a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Sunday is a good day to make a run up to U-district to check out the used book-stores and music stores (yes, they still sell CDs there).
Good news about the hostages, it seems.
I read in a German newspaper part of the agreement would be for the International Red Cross to visit all the hostages to assess their health.
Haviv Rettig Gur writes in The Times of Israel newspaper of the terrible calculus that is probably made on the part of the Israeli government for the release of the hostages, though:
The families of Israeli hostages have spent most of the past seven weeks in a kind of limbo, torn between competing arguments for how best to seek the release of their loved ones.
Would pressure on the Israeli government work? Could foreign governments influence Hamas? What does the ground war mean for their loved ones’ chances of survival?
With a deal apparently nearing completion that could release dozens of abducted children and their mothers, many of their families have suddenly gone silent. Hamas, they reason, will try to hold on to children whose families prove most effective in pressuring the Israeli government.
If last week every family tried to draw attention to their missing child, now the race is on to make their child forgettable.
It’s hard to imagine the torment of such a moment.
To families trapped in such a terrible place, nothing about the announced deal feels like an Israeli victory.
Hamas stumbles
Yet it’s hard to imagine a clearer signal of Hamas’s desperation than the deal agreed to by the Israeli government late Tuesday.
In the Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011, the exchange rate was 1,100 Palestinian prisoners, including mass murderers sentenced to life terms, for a single Israeli soldier.
At the time, most Israelis supported the deal and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Ehud Barak made sure to stand at Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s side as he set foot back on Israeli soil.
Twelve years later, after many of the terrorists released in that exchange were the ones who planned and executed the October 7 massacre, the calculus has changed.
Hamas abducted too many, including babies and ailing grandmothers, and did so in such cruel ways that the old logic of prisoner exchanges has been forever upended in the Israeli psyche.
As any aspiring gangster knows, there’s a tipping point to extortion when the cost of avoiding violence rises past the cost of the violence itself, when the victim’s incentives flip from payment to vengeful defiance.
At the start of the war, Hamas and Islamic Jihad started to trickle out hostages in ways that showed they didn’t quite grasp the change that had come over Israelis. They tried to delay the ground incursion by promising to release two hostages every few days.
But Israel ignored the gambit, and every ensuing attempt to dangle hostages before it. It launched the ground incursion with no more than a mention of the Israelis held in Gaza.
The new deal
And as the IDF advanced, photos began to leak of soldiers posing in the main centers of Hamas rule, including the parliament building and various headquarters, before demolishing these symbolic buildings.
Some foreign observers were mystified at the practice. Critics complained of “wanton” destruction. But Hamas saw and understood. When Israel telegraphed for three long weeks that it was preparing to enter Shifa Hospital, it was giving the enemy time to escape. It didn’t want a bloody battle in the hallways of a hospital. But it did want to enter that hospital and show Hamas there are no safe places anywhere in Gaza. And Hamas saw and understood.
This is key to understanding the war. Israel isn’t speaking to the West. Its leadership registers Western discourse as a second-tier concern. Its message is for Hamas, and this message is the strategic heart of the war effort: There is nowhere in Gaza we won’t go, no stone or tunnel or building we won’t overturn in pursuit of you. None of the tactics that once kept you safe apply anymore.
Tens of thousands of Hamas fighters have now been underground for nearly seven weeks. Their stores of food and fuel could be running low; they were prepared for an Israeli incursion, but not an open-ended one. Meanwhile, the IDF has systematically destroyed and sealed hundreds of tunnel entrances — upward of 600 at last count — as it slowly tightens the noose around the underground network in northern Gaza. Hamas’s subterranean strategy has been counteracted by a simple and patient Israeli answer: Burying Hamas forces alive in their own tunnels.
Then, all of a sudden, a deal was announced this week that drops the 1,100-to-one formula to three-to-one: 50 hostages for 150 Palestinian prisoners, all of the latter either women or prisoners who were minors at the time of their terror attacks.
But more interesting than who they are is who they are not. No Hamas fighters will be released, in part because Hamas didn’t really demand it. The prisoner release was treated by Hamas negotiators as a face-saving PR exercise. Their priority, Israeli officials say, was the ceasefire.
Hamas first demanded a month-long ceasefire in exchange for a few dozen hostages. Israel didn’t respond. As Hamas losses mounted, its demands shrank. It has now reached 50 hostages for four days’ respite.
But as the length of the lull shortened, new demands surfaced. For six hours each day of the truce, Israel must ground its reconnaissance drones. On Thursday the deal was delayed when Hamas sent through their Qatari representatives more demands for additional unspecified limits on Israeli field intelligence forces.
Israeli officials have explained these demands as part of the hostage release process: Not all the child hostages are in Hamas hands. Its fighters must travel aboveground to collect them from elsewhere in Gaza. They don’t want to be tracked while doing so.
This is, to put it mildly, a strange explanation. There’s a simpler one. A desperate Hamas with many fighters trapped in the steadily tightening noose around Gaza City has negotiated a last-ditch means for saving its northern forces by giving them a brief window to flee south in which the Israelis agree not to watch their escape too closely.
This is why Israeli officials are optimistic that Hamas will ultimately carry out its part of the deal. Hamas needs the time. It is why Israel even accepted the terror group’s transparent preparations to cheat, including the stipulation that the first three days of exchanges need not reach the 12- or 13-per-day rate of Israelis released, but that the number missing from that rate must be made up for on the fourth day. That demand suggests Hamas might be planning to release fewer prisoners for three days and then break the agreement on the fourth.
But Hamas demands are also preparing for the opposite eventuality, stipulating that as long as a roughly 10-per-day release rate is sustained, the deal can remain in force for longer than four days.
Or put another way, Hamas doesn’t know how long its retreat will take and is preparing for all contingencies.
If Hamas reneges, the war resumes, and whatever emotions Israeli leaders may feel — a palpable sense of guilt hangs over every cabinet deliberation — they will broadcast a collective shrug and return to the business of Hamas’s demolition.
Gallant’s grim victory
There’s a bottom line here. On October 29, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with the families of the hostages at IDF Headquarters in Tel Aviv. His message to them was buried in the avalanche of news from the front — the IDF had launched its ground war just 36 hours earlier.
The families were desperate. They said the ground war felt like a death sentence for their loved ones. Gallant’s response essentially laid out the Israeli strategy thus far.
Hamas, he said, “is making cynical use of all that is precious to us. They understand our pain and our anxiety.” But for that very reason, there was no way to simply negotiate the hostages out of Gaza.
The ground war would accomplish what political pressure could not. It was “inseparable from the effort to return the hostages. If Hamas doesn’t face military pressure, nothing will move.”
The war now moves south and will drive a whole new potential civilian humanitarian crisis. Hamas in Khan Younis will be just as trapped, but it will have far more troops available, a clearer understanding of IDF strategy and Israeli implacability, and a longer time to have readied the battlefield. It is there that the bulk of Hamas’s forces will find themselves in a pitched battle for survival — and where the hostages will serve as Hamas’s last available currency for buying pauses to regroup, resupply and, if the offer to Israel is generous, even escape.
From Gallant’s perspective, that’s just as it should be.
With the war in Israel and Gaza only on day 6, all other news on my TV seem to be in the By The Way/ Not Too Important category.
(The House of Representatives still does not have a speaker, and there are no viable candidates at this point).
Let’s leave Columbus out of it. Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
As of Sunday night:
Israeli media, citing rescue service officials, said at least 700 people were killed and 2,000 wounded, making Saturday’s surprise early morning attack by Hamas the deadliest attack in Israel in decades.
At least 232 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed and at least 1,700 wounded in Israeli strikes, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
Hamas fighters took an unknown number of civilians and soldiers captive into Gaza, a deeply sensitive issue for Israel, in harrowing scenes posted on social media videos.
Among those killed in Israel was Lt. Col. Jonathan Steinberg, a senior officer who commanded the military’s Nachal Brigade, a prominent infantry unit.
– Reported by newspaper Israel Hayom at israelhayom.com
The three friends made their way back to Seattle today, taking an early 7 am flight out of Fairbanks on Alaska Airlines.
We made a brief stop in downtown Fairbanks today, and then headed to the The University of Alaska Museum of the North (the museum is on the campus of the university).
Happy Friday.
Oktoberfest commences tomorrow (in Munich, Germany, of course).
The price of a beer* is expected to be between €12.60 and €14.90 ($13.45 and $15.90), an average of 6.12 percent more than last year.
*One liter of beer! (34 US fluid ounces or about two pints).
TRUMP’S MUG SHOT IS HIS TRUE PRESIDENTIAL PORTRAIT
He might be angry in the mug shot; he might even be scared.
But he damn sure doesn’t look surprised. Nobody is.
– Vinson Cunningham writing for The New Yorker magazine
The stamps I had ordered from a seller in New York City, arrived in the mail. The sender put beautiful stamps from yesteryears on the envelope for me.
Might he have picked the 1934 violet stamp with Mt. Rainier on just for me, because I am in Washington State?
I’d like to think so 😉
Mauritania’s endless sea of sand dunes hides an open secret: An estimated 10% to 20% of the population lives in slavery. But as one woman’s journey shows, the first step toward freedom is realizing you’re enslaved.
– John D. Sutter writing for CNN Interactive (In 1981, Mauritania became the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Activists are arrested for fighting the practice. The government denies it exists).
Happy Juneteenth.
It is the third time around for the newest federal holiday in the US, Juneteenth National Independence Day, which celebrates the end of slavery in the United States.
There is still a lot of differences in the way states treat the day, though: some commemorate it as an official holiday, some just a day of observance, and others something in between. (In Washington State it was made a permanent state holiday in 2022).
Stealing top secret documents from the White House (‘willful retention of national defense secrets’ is the charge, reportedly) and lying about it, bring consequences.
As simple as that.
This guy is continuing to making history— in a very bad way.
Friday Jun. 9 The DOJ unsealed its indictment of Trump today.
Prosecutors are charging Trump with 37 felonies, including 31 counts under the Espionage Act of ‘willful retention’ of classified records.
The charging docket also says that on at least two occasions, Trump showed classified records to visitors without security clearances at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey — including the map of a military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
[Information from Politico.com]
It’s Memorial Day here in the United States of America— the day for honoring and mourning the soldiers and personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.
My seller in Denmark sends me my stamps in envelopes decked out with beautiful stamps from yesteryear.
The descriptions are from the Scott 2012 Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, Vol 2 Countries C-F.
Small State Seal, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1972-1978
502 A55 4.5 Krone, Olive
Protected Animals, Engraved, Perf. 13
Issued 1975, Oct. 23
583 A174 130 Øre, Avocets
More than two years out, convictions and sentences are still getting handed out for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Eduardo Medina writes for the New York Times:
Mr. Grider, who operates a vineyard in Central Texas, pleaded guilty last year to entering a restricted area and unlawfully parading at the Capitol, his lawyer said. He went to trial on seven other charges, including civil disorder and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., convicted him on all counts.
On Tuesday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly sentenced Mr. Grider to six years and 11 months in prison and ordered him to pay $5,055 in restitution and an $812 fine.
In March, Judge Kollar-Kotelly said in court that videos of the episode had clearly demonstrated “how Mr. Grider put himself at the center of this conflict, steps away from some of the most violent, lawless and reprehensible acts that occurred in the Capitol on that day.”
She then asked: “How close can a person be to unquestionably violent and completely unacceptable lynch-mob-like acts of others, and still claim to be a nondangerous, truly innocent bystander?”
Mr. Grider’s lawyer, Brent Mayr, said in an interview on Tuesday that his client “truly regrets his actions on Jan. 6 and apologizes to his family, his community and, most importantly, his country.”
But he added that they were “deeply disappointed that his sentence is significantly longer than others who did so much worse than him.”
“He did not assault any officers, much less threaten anyone with any violence before, during or after that day,” Mr. Mayr said. “The disparity in this sentence is very, very disappointing to us.”
“I’m not particularly bothered. I’m not out here raging, angry about it, protesting. But I’m not the biggest fan.”
– Nicholas Sowemimo, 36, who spent part of his Saturday afternoon at The Hawley Arms, a well-known pub in North London, but he did not watch the coronation (reported by Derrick Bryson Taylor in the NYT).
LONDON — Britain’s Charles III was crowned king on Saturday, during an eighth-century ritual in a 21st-century metropolis with a handful of concessions to the modern age but the unabashed pageantry of a fairy tale, unseen since the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, his mother, in 1953.
“I come not to be served, but to serve,” Charles said in his first remarks of the ceremony, setting the theme for the intimate yet grand proceedings. The king, 74, was anointed with holy oil, symbolizing the sacred nature of his rule. He was vested with an imperial mantle, and the archbishop of Canterbury placed the ancient crown of St. Edward onto his head.
– As reported by Mark Landler in the New York Times