Samuel also said to Saul, “The LORD anointed you king over His people. Now heed the words of the LORD: ‘I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him when he came up from Egypt. Now attack Amalek, and destroy all they have. Kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.
… And Saul attacked the Amalekites, from Havilah to Shur, east of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and put all the people to the sword. But Saul spared Agag and the best of the sheep, oxen, fatlings, lambs, and all that was good, and were unwilling to destroy them.
Now the word of the LORD came to Samuel, saying, “I regret that I have set up Saul as king, for he has turned his back on Me, and not performed My commandments.”
First Book of Samuel Chapter 15: 1-9 (abridged)
So Samuel said to Saul, “did not the LORD anoint you king over Israel? Now HE said, ‘Go, and destroy the Amalekites.’ Why did you not obey HIM? Why did you swoop on the spoil, and do evil in the sight of the LORD?” And Saul said to Samuel, “But I have obeyed the LORD, and brought back Agag king of Amalek; I have destroyed the Amalekites.”
First Book of Samuel, 15: 17-21 (abridged)
But Samuel said to Saul, “you rejected the LORD, and the LORD has rejected you.”
First Book of Samuel, 15: 26 (abridged)
Then Samuel said, “Bring Agag to me.” So Agag came cautiously, saying, “Surely the bitterness is past.” But Samuel said, “As your sword made women childless, so shall your mother be childless.” And Samuel hacked Agag in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.
First Book of Samuel, 15: 32-33 (abridged)
It is not possible to understand Palestine’s suffering without a broader understanding of the role Israel plays for the West. As I put it in the previous post, an off-the-cuff response to the murder of Hezbollah Secretary General, Hassan Nasrullah:
Israel, as Stephen Gowans among others has cogently argued, is an outpost for imperialism in an oil rich region. A region all the more significant for standing between the West and a Eurasia perceived as a threat by five centuries of European colonial strategists, and some half century of US imperialists. Israel has a very special role in dividing the Middle East but some aspects are common to all colonial and neocolonial rule of the global south.
But epistemologically speaking, it’s possible for a necessary condition – of anything, but in this case of understanding one of three interrelated flashpoints for WW3 – to be an insufficient one.
The video linked to this post features former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke with former CIA analyst Larry Johnson. Mr Crooke is a quietly astonishing man. His intimate knowledge of the Middle East, taking in personal relations with players from Madeleine Albright through Ariel Sharon’s chief of security to Yasser Arafat, is matched if not surpassed by his depth of insight on Judaist, Shia and Sunni cultures.
The video runs for one hour eleven minutes, though I needed thrice that, over three sittings, to give it the level of attention – with numerous replays at critical junctures – it demands. It is the single most compelling text I’ve seen or heard since October 7 last year.
It divides into broadly three parts. First is a schism within Israel between fundamentalist Mizrahi Jews – their eschatological worldview forged over centuries of sharing the region with Muslim and Christian – and their more secularist compatriots, looking to an Ashkenazi tradition forged in Europe and shaped on the one hand by liberalism, on the other by centuries of pogrom culminating in the Shoah. Alastair argues convincingly, in that gentle and supremely informed way of his, that Mizrahi insistence on the Will of Jehovah as both Divine Revelation and direct Command to be neither questioned nor disobeyed, cannot be grasped through the materialist-rationalist lens of the Cartesian mind. In sum, an epistemological revolution in the self avowed Jewish State, its antecedents preceding October 7, has gone largely unnoticed in the West
The second part addresses parallel changes in the Muslim world. While his citing of Saudi Arabia’s rapprochement with Iran (crafted in Beijing, though he doesn’t say so) may not bear serious scrutiny, he convincingly depicts a broader trend of Islam slowly uniting. A potent symbol of this is the Al Aqsa Mosque, sacred to all strands of Islam but on a site claimed by Judaists as Temple Mount and one of several points where Alastair fuses past and present to drive home the eschatological dimension of the horrors now unfolding.
In the third and final part, Alastair responds to the billion dollar question from Larry – is there any off-ramp? – with a balance-of-forces assessment of the region and by extension the world at large. It makes grim reading for secularist Israel, regardless of whether the end-times fanatics take the rest of us down with them.
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To add more detail to his opening point about the schism between fundamentalist Mizrahi sections of the Israeli population and the more secular leaning Ashkenazi tradition and what this actually means in practical terms, Crooke relates an event in which as a guest of the Israeli Government of the time he is taken to one of the illegal settlements.
The settlers are told that they are okay to talk freely to Crooke, who then goes on in this interview to convey just how extreme this 800,000 strong armed militia, backed by Government Ministers and Rabbis, really are [spoiler: They give Zealots a bad name].
Substantiating the point by reference to the incident earlier this year in which those militias took over a police station to free IDF soldiers held for the War Crime of torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners, noting that not only the police and IDF stood by but that both are afraid of this group.
Rounding off with the stark, and practical, question as to how do you remove this private army in line with UN resolutions who are intent on creating a Greater Judea across the Region?
The implication being that you don’t without a bloodbath. On the basis of standard military doctrine in which an attacking force requires a three to one advantage in numbers over a defending force, you would need some 2.4 million personnel plus logistical and other support to carry out that mandate.
The unsaid part is that there is no negotiating wriggle room with such a mindset. And, here’s the heart of the issue, that is just as true for ANY Israeli Government and Israeli society as it is for any outside intermediary. Israeli Government’s of any political shape or ideology have no room to manoeuvre themselves in the practical reality that exists on the ground
Crooke’s understatement that conditions are not right for meaningful rational progress leaves unsaid the unpalatable reality that barring a mass Saul on the road to Damascus event amongst this group and all those they represent the only practical option would seem to be akin to the Roman siege of Yodfat in 67CE and that of Jerusalem during the time of the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule.
Either way, as Crooke also notes, a two-state solution is not an option.
Uncanny. Having just made the second and last of my (self) permitted coffees, I returned to the steel city control centre intent on writing a footnote on the very thing you raised in your comment.
One of the things that fascinates me is the IDF’s adherence to Samuels word. A good source was:
Sympathy for the Devil, Part Two The Amalek Effect
SCOTT RITTER APR 09, 2024.
This book of Samuel is a conversation I had with Cannon Stallard because I did not believe Samuel’s words on what God had said and I asked him “Does God speak to everyone?” and his reply was an emphatic NO. I can’t remember what else he said, it was 60 years ago.
The whole basis of the “Amalek” story is a fraud since Samuel himself was a fraud as was Eli and the Torah does what we would call a “cover up” of the facts about his illegitimacy. To think that so many Israelis justify the words of a fraud is not only an indictment of the very basis of the Amalek excuse as dishonest but also the content of annihilation. I had the same problem with Joshua and his fanatical slaughter of the people of Jericho.
It’s a case of finding any excuse to mass murder(genocide)much in the same vein as the Nazi psychos(German, Ukrainian or Israeli).
The excuse will endure, whatever the cost from such murderous fanatics and I don’t believe there is an off ramp and certainly not a one state solution.
The fact that many Israelis referred openly in tweets and F/B posts that the Ashkenazi were traitors to Israel…. and are often hostile to fundamentalist Jews…. and non pro Israeli hasbara Jews, speaks volumes about the mindset of said fanatics and it is impossible to reason with them. There is also the video of a Rabbi promoted to honorary General addressing IDF who had concerns about raping women and his answer was that it was alright to rape women as long as they are non Jews. Then there is both Netanyahu and Ayalet Shaked both referring to Ethiopian Jews as baboon bloods. How on earth does one find any kind of compromise with such psychotics?
I believe in BDS as an alternative to driving the Israelis to the 1948 borders by force, but then I am an anti war advocate first and failing that force if unavoidable.
Naive isn’t it?
Dave is right. NO Israeli government will change what exists and that only leaves hostile action and the UN Security Council will continue to dither as long as the US has the right of Veto, so the UN is a waste of time unless they are pressured enough to allow further membership of said Security Council as Russia and China have asked for, WITHOUT the US dictating who can represent their country as it has done previously.
The Israelis have milked their “victimhood” all the while making Palestinians the real victims in the last eighty years and if it wasn’t for the many decent Jews in Israel(and they are many)just not enough, I would have advocated limited hostilities against Israel many years ago, now they leave Palestinian sympathisers with little choice, or in fact No Way Out.
Self scrutiny is called for – a headache for sure.
Susan
Pepe Escobar writing on the Strategic Culture foundation…..
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/09/30/nasrallah-martyr-legend-lands-islam-get-ready-channel-their-rage/
…..seems to have come to much the same conclusion:
“The ball is now moving to public opinion all across the lands of Islam. Nearly two billion Muslims to a great extent will also drive the new phase of the Axis of Resistance. The killing machine, for its part, will continue to kill, kill, kill – mostly civilians, unarmed women and children.
Now nothing prevents the Axis of Resistance from stepping up to the next level. There’s simply no diplomacy, compromise, ceasefire, “two-state solution” or any other procrastination tactics in the horizon. Just a do-or-die existential fight against a relentless killing machine exhibiting, to paraphrase (and invert) Yeats, “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”.
For all practical purposes, the real (italics mine) Raging Twenties start now.
And the rage of the lands of Islam will be focused not only on the killing machine, but on its suckling she-wolf: the Empire of Forever Wars.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Pakistan, scores of Global Majority actors should be getting ready for a historical first: coordinate diplomacy, geoeconomics and military potential to the max to finally confront the bacteriological infection head on.
An auspicious scenario now becomes quite plausible: BRICS assuming the role of chief diplomatic channel for the lands of Islam. The next logical stage would be to get the UN out of Israeli/American territory and establish a HQ in a nation that really respects international humanitarian law.
The politically emerging Global Majority will then establish its own global, really united nations, organization – leaving the racists to wallow and rot inside their own walls. Meanwhile, in the battlefield, velvet gloves should be removed: the time has come for death by a thousand cuts.”
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On the BRICS leg this STF article is also of relavence:
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/09/30/cest-la-guerre/
“the entry of the new states into the BRICS+ partnership would make the geo-economic alliance majority Islamic, with a boost to anti-Zionist policies worldwide, and Israel knows this and wants to prevent it from happening. A war now, dragging Russia’s interests in the middle, risks causing a delay in the reception of the new BRISC members and, thus, a significant impediment to the revival of the Resistance.”
John Mearsheimer demolishes some of the assumptions on Spectator TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_USzVCWzh10&ab_channel=TheSpectator
Thanks, Phil, for sharing this great interview with Alastair Crooke (my favourite geopolitical commentator these days), and thanks to Dave and Susan for your insightful comments. What a time to be alive!*
(*If you’re aware of what’s going on, that is. Sadly, very few actually are.)