The Biden pier caper and Israel’s war

It’s tempting to place a major focus on the mishaps now besetting the U.S. temporary pier project off Gaza.  But we’re going to get past that lightly, for a brief, even more important discussion of a couple of unbudging realities in the overall situation.

One is that the Biden administration continues to try to thwart Israel’s strategy for Gaza, which is to eliminate Hamas as a factor there and reset post-Hamas conditions for long-term arrangements as advantageously as possible for stability and Israeli security.

The other is that the condition of Gaza has already been altered to the extent that it cannot go back to the status quo ante (i.e., before 7 October 2023).  The status quo ante is a dead letter.  What Biden is trying to thwart is Israel’s strategy for shaping the new status quo.  That’s what all the jockeying about Rafah, the hostages, cease fires, and what Israel is doing about Iran is about.

Total eclipse of the sun 2024

It’s not often a bunch of middle-aged adult siblings get to gather together – at all – when they live all across the country.  But such was the achievement of my birth family for the 8 April 2024 total eclipse visible in North America.  We even had two teenagers with us, both in specially-curated schooling situations.  The viewing location was Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a small but relatively busy tourist and sportsmen’s destination at the extreme southeastern edge of the state.

Broken Bow has a population of about 4,200 according to online resources.  It’s in the Choctaw area of the state assigned to the tribe when it arrived from the tragedy-laden “Trail of Tears” trek from the East,

Two pings on strike that killed food-aid workers in Gaza

This will be two short pings.  The set-up is that PM Netanyahu has acknowledged the IDF role in the strike on 1 April, in which seven aid workers for World Central Kitchen (WCK), traveling in a group of two armored vehicles and one soft-skin vehicle in central Gaza, were tragically killed in an air strike. 

WCK founder José Andrés is quoted as saying the trip had been deconflicted with the IDF, which would be expected after Israel said last month that it would ensure secure conditions for the food deliveries.  WCK, which transports food from a collection point in Cyprus, is working through the jetty hastily built off Gaza, just south of the existing jetty of the Gaza City port.  The delivery mechanics at the jetty look inconvenient and unwieldy; basically, small barges are being towed to the new jetty through the choppy, unsheltered waters of the Eastern Mediterranean just off the coast.  Barges are hard enough to deal with on inland rivers, as a recent barge-bridge collision on the Arkansas River in Oklahoma reminds us.  It doesn’t get easier on the open sea.

We can, of course, feel awful about the lives lost in this event.  Netanyahu says it is under investigation and there will be a full accounting.

Easter 2024

 

Many things are odd this year, one being that it’s a leap year with an extra month in Eastern calendars, and the dates for Passover are weeks after the Easter date for Western Christians.  Passover starts at sunset on 22 April and runs through 30 April.  For Orthodox Christians, Easter isn’t until 5 May.   It’s as if there’s a concerted effort of the cosmos to separate us all in 2024.

But rather than standing confounded before calendars, I propose we take this opportunity to call on Almighty God as Lord of time and space, and be His people before we are anything else, and recognize that there is no purpose of any calendar that He does not transcend.

There it is: Biden administration ponders blocking Israel with “peacekeeping” force in Gaza

The first thing to be said about this concept – and we’re going to keep this short and focused – is that it’s not fundamentally about the debacle in Beirut in 1983 or about the “Samantha Power” Doctrine of “responsibility to protect.”

By far the most important thing to be said is that the purpose is to thwart Israel in Gaza.

This isn’t enacting the pie-in-the-sky Power Doctrine.  This is a serious armed power move against Israel.

The purpose is to subject whatever Israel wants to do in Gaza to an outside veto backed by armed force.