Tag Archives: violence

Oscar Nominations for Hamas & ICJ Short Films

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I know it’s early to talk about the 2025 Oscars, but two new films deserve to start the ball rolling, for the category of Best Live Action Short Film—not documentary of course, which is separate. Best Live Action Short Film rewards fictional films, although docudrama-like simulations are eligible.

Both films appeared this past week, but I’ll start with the simpler and more dramatic one, aired today. Hamas, in it’s time-honored style, effectively used a static shot of a masked, uniformed fighter talking directly to the camera in his inimitable stern, you-can-trust-me fashion. Timed perfectly with its midnight release, it gives us a static photo of a man in camo with a keffiyeh-wrapped face holding up a stiff instructional finger that takes us right back to first grade, and is all the more compelling for that scary memory. Also, the only moving part of the picture at first—a rippling light-green audio wave sound tracing against a dark-green background—draws our eyes like a line of dancers.

The captioned translation says, “Our fighters carried out a complex operation on Saturday afternoon in the northern Gaza Strip.” Soon we see a video of a bloody person in military clothing being dragged limp up across a tunnel floor; next, three photos of weapons “seized” in this “complex operation.” Since the weapons shown are not Israeli, the filmmakers can be faulted for not getting better advice on how to achieve verisimilitude with their props. But film fans around the world want entertainment, not petty accuracy.

Our teacherly instructor goes on, “Our fighters lured a Zionist force into an ambush inside one of the tunnels…and clashed with them from close range. Our fighters withdrew after blowing up the tunnel and leaving all members of the force dead, wounded, or captured…”

Now, Israel claims no such event occurred, and it is almost never possible to conceal the death of a single soldier for more than a few hours while the family is notified. Killing “all members of” a “Zionist force” without Israeli news media finding out would take some added ingenuity on the part of Hamas, but they can do a lot now with fictional film. Adding an ad campaign with an Israeli soldier-doll in a Hamas fist and a bare arm stuck out of a tunnel grasping at a Hamas boot gives the film true artistic flavor.

Nevertheless, and I am sure this will be controversial, I think the best short-film fiction of the year so far comes from the International Court of Justice, in its filmed reading of it’s latest judgment against Israel in yet another case brought by South Africa. The Court’s cinematic achievement extends also to shielding South Africa from allegations that it is both authoritarian and corrupt, but that is not its main Oscar-worthy accomplishment here.

That is of course its magnificently devious account of its own conclusions. It didn’t really misstate them, it just put them in such a way that gullible news outlets like the New York Times could publish completely misleading headlines. Brilliant work on the part of the screenwriters here! And the head of the ICJ read his lines with such seriousness!

Here is the New York Times headline: “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive.” Perhaps they thought their subtitle would be a helpful clarification: “The International Court of Justice ruling deepens Israel’s international isolation, but the court has no enforcement powers.” Ah, pity. The court can’t enforce what the Times falsely claims it ruled.

To find out what it did rule, we have to actually read the script of the film as performed by the Chief Judge of the ICJ. The operative passage is #57 in the 18-page ruling:

“THE COURT… Indicates the following provisional measures: The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in the Rafah Governorate: (a) By thirteen votes to two, Immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” (italics mine)

Now let’s see… does the New York Times reporting capture the meaning of this ruling, including the words I italicized? Hmm. Now, what about the Wall Street Journal headline? “U.N. Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah.” Okay… Court Orders Israel to Halt Rafah Offensive… or Court Orders Israel to Halt Some Military Operations in Rafah…

I’m thinking about my first-grade teacher again, the one who taught me how to read. I don’t think she would be proud of me if I chose the Times headline as the better description of what the ICJ ordered. I’ve written many articles for both the Times and the Journal, and I promise you I know the limitations of both, but in this case only the Journal’s headline writer clearly knew how to read.

The court’s conclusions do mandate two and only two actions: That Israel re-open the Rafah Crossing for humanitarian aid, and that Israel give access to a fact-finding committee to inspect conditions throughout Gaza.

The first is based on a misconception; the Rafah Crossing was closed from the Egyptian side, not the Israeli side. This is proven by a phone call from President Biden to President el-Sisi this weekend resulting in Egypt’s agreeing to send aid through the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) crossing at the junction of the Egypt-Israel-Gaza borders. This crossing was closed on May 5 after Hamas bombed it to stop the aid flow. Anyway, aid is flowing, never enough to overcome what Hamas steals after entry, but flowing nevertheless.

As for the second mandate, if the committee expects to be protected by the IDF, it had better follow their advice about where and when.

Meanwhile, as to the ICJ’s main “provisional measure,” Israel continues to refrain from any action in Rafah “which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Still, the court’s ability to trick the New York Times and some other news outlets into misreading its conclusions—or allow them deliberately to spin them against Israel with all their power—is Oscar-worthy. Unfortunately it seems a bit of a stretch to give the Wall Street Journal headline writers a Pulitzer for knowing how to read.

War Crimes? Really?

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This has been an intriguing week. President Biden announced that he was putting a hold on shipments of certain American arms, notably hundreds of 2,000 pound and 500 pound bombs, because Israel had begun limited operations in Rafah without waiting for a hostage deal. A week or so earlier, Antony Blinken said that Israel had made an extremely generous offer and “the ball” was in Hamas’s court. Hamas eventually came back with a “counter-offer” of many detailed pages that amounted to, You stop the war, we win, you lose, you release thousands of terrorists, we give you back some hostages, dead and alive, and we once again rule Gaza as we did on October 6.

All concerned knew that this was not something Israel could have taken remotely seriously, and it amounted to no change in Hamas’s months of stonewalling. Yet most Western media, before they had time to read the document, took Hamas’s word that it was a real counter-offer, and proceeded to castigate Israel for going in a limited way into Rafah—beginning, of course, with the orderly evacuation of 100,000 civilians.

This arms shipment holdup was largely political posturing. There is little likelihood that Israel would use those kinds of bombs again (although it did early in the war), and all indications are that Israel’s plan for its Rafah operation, preceded by systematic civilian evacuations, was approved behind the scenes by the Americans. Netanyahu has treated Biden shabbily, and he finally got his wrist slapped, along with a clear warning that Biden could hit him harder in the future.

Biden is not betraying Israel nor is he flip-flopping, he is threading a very narrow needle. Neither he nor we nor the world can afford to have him lose the coming election, and so he tried to show that he would make it impossible for Israel to use those big bombs in crowded Rafah. This point is moot, because Israel was not planning to use them, and even if it was, it has enough of a stockpile to do it anyway.

Continue reading →

Dear Campus Campers: Do You Know What You’re Up Against? Hint:

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It’s not the police, or the university administrations, or President Biden. It’s this:

These numbers are from late March, before your movement spread widely. We’ll have to see how your protests move the numbers—and in which direction.

I am sympathetic to student protests, having been in the leadership of some on two university campuses in the ‘60s. Our two main goals were 1) to end segregation (the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was our real leader on that) and 2) to end the war in Vietnam. In retrospect, I still believe today what I believed then: We were right on both counts.

But were we successful? On the first count, we accomplished a lot, although there was a long way to go, and there still is now. One big reason for this relative success was of course Dr. King, but another was President Lyndon Baynes Johnson, who politically strong-armed into existence the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (yes, the same laws being broken apart by the current Supreme Court). Nevertheless in those years the culture of the country with regard to race improved in some ways that are difficult to reverse.

But on the second goal, ending the war, we failed miserably. Continue reading →

The Time of Our Freedom?

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Today is the thirtieth Sabbath of the Gaza War. It is also the Sabbath of Passover, the holiday called z’man cherutenu—the time of our freedom—since it celebrates the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. This comes from the Haggadah, the service read at the Passover seder, or sacred—and ordered—meal.

The service also contains the words, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” So many generations. So many different they’s. The Haggadah in some form has existed for at least two thousand years, and I don’t know when these exact words first appeared, but they are the same in my facsimile edition of The Copenhagen Haggadah of 1739, exactly two centuries before the Holocaust. And my friend Dr. Shlomit Finkelstein found the same words in a Haggadah dated to the late 1330s in Catalonia.

Thus, centuries before the Holocaust, before even the Cossack attempted genocide against Jews in 1648, Jews said every Passover, “In each generation they have stood against us to destroy us.” In this generation, the grotesque mass atrocities committed against Jews by Hamas—who soon promised to do the same a thousand times, as their charter pledges them to do—easily serve to confirm the Haggadah’s grim words. (For details of what Hamas did, see my description and this moving film starring Sheryl Sandberg.)

In the past week or two, US college campuses have imploded with demonstrations and encampments in favor of Palestinians and often Hamas, and virulently anti-Israel and often antisemitic. I say imploded rather than exploded because although they have spread throughout the country, they are implosive because they have mainly damaged themselves. Many have crossed the line from free speech to illegal action, inviting local and state police suppression. Ironically, they have risen up just as deaths in Gaza have reached their lowest levels ever. (See chart.)

Deaths in Gaza as counted by Hamas’s Health Ministry and reported by the UN (OCHA).

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Gaza: The Goebsie Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards

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Today, I will reveal the honorees for First Annual—okay, they might have to be more frequent—Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, for the individuals or collectives who have done the most recently to promote the Big Lie and the Blood Libel against the Jewish people (see chart for hints).

Timeline of deaths with blood libelers

But first: Just as the holy, peaceful, month of Ramadan—including four sacred Fridays and the feast of Eid-al-Fitr—blessedly passed with none of the predicted Islamic violence on the Temple Mount (the Noble Sanctuary), in the Middle East, and throughout the world, so the martial, belligerent, massive, unprecedented attack on Israel last night passed with virtually no damage. The coalition that completely blocked the attack included the US, the UK, France, and Jordan shooting down Iranian missiles and drones and Saudi Arabia providing logistic support. Imagine the degree of cooperation that such coordinated response must have involved. Now imagine the formidable coalition that will follow the war, annealed by alliance against this attack. My brother likens the attack to an amateur boxer throwing a hundred punches none of which lands, then waiting with tired arms for the professional blow that will pop his lights out. Now we’ll see what punch Israel uses. Its stock market finished higher today.

But back to our Big Lie-Blood Libel Awards, known colloquially as Goebbsies in honor of Joseph Goebbels, the master propagandist who put it to history’s most effective use.

The chart above shows today’s Goebbsie honorees against the timeline of the dramatically declining deaths in Gaza since the war started. These are total deaths in successive two-week periods (the blue line) as provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry and reported by the United Nations. There are many reasons to doubt these numbers, which are almost certainly over-estimates, but I am accepting them for present purposes because I want to focus on the steep decline—by Hamas’s numbers—and the remarkable fact that the lower the number of deaths got, the bigger the Big Lie got and the Bloodier the Blood Libel got as well. Five of the six Big Lies and Blood Libels shown here were smeared on Israel and the Jews when the number of deaths was about one quarter of what it was in the first month of the war—and declining. Continue reading →

Gaza War: A Visual Aid

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(Blogging on the Gaza War since January 14th. Please link them on to others.)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I shouldn’t have much more work to do this week. I started with the very good public website of Kevin Drum, who presented the first graph in the top half of the picture (panel a). Based on data from the (Hamas-run) Gaza Health Ministry via the UN, it displays the daily deaths (red dots) of Gazans from October 7 to February 19, with a linear function (dotted black line) fitted to the daily data. This function declines from between 300-400 in October to 100 in February.

The lower part of the figure (panel b, my responsibility alone) is my attempt to extend Drum’s excellent graph from February to today. The daily deaths (also from the Gaza Health Ministry via the UN) are shown as blue dots, with the red line representing the 7-day moving average. Please note that the two graphs are on very different scales. Continue reading →

Gaza War: Hamas is Haman

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(Scroll down to see earlier posts starting January 14th.)

We have passed not just the start of Ramadan, but the first and second Fridays, with today’s noon service considered particularly sacred. Forty thousand Israeli Muslim citizens and East Jerusalem Residents have come to the Noble Sanctuary—for Jews, The Temple Mount—each Friday to pray in one of its two great mosques, without a single untoward incident. Aside from a lone gunman in the West Bank, these Ramadan Fridays have been peaceful in the region and throughout the Muslim world. Estimates of Muslims visiting the Old City of Jerusalem today are up to 120,000. An Israeli journalist reporting from the crowded Noble Sanctuary as services let out described the atmosphere as reverent and celebratory.

Meanwhile, the tiny Jewish world—there are 100 Muslims for every Jew—is preparing for Purim, an irreverent, raucous, often drunken celebration of the survival of the Persian Jews, who came under deadly threat some 2,600 years ago. The Book of Esther,  chanted aloud in the evening and following morning in synagogues circling the globe, tells the story.

This year Purim begins tomorrow, Saturday, exactly 24 weeks after the Saturday (both the Sabbath and another Jewish holy day), on which Hamas terrorists committed grotesque mass atrocities against 1200 Jews and others in Israel, deliberately inviting destruction on themselves and the women and children they hide behind. Many say that this was the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. That it was, but actually the Nazis rarely took the time to rape women with knives or cut off the limbs of children before killing them. The Nazis did torture Jews at times, but mainly aimed at efficient mass murder.

Continue reading →

Gaza: What is Victory?

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Scroll down to see earlier posts in this series, beginning January 14th.

On November 11, 1918, the last day of World War I, there were higher than usual casualties, because General John J. Pershing—“Black Jack Pershing” as his men often called him—resented the Armistice. He insisted on hurting the Germans further, at high cost to his own troops, and continuing, to the last minute—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—to inflict German losses. He reportedly said: “They never knew they were beaten in Berlin. It will have to be done all over again.” *

A myth arose. The German generals spread the word that their army was “undefeated in the field” but was “stabbed in the back” by politicians bent on surrender. Actually, their defeat in the field was staggering. After four years of what was mostly standoff, a million Americans arrived and, with their reinvigorated allies, swept across German-occupied France and Belgium in three months. The allies occupied a small part of western Germany for a while before they went home. But in Berlin, they never knew they were beaten. Pershing, alas, had to observe in his later years the rearming of Germany and the second world war he had predicted, with all its dreadful costs. His warnings, like Churchill’s in Britain, were ignored.

After that second war, they knew they were beaten in Berlin, and they knew they were beaten in Tokyo too, because the US and its allies took the war into those capitals and insisted on unconditional surrender. Although greatly complicated by the division of Germany and the Soviet role, the US (along with the UK and France) transitioned from military control, including denazification, dissolution of the German army, and occupiers’ rule of law, through municipal elections, to the buildup of a democratic state, officially declared four years after the war. The US State Department explicitly decreed that this governance “does not effect the annexation of Germany.” West Germany regained “near-sovereignty” in 1955, but it remained nominally occupied until 1991, after re-unification. Continue reading →

Gaza, Israel, and the United Notions

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I was born in August 1946; the first UN meetings were held in London in January that year. So the UN and I are the same age—you might say, nonidentical twins. I have followed it from an early age, and I am glad to report that—despite the small scale and limitations of my lifetime efforts—I have done better with my challenges than my twin has in its equal lifetime.

Per the UN itself, the genocides in Rwanda and the Balkans in the 1990s proved “in the worst possible way” that the UN repeatedly failed to prevent this horror, despite being able to do so. It failed to stop and even to recognize earlier genocides in Indonesia (1960s) and Cambodia (1970s) and much more recent ones in Darfur, Iraq and Syria (against the Yazidis), and Myanmar (the Rohingya). The UN rights council refused to discuss China’s ongoing genocide of Uighur Muslims.

The UN’s failure to prevent small wars—more than 200 in its lifetime and mine—speaks for itself; advocates argue that it has prevented World War III, but that is conjectural. Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution condemning its Ukraine invasion, although the General Assembly passed it overwhelmingly. The UN has done good work against hunger and slavery and promoting sustainable development, but has consistently fallen short of its own stated goals. More than 780 million people (and rising) face hunger, and there are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history.

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Gaza War: Some Numbers

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Please see below (“Concerning the War in Gaza”, January 14) for my overview of the war, and the disclaimer introducing it, also applicable here. So is this: Every death is a terrible loss, and every civilian death more so.

In 1944, General Curtis Lemay was appointed to command the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force) in the Pacific Theater, his predecessor having been fired for a reluctance to bomb civilians. Lemay soon ordered the fire-bombing of Tokyo with napalm, killing as many as 100,000 people in six hours. He repeated this in other Japanese cities, with the estimated total deaths ranging from 241,000 to 900,000. This was before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed another 129,000 to 226,000. These mass bombings were not directed at military targets (few were involved) but were carpet bombings of civilians. To many, Lemay is a hero.

Similar incendiary bombings, also creating firestorms, were carried out by the British and Americans in the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, killing at least scores of thousands. Civilian populations being what they are, most of the victims in all these cases were women and children. Causing terror was their explicit goal, in the service of ending the war. Some considered these war crimes, but they were never tried or punished as such. German mass murder of civilians, using different methods, was of much greater magnitude, and was punished.

In part in reaction to the destructiveness of that war, the 1949 Geneva Conventions greatly strengthened the laws defining and prohibiting war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide, a term coined to describe what the Germans did to the Jews, but subsequently applied—in a few cases I think legitimately—to other mass killings. It has more often been misapplied. Continue reading →