July 2014 – Page 13

Mental Health Break

Puppies on a roll:

The Twilight Of Capital Punishment?

Following the recent debacle in Arizona, Ben Richmond determines that the death penalty is in decline:

Add up the 18 states where the death penalty is abolished, the three western states where the governors have placed formal moratoriums on executions, and the four states where lethal injection legal challenges have put a de facto moratorium on executions, and the states are split evenly. There are also seven states that, even without holds in place, haven’t executed anyone in at least five years. Add to that Ohio, Oklahoma, and now Arizona, where botched executions have at least temporarily halted the practice while the states review their procedures, and you’re looking at 70 percent of the states where the death penalty can’t happen, for the moment anyway.

Similarly, law professor David R. Dow, who represents death-row inmates, contends that the “end of the modern death-penalty era” is upon us:

Stephanie Neiman’s death was far worse than [Clayton] Lockett‘s, and [Joseph] Wood might not have suffered as much as his victims, Debbie Dietz and her father, Gene. But that does not alter the fact that the death-penalty regime is built on the myth that we as a society, when we execute someone, are better than he is. But when it takes 45 minutes or two hours to kill a man who helplessly strains against leather straps, no longer can we ignore the inherent violence of a sanction we have convinced ourselves is serene. Once you know how the magic trick works, you can no longer pretend.

But as Rebecca Buckwalter Poza notes in her report from Alabama – “the only state in which judges routinely override jury decisions not to impose the death penalty” – the picture looks very different depending on where you stand:

Today only Alabama judges still override jury recommendations of life in prison and sentence defendants to death instead. In two other states – Florida and Delaware – laws on the books technically still permit judges to adjust jury-recommended sentences. But both states have enacted restrictions that amount to abolishing judicial overrides in practice. None of Delaware’s death row inmates was sentenced by an override, and there have been no such judicial overrides in Florida in the last 15 years.

In contrast, the practice of judicial override in Alabama is so widespread that it accounts for one-fifth of death row prisoners. Thirty such overrides took place in Alabama in the 1980s; there were 44 in the 1990s, and there have been 27 since 2000. The most recent statistics show more than 40 current death row inmates were sentenced by judicial override, contrary to the judgment of the jury.

On the other hand, Josh Marshall observes the actors who are backing away from their role in executions:

[A]s the noose has tightened around the death penalty, both internationally and within the United States, fewer and fewer credentialed experts have been willing to involve themselves with state-mandated executions. Pharmaceutical companies have become more aggressive in making sure their drugs are not used to kill people. (Here’s a good run-down of the way in which Europe has sequentially banned exports of a series of drugs used in US executions – forcing states with the death penalty to keep switching from one drug to the next to evade the export bans, thus inevitably going further and further into unknown territory in terms of how these drugs work in an execution setting with relatively untrained staff.) Medical experts – or really anyone with serious life sciences expertise – just won’t participate anymore. I’m not saying never. But it’s become much more difficult.

Meanwhile, Florida death row chaplain Dale S. Recinella urges people not to overlook the “conditions of confinement”:

They’re extremely primitive. We have 412 men being held in six-foot-by-ten-foot cells with a toilet, a stainless steel shelf that serves as a bunk, and a small property locker for their legal materials and religious books. And that’s it. There’s no air conditioning in the summer when the heat indexes here are astronomical. So the first concern of someone ministering in these conditions is the plight of people in the cells, which is extremely difficult emotionally, physically and mentally. We’ve all heard of inmates who say, “Just give up my appeals and kill me,” and those are folks who don’t have the strength to endure these conditions. …

Especially with all of the botched executions recently, we’ve heard a lot of people defend it by saying, “It’s not as bad as what the criminals did.” Really? Should our standard of moral action be that we’re not as bad as the criminals in our midst?

Previous Dish on capital punishment here, here, here, and here.

Be A Man. Take Paternity Leave. Ctd

A new ad for Cheerios champions stay-at-home dads:

A reader responds to a recent post on paternity leave and masculinity:

There’s nothing more manly than taking paternity leave. Any stigma around it is tied to a general misunderstanding of its purpose. Paternity leave is the very opposite of time off: it’s a cruel parody of a vacation. Far from rewarding a new dad with a couple weeks to put up his feet and light a valedictory cigar, it’s meant designed to let a bewildered, anxious new dad support his exhausted, overwhelmed, frazzled spouse as much as possible and keep her from jumping out a window. But just as important, it creates the foundation of a lifelong bond with a child that no real man would want to break. A young single friend of mine recently suggested that paternity leave was bullshit—that new dads should be real men and get back to work. I somehow controlled my rage and gently explained to him that, after spending a couple of weeks in the trenches with an incomprehensible newborn and a spouse on the edge, I couldn’t wait to get back to work, where the office world, however imperfect, was populated with adults and routine and still made some kind of familiar sense.

The Dish also addressed paternity leave back in December. Another reader:

Before you get too far arguing for paid paternity leave, can we first get a quarter of employers to offer paid maternity leave?

According to Working Mother magazine, just 16% of employers offer paid maternity leave. And frankly, women really need leave after giving birth. It is extremely hard on your body! Lack of sleep because you spend one of every three hours ’round the clock in the first weeks as The Boob. If you have a C-section you are advised not to drive for two weeks. There are other TMI-ish side effects, too.

We could go a long way towards socializing boys and young men to care for children so they are better prepared for active parenthood. My husband, who is an amazing father, spent the first four weeks of fatherhood hiding in the scary unfinished basement of our colonial-era house under the guise of “putting together an IKEA bureau.” (He was a student on holiday break, so he didn’t have a workplace to hide in.) When he couldn’t hide anymore, his default action whenever the baby cried was to hand her to me. I tried to speak his language, engineering, and put together a Baby Management Flow Chart mapping out the basics of caring for a newborn. It helped, a little.

Update from a reader:

I’m a business school professor and a long-time advocate for fathers’ work-family concerns, including paternity leave (also a proud Dish subscriber!). In fact, I recently spoke at the White House Summit on Working Fathers and the Working Families Summit to advocate for these very issues. I was also a national spokesperson for fathers to support the FAMILY Act for paid parental leave for both moms and dads. I know this may be poor form, but I recently wrote a blog post about my paternity leave experience, how it affected my family, and why it is important for more dads to have access to leave. I think it melds the personal and the policy well, and it may be of interest to Dishheads.

Another Dishhead:

I wanted to mention my own experience with this, although it wasn’t paid paternity leave. When my ex and I found out she was pregnant with our first child in 2002, I was able to get permission from my company to take four weeks off – two weeks was my paid vacation, and two weeks was unpaid time off. We had 9 months worth of paychecks to save up, so I just set aside enough from each paycheck to cover the two weeks that would be unpaid.

Unfortunately, when my son was born in November of 2005, I was working for a different company, and we were evacuated to Dallas at the time due to Hurricane Katrina. It made for an extremely stressful pregnancy, particularly since no New Orleans area code phone numbers were going through, and we weren’t able to reach our OB. Luckily, the one woman I knew in Dallas was married to a a guy who was a nurse, so he was able to recommend an excellent OB for us, and everything went fine. I was only able to take two weeks off for my son’s birth, but I was probably lucky to get those, considering the conditions.

I can’t say for sure whether that time with my newborns has made us any closer, or made me a better dad. But I’m glad I was able to have it. And I’m baffled by the fact that the majority of dads I’ve asked about it say they took one or two days off, and don’t seem to think it’s that big a deal. But then I’m baffled at a lot of things some parents do.

Off topic, I’ve written you before, but I don’t think I ever told you before that I started out as a liberal as a young adult, then became a die-hard conservative for many years. And during some of those right-wing years, I actively avoided reading your site. Finally came back right around the time of the 2008 elections, and between your writing and Sarah Palin being chosen as McCain’s VP candidate, I’ve become a fairly die-hard liberal again, although hopefully a more informed one than when I was 20. Amusingly, I’m even to the left of my ex-wife now on some subjects. One of them being marijuana legalization.

So thank you for making me see the other side of a lot of issues I had my mind made up about. And I guess I should thank Sarah Palin for being bat-shit crazy, but I don’t think I will.

Russia Grows More Brazen

Over the weekend, the US released “proof that not only is Russia delivering heavy artillery for pro-Russian rebels, but it is actually firing rockets in eastern Ukraine from its own territory.” Rosie Gray collects further evidence:

On Wednesday, a Russian soldier, Vadim Grigoriev, posted several photos of Russian artillery positions on Russian Facebook clone VK with the caption, “We pounded Ukraine all night.” After Ukrainian media noticed his posts, Grigoriev deleted his profile and told Russian state media that his account had been hacked.

The State Department had previously accused Russia of shelling Ukraine from across the border, but had not released evidence for this until now.

Meanwhile, Kate Brannen keeps tabs on the “steady buildup of Russian troops along the border with Ukraine”:

The U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Douglas Lute, told the Aspen Security Forum Friday that 15,000 Russian troops were amassed along the border with Ukraine. U.S. officials say that Putin had 28,000 troops deployed along the Russian-Ukrainian border earlier this year, but withdrew all but roughly 1,000 of the soldiers in the run-up to June ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Since then, however, Putin has returned roughly 15,000 troops to the border, effectively restoring half of the initial drawdown.

What Can Liberals Do With The Ryan Plan?

Ramesh argues that liberals can and should play ball with Paul Ryan and embrace some of the ideas in his anti-poverty plan:

For a politician, Ryan has shown a lot of willingness to revise his proposals in light of reasonable criticism. His ideas for reforming Medicare, for example, have been refined over time. In this plan, too, Ryan has addressed some of the strongest objections to previous versions of conservative ideas. When federal payouts to states have been suggested before, critics have noted that they might leave states and poor people in a bind during recessions. So Ryan’s plan includes proposals — such as tying the amount of aid distributed to the unemployment level in a given state — intended to make the grants counter-cyclical. … The bigger question to my mind, though, isn’t what Ryan will do next. It’s whether liberals will give his good ideas a fair hearing.

Ryan and Obama are actually on the same page on several issues, including college expenses. Both men, Libby Nelson observes, want colleges to be held accountable for providing an education that’s worth the money:

Where Ryan and Obama differ is on how specific they’re willing to be about what “skin in the game” might look like or what outcomes they want to measure. Ryan’s higher education plan includes concrete proposals for Pell Grants and for capping loans for parents and graduate students. He also suggests specific ways that the federal government could ensure quality in two-year degrees and online programs. Ryan is much more vague when it comes to bigger philosophical shifts that would affect all of higher education.

That might be because he runs into ideological difficulties. Ryan’s explanations of the problems with higher education draw heavily on research and policy analysis from the New America Foundation. The think tank, which has influenced Obama’s higher education policy as well, proposed solutions in its reports too. But those solutions often call for a more muscular government role.

They also see eye-to-eye on the Earned Income Tax Credit, Dylan Matthews adds, but again, the devil is in the details:

[B]oth parties have accepted a norm in recent years where all budgetary proposals must be at least deficit-neutral, so both Obama and Ryan include measures to pay for the idea.

And neither set of pay-fors is remotely acceptable to the other side. Obama would pay for the expansion by raising taxes on hedge fund managers and rich self-employed people, while Ryan would cut other safety net programs and “corporate welfare,” which is this case means specifically energy subsidies the Obama administration likes. Ryan has explicitly rejected Obama’s funding mechanism, and it’s hard to imagine Obama accepting Ryan’s.

Earlier Dish on Ryan’s plan here. A reader sounds off:

You quoted Callie Gable:

A key element of the contracts would be encouraging work, which, currently, only cash welfare requires. Food stamps, federal housing aid, utilities assistance, and more don’t have work requirements — this would essentially mandate that states opting for the Opportunity Grant implement work requirements.

This gets the food stamp program, now called SNAP, wrong. SNAP requires that able-bodied adults without dependents (“ABAWDs” in federal bureaucratese) work or attend job training. Otherwise, they are cut off from SNAP benefits after three months. SNAP also includes a work incentive in the form of an earned-income deduction: for every dollar a SNAP household earns, its benefits decline by only 30 cents. There is reason to believe that these incentives are effective: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in more than half of SNAP households containing at least one working-age, non-disabled adult, recipients are employed.

The fundamental reason why more SNAP recipients aren’t employed is that many are not able to work. Almost half of all SNAP beneficiaries are children, and many more are elderly or disabled. Others live in areas where the state government – not individual applicants – have received permission to waive work requirements because unemployment is so high that people can’t get jobs.

Paul Ryan has some ideas that are great, including streamlining services and providing more assistance in the form of cash. Some of his other ideas, including turning programs into block grants, are terrible for reasons that others have explained. But it drives me crazy to see people talking about SNAP as though it doesn’t include work requirements or support people who work.

Can Israel “Win” This War?

Daniel Berman doubts it:

In effect, what Israel can do militarily is to kill a lot of people, the majority of which will probably be Hamas members or supporters, but which will do nothing to politically advance Israeli security beyond demonstrating to Palestinians and their supporters that in favorable circumstances Israel can do what it wants with international support. I do not necessarily think that such a demonstration is value-less; I authored a piece earlier this week arguing that a key prerequisite of any peace agreement is a Palestinian recognition that Israel as the stronger party will get the better half of any possible deal. As such, I think demonstrating Israeli superiority could be of value.

Yet the Israeli superiority that needs to be demonstrated is political not military; no sane Palestinian believes they can defeat the Israelis in battle. … In the end there will be a cease-fire, and Hamas will have survived by virtue of the campaign they forced Israel to wage, even if every single current Hamas member in Gaza is somehow killed by the IDF. After all, Hamas is already being treated by mediators as an almost equal of Israel while the Palestinian Authority is all but forgotten. At that point what truly will have been accomplished?

That helps explain the Israelis’ furious response to the Kerry proposal. But all Kerry is recognizing is what Netanyahu has wrought. It is Netanyahu who proved that the PA’s moderate strategy is futile – since Israel has only rewarded that moderation with more aggressive settlements. It is Netanyahu’s hysterical and belligerent exploitation of the deaths of three Israeli teens that elevated Hamas to a position it would never have achieved on its own. And this awful cycle of extremism from Jerusalem has now forged a unanimous Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire. But once the dogs of war have been released, it’s hard to rein them back in:

Young men who were only first-graders during Operation Defensive Shield are now soldiers invading Gaza by land. In each of these operations there have been right-wing politicians and military commentators who pointed out that “this time we’ll have to pull all the stops, take it all the way, until the end.” Watching them on television, I can’t help but ask myself, What is this end they’re striving toward? Even if each and every Hamas fighter is taken out, does anyone truly believe that the Palestinian people’s aspiration for national independence will disappear with them?

Before Hamas, we fought against the P.L.O., and after Hamas, assuming, hopefully, that we’re still around, we’ll probably find ourselves fighting against another Palestinian organization. The Israeli military can win the battles, but peace and quiet for the citizens of Israel will only be achieved through political compromise. But this, according to the patriotic powers running the current war, is something that we’re not supposed to say, because this kind of talk is precisely what’s stopping the I.D.F. from winning. Ultimately, when this operation is over and the tally is taken of the many dead bodies, on our side and theirs, the accusing finger will once again be pointed at us, the saboteurs.

Noting that Israel has carried out over 2,400 airstrikes since the start of the war, Robert Beckhusen explains why Israel’s air power is so ineffective against Hamas:

Whether Israel is justified or not in attacking Hamas, the choice the Israeli military to rely heavily on air power to achieve its objectives has resulted in disproportionate civilian losses compared to the threat Hamas poses. … The result is that either way, Hamas will probably come out of the fight with enough Israeli dead on its hands to claim some kind of victory. Hamas will likely be hurting badly. But Israel’s reliance on air power to destroy Hamas’s rockets will also likely fall short. Without a political solution, the conflict will almost certainly resume again.

(Photo: The bodies of at least ten children arrived at Al-Shefaa Hospital morgue, having been killed by an Israeli strike on a camp public park on July 28, 2014 in Gaza. At least ten Palestinian children were killed and others injured on Monday by an Israeli strike on the western Gaza City Al-Shati Camp. Israel launched a series of aerial strikes on different parts of the Gaza Strip on Monday, the first day in the Islamic minor feast. By Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

A Gift To Obamacare Foes, Ctd

In 2012, Obamacare advisor Jon Gruber said, “if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,” an interpretation of the ACA that supports the anti-Obamacare Halbig ruling. He made this point more than once. Nicholas Bagley dismisses the fracas over these comments:

[I]f you think what Gruber said is some evidence about what the ACA means, you can’t ignore other, similar evidence. That’s cherry-picking. So go ask John McDonough, who was intimately involved in drafting the ACA and is as straight a shooter as there is: “There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status.” Or ask Senator Max Baucus’s chief health adviser, Liz Fowler. She says the same thing. Or ask Doug Elmendorf, the current CBO Director: “To the best of our recollection, the possibility that those subsidies would only be available in states that created their own exchanges did not arise during the discussions CBO staff had with a wide range of Congressional staff when the legislation was being considered.” …

Better still, ask the states, which were on the receiving end of the supposed threat. According to a report from the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute, there’s no contemporaneous evidence that the states feared that declining to set up an exchange might lead to a loss of tax credits. How can it be that Congress unambiguously threatened the states with the possible loss of tax credits if the states never understood that threat?

How Ezra views this controversy:

Gruber’s comments aren’t getting so much attention because anyone actually believes them. They’re getting so much attention because some people want other people to believe them.

It would be much simpler if the argument about Obamacare could simply be about what it’s actually about: some people believe the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a good law. Others believe it’s a bad law and they would like to see it repealed.

The problem is that the people who believe it’s a bad law haven’t won the elections necessary to repeal it. So they’ve turned, in desperation, to the courts. But the Supreme Court doesn’t strike laws down for being bad. It strikes them down for being unconstitutional, or incomprehensible. And that’s forced Obamacare’s critics to make some very weird and very weak arguments.

Adrianna McIntyre chimes in:

Though the controversy over what Gruber said — and what he did or didn’t mean by what he said — has been newsy and potentially embarrassing, it’s not actually very consequential, legally. Courts put much more stock in the words that Congress chose when enacting the law, and the context in which Congress put those words, than what people say about the law.

While Gruber was certainly a key advisor during the Obamacare debate, he was not a member of Congress who voted to pass the actual law. And that likely gives his words less weight than those of legislators in front of the courts.

Weigel thinks the “timing of the speech is important”:

Gruber said this in January 2012. It wasn’t until May 2012 that the IRS issued a rule, clarifying that subsidies would also be available to the states that joined the federal exchange. And it wasn’t until July 2012 that Cannon and Adler published their paper making the argument that the language of the law forbade any such mulligan for states.

But this bolsters the libertarians’ case. Gruber is acknowledged, by everyone, as an architect of the ACA. There is, to date, no evidence that he flogged the carrot/stick subsidies idea on Congress, and as Cannon writes in a piece at Forbes, Gruber has done hours of scoffing at the rationale behind Halbig. It just happens that in early 2012, when Cannon was barnstorming states to get them to avoid creating exchanges, Gruber was telling them they had better create exchanges or they wouldn’t get subsidies.

Ben Domenech celebrates:

It’s rare that a piece of video evidence comes along which, in an instant, so clearly and thoroughly undermines the case that one faction has made so consistently. I’m a little shocked myself, and interested to see how the people who’ve been calling Michael Cannon nuts for years offer their mea culpas. Because they will do that, right?

McArdle makes simular remarks:

We can draw two conclusions from this: First, the reading of the law by Halbig’s plaintiffs is clearly not ridiculous or dishonest; if it is a mistake, it is a mistake that one of the law’s chief architects could make. And second, we should be very skeptical of people who are now telling us, four years later, what the legislative intent was. Memory really is extraordinarily unreliable, and as we see here, it’s very easy to forget what you believed even a couple of years ago. This is one reason that courts ignore post-facto statements about intent and concentrate on the legal text and the legislative history.

But Scott Galupo calls the controversy “pure unmitigated cuckoo cockamamie BS”:

The cherry-picking of off-the-cuff remarks isn’t the worst thing about this absurdist drama. Take a step back: Michael Cannon, the Cato mastermind, basically went on a fishing expedition to find someone with standing in the Halbig case. His lightbulb: the average citizen has standing! And now this bombshell video: the Gruber remarks were the first and so far only piece of documentary evidence I’ve seen that anyone actually believed subsidies weren’t intended to be offered via the federal exchanges. This evidence was discovered two years after the lawsuit was filed.

Waldman piles on:

If this was actually what Congress thought the law would do, then liberals would have been freaking out about this provision for years, because it would mean that millions of people wouldn’t be able to get coverage. And conservatives would have been crowing about it for years, for the same reason. But nobody on either side was, because it was never part of Congress’s intent. It was a mistake, and one contradicted by multiple other provisions in the law.

I have no doubt that when the Halbig case is re-argued before the full D.C. Circuit, either the plaintiffs’ attorneys or one of the conservative judges will bring up Gruber’s 2012 comments. Let’s just hope it gets shot down like the baloney it is.

Marriage Equality Update

#BREAKING: U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down Virginia’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

— Reuters U.S. News (@ReutersUS) July 28, 2014

From #Virginia, yet another federal appellate @freedomtomarry ruling, the 29th consecutive pro-#marriage court win. http://t.co/njYRbeWrd2

— Evan Wolfson (@evanwolfson) July 28, 2014

The 4th Circuit’s decision striking down VA’s ban on marriage equality is available here: http://t.co/pmTxdpS5n8

— AG Mark Herring (@AGMarkHerring) July 28, 2014

Inching Toward A Ceasefire?

Whole blocks of apartment houses destroyed in Shijaiyah. Scale is far far greater than previous Gaza wars. pic.twitter.com/vaZgKcay9Z

— William Booth (@BoothWilliam) July 26, 2014

The Gaza war continues, despite an uneasy calm during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which began today, and renewed calls for a more permanent ceasefire. During the halt in the fighting on Saturday, Gazans assessed the damage to their homes and neighborhoods, discovering scenes like the one above:

Some Shejaiya residents had held out hope their homes would be spared only to find utter devastation. Ahmed al-Jamal, a 60-year-old grandfather, sat on a plastic chair in front of the wreckage of his home. “I had no idea it was destroyed,” he said. He stared at the floor, picking absently at a piece of wire by his foot. “I came to get my things during the cease-fire and I found nothing. I don’t know where we’ll go.”

Meanwhile, Israelis have reacted with fury to John Kerry’s proposal for a cease-fire, which includes an easing of the blockade of people and goods in the Israeli-occupied urban prison. Kerry’s crime was to include Hamas’ regional allies, Turkey and Qatar, in the negotiations, to be based on the 2012 Egyptian proposal. The president also reiterated to Netanyahu that he wanted any cease-fire to allow for a normal life for Gaza’s residents. The Israeli cabinet leaked Kerry’s proposals and leading Israeli figures could not believe what they were reading. Actual relief for Gazans? Negotiations with Hamas’ allies even as Israel is on the verge of “victory”? Here is alleged moderate Ari Shavit letting it rip:

The Obama administration proved once again that it is the best friend of its enemies, and the biggest enemy of its friends. The man of peace from Massachusetts intercepted with his own hands the reasonable cease-fire that was within reach, and pushed both the Palestinians and Israelis toward an escalation that most of them did not want … If Israel is forced to ultimately undertake an expanded ground operation in which dozens of young Israelis and hundreds of Palestinian civilians could lose their lives, it would be appropriate to name the offensive after the person who caused it: John Kerry.

What the Obama administration proved is that the US and the world would prefer not to have to keep witnessing these bloodbaths and want to get to the real roots of the conflict. It’s understandable that the Israelis simply believe that US foreign policy is about backing them and paying them for the privilege, but this administration has at least attempted to forge a policy in America’s rather than Greater Israel’s interests.

David Bernstein has a similar take on Kerry’s proposal, now backed by all 15 members of the UN Security Council:

It’s truly awful; it meets most of Hamas’s demands, and none of Israel’s. Even the left-wing Ha’aretz carries this commentary from its diplomatic correspondent: “The draft Kerry passed to Israel on Friday shocked the cabinet ministers not only because it was the opposite of what Kerry told them less than 24 hours earlier, but mostly because it might as well have been penned by Khaled Meshal (leader of Hamas). It was everything Hamas could have hoped for.”

Adam Taylor offers a less tendentious take:

To understand why Kerry’s cease-fire plan failed, it helps to understand what a “cease-fire” really means in the reality of the current Israel-Palestinian conflict. While it’s not exactly a war, the conflict has been escalating and de-escalating for years, occasionally flaring up into full warfare at points. In this context, Kerry’s cease-fire doesn’t really look like a chance for a return to peace: It looks like a break from fighting and a return to a lower, yet still uncomfortable, level of hostilities that will probably soon flare up again. Israel has targeted Gaza, with the hope of crushing Hamas, four times since the Palestinian Islamist group came to power in 2007. Even if a cease-fire is agreed on soon, a betting man might predict the two sides will be trying to reach another one in a couple of years.

That’s a big problem. Numerous public opinion polls have shown that for all the international criticism of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, it remains popular within Israel. … “Israel must be permitted to crush Hamas,” is how Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013, put it in an op-ed for The Post published Thursday. Reports that Israel hopes to expand its ground operation suggest that may be the way things are heading.

In any case, Juan Cole argues, a ceasefire is not enough:

Gaza is not a country, that Israel can be at war with it. It is a tiny strip of land surrounded by Israel from land, sea and air, which is kept from exporting its made goods for the most part, faces severe restrictions on imports, and therefore has had imposed on it a 40% or so unemployment rate. Some 56% of Palestinians in Gaza are food insecure. Gaza is recognized by the international community as an occupied territory, with Israel being the occupying power. If being occupied by Israel were so great, by the way, why is Gaza so badly off?

Hamas keeps rejecting any ceasefire that does not include a provision for the lifting of the siege of the civilian population. I heard the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, speaking after the meeting of diplomats in Paris, and he spoke about a settlement that allowed for the social and economic development of the Palestinians. What a joke! France has done nothing practical to end the blockade or allow Palestinians to develop. So a cease-fire that does not include an end to the blockade on Gaza by Israel is not a cease-fire, it is a pause in the war.

Month: July 2014