Recent history: How Ronald Reagan got Israel to stop ongoing slaughter

This is about some history well worth knowing. In the past, the US used its power to get Israel to stop an ongoing military conflict. A NYT article (not paywalled) discusses some of the events on Aug. 12-13, 1982 regarding the power of a US president to stop an ongoing Israeli military action:

Chronology of Crisis About 6 A.M. (midnight Wednesday, New York time) - Israelis begin bombing west Beirut. As raids continue, Lebanon's Prime Minister, Shafik al-Wazzan, tells Philip C. Habib, the special American envoy, that the talks cannot continue.

2 P.M. (8 A.M., New York time) -The Israeli Cabinet meets. A message from President Reagan arrives, expressing ''outrage'' and, reportedly threatening to halt the Habib mission. The Cabinet decides to end the raids and order new ones only if they are ''essential.''

4 P.M. (10 A.M., New York time) -President Reagan tries for hour to call Mr. Begin but cannot get through. 4:50 P.M. (10:50 A.M., New York time) - King Fahd of Saudi Arabia calls Mr. Reagan. 5 P.M. (11 A.M., New York time) -A new cease-fire goes into effect in west Beirut. 5:10 P.M. (11:10 A.M., New York time) - Mr. Reagan reaches Mr. Begin for 10-minute telephone call. 5:40 P.M. (11:40 A.M., New York time) - Mr. Begin calls President Reagan to say that a ''complete cease-fire'' had been ordered.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 - President Reagan expressed ''outrage'' to Prime Minister Menachem Begin today over Israel's latest bombing raids in west Beirut, saying the attacks had resulted in ''needless destruction and bloodshed.'' It was the sharpest statement by Mr. Reagan since the start of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon nine weeks ago.

Larry Speakes, the deputy White House press secretary, said Mr. Reagan had been ''shocked'' by the Israeli attacks on west Beirut. Mr. Reagan voiced his feelings directly to Mr. Begin, according to Mr. Speakes.

Mr. Speakes said the Israeli action had threatened the efforts by Philip C. Habib, the special American envoy, to end the fighting in Lebanon and arrange for the withdrawal of the 6,000 to 9,000 Palestinian guerrillas trapped in west Beirut. In the last 48 hours, Mr. Habib's peace plan seemed on the verge of success. 'Massive Military Action'

''The President expressed his outrage over this latest round of massive military action,'' Mr. Speakes said early this afternoon. ''He emphasized that Israel's action halted Ambassador Habib's negotiations for a peaceful resolution of the Beirut crisis when they were at the point of success. The result has been more needless destruction and bloodshed.''

The NYT article continues. The ceasefire in 1982 was reported elsewhere as having been "independently" reached by Israel a 10 minutes before Reagan got through to Begin. However, word of Reagan's demand reached Tel Aviv hours before an "emergency cabinet meeting" which put an end to the bombing. Apparently, Israel wanted to save face and claim it stopped the fighting on its own accord.

An Aug. 9, 2007 Reuters article reported about Reagan referring to the Israeli military action as a holocaust:

Reagan diaries reveal president's private musings

Reagan took care not to spell out even mild swear words, so hell was written h--l and damn was d---. 

But at times he was provocative. He intentionally used the word "holocaust" to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to refer to an Israeli attack on Beirut. 

On February 6, 1982, he noted that "trouble brewing in the Middle East" ahead of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon and that, "Right now Israel has lost a lot of world sympathy."

He said one particularly devastating bombing and artillery attack on western Beirut in August 1982 had led King Fahd of Saudi Arabia to call the White House "begging me to do something."

"I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did -- I was angry -- I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off."

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute has this diary entry for Aug. 12,1982:

Met with the news the Israelis delivered the most devastating bomb & artillery attack on W. Beirut lasting 14 hours. Habib cabled—desperate—has basic agreement from all parties but cant arrange details of P.L.O. withdrawal because of the barrage. King Fahd called begging me to do something. I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did—I was angry. I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with it’s arms blown off. He told me he had ordered the bombing stopped—I asked about the artillery fire. He claimed the P.L.O. had started that & Israeli forces had taken casualties. End of call. Twenty mins. later he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and plead for our continued friendship.

I've said it before and say it again: The US had the power and could have used it to force a reasonable peace agreement, but it failed to do so. Now, it is too late for that. It probably has been too late ever since a Jewish zealot with a gun assassinated Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995. This gigantic failure of US foreign policy could wind up being the straw that breaks the back of American democracy. This US failure could be a necessary part of the reason that the American experiment in democracy came to its stupid end in 2024.

 

The cynical deceit in American radical right authoritarianism

At ~1:54 - 3:10 of this 8:30 video, Project 2025 co-author Russell Vought talks about secret plans for killing the deep state and installing authoritarianism in the federal government. 

On its website, CNN posted a 5:23 video of this secretly recorded interview, with more of the interview shown than in the longer YouTube video. Vought thinks he is speaking to family members of a wealthy donor, but instead one is a reporter and the other is an actor.

What needs to be understood is that America's authoritarian radical right have extreme policies and governing tactics that are being kept strictly secret from the public to avoid losing the 2024 election.

In the interview Vought says that DJT distancing himself from Project 2025 is just politics. He calls Project 2025 a liberal boogeyman. He says there are secret plans (350 documents) that are not in Project 2025 that reflect either what DJT wants to do after he is re-elected, or what Vought himself wants. The secret plans include a total ban on abortions with no exceptions for anything, which DJT has said he opposes. Vought concedes that DJT needs to win the election, so the total abortion ban and other unpopular policy goals stay secret. Vought calls himself a Christian nationism person, which is close to Christian nationalism but in some undefined way, and wants America to be a Christian nation, whatever that means. 

Vought envisions a total ban on all pornography and massive deportations of immigrants to save America (presumably from the Great Replacement threat). He says that DJT has the power to deploy the military on the border and everywhere else that law and order needs to be maintained. Vought envisions as shadow bureaucracy to subvert existing institutions, federal bureaucrats and their independence. On this point, he is literally talking about setting up DJT in a dictatorship. He envisions (i) defunding bureaucracies and impounding funds to throttle them, and (ii) forming a shadow Office of Management and Budget and a shadow National Security Council and a shadow Office of Legal Counsel, all of which planning will be kept strictly secret until after the election.

Vought describes Democrats and liberals generally as evil monsters. He claims the demonstrations after George Floyd's death had nothing to do with race. Instead he says it was a liberal attempt to destabilize the Trump administration and pull down "structures" in society for the purposes of revolution, presumably violent revolution. 

American politics does not get much scarier or threatening than this.

Poll data on Gaza ceasefire

Some poll data indicates that most Americans want a push for a ceasefire in Gaza. Zeto recently reported:

New Poll Suggests Gaza Ceasefire and 

Arms Embargo Would Help Dems with Swing State Voters

The YouGov/IMEU Policy Project poll found over a third of voters in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia are more likely to vote for a Democratic nominee who pledges to withhold weapons to Israel

A significant share of Democrats and independent voters in pivotal swing states Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona are more likely to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee (presumptively Kamala Harris) if said nominee pledges support for an arms embargo to Israel, and if President Joe Biden secures a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. The findings come in new polling commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project and conducted by polling firm YouGov.

In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withhold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely. 

Similar results were found when respondents were asked separately if they were more or less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if Biden called for an end to US.-funded weapons to Israel or if the US president secured a ceasefire.

The results were particularly stark when looking at responses by those who voted for Biden in 2020 and are currently undecided. In Pennsylvania, 57% of such voters said they’d be more likely to support the Democratic nominee if they pledged to withhold additional weapons to Israel for committing human rights abuses; in Arizona, 44% said the same; in Georgia, 34% said so.

YouGov has been ranked 3rd out of several hundred polling organizations.

Responsible Statecraft reported this last December: 

Roughly three in four Democrats support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, according to a new poll from Data for Progress [poll ranking 24th] that highlights the sharp divide between the Democratic Party and its supporters as Israel resumes its ground campaign in the war-torn strip. A total of 61% of Americans polled said they were in favor of a ceasefire.

While the Biden administration has signaled that it is concerned about the level of civilian casualties in Gaza, the White House maintains that any sustained pause in fighting would embolden Hamas and enable future attacks against Israel.

The administration’s hard-line position stands in contrast to the growing support for a ceasefire in the House, where roughly half of the Democratic caucus has called for an end to the war. Biden’s policy has, however, earned a better reception in the Senate, with only two Democrats saying they back a ceasefire.

The poll, which surveyed roughly 1,200 likely voters between Nov. 22 and 25, also found that a plurality (49%) of Republican voters support a ceasefire, though that number dropped by more than 10 points when respondents were told that such a move would “keep Hamas in power and allow them to prepare another attack against Israel.”  

Voters also overwhelmingly support the idea that weapons sales to Israel should be conditioned on human rights, according to the survey. That trend is particularly strong among Democrats, 76% of whom say Tel Aviv should only receive weapons if it uses them in accordance with “our standards for human rights.”

Truthout commented on the YouGov poll mentioned above: Support for an end to the arms transfers to Israel is strongest among those who are undecided in the presidential race.

A Gallup poll from last March (poll ranking 35th) reported this data:

Apparently, being informed changes opinions

If the collective poll data is correct, a call by Harris for at least a ceasefire probably would help her more than it hurt. However, doing that would probably anger many pro-Israel people and groups in the US. AIPAC might throw its considerable cash and influence in support of DJT, who favors obliteration of the Palestinian people. If the election is close, that factor alone might be sufficient to tip the race in favor of DJT. 

It would be beyond ironic if the US lost its democracy to authoritarianism due in a small but necessary part to continuing US support for Israel's war in Gaza. We live in times that are very dangerous for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. Unreasonably and irrationally dangerous.

New Israeli human rights group report on systematic torture in Israel

 B'Tselem, the well known Israeli human rights organization, issued a disturbing report called "Welcome to Hell," last week. On its website (where the full report can be seen or downloaded) the human rights group describes its report thus:

Welcome to Hell is a report on the abuse and inhuman treatment of  Palestinians held in custody since 7, October 2023. B'Tselem collected  testimonies from 55 Palestinians held during that time and released, almost all with no charges. Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.

Democracy Now and CNN have both covered the report. Below is a 25 min. clip from Democracy Now that discusses the horrifying report, along with recent UN condemnations of Israeli torture of Palestinians, and reporting on Israel's TV channel 12 which aired shocking footage of soldiers sexually assaulting a prisoner at Sde Teiman base, where 1000s of detainees from Gaza are held, and tortured (as revealed in previous reporting covered on this blog).

Earlier this month, video emerged  of a gang rape of a Palestinian prisoner by guards at the Sde Teiman detention facility in the Negev desert, southern Israel.

The video, which was widely reported,  shows the prisoner being selected from a larger group lying bound on the floor. The victim is then escorted to a wall, where guards, using their shields to hide their identity from the camera, proceed to rape him. When 9 guards were held for questioning by the IDF (a rare event indeed), some far right ultra-nationalist politicians, like Security Minister Ben-Gvir (who perversely oversees the Israeli prison system) and many Israeli youths who share his views, condemned the decision to arrest the suspects, arguing that "anything is permissible, even rape, for the security of the state." He went on to say, "It is shameful to arrest our best heroes." 

Another far right minister, Finance Minister Smotrich, demanded “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.” The rape and torture is legitimate against anyone deemed "Hamas" a label used even for 100s of randomly seized detainees from Gaza who have been rounded up, tortured and later released without charges. 

Disturbingly, when asked by an Arab MP in Israel's Knesset whether "it is legitimate to insert a stick into a person's rectum," Hanoch Milwidsky, a member of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, responded: “If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!” (source: CBS News Reports). 

Responding to warnings of overcrowding within the prison system from the security agency Shin Bet in early July, Ben-Gvir repeated his call for Palestinian prisoners to be executed, tweeting that one of his principal goals since attaining office had been to “worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law”.

He said: “Everything published about the abominable conditions” of the Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons “was true”.

So here we are, once again sending weapons to what has clearly become a fascist state, replete with eliminationist ideology, concentration camps, systematic torture, the now completed destruction of Gaza. This is our "closest ally!? " 

The Times of Israel reported that  Blinken (note: not Biden) has just approved $20 billion sale of weapons to Israel, including F-15s-- right on the heels of the revelations discussed here, which place Israel well outside of the category of ethical and  law-abiding Liberal Democracies of the world.  Biden doesn't make a sound about it. Blinken seems to be making decisions, while Biden is disturbingly AWOL. State Dept. mouthpieces only say, "Israel will investigate these allegations of violations of international law" as if they are reliable and transparent. Kamala Harris has studiously avoided the topic, as she tries to appease concerned progressives without actually saying anything about US policy in the face of these tragic developments. Of course, the problem will not go away as protestors prepare to make their voices known to the Biden Administration, including Harris at the upcoming convention.  Campus protests are sure to restart in a few weeks, and it will be important to see how Harris responds. She has promised to listen with respect. I hope so. Of course, Trump too avoids discussing his plans should he win. But at the moment Trump has no power to stop sending weapons even if he wanted to (and he does not). This is happening in real-time. This administration has responsibility for its own policies in the ongoing present. The buck stops there. It is not only a potential pitfall for the Dems, but a moral stain on this nation. We have enabled all of this for the better part of a year, and do not even know who is in charge anymore. 

It is in the context of all the above, that the following report on the Human Rights report and related revelations of torture, which is being defended by wide swathes of Israeli society and ignored by others, is of particular relevance.

Recommended related readings:  

>>"As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel: This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree "  by Omer Bartov at The Guardian here.

>> Haaretz' Gideon Levy: "Welcome to Hell: B'Tselem's Ignored Abuse Report Shows Israel's True Face" The short article can be read at Haaretz here.

Because the article may be behind a paywall, I will past just a few paragraphs from it below: 

 The B'Tselem report published this week, "Welcome to Hell," isn't only a report about what's happening in Israel's prison facilities; it's a report about Israel. Anyone who wants to know what Israel is should read this report before any other document about Israeli democracy.

Anyone who wants to become familiar with the spirit of the times in Israel should note how most of the media outlets ignored the report, which should have caused outrage and shock in Israel. Even the documentation of the gang rape reported this week by Guy Peleg on Channel 12 News didn't show only the Sde Teiman detention facility. It showed the face of the country.

If a report like that of B'Tselem was almost totally ignored here, and if even after the evidence shown by Peleg the debate as to whether it's permitted to detain the despicable soldiers presented in it continues – on the Channel 12 morning program there was a discussion of who's in favor of rape [of alleged terrorists] and who's opposed – then Peleg's documentation is documentation of the face of Israel 2024, its spirit and its likeness.

Unfortunately, even Peleg continued to call the victim of the barbaric rape a "terrorist" (after all, he does work for Channel 12 News), although a moment earlier he revealed that the rape victim wasn't a member of Hamas or a company commander – he was an ordinary policeman in the anti-drug unit in Jabalya. He was also pulled out from among dozens of detainees who were lying handcuffed on the floor, perhaps at random because he was the last one in the row. No violence and no riots, as the suspects' disingenuous lawyers tried to claim....

When you read the 94 pages of the B'Tselem report, which causes you to lose sleep, you understand that it wasn't an exceptional incident, it's the routine of torture, which has become a policy. As opposed to the torture by the Shin Bet, which presumably had a security-minded purpose – to extract information – here it's solely to satisfy the darkest and sickest sadistic urges. Look how calmly the soldiers approach to carry out their malevolent intention. There are dozens of other soldiers too, who saw and knew and remained silent. Apparently they also participated in similar orgies, based on the dozens of testimonies cited in the B'Tselem report. That's the routine.

The indifference to all these things defines Israel. The public legitimization defines Israel. In the Guantanamo Bay detention camp that was opened by the United States after the 9/11 attacks, nine prisoners were killed in 20 years; here it's 60 detainees in 10 months. Need anything more be said?

 

As it is OUR tax money that is paying for these obscenities, what, if anything do you-- readers-- think we, as ordinary citizens should do? Nothing? Sign petitions? Protest? Shrug our shoulders in saddened resignation? Nothing? Who bears responsibility if not the country paying for all of this insanity? Who does the government here represent in theory if not the citizens? Is this country actually  a democracy if such representation does not exist even in a case like this where the vast majority of condemn Israel's behavior and want to see immediate and permanent ceasefire and humanitarian aid? Most Democrats believe Israel has committed genocide, and yet the Dems in charge in Washington ignore their voters and send more weapons (yet again) on the heels of reporting the likes of which we haven't seen in Western nation-states since WW2. The Israelis are not even denying it any more, as documented in this blogpost and the video and articles it features. How can we sit passively by in the face of this scandalous abuse of power by our top politicians? Do they act in your name?

Psychological incivility research update: Incivility is bad for rationality

A 55 minute segment of the Hidden Brain program that NPR broadcasts weekly focuses on social science related to incivility. Rudeness is toxic to the human mind. The effects are subtle but surprisingly powerful and often lingering. The interviewer is Shankar Vedantam and he speaks with researcher Christine Porath.

One part of the transcript, starting at 16:04:

Shankar Vedantam: I want to examine both the immediate effects of incivility on the mind, as well as some of these long-term effects that you're talking about. You say that instability can hijack the amygdala. What do you mean by this, Christine?

Christine Porath: Well, I think it means that we're flooded with emotions and that's when kind of this idea of fight or flight gear kicks in. And it leads to us, for many people, being paralyzed almost in terms of not being able to respond to things, or not being able to react or make changes that would help us in that moment. It's almost as if we can't cope with the situation because we're struggling to process things. And so one way that I think about this is like the storm inside your brain.

Shankar Vedantam: Christina has conducted many studies into the effects of incivility, one of them builds on a famous psychological experiment. Volunteers are asked to watch a video of people rapidly passing a basketball. Right in the middle of the game, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the frame. Many volunteers fail to notice the gorilla because they're so focused on the ball being passed.

Shankar Vedantam: In Christine's experiment, she exposed a subset of volunteers to incivility before they watched the video.

Christine Porath: They were five times less likely to see the gorilla on the screen and that really surprised us but also with other studies, what we found is that it took people a lot longer to answer questions, to solve anagrams, word jumbles, to create words. They had much more difficulty doing that kind of thing, so cognitive performance went down significantly, roughly about 30% across different studies. And even their physical moves to answer questions, that was slower. It seemed to be affecting people in all sorts of ways and what's interesting also is that people weren't aware of this.

Shankar Vedantam: There's been some work that you and others have done looking at the effects of incivility on memory. What do you find?

Christine Porath: We find that when people witness rudeness, they are far less likely to be able to remember things. They make a lot more errors. We measured this with math errors. We measured this with performance errors on cognitive tests and the differences were really stunning with just seeing this or being around it.

Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. You've even found that incivility has effects on our creativity, which I found really surprising. What do you find, Christine?

Christine Porath: Yeah. We find again, whether you experience incivility, whether you witness it, it decreases your ability to come up with creative ideas. In some of the tests, we give them this study where they come up with as many ideas for what to do with a brick as possible, and we code it for dysfunctional ideas as well as how creative the ideas are. What we find is the people that were exposed to rudeness, they come up with really dysfunctional responses for what you do with a brick. They'll say things like, "break someone's nose," "smash someone's fingers," "beat or crush a person to death," "sink a body in a river," "throw it through a window," "place it on the floor to stub people's toe," or something like that.

Shankar Vedantam: It almost seems as if people are coming up with creative uses for the brick that are somewhat aggressive.

Christine Porath: Yeah, scary aggressive. It was just stunning to see the ideas that people came up with because really all that they were exposed to was just one quick incident. It was like a fleeting moment that they were exposed to and somehow this is what they came up with.

Shankar Vedantam: Why do you think rudeness has these effects on creativity, both in some ways limiting how creative we can be, but also perhaps exacerbating this kind of aggressive creativity?

Christine Porath: I think it ties to the hijacking people's focus and attention and the lack of awareness around that. People become much more self-focused, much less other-focused and I think our mind is wrapped up on replaying the incident, where they're not focusing on the task nearly as much. They're overwhelmed by other thoughts and so it's very hard to think about anything else.

Let’s do some self-reflecting…

Well, our Christian visitors are finally gone.  It was a good visit, no problems.  But I have to say, I’ve never heard the word “church” mentioned so many times in the short 3-week timeframe before.  But religion is their obsession, so…  I think I can understand.  I try to.  It's something real and important to them; as real as our (mostly atheists here) reality is to us. 🤷‍♀️

Which got me to wondering, do we here have the same kind of obsession with our politics as they have with their particular obsession, religion?

I ask in earnest because, if I’m honest, I do see some similarity.  So, what is the real difference between obsessions?

Could it be:

• A case of something we see as their fantasy versus our reality?  Meaning, we are more obsessed with thoughts of the real world, versus their being obsessed with thoughts of the other world?  

• Does our being tethered to a more “provable reality” makes that obsession more, I’ll call it, “legitimate/worthy”?  How is legitimacy and worth really judged/gauged anyway?  Strictly in the eye of the beholder?

• For example, while we worry about the real-world consequence of, say a Trump victory in November, they worry about the other worldly consequences of not accepting religion (i.e., eternity in Hell).

Discuss the difference between obsession with politics versus obsession with religion.  Break down the relevant factors to be considered.  Justify them, in your opinion.

(by PrimalSoup)