The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

We will be reading and watching for days and weeks to come about the awful human misery unfolding in Gaza, one of the most politically sensitive enclaves anywhere on earth. The Tribune featured an in-depth look at the history of the region earlier this week. Here’s another brief take on the current tragedy.

The collapse of empires often produces newly independent entities whose differences may have been papered over by a central organising authority. We saw this with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia 30 years ago. The Balkan Wars of the 1990s and the current Russo-Ukraine War are among the many consequences of these fallen empires.

The horrific new conflict between Israel and Hamas can trace its modern roots to the fall of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire 100 years ago after World War I.

In the early 16th century, the area now known as the Gaza Strip was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. During World War I, it fell to British forces and became part of the so-called British Mandate of Palestine. Following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt administered the newly formed Gaza Strip. It was then captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967.

The Gaza Strip has since been part of what amounts to a Palestinian homeland, together with the West Bank of the Jordan River. Israel, always resolute in its own defense, stands between these two Palestinian areas.

A seemingly unbridgeable difference of opinion has persisted over this arrangement between America, some Western allies and Israel on one side, and most of the rest of the world on the other. This is despite incessant, sincere efforts by the US and other nations to find a compromise way forward that might be acceptable to everyone.

No practical solution is at hand, however, especially with determined extremists exerting significant influence in both the Gaza region and Israel. Further complicating matters is the fact that this unsettled situation also serves the interests of several mischief-making actors within and outside the immediate area surrounding Israel. This list includes Russia, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

How big is the Gaza Strip? For context, let’s compare it with Nassau/New Providence, which is home to 300,000 inhabitants on 80 square miles of territory.

The Gaza Strip, by contrast, tries to support two million people on 140 square miles. That means that Nassau has 15 percent of Gaza’s population on 57 percent of its territory. We are densely populated on New Providence. But Gaza – that’s much more so.

Think about that the next time you get trapped in a traffic jam on West Bay Street, Eastern Road or any of the other major road bottlenecks we experience here. And consider what might happen if someone precipitated a crisis that panicked us in the way Gazans are now terrified.

This, then, is the setting for the current crisis. There’s just too much humanity, history, religious profundity and current tension crammed into far too small a space.

Israel has declared a state of war. President Joe Biden has visited the region this week. He had already dispatched his secretary of state to the region to try to calm things down before Israel occupies what will remain after the bombing of Gaza City and the northern half of the Gaza Strip.

After meeting with other regional leaders, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken Tuesday returned to Israel for a second meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, according to a press release, “underlined his firm support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas’ terrorism and reaffirmed US determination to provide the Israeli government with what it needs to protect its citizens”.

Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza that is regarded by the West as a terrorist group dedicated to the eradication of the state of Israel, will likely regard its cunning surprise attack on southern Israel as a triumph, since it elicited a massive Israeli response that will elicit horror and resentment in much of the outside world.

Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and other Islamic extremist groups, is sustained by grievance and resentment at outside (Western) domination, as well as the hopelessness that accompanies social, economic and political despair.

It’s difficult to imagine a lasting solution to the overall crisis situation in and around Israel, since the underlying issues remain stubbornly resistant to solution.

Tragedy and grievous loss of life lie ahead for too many in this highly combustible region. It’s hard to be hopeful for the future.

Who is Vice President Kamala Harris really?

While Trump and Biden spar with each other as they prepare for what still seems like a certain rematch next year, a persistent subplot is likely to be “who is Kamala Harris really?” and how do voters feel about the possibility of her becoming president if Biden falters? Republicans will try to exploit this uncertainty.

“My career, for the most part, has not been one of being focused on giving lovely speeches or trying to pass a bill,” Harris recently told a New York Times interviewer. “And so that’s how I approach public policy. I’m probably oriented to think about, ‘what does this actually mean,’ as opposed to ‘how does this just sound?’”

This somewhat unconventional perspective reveals Harris as someone “who is fundamentally uncomfortable with having to make an affirmative case for herself to the public — and feels she shouldn’t have to.”

But Harris has often been compared to Barack Obama. He was also smart, attractive, bi-racial and ambitious. Obama had been a community activist and state legislator; Harris was a prosecutor, both in San Francisco and for the state of California. Obama is an inspiring orator. Harris focusses on what’s in front of her.

Questions have been raised about Harris’ vision for her party and for the country. Her response is to circle back to the tasks at hand. Maybe she lacks what president George H W Bush used to call “the vision thing”. But it doesn’t seem to concern her.

“Sometimes” the interviewer wrote, “I can sense the frustrations of an elected official who clearly is skeptical of the press — a career prosecutor who is more comfortable asking pressing questions than giving straightforward answers.”

It seems the vice president can live with whatever her political future brings. She’s going to continue to operate on her own terms.

Often brash and Bombastic Trump impossible to ignore

This latest Middle East conflict has elicited from Joe Biden an altogether predictable response. He is promising virtually unlimited support for Israel. That’s what American presidents are expected to say. But GOP frontrunner Donald Trump added some remarks the other day that would result in widespread excoriation and probably dismissal from the Republican primary field for anyone else.

Trump criticised Israeli intelligence failures and some of Netanyahu’s earlier actions in an address to supporters in Florida. He also garnered headlines with the offhand remark that Hezbollah is “very smart”. Sticking to his trusty bombastic style, the former president also noted that had he been in the White House, “no one would have launched any attacks against Israel”.

And while Biden is burdened with significant international issues to resolve and is dogged by sagging popularity and stubbornly high interest rates at home, Trump is relatively unfettered by any current job responsibilities and is therefore free to boast about things he never achieved as president and that he likely could never accomplish if voters return him to the White House next year.

Trump is facing a grand total of 91 indictments this morning. The most significant of these charges concern his alleged incitement of the January 6, 2021, US capitol riot and other actions intended to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. In that election, Biden’s victory by over seven million votes was duly certified in Washington.

This trial in Washington DC has a tentative start date of March 4, 2024. That date falls right in the middle of a cluster of Republican state primary elections. Other Trump trials in New York, Florida and Georgia will likely follow.

And through it all, Trump will remain where he has been for nearly a decade. He will never be far away from the epicenter of the daily news cycle. He’ll be outrageous, brash, mendacious, controversial – and on your TV and in your newspaper. He will as always be impossible to ignore or overlook.