 1943-44 Berlin bombing raids from Wikipedia:

"On February 15–16, important war industries were hit, including the large Siemensstadt area, with the centre and south-western districts sustaining most of the damage. This was the largest raid by the RAF on Berlin. Raids continued until March 1944.[25][26][27]

These raids caused immense devastation and loss of life in Berlin. The November 22, 1943 raid killed 2,000 Berliners and rendered 175,000 homeless. The following night, 1,000 were killed and 100,000 made homeless. During December and January regular raids killed hundreds of people each night and rendered between 20,000 and 80,000 homeless each time.[28] Overall nearly 4,000 were killed, 10,000 injured and 450,000 made homeless.[29]"

From Wikipedia:

"The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[3] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[4] Up to 25,000 people were killed.[1][2][a] Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas."

We could add to this the atomic bomb in Japan, and stories about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  There were/are battles and massacres in the former Yugoslavia, in various parts of Africa, in South America.  

The United Nations was supposed to help end such wars, but it's structured so that the large powers have veto power over crucial decisions.  Certainly the arms dealers play a huge role in all these wars, though there were wars before capitalist corporations took over the technology of killing.  

We also have to figure out how and why psychopaths find their way to power and control of militaries and the budgets to arm them.  Is there a way to overcome this?  

Is all this simply embedded in our DNA?  

[This post fits into the series I'm doing on the Israeli-Gaza war, though it's not part of 'plan' I had for those posts.  You can link to those posts at the Israel-Gaza war tab just below the orange header above.  Here's the same link.]

Subbing In San Francisco- USS Pampanito

The grandkids had contradictory ideas about  where they wanted to go yesterday.  She was more willing, but he adamantly didn't want to go to the Children's Creativity Museum.  

I googled 'San Francisco for kids' and pointed out that we could go visit a submarine.  Immediate mood change.  

So we got the 28 bus and rode it to Fisherman's Wharf.  

The USS Pampanito SS-383 is a WWII Balao Class Fleet Submarine.

There were something like 80 men aboard, and a sign outside said they were gone for long periods of time without a shower.  But on the tour we saw two showers.  One for the crew and one for the officers.  My granddaughter asked about that after the tour.  The lady said that the men who worked in the engine room and got oily and the cooks got to take showers, as well as the officers.  But water had to be rationed.  

Q:  Couldn't they use saltwater?

A:  When they surfaced, and it was safe, the men could just jump into the water.

Sleeping quarters for the crew.  There was one bed for three crew members since two were always on duty.  

This was the kitchen for the crew!

I saved this image below at higher resolution, but I still don't think you can read it.  So here's a link to a site on How Submarines Work.  It has a better animated version of how it takes on water to dive.

From the lower part of the sign below: 

"The United States submarines and the men who served on them represented less than 1.6% of America's al naval force during WWII, yet was responsible for sinking 55% of Japanese naval and merchant marine flees.  This extraordinary record was nt without cost.  Almost 23% of the submarine force was lost, comprising more than 3.500 men and 52 submarines."

Two subs were lost on October 24, 1944 and another on October 25.  The last one was lost on August 6, 1945 - the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, three days before the Japanese surrendered.  

The kids enjoyed the visit to the sub a lot.  And we kept them occupied on and around Fisherman's Wharf for several hours before getting the bus back home.  

A benefit of the 28 bus is that it stops, along the way, at the Golden Gate Bridge visitor center. 

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part III

Preview:  GUERRILLA WARFARE - A brief discussion of guerrilla warfare, then you can watch the classic film on the Algerian war for independence from France:  The Battle Of Algiers.

Part I of this series is here.  It identifies and briefly discusses the following topics I think important to be aware of when confronting the Israeli-Gaza war.

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

Part II is here.  It looks at:

4. GENOCIDE

5. ZIONISM

6. ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

[Part III was going to include a section on Hamas.  But that has turned out to be lengthier than I first imagined.  The Hamas Charter is pretty explicitly an Islamic call to overthrow the State of Israel.  But in the spirit of topic 1 in Part I - Propaganda, Misinformation, and the Obliteration of Truth, I needed to be sure I was not being misled and then I wanted to present it in a way that showed different translations to assure readers as well.  So I'm going to make that Part IV. And I'll probably add a Part V to organize my thoughts after doing all this research and writing.]  

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

I don't have a lot to say about this, other than to say it is an important factor that has helped empower Netanyahu and the Israeli political right wing.  From a Brookings Institute report:

"The over one million people who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in a wave from the beginning of the 1990s have changed Israel to its core — socially, politically, economically, and culturally. Within the first six years, they formed what became a large secular nationalist political camp that secures right-wing rule to this day."

The immigration of Ultra Orthodox US Jews also plays an important role - especially in the policies of taking Arab land in the West Bank and turning it into Jewish settlements.   While their numbers are tiny compared to the Russian immigrants, their interest in settling in the West Bank exacerbates conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.  

9.  IGNORANCE 

Ignorance by itself is not bad.  We are all ignorant about many things.  Just go in any library and peruse the book titles.  Some topics you know well.  Others not at all.  The important things about ignorance are:

1. You are aware of your ignorance
2. You don't act as though you know what you're talking about on subjects you're ignorant on
3. You recognize that expertise in one area doesn't give you expertise in other areas
4. What we know, what science uncovers, is merely a model of reality.  That model is often incomplete and new discoveries require changes in our models.  So what you learned in the past may be out of date, or it may have been wrong in the first place.

My basic point here is that lack of knowledge, and the lack of awareness of one's ignorance, combines with Topic 1:  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH, to make thinking out the Israeli-Gaza situation even harder than it already is.  The rest is some background to own ignorance.

Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity.  It means that someone hasn't been exposed to certain knowledge, information.  Perhaps one has lived in one location forever and been around people who mostly look and think and behave like them. 

First radio, then television, and then the internet have made it easier to escape such isolation and to learn more about the world and the people in it.  [And I'm not saying that never having been more than 100 miles from your home is necessarily a bad thing either. Being grounded in a geographic location can give someone connections and insights that people without such permanence lack.]

Spending a year as a student in Germany made me see things I could never have seen had I stayed home.  I don't mean so much that I saw Germany and Europe, but more that I saw my life growing up in California from a whole different perspective.  Learning that I could exist reasonably well without using English also rearranged my brain.

When I first arrived to teach English in Thailand so many years ago, I was gaining ability in my Thai language skills, and rapidly learning about my community and Thailand.  It took me six months before I realized:

As much as I was learning, the volume of what I didn't know, grew ten times faster.  My ignorance wasn't growing, just my awareness of my ignorance was growing..   

As a blogger, I'm reminded daily about how much I do not know.  I'm constantly googling to learn more about the background of someone or something I know little or nothing about.  It's a constant fight to resist unconsciously filling in, from my prejudices, what isn't said about something I learn about in the news or online.  I write something and then realize I don't know if it is true or not and have to verify it.  

The internet makes such fact-checking much easier than it ever was before, but I come to this having spent years painfully tracking references in bound volumes that then led me to track down the books and journals that might hold the answer.  I've had to go through articles by people who make conflicting arguments, and then had to look for more evidence that would give one side more likelihood of being accurate than other positions.  

A friend pointed out that he's not so sure the internet makes it easier because there's so much disinformation.  Experience in critical thinking and sleuthing is important on the internet.

That's why Topic 9 - IGNORANCE is closely related to Topic 1 (in Part I) PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH.   And why Propaganda is the very first topic.

Without a substantial foundational web of of knowledge, it's hard to figure out 

• where to store in your world view every new bit of data
• how to evaluate its accuracy
• when and how to shift your own understanding of a particular subject

10.  GUERRILLA WARFARE - I covered this as much as I think I will  in a previous post that invites to you see the movie The Battle of Algiers.  Here's the link to that post, which was like a sneak preview to this series of posts.  

11.  FACTORING IN WHAT'S HAPPENING BEHIND THE SCENES

I've just finished reading Michael Nolan's Ike's Gamble.  It's 258 pages focused on President Eisenhower's policy toward Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser from 1954-1959.  Nolan uses a vast volume of State Department files that only have been recently made public, reviewing the memos sent by different State Department officials as well as other correspondents and notes taken by people then and there.  

I understand the people protesting Israeli killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.  I  understand and share the frustration of US citizens who object to the US supplying weapons to Israel to carry out the attacks.  I get that people want President Biden to pressure Netanyahu to call a cease fire.  I think that is a legitimate request.  But the people who then condemn the Biden administration and say they won't vote for him because of Israel, well those folks I don't get at all.  

There is so much going on behind the scenes that we know nothing about, that we really have no idea of exactly what the Biden administration is doing to try to stop the attacks in Gaza.  The Nolan book makes that point very clear.  It also makes it clear that they may or may not be doing things that will help the situation improve.  

[Sorry, a bit of editorial here:  But for sane US citizens to argue that Israeli policy is a good enough reason to not vote for Biden, when the alternative is Trump, suggests to me incredible shortsightedness.  There is nothing that Trump will do to improve the situation of Palestinians.  Nothing.  He's cozied up to Netanyahu.  He helped to move the Israeli capital to Jerusalem, something Palestinians vigorously opposed.  In fact, it's clear he would do his best to end the US experiment in democracy.]

Here's a  Tweet that makes the same point on a different subject that also reminds us that much goes on behind the scenes that we will only learn about much later on if ever.

The takeaway: Much of DOJ’s investigative work takes place out of the public eye. DOJ speaks through its filings. And just because the public doesn’t see action/movement on a matter, that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. End

— Anthony Coley (@AnthonyColey) December 19, 2023

13.  WHY GETTING JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL SEEMS EASIER THAN NATIVE AMERICANS GETTING EUROPEANS OUT OF THE UNITED STATES

This was originally going to follow the section on Hamas.  Since I'm moving Hamas to the next post, it makes sense to move this one as well.  But if you're curious - be my guest and think out, even write down what you would write on this question and see how similar your ideas are to what I'll write.  That's always a good way to move from a passive to an active reader.  

 

Hope to see you soon with Part IV.  I'll make this link live when it's ready.  

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part II

This is a truly touchy topic all around.  I'm listing here some of the aspects that I feel are critical to understand (no, be aware of is a more realistic goal).  Assume that I am torn in different directions and not pushing an answer one way or the other.  

Part I of these posts gives an intro to these posts and covers:

 1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

PART II

4.  GENOCIDE

The word "genocide" was coined to give a name to what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust.   

"Seventy years ago this fall [2014], the word "genocide" made its debut into the English language, on page 79 of the 674-page Axis Rule in Occupied Europe [which you can find here in Reading 3], in a chapter called "Genocide—A New Term and New Conception for Destruction of Nations."

The writer was Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer who had fled the persecution of the Holocaust and moved to the United States in 1941. A few months after his arrival, he heard a radio address in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told listeners about the horrors of World War II. . .

[Lemkin] decided to create a name for the crime without a name. He came up with genocide, which he defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he created the word by combining the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). In 1948, nearly three years after the concentration camps of World War II had been closed forever, the newly-formed United Nations (UN) used this new word in the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," a treaty that was intended to prevent any future genocides."

The US Holocaust Museum defines the term in more detail 

"Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories:

• Killing members of the group
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

There are a number of other serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide. They include crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing."

Netanyahu would argue that his intent is to secure Israel from terrorist attack, not to kill Palestinians.  

Whether what's happening in Gaza is genocide or one of the other crimes listed probably doesn't matter too much, but I'm sure those fighting against Israeli bombing in Gaza are relishing the irony of charging Israelis with genocide.   

Since I wrote these words on genocide, the South African complaints about Israeli genocide to the  International Court of Justice has become available.  In it, starting from page 60, they quote a number of Israeli officials, in different ways saying things that suggest Israeli intent to obliterate Gaza.  Here's just one example from Prime Minister Netanyahu:

"The Israeli Prime Minister also returned to the theme in his ‘Christmas message’, stating: “we’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents . . . This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism”.445 On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.  And we do remember."

"The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “ The Prime Minister referred again to Amalek in the letter sent on 3 November 2023 to Israeli soldiers and officers.447 The relevant biblical passage reads as follows: “ Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses."

This is the tenor of the evidence of intent that the South African complaint offers to International Court of Justice.  And as I write this, I always keep in mind the possibility that this whole document is a fake, that the quotes are fabricated.  But I don't think so.  Some of the Prime Minister's remarks are almost identical to the "Civilization versus Savages" theme  I posted above in Section 2 on Netanyahu that appeared in his 1995 book.  

But remember, these are like the prosecutor's opening argument.  It's their side of the story.  The defense hasn't yet had a chance to put things in context or to refute the arguments.  

Because I'm taking forever to write this, I can add the Israeli response.  Ha'aretz, the oldest Israeli newspaper, has this report on the Israeli response to the South African allegations.

[Being mindful of Issue #1 - Propaganda, Misinformation - the first link in the previous sentence is to the Encyclopedia Brittanica  article on Ha'aretz.  The second links to their report.]

5.  ZIONISM

This is another term that gets bandied about.  I'm not going to try to define it here, but you can see a couple of differing definitions/commentaries at the links below.

Wikipedia's treatment

The Foreign Policy Institute's take

The Promise and Failure of Zionism

Many people seem to have trouble distinguishing between Zionists, Jews, and Israelis and use two or all of those terms interchangeably to mean the same thing.  As though all Christians believe the same thing or act the same way.  People who identify (or are labeled) Jews come in many flavors, beliefs, ideologies, lifestyles.  The same is true of Israelis.  

6.  ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

After World War II much of the world was shocked to learn of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis.  (If you don't believe the Holocaust happened, don't comment here.  I'll delete it as soon as I see it.  Rather educate yourself and get past your ignorance.)  Among Jews, the campaign to create a Jewish state in historic Israel was not universally supported.  But after the war, with many displaced Jewish refugees, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, sentiment supported establishing the state of Israel.  The newly formed United Nations approved. 

For the first years, the world heard heartwarming stories of the "Land of Milk and Honey," of the miracle in Israel making the desert bloom  When Israel was attacked in 1967 by surrounding Arab countries, Israel fought back and quickly defeated their enemies and kept the territory they took.  Moshe Dayan was an international hero, easily recognized with his black eye patch.  

But from the beginning the story wasn't so rosy.  Jews forced Arabs to abandon their homes and land.  Many fled to other Arab countries.  Over the years attempts to establish peace were thwarted by Palestinian rejection of the idea of Israel even existing.  Israeli supporters in the West used this rejection to show the Arabs were intransigent.  But it's clear that from the Arab perspective, the creation of Israel was similar to other colonial conquests where the indigenous people were simply removed for the colonists.  Even if the colonists were themselves a displaced people.

In the last 20 years or more, Israel has increasingly been a very oppressive ruler over the occupied territories.  Israel's annexation of West Bank Arab lands to build settlements for Israelis has exacerbated things.  People began talking about an Israeli apartheid. One can easily see similarities between the occupation and the way Black Americans are frequently treated by the police in the US.  

It's clear that many Israeli soldiers treat Palestinians with disdain. There are many places you can read about this, but I would offer Colum McCann's Apeirogon as a good place to start. [I highly recommend  reading Apeirogon]  It's the story of one Palestinian and one Jewish father who have both lost teenage daughters to the violence in Israel.  They are brought together and work with a group that advocates for peace and understanding.  There are very detailed descriptions of the indignities that Palestinians suffer daily.  

I believe that this treatment comes from 

• Israelis always feeling threatened (and Hamas does its best to stir up those fears) and 
• the ethnocentrism evidenced in Netanyahu's belief they are fighting a noble war between civilization and savagery.  [See Part I on Netanyahu]

As I mentioned in the post on The Battle of Algiers, people with little or no power, dominated by another people with lots of power, have few options other than guerrilla warfare.  

I'd also mention that other Arab countries tended to not take Palestinians as refugees into their countries.  One explanation was that by making Israel the collective enemy of Arabs, they could distract the Arab world from intra-Arab conflicts, and they could distract their own citizens from protesting their own authoritarianism.  Another explanation has been they simply didn't think they could handle the influx of so many Arabs with a somewhat different history in their own countries. 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

There are lots of articles about how Palestinian schools teach hate, such as this 2022 Times of Israel headline:

"UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog

Israeli organization says that rather than taking the material out of the 2022 curriculum, the UN Palestinian refugee agency has merely taken it off its public education portal"

It takes a little more digging to find counter arguments such as this one from The Palestine Chronicle by Rima Najjar:

Zionism is an insidious ideology. Its ideologues often gain traction by well-placed and oft repeated constructs – in films and TV series, in posts and comments on social media, and even in academia. So, it is no wonder that people end up having ideas about certain things, like the nature of Israel, the Zionist Jewish state, or the nature of Palestinian Arab culture and identity, or the nature of Jewish culture and identity, as if by osmosis.

One of these “memes” in the air, if you will, is the oft repeated comment by hasbara agents on social media that says Palestinians teach their children to hate Jews. This notion can also be found in numerous attacks on the Palestinian Authority curriculum with the same accusation of “teaching children to hate Jews”, when in fact, the opposite is true, as is often the case with Zionist propaganda (see Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education – Library of Modern Middle East Studies).

My understanding is that 

"'teaching children to hate Jews', when in fact, the opposite is true, as is often the case with Zionist propaganda"  

doesn't mean the Palestinians teach their kids to love Jews, but rather means that Israelis teach their kids to hate Palestinians.  

Michael Kaplan gave this example, in 2014, of Jews teaching their kids to hate Palestinians.  When Israelis Teach Their Kids To Hate. 

Two, more thorough, academic studies of Israeli text books suggest it's more subtle, but just as invidious.  

Here's the abstract of 2012 book by Nurit Elhanan-Peled

"The present book presents a critical multimodal study of one aspect of the Israeli-Zionist narrative as it is reproduced in school books of three disciplines: history, geography and civic studies. It consists of an analysis of the visual and verbal texts that represent the 'others' of Zionist Jews, namely Palestinians – both the citizens of Israel and the non-citizens who have been living under a military regime in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967.The book shows that Israeli textbooks use racist discourse, both visually and verbally to represent Palestinians."

I only could find a few passages at the link to the publisher, but here's one to give you a sense of the book:

"... Texts present Palestine before 1948 as barren land and empty territory, abandoned since biblical times, waiting for Jews to redeem it while expunging Palestinian history and culture transforming 'Palestinian Arab students into "present absentees" as they learn about "the land of Israel"' (Abu-Saad, 2008: 24) without them. These texts are 'designed to "de-educate", or dispossess, Indigenous Palestinian pupils of the knowledge of their own people and history' (Abu-Saad, 2008: 17;Al-Haj, 2015;Mazawi, 2011;Peled-Elhanen, 2012;Raz-Karkotzkin, 2001). Textbooks construct Palestinians as 'backward, unproductive and untrustworthy; or even more negatively as murderers or rioters' while Jews engage 'in a justified, even humanitarian, war against an Arab enemy that refused to accept or acknowledge the existence and rights of Jews in Israel' (Abu-Saad, 2019: 101; Bar-Tal, 2001;Meehan, 1999). ..."

A 2020 Ha'aretz article - eight years later than the Elhanen book -  describes a Tel Aviv University study:

"Ben-Amos set out to explore how Israeli textbooks and pre-college matriculation exams address the occupation. He calls the situation 'interpretive denial.'”

Ben-Amos set out to explore how Israeli textbooks and pre-college matriculation exams address the occupation. He calls the situation “interpretive denial.” . . .

In most textbooks, “the Jewish control and the Palestinians’ inferior status appear as a natural, self-evident situation that one doesn’t have to think about,” he writes in an article to be published in a book on teaching history edited by Eyal Naveh and Nimrod Tal. . . .

Ben-Amos says the textbooks’ ignoring of the occupation or attempts to normalize it stem from self-censorship. In the absence of clear guidelines, nobody wants to be blacklisted and denounced, which was the fate of teachers and publishers who tried to convey a more nuanced message than the one permitted by the Education Ministry. . . .

Elhanen has continued writing articles on the subject of how 'the other' is treated in Israeli schools and textbooks.  You can see a list of books and articles here, some with links to full text.

I did find one more book- Palestinians in Israeli Textbooks (2016) - which seems to  say that it was bad in the past, but things are much better now.  

It's hard to find ways to peace when Palestinian children are regularly taught in schools and in the streets  to hate Jews and when Jewish children are given texts that either omit Palestinians or reinforce the idea that Jewish superiority over Palestinians is the natural order of things. 

Though as one Palestinian responded (paraphrasing), "Palestinian kids don't need to be taught in schools to hate Jews.  They pick that up by living under Israeli occupation."

Part III is still being written.  Here's the link.  

Why Making Real Time Sense Of Israeli-Gaza War Is So Difficult -Part I [Updated]

I've avoided posting about the Israeli-Gaza war for a number of reasons. (The one exception is this post recommending folks watch the Battle of Algiers.) 

The LA Times screenshot below articulates the thoughts behind my hesitation. 

Not that I'm either, but it does feel like people are being forced to pick a side and then attacked for it.  For many nuance is a copout.  

I've been thinking about this post since Hamas attacked Israel.  I've been writing it for about six weeks. Writing, at least the way I write, forces me to learn, to confront those statements I'm not certain about (most) with internet searches and trying my thoughts out on friends.  

The post has been growing organically.  As I write some things, later news events cause me to look up other assertions relevant to all of this.  

This post isn't supposed to be answers, but rather an annotated list of things (yes, I'd like a better word than that, suggestions?) people should know about before taking a firm position on the situation.  Each item is worthy of its own book length discussion. Most of these issues are intertwined.  Separating them into discrete items makes it easier to talk about them, but can be misleading, so read with caution.  Here's the list as it stands today (January 18, 2024)

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

4.  GENOCIDE

5.  ZIONISM

6.  ISRAELI MISTREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS 

7.  TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI EDUCATION

8.  RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS AND ISRAEL'S RIGHT WING TILT 

9.  IGNORANCE 

10.  HAMAS

11.  GUERRILLA WARFARE

12.  WHY GETTING JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL SEEMS EASIER THAN NATIVE AMERICANS GETTING EUROPEANS OUT OF THE UNITED STATES

I've 'finished' 1-8.  I've decided that this is too long for most readers, so I'm going to break it down into several posts, starting with 1 through 3B.  A version of 11 - Guerrilla Warfare - is already up offering you the movie Battle of Algiers.  

1.  PROPAGANDA, MISINFORMATION, OBLITERATION OF TRUTH

Democracy requires citizens have access to information - how organizations work, who has power and how they use it - that enables us to make intelligent choices in how we lead our lives and who we vote for to represent us in government. 

Politicians and citizens have always bent the truth in their favor, but today the truth is almost unrecognizable. Trump's Republican Party realizes their ideas are outmoded and they can only win major elections by lying and subterfuge.  Right wing billionaires scheme to protect their wealth and ability to do as they please without regard to others.  Foreign authoritarian governments (ie Russia, Iran, China) have an interest in 'proving' to their citizens that democracy cannot work and destroying democracy in the US would be their greatest victory.  

Here's an Anchorage Daily News headline Dec. 19 2023 on a Washington Post story:

"The rise of AI fake news is creating a ‘misinformation superspreader’"

The story it makes my argument:

"Historically, propaganda operations have relied on armies of lowpaid workers or highly coordinated intelligence organizations to build sites that appear to be legitimate. But AI is making it easy for nearly anyone — whether they are part of a spy agency or just a teenager in their basement — to create these outlets, producing content that is at times hard to differentiate from real news."

So, starting off this discussion, I'd note that from even before the Hamas attack on Israel, false information was being spread to support and attack anyone who ventured to comment on this topic.  Russia sees it as a way to peel off voters from Biden to improve Trump's election to a second term knowing Trump would much more vigorously support Russia's plans in Ukraine and the world.  

It's also a way to divert world attention away from Ukraine and onto Israel.  (This may be just a brief sentence, but I suspect it's an important factor.)

While I think today (in January) the outline of the war is clearer than it was when I started, there is constant misinformation spread in mainstream media as well as social media.

2.  THE PROBLEM OF NETANYAHU 

Before Netanyahu was ever prime minister I found a book he authored on the bargain table at Borders Books in Anchorage.  So this was before 1996 when he first became prime minister.  I read the book and was appalled.  What I remember most vividly was a sentence where he said something to the effect of "I never met an Arab I could trust."  I didn't keep the book, but I've looked on line to see what books he wrote before 1996.  Wikipedia lists Netanyahu's books.  Here are the ones published before 1996:

• International Terrorism: Challenge and Response. Transaction Publishers. 1981. 
• Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Avon. 1987.
• Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1995.

All these are edited books, with Netanyahu providing the introduction.  What I recall was more of an autobiographical work.  But I can't find any reference to such a book by Netanyahu before the 2022 autobiography.  

But I did look at an online preview of Terrorism: How The West Can Win. [click on Preview at the link].  This is an edited volume and Netanyahu introduces other speakers at a conference, so these excerpt probably cannot be directly attributed to Netanyahu.  But he has organized this conference and invited the presenters.  Netanyahu edited the book and presumably decided what went in and what didn't. [And we'll see later that this sentiments reappear in the current crisis.]  

The book ignores the idea of terrorism being the last resort of an oppressed people who have no legal way to protest their condition or change it.  Rather it is Civilization versus the Savages.  He quotes Gibbons of the fall of the Roman Empire 

Then he goes on to say that the same dynamic is happening today - civilization vs. the savages.  

This is the language that Europeans used to justify conquering non-Christian lands in the 16 and 1700s.  It's how the US government justified removing Native Americans from their land and killing those who resisted.  And one might argue, how the current Israeli government seems to treat Palestinians in the West Bank as they confiscate their property to make room for Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

I don't know what Netanyahu says about the Jewish terrorists who fought against the British occupiers of Palestine in the first half of the 20th Century.  The deadly bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 was organized by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.  The book preview does include the index which does list   "King David Hotel Incident on page 45", but the preview on line doesn't go to page 45. In fact it has no page numbers.  He specifically rejects the idea that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."  But what about the Colonists who threw tea into Boston Harbor, or Ho Chi Minh who fought the French and then the Americans to free Vietnam from colonial rule?  

Netanyahu has also  been the subject of criminal prosecutions and huge public demonstrations against his weakening of the judicial branch of government.  Some have argued that pursuing this war is a way for Netanyahu to distract the nation from his legal problems.

It would be interesting to know the relationship between Netanyahu and Henry Kissinger about whom Netanyahu Netanyahu said we "have known one another for 'many years,'”  They seem to be kindred spirits.  

"Kissinger believed in power and disdained abstract ideas about progress, fraternity, democracy and freedom, ideas that America disseminates around the world. In his 1994 book “Diplomacy,” he justified national interests as the desired basis of foreign policy, calling on American leaders not to abandon this even after winning the Cold War.

His approach was congruent with Israel’s foreign policy, which since the days of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion believes in force while harboring deep reservations about international institutions and norms such as human rights and weapons control. That is why the harsh criticism of Kissinger by the left as the person directly responsible for mass murder, atrocities in Cambodia, Laos and Chile, Bangladesh and Timor, and for the bloody and needless prolongation of the Vietnam War, is heard in Israel only among a small circle of anti-American leftists."  (from Haaretz)

My sense of Netanyahu is that he is an absolutist on Arabs and terrorists and sees the civilian deaths resulting from the bombing of Gaza are, in his mind, completely justifiable as he attempts to rid Israel of terrorists.  

3A.  HISTORIC ANTI-SEMITISM

I don't want to go through the history of anti-semitism here.  Go to the link if you need a briefing.  I mention it here only to say that the reactions to the Israeli-Gaza war are aggravated by the latent pool of historic anti-semitism that persists in the world today.  

Further we have the conflation of Israeli, Jew, and Zionist.  And the assumption many have of Israelis, of non-Israeli Jews, and Zionists being a unified organism that all support Netanyahu's policy of bombing Gaza.  Each of the groups has divisions and groups who support and oppose, to varying degrees, the bombing.  

It's easy for people who know little or nothing of other countries to group all the people as being united.  But just as the United States has many divisions, so do all other countries. 

I mention this because there are people with strong opinions about the war who really have little or no experience with or understanding of the many different types of Jews or Israelis, who know nothing about the history of the geography and politics of the Middle East, particularly the land where Israel is located.  

Many Jews feel - and the current tolerance on the right of Neo-Nazis verify those feelings - that anti-semitism is alive and well today in the world and that no matter what Israel does they will be vilified.  An Orthodox Jew told me once, he didn't care what the world thought, because it didn't matter what Israel did, they would always get blamed.  

3B.  THE HOLOCAUST

The details in this section are a little rough, but I think the general point is valid.

The loss of 6 million Jews during WW II, seems to have stirred the world to allow the establishment of a Jewish state in what had been the British held territory in Palestine.  There was a moral high ground that Jews had.  And they managed to tell a story of a people who escaped hell on earth to create the Land of Milk and Honey and the miracle of Making the Desert Bloom.  In 1967, these survivors repelled the attack from various Arab neighbors.  Moshe Dayan was an international hero. 

But things went downhill from there.  I suspect part of the problem was that Israelis wrapped themselves in the story of surviving the Holocaust and slogan "Never Again."  They used these to justify taking Arab property and forcing many Palestinians to flee as protecting themselves from another Holocaust.  And Arabs who refused to acknowledge the right of a State of Israel to exist, gave some legitimacy to this idea.  

But in refusing to become the victims ever again, they slipped into the role of the oppressors in the West Bank and Gaza.  There's enough fault on both sides, but using the Holocaust to justify their treatment of Arabs to the world and to themselves, meant that they began losing the PR war among the rest of the world.

[Update - January 19, 2024, I found this comment today in an article by Nurit Elhanan of Hebrew University:

"The only thing that unites the antagonistic Jewish ethnic groups in Israel is fear of the enemy and the quest for a Jewish national 'purity' along with the belief only a Jewish majority and a strong Jewish army can prevent another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the Palestinians or other Muslim powers, such as Iran." [emphasis added]

So, this is the end of Part I.  Part II is now (1/21/24) up.   Part III is now done.  Still more parts will appear soon.  

The Battle Of Algiers Offers Insights Into Israel-Gaza War

 I haven't posted about the Israel-Gaza* war for a variety of reasons, the key ones being the unreliability of the many accusations flung back and forth, the very complication of the issues including all the action going on behind the scenes that we don't know anything about.  

I've come up with a list of about a dozen issues that I see as important for anyone trying to understand what is happening and why.  Surely there are more.  And they all have threads that wind into the other issues. 

Guerilla Warfare 

One of the issues is the nature of guerrilla warfare.  Having been alive as the Vietnam War (or the American War as the Vietnamese call it), Afghanistan - first Russia and then US - I've learned a little bit about guerrilla warfare.  We see it when a militarily weak group of people feel badly mistreated and take on their overwhelmingly powerful perceived oppressors.   

Here's Wikipedia's summary:

"The main strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare tend to involve the use of a small attacking, mobile force against a large, unwieldy force. The guerrilla force is largely or entirely organized in small units that are dependent on the support of the local population. Tactically, the guerrilla army makes the repetitive attacks far from the opponent's center of gravity with a view to keeping its own casualties to a minimum and imposing a constant debilitating strain on the enemy. This may provoke the enemy into a brutal, excessively destructive response which will both anger their own supporters and increase support for the guerrillas, ultimately compelling the enemy to withdraw. One of the most famous examples of this was during the Irish War of Independence. Michael Collins, a leader of the Irish Republican Army, often used this tactic to take out squads of British soldiers, mainly in Munster, especially Cork."

In this case, Hamas are clearly the guerrillas against the overwhelming military strength of Israel.   

Wikipedia in a separate article offers a history of guerrilla warfare back to 6th Century BC China.

For me, the nature of guerrilla warfare got much clearer when I saw the movie The Battle Of Algiers, sometime in the 1970s.  

I'd strongly recommend watching this film for anyone who wants to understand what is happening now in Israel and Gaza.  

The Internet Archive has posted the film and has links to embed it in blogs and other websites.  I have never before posted a full movie like this and it feels a bit wrong.  You can also watch it at the Internet Archive.  

Aside from showing guerrilla warfare from the point of view of the guerrillas, it's a classic example of cinéma vérité.  It's just a really well made movie.  

Without understanding the underlying reasons a group uses guerrilla warfare tactics, it's hard to understand a war in which guerrilla forces fight against a much more dominant culture.  

History shows us many examples where overpowering military advantage eventually loses to an organized, but much, much weaker resistance movement.  But there are also examples of that weaker unit being crushed.  My sense here, though, is that the ruthlessness of Israel's response will create millions of more resisters among the Palestinians. 

Astute readers will have figured out that I've once again avoided the topic of Israel and Gaza.  Yes, and no.  It's much to complex a topic to deal with in one post.  I'll refine my list of key issues and then post the list.  Then I'll cover as many of the issues as I have the stomach for in other posts - some on just one issue, others may combine a few.  

In the meantime, I'd challenge readers to come up with their own lists of the key issues.  Then you'll be able to compare your lists with mine and, I hope, improve my list in the comments.  

Make some popcorn and enjoy the movie.  

*I've labeled this Israeli-Gaza war, but one could also say Israeli-Palestinian war.  

"flood the zone with shi*t" - Why Courts And Media Don't Seem Adequate These Days

[Bear with me.  I'm trying to pull a number of issues together.  Basically, we need to step back and see the bigger picture rather than get distracted by all the crap the Right is throwing out there.  Their goal is to spew so much nonsense that the system breaks as people try to address it rationally.] 

Choosing labels carelessly  

"CULTURE WARRIORS such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) . . ."  LA Times"

There may have been a time when there was something that could be called 'culture war,' but that time is long past.  MTG is not offering anything resembling 'culture' unless the naked quest for power is considered a 'culture' today.  There's nothing here, really, about Christian values, though one could argue MTG represents hijacked Christian values to wrest power.  The attacks on LGTBQ and specifically trans and drag queens is merely a hook to incite the gullible to send cash and votes toward the GOP.  

On the other side are people who merely want to be free to be themselves.  If they take PRIDE in who they are, it's merely because society has vilified them so long and so hard, that they need some validation now and then.  

The media are slow to discard misleading labels, while the Republicans have an automated factory where they produce and distribute new imagery daily.  Where they take left leaning terms and turn them into epithets.  Some journalists are too young even to remember that the correct name is Democratic Party, but the Republicans have flooded the airwaves so long with "Democrat" party that people think that's the name.  

Eastman mulls the economic benefits of letting kids die

"In the case where child abuse is fatal, obviously it's not good for the child, but it's actually a benefit to society because there aren't needed ??  government services ?? for the full course of that child's life."

Rep. David Eastman (R - Wasilla) on the cost savings to the state when abused children die.

Alaska: Rep. Eastman of the family values party says it's actually a net benefit to society when a child dies from abuse & neglect because of the financial burden it would otherwise put on the state budget. pic.twitter.com/NKUOvUZvgf

— ChudsOfTikTok (@ChudsOfTikTok) February 21, 2023

The Republicans in Alaska have rules that oust other Republicans from committees if they don't vote with the party on budgets.  But making a case for letting abused kids die because it saves the state money, well, he has the right to free speech according to the committee chair Rep. Vance (R Homer).  

But, as I write, it seems that the House has censured Eastman over this.  (Thanks Matt Acuña Buxton)

The problem I have as a blogger (and any legitimate journalist has) is dealing with all the jabberwocky  being thrown out there by the Republicans - from DeSantis' shipping of immigrants to New York, banning the teaching of history he doesn't like, and his Don't Say Gay campaign (just a few examples) to the Hunter Biden laptop.  

And that's the point.  Stephen Bannon said to "flood the media with sh*t" and that's exactly what they are doing.  

From CNN

While some of the actors in this circus may actually believe what they're doing, those encouraging people to file all those election challenges and to write all those laws letting kids carry machine guns in public are just "flooding the zone with shit."  Getting people riled up and wasting time on fighting all the shit flying at them.  

Our justice system is based on the assumption that people believe in the Rule of Law and that the vast majority of people will voluntarily obey the law.  Neither our court system nor our journalists are quite ready for large numbers of people rejecting the rule of law or the rules of reason.  

The lawyers were trained to dot their i's and cross their T's, but with Trump and others filing bogus lawsuits and appeals and motions, the courts can't keep up. The public is losing confidence that they will ever be able to bring Trump and his mob to justice. But that's how Trump has stayed out of prison all these years.  The legal system has to retool itself to handle this sort of threat.  Not sure how.  Dominion suing Fox is one option, but so much damage happens before it is settled.  And Alex  Jones declared bankruptcy to avoid the financial consequences of losing his lawsuit.  We need tactics that work with the Right's new weapons.  

Journalists are trained to be impartial to the extent they feel compelled to treat insurrection as a legitimate point of view.  I'd note that some journalists believe they shouldn't vote because that taints their objectivity.  Here's an NPR journalist mulling over NPR's ethics code.  The Republicans are counting on journalists to continue such internal counting of angels.  

Such purity doesn't matter any more (if it ever did) because whatever journalists do, the Republicans will vilify them.  Meanwhile old school journalists will try to respectfully cover MTG's calls for a new confederacy and Eastman's claim that letting abused kids die is beneficial to the state of Alaska.  

Not voting, not declaring one's party, might seem the right thing to do, but I think declaring where you stand openly and then letting readers determine if your personal values color what you write (or say) is the more honest approach.  

In any case, the old rules don't apply to the new political world we're in.  Yes, a lot of voter fraud cases were won.  And a number of January 6 Insurrectionists (yes, that term identifies me as biased, but it was also the conclusion of the courts) went to prison.  But most of the top people are still living, ostensibly, comfortable lives.  (I'd like to think that all the  pending litigation is at least  disturbing Trump's peace.)

We need new tools for dealing with the current manufactured chaos.  How much damage have we had to endure (can we endure) before the deluge of lies is dammed?  

There are perhaps a dozen more threads I could easily follow that give context to what's happening today. 

 It's a psychological barrier to blogging because I know that writing about some discrete issue merely entangles me in Bannon's web.  But people's attention spans are much shorter than they used to be.  Few want to read long attempts to put things into perspective.  I'm not just making this up.

"A recent study by Microsoft Corporation has found this digital lifestyle has made it difficult for us to stay focused, with the human attention span shortening from 12 seconds to eight seconds in more than a decade."

But you can't read too many long articles, let alone books, even with a 12 second attention span.  But if you got this far, you're doing fine.  And should take articles like that with a grain of salt.  Who measured the average attention span in 2000, for example?  No, I'm not going to dig up the actual research report to find out.  It does say that drinking water, exercise, and avoiding electronic devices helps increase attention span.  So go for a walk and don't take your phone.  

Bearings And Sunshine - And Some Oak Park Houses

We're in Chicago/Oak Park, Illinois visiting a long time friend (we were roommates in Peace Corps training over 50 years ago) and J's brother who we haven't seen since well before the pandemic.  We arrived Wednesday evening, on a cloudy night.  My internal compass wasn't working.  The next day the clouds were low and leaking.  I just couldn't sense north or south, east or west.  

Then this morning I pulled up the shades.  

Blue sky and sunshine!  When we went out I was able to figure out directions much easier knowing my shadow was generally toward the north.  

We went off for a walk which gave me a chance to take some pictures of a few houses and other objects that caught my eye.  I'd note, for people who don't know anything about Oak Park, it's the town where Frank Lloyd Wright lived and had his studio.  There are a number of his houses and other structures in Oak Park.  

This is a WW I monument in the park next to the public library.  Monuments like this one glorify war by suggesting all who fought in the war were heroes.  They give young boys and men the idea that fighting for your country is noble and makes you a hero.  There are times when that is true.  I think those fighting in Ukraine now to keep Ukraine free from Russian conquest are noble.  

But far too many wars are fought to protect business interests or access to raw materials in other countries.  The only people who always benefit from war are arms dealers - whether guns, tanks, planes, and the people who supply all the needs of soldiers.  Those folks don't worry about the people - civilians and soldiers - killed or wounded or psychologically damaged.  They don't even care about the destruction that war causes.  In fact, they may even get contracts to reconstruct the cities their products destroyed.  

Kids around the United States and other parts of the world tend to see a lot more statues honoring the military and war than statues that treat doctors, teachers, artists, or scientists as role models whose paths are worthy of following.  

The sun was nice today, but the temperature never got more than mid-30s, The wind today was not much more than a breeze.   Also got to do some surrogate cramping today as we picked up my friends' granddaughter from pre-school and wandered around through parks and neighborhoods until her mom got home.  She decided she was going to eat my knee and so I said I'd eat her ear.  Five yer old ears are the tastiest I said.  And she responded without a pause - I'm four.  (She's five.) We did have fun.