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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 14-May-2021
14-May-21 World View -- Communal violence within Israel threatens much wider war

Web Log - May, 2021

14-May-21 World View -- Communal violence within Israel threatens much wider war

Understanding the mainstream media

by John J. Xenakis

This morning's key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

Israel-Gaza war continues to escalate
Communal violence within Israel threatens much wider war
Generational Dynamics analysis -- the 58-Year Rule
Understanding the mainstream media

Israel-Gaza war continues to escalate

Israeli riot policeman tries to block a Jewish right-wing man as communal violence erupted in Lod on Wednesday (AP)

Israeli riot policeman tries to block a Jewish right-wing man as communal violence erupted in Lod on Wednesday (AP)

Communal or sectarian violence within Israel threatens a much larger war. I'll return to that subject below.

The following are the recent developments in the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza:

In the last two days, Hamas has launched over 1,500 rockets into Israel, targeting large population areas like Tel Aviv. The rocket attacks have killed six Israelis, and injured hundreds others.

Israel has retaliated with airstrikes into Gaza. Israel has targeted large apartment buildings, which puts civilians at risk, because Hamas purposely stores military hardware and military offices side by side with civilians in these buildings. Some 96 Gaza civilians have been killed, and hundreds have been injured or displaced.

Hamas's rockets are supplied by Iran. Hamas has built up an inventory of these weapons over the years. Hamas has recently acquired a new long-range rocket with a range of 200-250 km, which puts most of Israel within range.

Hamas would like to force Israel to shut down its airspace. Hamas has launched rockets in the direction of Ben Gurion airport, forcing Israel to divert flights to Ramon airport in far southern Israel. But now Hamas is launching its new long-range rocket towards Ramon airport, but it landed in the open desert.

Israel has called up 9,000 reservists and is massing troops and tanks on the border with Gaza in preparation for a possible ground invasion. Israel has been launching artillery attacks across the border into Gaza. A late announcement is that there are some ground troops in Gaza.

It's estimated that there are 20-30 thousand armed Hamas and security personnel inside Gaza, so any Israeli ground invasion would mean major bloodshed for the military on both sides, and for the thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

My view has been that the current war would fizzle out within a few months, like the 2014 war. The only thing that could prevent that is if some third country, like Egypt or Turkey, actively entered the war on the side of Hamas.

Communal violence within Israel threatens much wider war

However, there's a new development that changes that calculation. The new development, which has apparently caught everyone by surprise, is the rise of extremely bitter communal / sectarian violence between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. To be clear, we're talking about Israeli citizens who have for years been living side by side within Israeli cities and towns. About 20% of Israel's total population are Arabs.

There have been shootings, lynchings, rock-throwing, and stabbings. The epicenter of the ethnic violence is Lod, a city with large Jewish and Arab populations. However, the violence has been spreading to cities across the country.

In one case, a lynching was shown on tv in real time. In the city of Bat Yam, a live tv broadcast showed a Jewish mob dragging a man, whom they believed to be Palestinian, out of his car before severely beating him. Needless to day, the video of this live broadcast has gone viral.

"Death to Arabs" is frequently chanted in rallies throughout the country, including Haifa and Acre in the north, as well as Lod, Jaffa, and Tiberias.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on both Jews and Arabs to cease attacks on each other:

"Nothing justifies the lynching of Arabs by Jews and nothing justifies the lynching of Jews by Arabs."

Maybe nothing justifies these lynchings, but it's clear that these lynchings are going to increase in number.

Generational Dynamics analysis -- the 58-Year Rule

As one commentator said, there has been a "social compact" in Israel for decades, permitting Arabs and Jews to live together side by side in peace, but now that social compact is coming apart at the seams.

The 58-Year Rule is a significant finding of modern generational theory. According to the Generational Dynamics 58-Year Hypothesis, which by now has been well proven, a new ethnic civil war will not begin less than 58 years from the end of the previous ethnic civil war. That's because 58 years is precisely amount the time when the generations of survivors of the preceding war all die or retire, all at once, and the younger post-war generations come to power. It has now been 73 years since the end of the last ethnic civil war, the war between Jews and Arabs that occurred with the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and so Israel is fully ripe for a new ethnic civil war, and that seems to be what's happening.

Two recent examples of ethnic civil wars are the Rwanda war of 1994 and the Bosnian war of 1995. In Rwanda and Bosnia, populations had intermarried and were living on the same streets, where their children had played together. But that did not stop someone from picking up a machete, going next door, killing the father and children, raping the wife, killing her, and then cutting them all up into mangled pieces. These examples are the rule, not the exception, for ethnic civil wars.

So as long as the war between Israel and Gaza is at the top level government levels, then the top-down war is likely to fizzle out, as I said. But when the war is organic and bottom-up, then it's likely to spread into a much wider war, crossing into neighboring countries.

So for those of you who can take a breather from Washington politics and want to watch what's going on in the world, this is the place to watch. If the communal violence dies down, then a larger war will be avoided, for the time being. But if the communal violence grows and spreads, it will probably engulf the entire Mideast.

As regular readers know (since I've written it many times), Generational Dynamics predicts that there is an approaching Clash of Civilizations world war, pitting the "axis" of China, Pakistan and the Sunni Muslim countries against the "allies," the US, India, Russia and Iran. Part of it will be a major new war between Jews and Arabs, re-fighting the bloody the war of 1948-49 that followed the partitioning of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel. The war between Jews and Arabs will be part of a major regional war, pitting Sunnis versus Shias, Jews versus Arabs, and various ethnic groups against each other.

Understanding the mainstream media

This is a completely separate subject. The following text is something that I posted in the Generational Dynamics forum that may be of interest to a larger audience.

The problem is that media sources have become dishonest and censorious, and so the question is: Who is to be believed?

But after writing thousands of articles over almost 20 years, I've developed a pretty good intuition about who in the media is telling the truth and who is bullshitting.

I should probably put together a whole big article on the subject, but here are some sample conclusions:

CNN, MSNBC, AP, Tehran Times, Russia Today, China Daily are all similar in that they're "state media," and just parrot the government line uncritically.

Fox News generally lives up to its "fair and balanced" claim, since they present both sides of issues pretty fairly.

For international news, the BBC is pretty good, but when it reports on American news, which it does all the time, it's the same as CNN and MSNBC. BBC receives a great deal of funding from NPR, and so it is required to follow the same Democrat party talking points.

Al-Jazeera is also pretty good with international news. But you'll never see a negative story about Qatar. Also, they hate Israel, and they hate the Palestinian Authority even more, but they love Hamas. But for Asian news they're pretty good. Oh, and they hate America, and they REALLY hate Trump.

AFP is pretty good for Mideast, Asian and African news. VOA and RFERL are pretty reliable.

Reuters is an interesting case, because I've found them to be almost always completely fair and balanced. I believe that the reason is that Thomson Reuters is an Canadian company, so they have a wholly different view of the world.

When I'm writing an international story, I have to use each news source in a credible way. For example, I'll consider China Daily or Global Times to be an accurate statement of China's political position, and I would consider them more credible on this subject than, say, Reuters or AP or the BBC. On the other hand, the BBC is much more credible about China's actions.

In an international story, like the Israel-Palestine story of today, I don't want to take sides, so I try to find accounts from each side, ideally to quote them in parallel. This is not always easy to do.

And of course I'm always guided by previous Generational Dynamics conclusions. For example, I've known for decades that there will never be a "two-state solution" in the Mideast, so I know automatically that any policitian who talks about it is full of crap.

So maybe at some point I'll expand this into a more comprehensive article.

Sources:

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(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Generational Dynamics World View News thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (14-May-2021) Permanent Link
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