(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: 'We are at war'. [1] [] Date: 2023-10-08 We begin today with a Haaretz editorial that places the blame for yesterday’s surprise attacks by Hamas on Israel at the feet of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu will certainly try to evade his responsibility and cast the blame on the heads of the army, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security service who, like their predecessors on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, saw a low probability of war with their preparations for a Hamas attack proving flawed. They scorned the enemy and its offensive military capabilities. Over the next days and weeks, when the depth of Israel Defense Forces and intelligence failures come to light, a justified demand to replace them and take stock will surely arise. However, the military and intelligence failure does not absolve Netanyahu of his overall responsibility for the crisis, as he is the ultimate arbiter of Israeli foreign and security affairs. Netanyahu is no novice in this role, like Ehud Olmert was in the Second Lebanon War. Nor is he ignorant in military matters, as Golda Meir in 1973 and Menachem Begin in 1982 claimed to be. Netanyahu also shaped the policy embraced by the short-lived “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid: a multidimensional effort to crush the Palestinian national movement in both its wings, in Gaza and the West Bank, at a price that would seem acceptable to the Israeli public. Natan Sachs writes for The Atlantic that Hamas has probably achieved, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. Hamas executed a stunning military surprise, breaching the Israeli border in multiple ways and attacking more than 20 Israeli population centers, as well as military bases. Militants kidnapped dozens of Israelis—apparently including children and the elderly—and captured military personnel. Israeli social media and news outlets filled with calls for help from families in southern Israeli towns occupied by Hamas, sheltering in their homes as armed terrorists went door-to-door. The failure of Israel’s intelligence and preparedness is second only to that in 1973. But this Hamas victory might prove Pyrrhic. In fact, Hamas itself might have been surprised by the extent of its initial success. The trauma in Israel today should give pause to those thinking that Israel will simply acquiesce to a short tit for tat. As bad as things have been in Gaza in the past two decades—and they have been terrible—the coming weeks could prove even worse. [...] The government will feel immense pressure to send ground troops into the Gaza Strip, perhaps even to end the decade-and-a-half-long bloody and stifling stalemate with Hamas and topple the group militarily. Israel has refrained from doing so to date in part because it would be an extremely bloody affair. Israel has had no answer to the question of what might replace Hamas, and still doesn’t. Yet the Israeli public will demand decisive action, including ground operations, even if these again fall short of a complete takeover of the Strip. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has a few reminders about the state of politics in Israel now the Israel is in a state of war, The first point is that Israel has been in a state of political paralysis and stalemate for the better part of a year. Both leaders of the opposition have now offered to join an emergency national unity government for the duration of this conflict. I’ve seen people saying maybe this is how Netanyahu finally puts his political problems behind him because of national unity in the face of war. Alternatively, that the opposition leaders are being craven in offering to join. Both arguments mistake the situation pretty dramatically. When a country faces a catastrophic attack, the opposition joins with the government. That’s just how it works. More specifically, there’s probably some real value in not having Netanyahu dependent on the crazies in his current government at least in the very short term. (This is actually the argument Yair Lapid made explicitly.) More generally, I think there’s really no underestimating the impact of this on the country. It’s the kind of event that is likely transformative not just for Israel but for the region generally. I’ve seen lots of comparisons to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. That may sound like hyperbole but I don’t think it is. There’s no getting around the fact that Netanyahu was the one minding the shop when this event happened and it’s a catastrophic security failure for the state that is almost beyond imagining. The other point to keep in mind is that much of the security reality of the last fifteen years in Israel has been one of a managed security by Hamas and governments of Benjamin Netanyahu. These are the fiercest of enemies. But they also have a symbiotic kind of political power. You hit us; we hit you back; now we have quiet. Netanyahu’s power as a national security leader is that he keeps all these conflicts at bay. He doesn’t solve them but manages them. He keeps the country safe but he also doesn’t get involved in debilitating foreign adventures. There are blow ups, rocket barrages, retaliatory strikes against Gaza to degrade Hamas’ military potential. But the strategic reality was equilibrium. Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post looks at the affects that an Israeli-Hamas war might have on the Biden Administration’s policy goals in the Middle East. Perhaps more important for the administration was what the shocking invasion could mean for U.S. efforts to forge a normalization accord between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a goal that has become one of Biden’s major foreign policy priorities. “It’s way too early to tell,” said Tom Nides, who served as Biden’s ambassador to Israel until July. “I think given the current state of events,” amid reports of hundreds of Israelis dead and wounded, Hamas’s claims of holding dozens of military and civilian hostages, and Israel’s retaliatory airstrikes inside Gaza, “we’ve got to get through this first before we can even see if we can put Humpty Dumpty together again.” [...] Administration officials, despite reports of progress in their energetic pursuit of a Saudi-Israeli deal that it hopes will undercut Chinese influence in the Persian Gulf region, have been more tempered in private about the likelihood it can be achieved. The agreement would require both sides to dilute their demands and accept conditions that could be difficult if not impossible. Turning to domestic matters, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate says that the U.S. Supreme Court may be the one institution that is trying to pull the country back from a brink. I’ve spent this week looking for the signs and divinations of any kind of institutional pulling back from the brink, and it seems to me that the only entity that seems to have been working to get its own crazy under control is the Supreme Court, the branch of government that at present also happens to pose the greatest threat to the continued experiment that is constitutional democracy. It is the Supreme Court that soundly rejected and repudiated the Alabama Legislature’s efforts to ignore its June holding in the Voting Rights Act case. It is the Supreme Court that at least sounded, this past Tuesday, as though it wasn’t all that interested in striking down entire federal agencies as unconstitutional. This week at the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas even managed to recuse himself from a case in which he had a conflict of interest. A few weeks back, he managed to choke out an amended disclosure form. None of the justices have spent the summer openly trashing one another in speeches or to the press, as they did after the Dobbs leak last year. And while I have no illusions that the upcoming term will go well, it is now at least absolutely plain that all the nutters on the 5thCircuit auditioning for Matt Gaetz status on the federal bench are not going to be able to overmaster the saner minds at the high court. It’s not James Ho’s judiciary yet—and neither is it Samuel Alito’s. Chief Justice John Roberts has made it clear that whatever MAGA poison is seeping through the GOP primary and the House Republicans, it’s not going to set fire to One First Street anytime soon. I’m not ready to go that far when it concerns the U.S. Supreme Court just yet. I will say that the judicial branch of government, generally, has been a firewall against the worse that could happen to American democracy. Luis Feliz Leon reports for In These Times that while the UAW strike continues, the UAW won a significant concession from General Motors. The UAW was poised to tap 5,000 members at GM’s assembly plant in Arlington, Texas, as part of its latest stand-up strike escalation. These workers would have joined 25,000 already on strike at five assembly plants and 38parts distribution centers nationwide. But in the eleventh hour, GM agreed to put battery manufacturing facilities for electric vehicles into its national union contract. [...] The companies have argued that the union can’t legally negotiate over EV battery plants, but apparently the threat of a widening strike changed GM’s horizons. [...] The significance of GM’s concession is even greater when you consider that the Arlington plant plans to reduce production of SUVs at the facility in favor of all-electric alternatives. David Remnick of The New Yorker interviews former vice president Al Gore, primarily about climate change, the threats to democracy, and the interconnection of the two issues. You’re looking better already. Tell me, why is it impossible for politicians to run on this successfully? What are the barriers preventing a day-to-day politician, on the state or national level, from making this an effective electoral cause? The polluters have gained a high degree of control over the processes of self-government. I’ve often said that, in order to solve the crisis, we have to pay a lot of attention to the democracy crisis. Our representative democracy is not working very well. We have a dual hegemonic ideology called democratic capitalism, and the democracy part of our ideology has been cannibalized, to some extent, by economic actors, who have found ways to convert wealth into political influence. Wealth has always had its usefulness in the political sphere, but much more so in an era in which the candidate who raises the most money, and can buy the most media presence, almost always wins the election. And there’s been kind of evolutionary pressure as to people who go into politics: people who don’t want to put up with that kind of routine shy away from it now. Those who like it are more likely to run and get elected. [...] You mentioned democracy early on. It is well known, at least to people of a certain age, that after challenging the results in 2000 you painfully, elegantly, and with grace conceded. We saw what we saw with January 6th...Did the crisis of democracy take you by surprise? No. Well, I wrote a book called “The Assault on Reason,” in 2007. It began with a notation that many Americans were asking the question, What has happened to America? It has been building for quite some time. But I think that the love people have for freedom, for self-determination, and for self-government is reawakening... Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer wondering what happened to the usage of ”woke.” Woke had a precipitous decline in usage over the summer. Google searches for the word have tanked. For years, woke was firmly lodged among Merriam-Webster’s most-searched terms, and yet in the last few months, the word has frequently not appeared on that list at all. In August’s first Republican debate, the word came up only once, from Nikki Haley. In the second debate a month later, zero times. After spending the last few years coopting, redefining, and villainizing all things woke, Republicans have … given up on it? But I thought it was ever so important. Dictionary and Google lookups are one thing, but an analysis of news websites surfaces similar results. The NOW Corpus tracks 18 billion words that have appeared in web-based newspapers and magazines since 2010. It shows the usage of woke fell off a cliff this summer. The word came up less than half as often in September as it did in March of this year. It’s quite a turnabout for a word that was looking to be the centerpiece of a number of campaigns, especially that of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Less than two years ago, DeSantis was so bent on branding himself the ultimate anti-woke crusader that he announced a legislative proposal called the Stop WOKE Act, which aimed to end teaching about race and discrimination. He frequently positioned himself amid boldfaced signs advertising his “war on woke.” Everyone have the best possible day! 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