Saturday Commentary and Review #140
Hamas' Medieval Raid on Israel, "Fake" Populism?, Zelensky Meets the Big Bankers, Space Travel as Mankind's Destiny, We Need More Copper
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
I was planning on posting the SCR yesterday morning, but I, like everyone else in Europe, woke up the news that Hamas had launched a massive and audacious raid into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Even though I prefer not to chase the news cycle, I had no option but to delay posting this weekend’s SCR because this story is too important to not discuss immediately. At the same time, I wanted to wait a whole day in order for some of the fog of war to be lifted, and to get a better handle on the facts (or close approximations thereof) once they have been established.
The scenes coming out of Southern Israel show a daring raid, medieval in nature, as Hamas fighters appear to be making little distinction between Israeli security forces and civilians. Pro-Hamas accounts on Telegram are filled with videos of Israelis taken hostage and being transported back to Gaza where they will most likely be used as human shields, or as bargaining chips with the Israeli Government. Other videos show the desecration of the dead bodies of Israelis, and some even strongly hint at the rape of Israeli women. It’s not a pretty sight. At the same time, I urge caution to those watching these videos and seeing these photos, as not everything can be believed at first. Everyone should know that by now after experiencing ‘warfare voyeurism’ via TV and especially the internet.
The fact of the matter is that Gaza is an open air prison, with Israel and Egypt playing guard. The fact of the matter is that Hamas runs the Gaza Strip, and is an Islamist force hell bent on destroying the Israeli state and forcing Israelis out. There is no possible deal to be made between any possible Israeli governments and Hamas.
Many are focusing on the catastrophic failure of Israeli intel that allowed for the border to be breached so easily. Is it a failure of technology? Some of the more conspiratorially-minded are suggesting that Bibi ‘allowed’ this raid to happen to shore up support for his government and to permit it to ‘cleanse’ Gaza of Palestinians once and for all.
What should be very worrying for Israel are signs that Hezbollah might enter the battle from the north, and that Palestinians on the West Bank rise up as well. Israel has the ability to fend off both Hamas and the various Palestinian militant groupings on the West Bank, but Hezbollah is an unknown quantity.
What this operation by Hamas does accomplish is setting back the attempts by the USA to forge an Israeli-Saudi alliance. This is what leads many to conclude that this operation must have a strong element of Iranian support, if not planning. After all, Iran does support groups like Hamas in order to pressure Israel when need be.
Most of the Arab world is cheering on this audacious raid by Hamas, and for obvious reasons. Everyone will read into it what they want to read into it, and use what they can to bolster their own pet causes. Already some are trying to pin the blame on Russia, which is ridiculous, in light of Moscow’s strong relations with Bibi and his government.
Civilians will no doubt be the greatest victims of this new war (officially declared by Israel today), but life is cheap in many parts of this world. The underlying cause of this conflict i.e. the displacement of Palestinians by Israelis still persists, and a solution is nowhere on the horizon. That’s why this new war will lead to no great change, unless the Israelis decide to forcibly expel two million Palestinians from Gaza (and annihilate the moral argument for the establishment of the State of Israel), or if by some incredible set of circumstances, Israel collapses. All in all, it’s a shitty state of affairs, but one must concede that life in Gaza is pretty shitty all of the time.
As this is ongoing event, I don’t have a specific article to share with you for this segment, and will instead present this profile of Mohammed Daif, the commander of the military wing of Hamas instead:
Within hours, Hamas had scored an unprecedented first strike against Israel while also taking dozens of hostages — estimated on Sunday to number about 100 — back to its teeming coastal enclave. Hamas’s social media channels simultaneously released slickly produced videos showing its militants paragliding over the border and gruesome images of dead soldiers and terrified Israeli civilians.
For Deif, whose nom de guerre meaning “Guest” is taken as a reference to the practice of Palestinian fighters spending each night at the home of a different sympathiser in order to evade Israeli intelligence, the assault was his most audacious, and deadly, yet.
Hunted by Israel for decades, and almost killed in an air strike 20 years ago that reportedly left him in a wheelchair after losing an arm and a leg, Deif’s ability to outwit Israel’s military while killing soldiers and civilians alike has earned him the reverence of Palestinian militants.
With the Israeli military seemingly caught unawares, Deif has catapulted himself to the highest echelons of the Palestinian leadership, eclipsing his rivals in Fatah, the more moderate faction favoured by the west, and his counterparts in Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the US, EU and Israel.
On hostage-taking:
The most significant factor for Hamas is the sheer number of hostages hauled back to Gaza. Israel handed over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to free a single soldier, Gilad Shalit, after five years of captivity by Hamas in 2011.
“Hamas understands very well that, when it comes to holding Israeli prisoners, patience is all they need,” said a regional diplomat who helped negotiate Shalit’s release. “Over time, the Israeli public will create the pressure. All Hamas has to do is wait.”
Little is known about him:
Deif, one-time bombmaker and the architect of a decade-long programme to dig a network of tunnels under Gaza, was born Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri in the Khan Younis refugee camp during the 1960s, according to an Israeli official familiar with his security file.
Gaza was then under Egyptian control, and the Israeli official familiar with his file at the Shin Bet intelligence service said either his uncle or father had taken part in the sporadic 1950s raids by armed Palestinians into the same swath of land that Deif’s fighters infiltrated on Saturday.
So little is known about him that even his name is a mystery. People who knew him in the 1980s say that even then he went by the name Deif, while others said they knew him by his birth name. Only one grainy photograph of him exists in the public domain.
His taste for theatrics was honed at an acting troupe he joined while at the Islamic University of Gaza, a hotbed of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood’s style of political Islam. By the time Hamas was born in the late 1980s, forged in the fire of the first intifada, or uprising, against Israel’s occupation, Deif was in his 20s.
Around that time, Ghazi Hamad, now a Hamas politburo member, shared a prison cell with Deif after they were jailed by the Israelis.
“From the beginning of his life in Hamas, he was focused on the military track,” said Hamad. “He was very kind,” he recalled, “all the time a patriot who would make little cartoons to make us laugh.”
On the “need” for a violent approach:
The Israeli official said Deif sought high-impact targets, such as settlers and soldiers in the occupied territories, buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He also oversaw the rocket barrages that send Israelis into bomb shelters at regular intervals.
Within Hamas, the official said, Deif was an opponent of the complicated dance whereby Hamas would agree to halt fighting that sporadically flared in exchange for Israel allowing additional funds into the blockaded strip or more work permits for Gazans.
While this arrangement helped to manage cycles of violence, it has also led to four wars in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2021 and then this one, all of which the militants portrayed as a victory.
“This terrorist action has finished this practice forever,” said the Israeli official of Saturday’s assault. “Now there will be no truce, only retaliation.”
Which is exactly, it seems, what Deif had always wanted.
This subject is probably the most heated international one on the internet. I please ask you in advance to be thoughtful in your comments about it, whether you are a neutral or if you favour one side or the other.
Populism, as defined by Encyclopedia Britannica:
populism, political program or movement that champions, or claims to champion, the common person, usually by favourable contrast with a real or perceived elite or establishment. Populism usually combines elements of the left and the right, opposing large business and financial interests but also frequently being hostile to established liberal, socialist, and labour parties.
Populism has become a bad word in the West thanks to both #Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s also a word that has lost all meaning, as it is applied willy-nilly, becoming a catch-all term for anything that falls outside of the acceptable bounds of elitist liberal democracy and globalist economics.
Populism is by definition anti-elitist, and it flares up in conditions when the gap between the ruling elites and the people becomes too large, whether economically, culturally, or socially. An action will invite a reaction, as physics teaches us.
Almost all of you here are populists in one form or another. The dissatisfaction with how the ruling elites in the West rule is a large part of why your are subscribed to this Substack. Many of you are upset with how the gap in wealth continues to widen, causing all the negative impact on your living standards. Others are more focused on top-down social reorganization. What everyone wants are governments that are more responsive to the people and who can give its citizens a fair deal in life.
At the same time, populism does not have all the answers. Very often, populism will contain too many contradicting positions, with quite a few of them being impossible to implement. Other populist solutions may appeal to emotion, but fail in terms of policy.
The Bronze Age Pervert has recently written an essay on populism, and argues that there never was a “populist moment”, and warns us about the dangers of the increasing calls for economic populism, using Argentina as an example of where it has historically failed:
Milei becoming a star, however, has led to some uncomfortable moments as many on “antiestablishment” and “dissident” spheres, both right and left, have paid any close attention to content of his words beyond the comedy. Quickly they notice he is “libertarian” and asking for reductions in government spending, government programs and size, and calling for the elimination of government departments. This goes against the Dissident Talking Points that have emerged since 2017, which dismiss Libertarianism as a “basic bitch” ideology, identify all free market rhetoric with the old guard of the GOP that Trump destroyed in the 2015-6 primaries, and are largely based on “economic populist” or “economic nationalist” positions vaguely identified with Steve Bannon or called “Bannonite.” Like all enduring Talking Points, these have some truth, maybe even 60% of truth behind them. Libertarianism, both in the form pushed by theoretical ideologues whether from Cato or Mises Institutes, or in the lite-political form pushed by the Jack Kemp wing of the GOP exemplified by men like Paul Ryan, was largely discredited not just by Trump but by manifest failures in the years leading up to 2016. The failures were of two kinds. A full discussion of these failures of rhetoric, practice, or in the case of genuine and honest Ron Paul-style libertarianism simple inability to contest in democratic political struggle — for whatever reasons — is very interesting but should be left for another time. I want to address for a moment the “Bannonite” and “economic populist” consensus that has emerged on the dissident spheres so-called of the right for the last few years, and which is now being pushed in its major zines and publications acting as the public voice of a supposed “resistance.” It is because of the widespread acceptance of this orthodoxy — really a set of unexamined talking points — that the right increasingly sounds like a version of Chomskyite Marxoid professor in cheap tuna-stained blazer, droning on about the IMF, the WEF, Neoliberalism, the supposed problem of “hypercapitalism” and Capital, “atomization,” “destruction of native and traditional communities”; while stomping with a kind of self-important frisson for “an engagement with socialism,” “class analysis,” “postracial multiracial working class democracy,” as if these things were the newest and most revolutionary ideas and as if there was a genuine prospect of being the vanguard of millions of urban proletarians against the bourgeois “Anglo Liberal” order.
Bronze Age Pervert writes in a highly polemical style, and I do not agree with everything that he says. For example, I do believe that atomization is a very real matter in the West. But he does give us reason to think. On Argentina:
Such people have been in power in Argentina for decades, and haven’t delivered what you would think people are yearning for a government to deliver based on the expression of mass direct concern during the time of 2015 and 2016 and before pundits and Intellectuals began their campaign of obfuscation. Argentina has had “Bannonite” or “economic populistnationalist” government for decades, on steroids. They got 100% of what Bannon-types and “conservative socialist” and “dissident right” or whatever edgy name they will call themselves — they got it all these are now demanding, everything that’s being asked for, and much more. For decades, this has been the case in Argentina. Everything in the rhetoric but also the policies, often enforced at point of gun. Peron utterly crushed the Argentine landowning upper classes, and brought in a nationalist and populist economy, freed from English interference in particular, and often invoking family values and traditionalist communitarian language. If you want conservative socialism, here is your example in action, in full — and see then its fruits after some decades…
Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well.
……..
Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so.
“Boxed into a corner”:
The corner into which the anti-establishment factions of America and France especially have locked themselves — other parts of Europe too though — a corner from which, after a few years of trading simplified orthodoxies through a retarded telephone game, they’re unable to see plain reality at least in Argentina… and they are unable to see why someone like Milei is ascendant there not despite but because of his rhetoric and promise of freedom… this may be hard to overcome in the coming few years. It is loser rhetoric that obscures the reality of tightly controlled, highly regulated life in America and the West under absurd slogans such as “hypercapitalism” and “atomization” and that wrongly assumes European youth, or frankly any other kind of talented youth, needs government aid and protection rather than needing to have the boot taken off the neck. It is just easier to see it in another country and another world where maybe talking points haven’t so thoroughly covered up what’s in front of your eyes.
I take issue with this portion because I believe that a strong middle class is the best foundation upon which to run a nation. More laissez-faire would just mean a greater divergence between the rich and the poor, and the total disappearance of the middle class.
BAP predicts a dark future for Argentina:
Milei is the latest in a series of last-ditch and probably doomed attempts to stop this, the logic of democracy. It’s possible at times that, under the logic of mass democracy — take from those who have and work to give to those who don’t in exchange for votes, and if you run out of these latter, just import them from somewhere under humanitarian language — it’s possible to stop it for a while. Things under this logic periodically get so bad that various coalitions sporadically form and may elect someone like Milei, or, before him, Macri. But these men soon find that to achieve their aims they would need reforms so extreme that revolution and maybe even civil war would be inevitable. So they give up, and the process then continues until the next crisis. But it doesn’t end and can’t end, until it all ends.
It’s easy to see how a country like Argentina ends, and it is likely going bust as a country. Some territory with that name will exist in maybe fifty years, but I’m not even sure it will still be called that. You can see the final outcome of everything I’ve said already: no intelligent, ambitious young person wants to be enslaved in that type of a thing forever, which is why everywhere you go in Costa Rica or Spain, or other parts of Europe, you see young Argentines who have left.
I am not partial to socialism nor social democracy, in fact I oppose both. These types of systems stifle human creativity and innovation, and do create classes that are too heavily reliant on government to finance their lives.
At the same time, a society of just rich and poor begs for violent revolution.
By now, most of you are aware that Ukrainian President Zelensky met with key business leaders in New York City a couple of weeks ago. This story is now old, but it is worth discussing.
Zelensky’s trip to the USA was his worst to date. Denied the opportunity to speak to Congress (the official reason was that there was no time to allow it due to budget issue), he went cap in hand once again but was not given the welcome that he has grown used to. Will Ukraine get more money from the USA? The safe bet is “yes”.
At the same time, Zelensky met with Big Business to ‘encourage’ them to finance the government and invest in Ukraine, a notoriously corrupt state. This has been framed as a set of business meetings, but in reality what they were was a series of meetings with interested parties seeking to purchase what remains of Ukraine in a fire sale, as Kiev is growing increasingly desperate as the war continues to grind on:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday pressed his case for financial help for his country with some of America's best known billionaires who made their fortunes in industries ranging from finance to tech and sports.
The small number of hedge fund managers, real estate investors, philanthropists, bankers and former government officials met with Zelenskiy in New York as he laid out the need for more investment in Ukraine now, 19 months after Russian forces invaded.
The meeting was scheduled for hours after Zelenskiy addressed the United Nations Security Council about Russia's invasion and its consequences. The meeting was organized by JPMorgan Chase, the sources said.
Billionaire investors Ken Griffin, Bill Ackman, and Blackstone Group president Jonathan Gray, who are often invited to weigh in by central bankers and policy makers on political issues, were invited to meet Zelenskiy.
Robert Kraft, chief executive of the New England Patriots football team, Henry Kissinger, a former United States Secretary of State, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, politician, philanthropist and businessman Mike Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York, and real estate investor Barry Sternlicht, also joined the meeting, which was held at Ukraine's mission to the United Nations.
Zelensky is offering up more pieces of the Ukrainian pie, but he also has oligarchs back home that he has to answer to, and whose interests he must not negatively impact.
The group sat around a table and listened to Zelenskiy, speaking in English and flanked by aides, make his case for investing in his country, coupled with an urgency to lend more support now, some of the attendees said.
The group of bankers who convened the meeting to discuss investment in Ukraine included JPMorgan executives Mary Callahan Erdoes, its CEO of asset and wealth management, and Vince LaPadula, its CEO of workplace.
Ukraine has tried to lock in financial support from business leaders to help rebuild the country.
Representatives for Griffin's Citadel, and Ackman's Pershing Square Capital Management and other attendees declined to comment.
This is a fire sale. Imagine for a second Ukraine as a banker protectorate, with finance men running around trying to reorganize the state in the middle of a brutal war. This would make for a great black comedy.
…it also fits nicely within what Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism”.
When people ask me why I like the art of Mark Rothko, they expect a longwinded answer from me. I shatter expectations by replying “I dunno…I just like how it looks”. I don’t have deep answers for everything ;)
A similar thing applies to space exploration. I am very much in favour of it. When asked “why?”, my response is a very trite one: “Our destiny as humans is to reach out to the stars”. I apologize in advance for this.
Thankfully, Marko Jukic has spared me the effort of doing a lot of thinking on the subject, and has written a punishingly long essay on the subject:
On the philosophy:
Perhaps the Earth is not our natural habitat, but only a part of it.
This poses an existential problem because it means we cannot think of ourselves as only a terrestrial species. We rightly believe that we must take care of our natural environment. But drawing the border of our natural environment at the Earth’s atmosphere is only a convention. This boundary helps us feel like we are masters of our fate, since our economic and technological capacity to affect the Earth is currently far greater than our capacity to affect the rest of the solar system, let alone the cosmos. If we are not only a terrestrial species, then what are we?
Our destiny as humans:
An unresolved existential problem became a political one. A theory of human beings as irrelevant, confined and small in time and space, results in political systems that seek to keep human beings small. The byproduct is the ascendancy of alternative ideological projects like “degrowth,” which seek to put humans back in their place as minor fauna, or like summoning an artificial superintelligence that will either drive us to extinction or, with luck, keep us around as tiny pets.
The scale of the cosmos has not shown that we are irrelevant, but that we simply do not know enough about the world to know our relationship to it. As a species, most of our greatest philosophers, intellectuals, and spiritual leaders lived before the Space Age. Their answers to the questions posed by the cosmos reflected the state of their scientific knowledge, which was, in fact, more advanced than we typically assume. But they ultimately lived in a terrestrial world. Since men first walked on the Moon in 1969, we have not.
To have a flourishing future as a civilization, we have no choice but to resolve the anthropological problem posed by space: what it means to be human will be ultimately determined by how we respond to the question of space, which will itself determine how we organize our societies. To ignore this question is also to ignore an already integral part of human nature—we are de facto already a space-faring animal, the only such animal on this planet. Moreover, this question cannot be answered through philosophy alone, because space is not abstract, but physical and full of surprises. The only way to answer it is empirical: to explore space ourselves.
To complete our understanding of humanity, there are no alternatives to a spacefaring future to the limits of the known universe.
I quite like this argument.
Space travel as “fundamentally mystical and religious”:
At its core, the appeal of the ambition to explore space was not scientific, economic, military, or technological, or even just ambition for its own glorious sake. Rather, the first rocketeers had existential questions or anthropological visions, which they were convinced could be answered or manifested, respectively, through the exploration of space. Despite a diversity of views on what space might mean for humanity, they shared a conviction to discover the answer empirically with rocketry.
Shortly after the end of World War II, Wernher von Braun wrote his one and only novel, Project Mars, about a near-future expedition to the Red Planet that discovers friendly, subterranean Martians from a dying civilization. In the book’s preface, he noted his intention was to “offer opportunities for ruminative philosophical reflection.” One of the main characters in the story addresses the future world government to argue for funding a Mars mission. He says “rocket scientists” were not motivated by the desire to build weapons, but “animated by secret visions of reaching into the heavens, of bringing their fellow men closer to what all our primitive ancestors felt was the outward manifestation of the Deity, and which was by them so worshiped.”
Speaking through his fictional characters, von Braun saw the rationale for space travel as fundamentally mystical and religious. He dismissed the arguments that great explorers or inventors throughout history were motivated by economic goals, but rather by “some mystic longing” and the “divine urge.” In von Braun’s telling, the arrival of human beings on Mars was, to the dying Martians, “but final confirmation of the universally held, deep, religious conviction that God had created Man in His own image, wherever Man was to be found.” It is humans who have “brought together the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism, which shall envelope the depths of space.”
The man who put Americans on the Moon was not overly concerned with whether space travel would create more jobs or lead to better consumer goods. Instead, he evidently believed that God himself had endorsed space colonization as the destiny of humanity, where, out there among the stars, we would no less than encounter our fellow believers. His character concludes a speech: “Only through God has the door to our neighbors in space been opened! Shall we slam it in His face?”
This is a great essay that you should read at length, provided that you have the time to do so. Click here to read the rest.
We end this weekend’s SCR with a deep dive into how our future is going to be reliant on finding more sources of copper on our planet:
Up until recently it has been quite easy to forget how important copper is to the modern world. Perhaps that’s because unlike the other foundational components of civilisation like steel or concrete, copper is invariably sheathed away from view inside wiring. Yet without copper there would have been no electrical age – no second Industrial Revolution. Indeed, for a period in the late nineteenth century it looked worryingly as if the electrical era would halt before it began, because of a shortage of the red metal.
Up until the late nineteenth century, most of the world’s copper was mined and sorted more or less manually. Chunks of rock were torn away from the ground and inspected to check whether they had the tell-tale signs of copper (sometimes the green of oxidised copper, sometimes a yellow crystalline mineral known as chalcopyrite). High-grade ores with more than a few percentage points of copper were sent off for smelting and processing and the rest was left in the ground.
The problem was, by the turn of the twentieth century the most abundant ores had already been mined out. So, as the electrical age dawned, global copper production was flatlining. Even as he was inventing some of the world’s first lightbulbs and building the world’s first power stations, Thomas Edison was fretting about being able to lay his hands on enough copper to put inside them.
That brings us back to Jackling, a self-made man who came from poverty but managed to get himself trained as a mining engineer. What if, Jackling asked himself, you could extract copper not just out of those high-grade chunks (copper content of over five per cent) but also out of the other stuff too? In many mines around the world there were vast volumes of ores which looked to the untrained eye like normal rocks but contained a few percentage points of copper. They were set aside because it was simply too expensive to justify refining them. But, wondered Jackling, might there be some way of changing the calculus?
In 1904 at Bingham Canyon, just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, he answered that question in dramatic fashion. Vast quantities of explosives were deployed to blast massive chunks of low-grade ore out of the ground. Steam shovels and steam crushers were brought in to ferry and grind the ores. What was once a mountain was turned into a kind of dust, which was then mechanically and chemically processed in what became known as ‘flotation separation’: the ore dust was mixed with an oily compound and then sloshed and shaken inside large tanks, allowing copper particles to float to the surface before being smelted into solid metal.
What might sound like an arcane set of process changes turned out to be utterly revolutionary. Jackling’s ‘non-selective techniques’, as they are sometimes called, meant you could extract copper from even low-grade ores in large quantities. All of a sudden, the metal was no longer in short supply; it was plentiful. Better still, new electrolytic refining methods meant that the quality of copper being turned out by these new mega-mines was even better than the kind previously produced by older reverberatory furnaces, which roasted processed copper ores and dominated the business back in the nineteenth century, when the UK refined most of the world’s metals. That mattered because only the very purest copper could be turned into wires for generating and conducting electricity. At the very moment the world needed ultra-pure copper in large quantities, Jackling and his financiers, including the wealthy Guggenheim family, helped deliver it.
Click here to read the rest.
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Be polite and considerate when commenting on the Israel vs. Hamas conflict please and thank you!
Thanks for writing. I am politely and considerately wishing Israel a swift (and lasting) victory in this terrible war and hopefully as few innocent people die as possible.