James M. Redwine

Israel

A Thrown Stone

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On October 7, 2023 a force of Palestinians from the Gaza area adjacent to Israel launched an attack that lasted one day and killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Hamas has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters. Israel has 170,000 active military personnel with 450,000 reserves available for call up. Hamas has no air force or navy and attacked in jeeps, on motorcycles and with paragliders. Israel has many jet fighters-bombers, several warships including submarines, tanks and armored personnel carriers, and nuclear weapons.

Why would the Hamas David challenge the Israeli Goliath? 1 Samuel 17. The Biblical David used a stone to bring down the heavily armored gigantic Philistine then cut off his head. However, the vastly out-gunned Hamas fighters precipitated an overwhelming Israeli reign of death, terror and destruction on, so far, 14,000 Palestinian civilians for a month and a half with the Israeli promise of more to come. Surely Hamas anticipated its impotent assault could not defeat Israel and that Israel would react with a massive military response. So, why do it? The origins of October 7th are in the history of that small geographical area and those two related peoples, Jews and Palestinians, who claim the common progenitor of Abraham. Also, both believe the roots of much of the first five books of the Bible. Their histories and cultures are intricately and inextricably intertwined.

Thanks mainly to the help of the British and Americans the Palestinians who had been living in what is now Israel for hundreds, if not thousands, of years have gradually been displaced by a Jewish population seeking a homeland. The Jews look back to thousands of years of history for their claims. Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 began the process of Palestinian expulsion and America has supported it financially, politically and militarily since 1948. Once again one might ask, why?

With the British, as we Americans can attest, colonialism has been a way of global conquest for hundreds of years. British insertion into the Middle East was and is simply a vestige of the Elizabethan Age. America has a different raison d’être, in part as a reaction against Great Britain’s colonial treatment of our 13 Colonies.

An important event in the American Revolution was King George’s Royal Proclamation of October 7 (note the irony of the date), 1763 that sought to prohibit expansion of American colonists into lands west of the Allegheny Mountains from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The Proclamation reserved that great expanse of America for the “indigenous population”. This was not done by Britain to protect Native Americans but to preserve control to the British. The people of the Colonies saw this as encouraging Indians to kill Colonists. In fact, this 1763 Proclamation was at the heart of our 1776 Declaration of Independence’s complaint about King George:

“He (King George) has excited domestic insurrections amonst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

This American attitude towards Native Americans is akin to Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians. And after England was defeated, Anglo-Saxon Americans declared a Manifest Destiny in which their Christian God had ordained that the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico was the sole province of Anglo-Saxons and that the savages who lived there should be eliminated. This attitude toward Native Americans is similar to the attitude of some toward the presence of Palestinians in traditional Palestine.

Such an attitude may be what led Hamas to make such a vicious and futile attack on October 7, 2023. Many Native Americans fought back against the onslaught of Manifest Destiny long after it was a fait accompli. Of course, they were called terrorists. And as Chief Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation said:

“They (white men) made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”

Hamas may have lived for several generations under a system of a Jewish God giving Palestinian land to the Jews and decided there was nothing more to lose.

Forever Hopeful

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According to the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council, Israel has illegally controlled Gaza for many years. The Palestinian people live under what is effectively a military suppression in which Israel denies freedom of movement and self-determination to Palestinians. This situation is reminiscent of what American colonists faced from Great Britain before 1776 and what Native Americans faced from the United States. Resistance from the colonists and the Native Americans was called terrorism by the conquerors.

Whatever one may think of Hamas, that is, evil terrorists or patriotic resistance fighters, it is probably incorrect to believe they are stupid. They surely knew they could not defeat the fourth most powerful military, one with jets, tanks and nuclear weapons, with missiles, pick-up trucks and automatic weapons. In fact, the attack of October 7, 2023 lasted one day. So why do it?

Twelve hundred Israelis were killed but that led to 11,000 Palestinian deaths over a month and a half, so far, and the destruction of much of Gaza. Such a response was surely anticipated. The attack by Hamas appears to have been an irrational, nihilistic act of savagery, a hopeless self-destructive reaction to generations of suppression and denial of human rights.

All peoples, including Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves and strike back at those who attack them. The defense should be specific to the attackers. For example, Custer may have had a legitimate mission of protecting settlers, but his massacre of Chief Black Kettle’s tribe at the Washita River in western Oklahoma on November 27, 1868 did not target renegade warriors but non-combatants. What Israel is doing in Gaza is illegal collective punishment, not revenge specifically against Hamas.

So, what to do? As with most solutions to difficult problems, first one should stop the behavior that is causing the damage. The United Nations, particularly the United States and Great Britain who were most responsible for creating and sustaining Israel, should enforce a ceasefire. Then massive amounts of human relief such as water, food, shelter and medical care, should be provided. A cooperative organization of international United Nations peacekeepers, investigators and courts should ferret out the members of Hamas responsible for October 7 and bring them to justice and determine and prosecute any war crimes committed by Israel.

A re-building of Gaza’s infrastructure should begin and a formal long-term goal of a true two-state solution should be instituted. In other words, first stop the bleeding then bandage the wounds then rehabilitate both Israel and Palestine with a view toward a real and permanent peace. Are these things immensely difficult, yes. Impossible, maybe. But what is the alternative? And after all, that was the guarantee when Israel was created out of Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration in 1914:

“…[I]t being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …”

D-Day

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“Throughout the 200-year history of the United States the American nation has been at war.” That was how author William Koenig led into his 1980 book, Americans at War. Although ostensibly a study of American warfare from about 1775 at Lexington and Concord to 1975, the end of the Viet Nam War, Koenig actually starts with the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 and Native Americans meeting the ship. Had he waited until today to publish he could have included another fifty years of Americans at war, right up to Ukraine.

In general, we Americans view our involvement in foreign wars, that is, non-Native American warfare, as justified by the belligerence of others who have forced us reluctantly into “making the world safe for democracy.” The beginning of our provision of armaments, intelligence and training to Ukraine dates back to soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “breakup” of the Soviet Union. The current U.S. commitment of over 50 billion dollars is only a fraction of our huge military and economic support for Ukraine over many years. Russia has often taken note.

George Soros, the Hungarian born American billionaire, stated on May 24, 2022 that the Russia-Ukraine war may be the start of World War III and result in the end of human civilization. Such doomsday statements are not a new phenomenon. Ever since the days of The Flood people have warned that human behavior, usually by someone other than the Jeremiad of the moment, was going to lead to the end of the world. They mean the end of homo sapiens’ short 200,000-year reign on our 4.5-billion-year-old planet. Earth will survive, but without us.

I have no estimate how many predictions of mankind’s demise have been made from the time of our common really great-grandmother, Lucy, in Africa until 1945. Until America came up with and used the atom bomb, the philosophers who had previously cried wolf were doing just that. However, now with numerous countries possessing nuclear weapons and itching to use them, we may have finally made honest men out of Noah and all the other survivalists. I am not going to address climate change and pollution as doomsday machines as I only have about three pages of print available. I will stick with nuclear war in this column.

With nuclear powers, such as Russia, North Korea, China, America and Israel all claiming they fear for their survival, I am reminded of my onetime acquaintance who told me in 1973 that if Egypt were about to destroy Israel that Israel would be justified in destroying the whole world to avenge itself. Fortunately, he was not an Israeli and Egypt stood down. I do wonder if Putin might feel so threatened he would believe Russia would be justified in starting the nuclear daisy chain.

These thoughts of World War III came scrambling into my brain when I thought about June 06, 1944 and D-Day. Americans and many others thought the World War of 1914-1918 with its inane carnage, over no one knew what, was going to end world-wide war. Then the courage and sacrifice of 150,000 American soldiers on D-Day was touted as the beginning of the end of totalitarian regimes. Later we thought we had learned something from Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, George Soros, hardly a war monger, fears we may be at the beginning of WWIII raging in Ukraine.

As for me, I will place my confidence in that part of human nature that has pulled us back from self-immolation many times. History leads me to have faith we will not self-fulfill such a dire prophecy. Of course, if I am right everyone will be around to say so, and if I am wrong, what difference will it make?

Bowled Over

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Photo by Peg Redwine

Much as the Summer Solstice ushers in the ennui of torturously less daylight each day, as each of the forty-four college football bowl games is completed the dark pall of life without football forces us to put down our beer, get off the couch and go back to work. I accept that COVID is a significant issue but so is mental health. And one of America’s best palliatives for depression in the gray days of winter is watching other people risk their well-being on the football field.

The first college football game was played on November 06, 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton in New Jersey; one hundred people attended the game that Rutgers won 06-04. The first college bowl game was the Tournament of Roses’ East-West game (The Rose Bowl) played on January 01, 1902 between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Stanford University Cardinal; there were eight thousand-five hundred spectators. Michigan won 49-0 and Stanford quit with eight minutes left to play. That first bowl game was initiated to increase interest in Pasadena, California as a tourist destination and to market the surrounding area and its products. All bowl games since that first one have had similar goals. The outcome of the games is not of paramount concern to most.

The attendance at such highly hyped events as the Tailgreeter Cure Bowl between Coastal Carolina University and Northern Illinois University on December 17, 2021 is indicative of the lack of fanaticism at most bowl games; 9,784, about the same number of fans who showed up for that first Rose Bowl. The bodies in the stadiums at bowl games are not the targets, eyeballs on TV advertising and promotion of each venue are.

As for the schools and players involved, they may have analogous goals. The colleges want to showcase their products and make some money and some players have hopes of enhancing their football futures either as players, coaches or announcers. In other words, the first bowl game was for exhibition purposes and, except for the payout by major sponsors to each school, that is still the overriding rational.

With that in mind I have a few suggestions on how we can incorporate the goals of all involved, or watching, with the ever-expanding number of college bowl games. As I mentioned earlier, we already have 44 bowls. It would require an addition of only 8 more to be able to have one bowl game every week of the year. Surely such eager potential sponsors as Bitcoin or China would pony-up for a chance to showcase their greatness. Maybe a bidding war could be encouraged between Jeff Bezos and Mark Cuban or Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Israel and Iran could promise to dismantle their nuclear ambitions and sell their peaceful intentions via commercials. Surely Facebook and TikToc would want to play.

One might wonder how one extra, exhibition-type game could be woven into a school’s regular football schedule. From the quality of play of most bowl games and with countless players opting to sit out, it is apparent that just showing up for one more Saturday should not be a problem. When my friends and I played Friday night football it was not unusual for some of us to show up the following Saturday morning for an impromptu, unorganized sandlot game just because. A lot of bowl games have a similar feel.

This system would expand college football perpetually and solve the ego problem for such “sponsors” as Jimmy Kimmel who endowed the Jimmy Kimmel LA Bowl. America could probably easily come up with underwriters such as Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Heck, I humbly suggest the Jim Redwine Armadillo Bowl might draw a nod or two and Peg and I will kick in fifty bucks apiece if that would suffice. We could host it in a pasture at JPeg Osage Ranch if the resident varmints do not too strongly object and if fans do not mind sitting on the ground. TV rights could be negotiated.

Sticks And Stones

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Special Consul Robert Mueller testified before Congress on July 24, 2019. During his six hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee the major emphasis shifted from concerns about the outcome of the 2016 presidential election to attempts by foreign countries to influence all of our elections.

Mueller testified that for many years and right up to our next election cycle in 2020 several foreign entities were involving themselves in our democracy. And while Mueller specified only Russia for 2016 he made it clear that we should be aware of other actors. Iran, Israel and even our first cousins the British, among numerous others, have sought to inveigle themselves into our governmental decisions.

We have often been subtlety and sometimes not so subtlety nudged toward or away from war or toward or away from alliances with other countries. The favored techniques in days before the internet were the planting of fake newspaper stories or biased books and movies. Today spy dossiers or misleading memes and tweets over the internet are the preferred methods.

But if the aim of a foreign country is to defame or embarrass a politician it seems silly to dispense dirty secrets or even create false ones when such disclosures and prejudiced articles appear in the newspapers and on television every day. For example, if a country wanted to defame Donald Trump it should just encourage Americans to read The New York Times or watch CNN. And if a foreign entity wished to bring down Hillary Clinton it should republish stories from The National Enquirer or push FOX News. There is no need for foreign attempts to bring down a candidate for public office when we do such a thorough job of that ourselves.

What is even more perplexing is why any foreign country cares about our elections when we care so little about the outcomes ourselves. About 40% of eligible voters do not vote in presidential elections and only about 40% trouble themselves to vote in mid-term national elections. And when it comes to state, county and city elections most of the voters are those hoping to get jobs from the winners.

The bottom line may be that foreign entities are often more concerned with the outcomes of our elections than we are. Maybe we should learn from them.

With Charity For Some, With Malice For Others

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James Mattis is President-Elect Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. According to former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Mattis is a student of history who understands the dangers of Thucydides’ Trap. Thucydides (471 – 400 B.C.) was an Athenian historian who lived through the Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 B.C.), which exhausted both the loser, Athens, and the eventual winner, Sparta. This thirty years of internecine carnage sowed the seeds of Greece’s vulnerability to Roman conquest.

Thucydides observed it was the rise of the upstart Athenians and the fear and resentment of that rise in the more powerful Spartans that led to war. Archidamus, the Spartan king, had cautioned his citizens to not be hurried into conflict out of any sense of offended honor or an attitude of superiority. However, hotter heads prevailed.

The United States is unquestionably the strongest nation on Earth militarily and economically. We may have the power to dictate terms to most other countries. We are the Sparta of our time.

On the other hand, we may wish to learn from history, not repeat it. If Russia attempted to influence our elections, we should address this serious issue with all due diligence. Due diligence is not a euphemism for dueling.

If China builds artificial islands in international waters and declares them China, we need not make a bellicose response. Maybe negotiation from strength might be better.

If the United Nations Security Council passes a unanimous resolution that calls for Israel to follow international law, due diligence does not require that Congress withhold funds from the United Nations unless Israel gets a retraction.

Now that Secretary Clinton and President-Elect Trump have ended their election cycle neither they nor their supporters should precipitate a Pyrrhic Victory for our country by continuing to attempt to delegitimize their opponents or their opponents’ positions by the technique of circular firing squads.

Perhaps it is time to once more look to the wisdom of some of those marvelous ancient Greeks and even our own President Lincoln and not let a misguided sense of offended honor or an overestimation of our own righteousness lead us to another long series of self-destructive attitudes and actions.

{This article relied heavily on an article dated May 6, 2015 by Leon Whyte that drew upon the scholarship of Harvard Professor Graham Allison and appeared in The Diplomat. Click here to go to referenced article ->}

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