It makes perfect sense. Send tanks and bulldozers and soldiers into Gaza, and then when the panicked, displaced residents end up in refugee camps, drop bombs on the camp. Kill, kill, kill to exterminate Hamas to the point where you’ve got somewhere around 10,000 dead, mostly families and children, and then claim you’re killing terrorists. The logic is impeccable.
Oh wait. No. It makes no sense. None of this is rational.
The only way to understand it is to recognize that it’s driven by fear and religion. Here in the USA, we have nothing to fear from Hamas, so the motivation is just God. American support for Israel is based on an absurd belief in prophecy. Listen to Pastor John Hagee.
Pastor John Hagee, CUFI founder and Chairman, speaking at the (CUFI) Christians United for Israel’s 2018 Washington Summit held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC on July 23, 2018 (Photo by Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
Who needs a reasonable justification for massacre when you can just claim God told you to slaughter people?
American evangelicals have long prided themselves on their undeviating support for Israel—but the basis of this alliance is not a standard convergence of diplomatic interests, and it’s certainly not a flourish of faith-based solidarity with the Jews. Instead, it’s a matter of the opportunistic choreographing of the foreordained final act of history. Believers in the literal interpretation of “endtimes” prophecy see the fortunes of Israel as a key harbinger of the Final Judgment and the elevation of fallen human history into the realm of the divine. In secular leftist politics, advocates of rapid escalation of class and geopolitical conflict are known as accelerationists; in endtimes prophecy belief, acceleration is left to God, but his Christian emissaries still retain the awesome power of recognizing and celebrating the signs of the pending judgment—and urging earthly powers and principalities to get in line with the divine plan before it’s too late.
The best-known promoter of this worldview is Texas-based Pentecostal televangelist John Hagee, the founder of the advocacy group Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Hagee is a longtime fixture in the endtimes media complex, claiming that the march of time is rapidly aligning with the events foretold in Revelation and other prophetic books of the Bible. After Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, he took to his pulpit at his Cornerstone Church in San Antonio to urge immediate US intervention against Iran, as several Israeli diplomats looked on, and right-wing members of Congress offered taped testimonials of their own.
The “endtimes media complex” — now there’s a scary thought. They’re a bunch of loonies, but look at that: representatives of Israel and congress are hanging out with him. And listen to what his big message is:
“The righteous rage of America must be focused on Iran,” Hagee announced, as journalist Lee Fang, who recently released a documentary on the evangelical-Israeli alliance called Praying for Armageddon, reports. “Let me say it to you in plain Texas speech: American should roll up its sleeves and knock the living daylights out of Iran for what they have done for Israel. Hit them so hard that our enemies will once again fear us.” Hagee’s son and co-pastor, Matt Hagee, took up the same refrain in lurid prophetic language. “The secretary of state is not going to get us out of this one,” he declared in a burst of self-satisfied scriptural omniscience. “God has a hook in the jaws of these nations, and he’s drawing them here. God tells Ezekiel exactly how he’s going to defend Israel. He speaks about raining down fire and hail and brimstone. That’s a heavenly air assault.”
What kind of sane person would pray for Armageddon, and would urge another bloody war with a large populous country that can only end with millions dead? It takes religion to drive that kind of hatred.
And now we’ve got one of these murderous kooks appointed to the Speaker of the House, third in line to the presidency.
Which state is Israel in again?
So, we have to have a greater loyalty to Israel, over say an ally of dozens of ratified treaties, such as the UK, because of the love of Jesus and his machine gun nukes.
And we need to murder millions of Iranians, because of the book of Esther or something.
I’ve a better idea, take that guy and his followers, drop them off on an island and have the US Navy sink the fucking island.
But, never fear, because theirs is the religion of love. The mighty love and mercy of a baseball bat to the face. And utterly as useful as a football bat.
Hagee has predicted the Apocalypse and the end of the world several times.
It’s always been wrong.
The last time was 2015. Because there were some full moons.
Full moons are rare, only happening roughly every 28 days.
Even a lot of xians find Hagee to be a creepy guy.
The Jews don’t much like Hagee either.
He is an out antisemite who makes a lot of claims with no factual basis.
He claims Hitler was half Jewish. Wikipedia: “Hagee has claimed that Adolf Hitler was born from a lineage of “accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews”.[27]”
Hagee has claimed several times that god caused the Holocaust because the Jews deserved it.
This didn’t go over very well with the Jews themselves.
@2 raven: The thing about predicting disasters is that eventually there will be disasters. So preachers, conspiracy theorists and economic doomers predict disasters continuously. When one strikes they point to their recent predictions as proof they are right and sweep the older ones under the rug.
raven @ #3 — Was his prediction of apocalypse was because there were 13 full moons in a year instead of 12? 13 is a very evil bad number, and 13 moons is a bad omen. That extra full moon only happens about…oh…every three years…for millions of years. Very rare.
wzrd1 @ #1 — “I’ve a better idea, take that guy and his followers, drop them off on an island and have the US Navy sink the fucking island.” Maybe a better idea is to put them on a yacht, haul them to the Strait of Gibraltar and let the orcas deal with them.
Oh, come on now! This is far too simplistic… There’s a big helping of racism in the mix too.
Psalm 137 final verse : ” Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” or in the version set by William Walton “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, Happy shall he be that taketh thy children And dasheth them against a stone,”
Latest headline.
The Netanyahu regime has no idea what they are doing.
Israel tried this in the recent past, from their capture of Gaza in 1967 (what a prize) to when they withdrew in 2005.
They withdrew from Gaza and dismantled their settlements because the settlements weren’t defensible and it was costing them too much in lives and money to occupy Gaza itself.
So, they intend to repeat what didn’t work the first time and occupy a hostile population of 2.3 million desperate people.
This occupation would also make them responsible for the food, water, shelter, sewage treatment, medical care, and education of…2.3 million Gaza people.
If you are going to run a large prison camp, you still have to take care of the inmates.
This is the history of the current Israeli government. Incompetent all the way down.
That the Hamas attack was so successful was because Natanyahu’s government was incompetent and asleep at the wheel. 80% of Israelis blame them in part for the death toll from the attacks.
They are good at pushing Palestinian civilians around and destroying the Israeli democracy and that is about it.
Netanyahu can only think as far ahead as keeping the legal cases against him from proceeding and putting him in jail.
The evangelical Christian supporters of Israel are anti-Semites. They believe their god will come back and smite everyone but them and will especially smite the Jews who did not follow Jesus (or what they think Jesus was). They have no love for Israel, they have no love for anyone except themselves. They are no closer to being followers of Jesus than the Hamas commanders who lead the October 7 attack.
Raven @ 8. “The rabbits who caused all the trouble” by Thurber? Not that I regard Hamas as innocent in any way.
“The only way to understand it is to recognize that it’s driven by fear and religion.”
Would like to make a slight change to the verbiage; The only way to understand it is to recognize that it’s driven by religion using fear.
That may be true of the Hagees and their marks. But it’s not true of the American security establishment or much of the political class: the reasons there are far more to do with imperial strategy. Israel is the USA’s key ally in one of the most important regions of the world – bound to the USA by its need for continual supplies of weapons, the money to buy them, and political support at the UN (where the USA can and does regularly veto UNSC resolutions condemning Israel’s breaches of international law).
What sort of “imperial strategy” does US alliance with Israel serve, other than their own? They’ve never been any good for US “imperial” interests.
There is also possible (NB possible – I do not speak with any expertise in this matter) financial motivation:
a) natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza (discovered 1999/2000), and
b) the “Ben Gurion Canal project” which would create a route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea wholly controlled by a US ally.
Both of these only really having the potential to become reliably profitable for US interests once the Palestinians had practically all been murdered or driven into exile and the last few remaining patches of their land stolen too, of course.
Recently read an interview with someone from a Jewish organization complaining about the rising antisemitism here in German (definitely a serious problem). He also criticised people commenting on the current violence without knowing the complex background and different viewpoints – and then described how horrible it was to mention anything about Israel’s previous actions when talking about Hamas’ recent terrorist attack…
Mordred @ 16
I strongly recommend this link for deep background.
Ilan Pappe is an expatriate Israeli historian. He shows Israeli leaders have lied to their people from the start, even before Israel existed as a nation.
“Declassification of Israeli documents reveal dark truths ”
https://youtu.be/ehSLtOWeE5U
As demonstrated during the 1956 Suez Crisis, they’re within striking distance of the Suez Canal. Navigation through the canal is vital for both oil shipments from the Persian Gulf and for US military operations, demonstrated as recently as last weekend, when the Eisenhower carrier strike group plus an Ohio class (i.e. nuclear weapons capable) submarine used it to enter the Red Sea.
I had posted the link in the infinite thread, but Mordred’ comment makes this on-topic; you CAN NOT exclude the background.
Israel is nominally a democracy, but so was USA during the Indian wars.
(The culture of the Iroquis and others were not akways enlightened, but it did not justify ethnic cleansing. Nor can the establishment of an apartheid state in the terriotory of former Palestine be justified.)
My apologies for making two separate posts @ 17 and @ 19.
Stream-of-consciousness writing makes compact prose hard.
That is true and obvious.
Nothing happens in a vacuum.
Today is the sum total of everything that happened in the past.
When someone makes a nonsense argument like that, you just have to say No. No, we aren’t going to pretend the past never happened.
To show how stupid this is, just look at what Israel is doing right now in Gaza. Destroying a lot of the city and killing 10,000 and counting civilians, many of them children.
What would happen if we pretended that there was no past to this?
Hamas doesn’t exist, the Hamas attacks never happened, and this makes Israel look like what? Genocidal maniacs killing for the sake of killing.
…they’re within striking distance of the Suez Canal.
“Within striking distance?” Egypt OWNS the Suez Canal. If access to the canal is a vital US interest (and I agree it is), then we can bribe or work with Egypt to get it. We don’t need Israel for that — and in fact, our unquestioning support of Israel Uber Alles is DAMAGING our ability to work with nearby states on many important issues, such as Islamofascist terrorism.
As for natural gas off the Gaza coast, how much of it is there? Enough to offset the strategic, economic and political losses we’ve been suffering so far in that area?
I somewhat doubt that the US military is much inclined to rely on the stability of Egypt. I probably wouldn’t.
@3 I’m certain most Jews, broadly speaking, would be disgusted by Hagee’s constant Nazi apologia. Buuuuut as always, there’s an exception. John Hagee has won numerous awards and commendations and fellowship from numerous Zionist organizations. He’s gotten the Magen Israel (“Defender of Israel” ) prize from the Begin Conference for National Security. Which I guess makes sense, as Menachim Begin himself was far more interested in shooting Arabs in Palestine than fighting Nazis in Europe and bailed from “Anders’ Army” to do just that.
What choice do we have?
Do you want to invade and occupy Egypt?
Because our last two invasions, Iraq and Afghanistan worked so well.
We could live without the Suez canal, albeit with some difficulty. We did it a while ago.
The Suez canal was closed for 8 years after the 1967 war.
It affected us I’m sure, but it more affected Europe and the oil exporting countries of the gulf. Even Iran ships oil through the Suez canal.
Don’t forget that Egypt also needs the canal. They make a lot of money off of it and they are always almost broke.
Raging Bee is right that our alliance with Israel doesn’t help our relationship with Egypt.
The last time the Suez was closed was after the last Israel-Egypt war in 1967.
As you might know, these two countries have a long standing adversarial relationship.
I certainly wouldn’t, no – but we’re not talking about me, we’re taking about the US military and political establishment. I’m just describing what I suspect their thinking is, it shouldn’t be taken as an endorsement. To be clear, I think the US military and political establishment is run by a bunch of deeply racist genocidal (if not omnicidal) lunatics, and I don’t expect their thinking to be rational in any way. Having said that, Egypt is not particularly politically stable, and has a number of Islamist factions who are only currently held in check by some fairly brutal repression. I wouldn’t rely on the country not to descend into civil war, with various factions competing to either control the canal, or deny its control to their rivals.
The economic impacts of the closure of the canal after the ’67 war are very difficult to separate from the impacts of the ’73 oil embargo, but it’s fairly safe to say they were huge, and an argument could be made that almost everything in US foreign policy since has been directed at preventing a repeat.
@birgerjohansson #17:
A similar 2021 thread by Raphael Mimoun (also published as a WaPo OpEd):
I would make some quip about Bible-fuckers not being sane to begin with, but then I’m likely to get a #NotAllChristians lecture and I have neither the temperament or inclination for that right now.
Instead, this is what happens when you believe that a fantasy world (i.e. heaven) is more important than the real world. It’s a similar to their attitude toward Climate Change: Even if it IS real and not a Communist/Atheist hoax to destroy America, it is part of Gawd’s plan and it’s presumptuous and Satanic (the Antichrist is often predicted to be some progressive politician or leader who preaches peace and utopia) to challenge Gawd’s will. .
That is true.
The current military government deposed the Muslim Brotherhood to gain their power.
And Egypt has serious problems that they are barely keeping contained. The economy is shaky, they are running out of water, and the population is large, poor, and still growing rapidly.
This is one reason why they won’t take Gaza and the Palestinians.
They have so many problems already that they absolutely don’t want to add to them. Hamas is a chapter of…the Muslim Brotherhood.
That being said, how stable is Israel?
This is also a deeply split society and one reason why they dropped the ball on the Hamas attack.
They were too busy fighting among themselves, secularists versus religious fanatics, democracy against a religious dictatorship and didn’t pay much attention to their security threats.
And, how stable is the USA itself?.
According to polling results from yesterday, Trump is beating Biden in key states.
That anyone much less a majority would vote for this guy shows something deep and wrong about the country I live in.
“The Secretary of State is not going to get us out of this one.” Say what? We’re not technically in it, except for sending weapons and threatening Iran if they step out of line. Meanwhile, a country with superior weapons and practically all the land is beating up on a bunch of people who mostly can’t defend themselves, and yet we’re still supporting them, Good ol’ U.S.A., supporting bullying like we always have (except, of course, when we haven’t, but those are outliers).
@ 27
As well as everyone else in the “civilized world,” that’s why our progressive and humane Western democracies are falling over themselves to stop Israel’s policy of colonialism and genocide.
Oh wait, no they’re not. They’re all cheering Netenyahu on and sending the bastards more money and weapons.
Fuck this planet.
In the news:
(https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/11/6/23949597/gaza-hospitals-supplies-airstrikes)
Speaking of justifying the unjustifiable… Sam Harris and IDWs.
Podcast (MP3): Polite Conversations – Woking Up, Dehumanizing Rhetoric 101 (42:54)
Sam clips and Eiynah’s commentary begin at 25:46.
I somewhat doubt that the US military is much inclined to rely on the stability of Egypt. I probably wouldn’t.
Would Israel be more stable or reliable? Even if they’re internally stable, that doesn’t mean they’d have a stable hold on a position well outside their turf.
Also, if Israel made any significant move to gain any kind of influence or control of the Suez Canal, that would most likely destabilize the whole region. It would be a lot safer to rely on Egypt for that.
“God said to Abraham, ‘kill me a son’…”
@34 / 35: Once again, this is not a position I’m advocating for, it’s one I’m imputing to the sort of people who thought invading Iraq was a good idea.
Hagee: “…Hit [Iran] so hard that our enemies will once again fear us.”
“Once again?” That kind of implies we tried something like that before. How’d it work?
@33: Sam Harris is piping up again? That fills a long-felt need… :-/
Raven @ 21
Yes, yes, but the debate is so tribal and bad-faith comments in media so common that stating the obvious again and again is needed to not get drowned out by Fox News , Christian nut jobs etc.
(There are also bona fide anti-semites in the media landscape -not so much in the western media, fortunately- adding to the cacaphony. Our local imams in Sweden have their hands full telling immigrants not to blame the local Jews for the acts of the Israeli government. Juggling all these media streams and debates is non-trivial.)
briggerjohansson @ #17
Traditions die hard. That lying may well go back 2,200 years, although they were Judean leaders rather than Israeli as “Israel” had not existed for a long time by then if it ever existed at all.
Speaking oaf possibly lying about Israel/Judea’s ancient past, I read an article by a retired Israeli general saying all those Holy Land archaeological digs by all those idealistic Israeli students found almost no evidence to support any of the ancient Bible stories or historical folklore.
“Speaking OF possibly lying” — just a typo, not calling the general an oaf…
It’s known that most of the Old Testament is fiction.
Ironically, Gaza was never part of Israel, even in the bible.
It was settled by the Philistines and sometimes under Egyptian control.
That is the Philistines of David and Goliath and Samson and Delilah.
The OT claims the Israelis were mighty warriors but they never managed to conquer the Philistines.
Ironically, the Judaeans never genocided the Canaanites either.
They are in fact, a tribe of Canaanites. Hebrew is a Canaanite language.
The Canaanites still exist as shown by ancient and modern DNA analysis.
We call them today Jews, Palestinians, and Lebanese.
More irony, the Jews and Palestinians are by DNA analysis very closely related.
It’s all very OT and Babblical.
cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jura
Used to be village populated by Arabs before 1948. Well, Palestinians.
Now, it’s called Ashkelon. Part of Israel of 2023.
An Israeli settlement attacked by Arabs.
(Such an unprovoked attack!)
The OT is full of implausible events.
One of more obvious ones is the Exodus of Jews from Egypt to Judea.
In the bible it took 40 years while the Jews wandered around the Sinai peninsula.
In reality the distance between Port Suez on the Red sea to Jerusalem in a straight line is 202 miles.
If the Jews walked 10 miles a day, not an excessive distance for ancient people who walked everywhere even if it was whole families, it would have taken 20 days. We can put some rest breaks in there. so it might have taken a month. Or maybe even two months.
There is no archaeological evidence that a huge mob of people spent 40 years camping out in the Sinai desert.
They were very godly people, and they cleaned up after themselves meticulously the whole time. And God recycled all their trash every day. Yeah, that’s it…
Or maybe Satan recycled everything so all the Jews would forget they were God’s people? And he made them forget which way they were walking, whenever God wasn’t looking, so that’s why they were lost for 40 years…
It seems that all this, the long twisted, murderous history in the Middle East as well as in North America and elsewhere just points out that the arrogant aggressive elements of human kind have always been soulless barbarians. There are so many kind decent people who always become (to use the horrible dehumanizing term) ‘collateral damage’. I don’t see any positive ending to all the carnage. The limitless hate, deceitful weaselwording, fictional, biblical justification and evasion by many parties from many diffent countries prevents any honest dealings. What I hear and read, reported by the evasive, biased media, even makes me wonder whether the u.s. government is deceitful or fearful and ineffectual or if it is being devious. It is not clear. What is clear is how little human life is worth in this fractured, violent world. Yes, many seem to want to lead us into the New Dark Ages.
raven @ #46 — They weren’t allowed to enter. God Almighty blocked the Hebrews (they weren’t Jews…yet) because spies sent into Canaan were afraid of the locals and described them as giants.
As for movement of large numbers of people, per Rabbinic tradition (from what I’ve read) the exodus occurred in the 14th century BCE. That just happens to be the time when the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II (Ra-Moses?) reasserted Egyptian hegemony in the Levant against the Hittite ruler Muwatalli II. There is even correspondences between the two.
However, that’s probably just a coincidence because the story probably didn’t come into existence until much later. The oldest manuscript which is just a few lines from Exodus is 1st or 2nd century CE, so that’s not useful.
However, there is evidence that various political powers, such as the Persians, created origin myths to justify relocating populations. This might be associated with the so called return from Babylonian exile. Also, some of the later political entities in Judea may have had interest in inventing origin myths to shore up their claim to fame. Herod made quite a lot of money by building a temple and encouraging pilgrimage to it. You need a good story to make that work.
@42- Raging Bee
The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman might be a bit dated by now and it’s been years since I read it but the gist I recall was there’s no evidence the exodus from Egypt happened and it seems Israelites arose from within the Canaanites.
I just finished The Rise of the Israeli Right by Colin Shindler. It dove into the origins of Revisionist Zionism, and the adjacent Maximalists, and portrayed Zabotinsky with a bit of complexity. I didn’t come away with as negative a view of him as I expected though his Iron Wall concept of dealing with Arab adversaries with resolute strength has influenced the right ever since, perhaps in distorted form. He acknowledged there were Arabs (not the land without a people for a people without a land trope) and they had opposing interests and could not be bought off as the left leaning idealists thought. He also referred to incoming Jews as colonists. So there’s that. I came away with a quite negative view of Begin for many reasons not just Irgun. He seems to have coopted Jabotinsky’s image and some Revisionists including Jabotinsky’s own son were put off by him.
The Irgun-Herut types really were upset that Transjordan was ceded to Abdullah and wanted it back. The proposed partition before ‘48 was definitely a no-go. One part of the book that kinda made me scratch my head is Shindler saying the IDF was standing outside Sabra and Shatilla, while the Phalangists were avenging Gemayel, “unaware” of transpiring events. Was that so? He also could have delved into Sharon’s rationale for the now relevant Gaza disengagement with more depth. He did state: “Sharon reasoned that this would divert American support into a channel which he would be able to control and direct. It would also buy Israel time by keeping any negotiating process in deep freeze.” He also pointed to Sharon’s keeping in mind “…the demographic argument that Israel’s democracy would be undermined by retaining the territories, given the higher birth rate of the Palestinians.” He also talks of Netanyahu’s political maneuvering around the withdrawal, which is ironic now as he struggles with Sharon’s ghost as a backgrounded nemesis.
Now I’m trying to plod through Avi Shlaim’s The Iron Wall, a newer edition than I read years ago. I had already read ahead on his coverage of the disengagement. I’ve got a few unread Pappe books but I’m hesitant as to what his biases may be. Shlaim is a New Historian critical of Israel, but seems somewhat evenhanded in places. He has really interesting takes on the odd backroom connections between Abdullah and the Zioinists…new Israeli gov’t. There’s much said of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank after ‘67, yet Jordan’s annexation before that was a bit off in terms of Palestinian aspirations.
Also if I may point out, it’s at least a good idea the US has committed the amount of Navy presence it now has to monitor the conflict. There was a lone US Navy vessel off the coast of Sinai during the Six Day War that found itself the victim of a bit of target practice by Israeli forces. That shouldn’t recur now one would hope.
I remember that Israeli attack.
On an unarmed US Navy spy ship.
They spent 2 hours bombing and torpedoing the USS Liberty and badly damaged it with a huge hole in the hull.
Somehow the crew managed to keep it afloat and get it to a port.
We lost 34 of our own people that day.
I can respect the worship of a benevolent god, or even of an averagely good god, but when the god you’re worshipping is a blood-thirsty mass murderer, you should seriously reconsider your beliefs.
BTW what is wrong with Iran? Iran is a theocracy, just how Hagee likes it.
-Republican (and some Democrat) members of the House have voted to censure a member of “the sqad” for criticizing Israel, and using the Palestinian phrase “from the river to the sea” which they claim is a sign of wanting to annihilate Israel.
(Looks at map)
The West Bank adjoins the Jordan river… and the Gaza strip adjoins the sea. So do the Republicans and Democrats want the Palestinians to give up the West Bank? Or the Gaza Strip? Or both?
Bad-faith attacks on critics such as this one should be called out in the strongest terms
@rietpluim #55:
It’s the wrong flavour of theocracy. If the Iranians would just see sense and stop cracking open their boiled eggs at the big end, Hagee would be lauding them to the heavens.
I’m Christian, those types of fundies scare me . I think they’re f***ing crazy 😳. I honestly think that Putin thought that they had more of a hold on the USA than they do , which is why he felt it was ok to attack Ukraine . He’s their king of the North if you believe that superstitious nonsense.
@ 8 Raven
So, they intend to repeat what didn’t work the first time and occupy a hostile population of 2.3 million desperate people.…If you are going to run a large prison camp, you still have to take care of the inmates.
No, I think they intend to drive out or kill all the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
About the Suez Canal, recall that Egypt was firmly in the Soviet camp from the overthrow of the monarchy in 1953 until after Nasser’s assassination in the early 1970’s. El Sisi might feel he could get a better deal today from China or Russia.
@ 26 Dunc
The economic impacts of the closure of the canal after the ’67 war are very difficult to separate from the impacts of the ’73 oil embargo, but it’s fairly safe to say they were huge
After the '67 war, we had a delay in delivery, a bit like the interrupted supply chains during Covid because everything going through the Canal had to go around the Cape. In 1973, there was <b>no</b> oil and no real idea how long the embargo would last. My impression is that the '73 embargo was worse because of the uncertainty factor.
@ 31 Akira MacKenzie
One of the first cracks in EU/NATO solidarity?
Spanish minister backs legal initiative to bring Israel before ICC for ‘war crimes’ in Palestine