That's It. That's the News.

The corporate media seems to be getting worse. I reference here, in full, yesterday's post by Craig Murray, "Those Who Die in Palestine: Those With Dead Souls Here," which succinctly captures the perverted contortions of the prestige press, in this case the Guardian:

I cannot imagine the cold courage it must take to be a Palestinian, walking in protest, unarmed, towards the fence that contains the agony of their long drawn-out genocide, in the knowledge that the bullets will start splintering bones and ripping out brain matter around them, and every millisecond could be their own last. 

I cannot imagine the cold viciousness it must take to work on the Guardian newspaper, where on the homepage the small headline of the latest six Palestinians to be shot dead, is way below the larger headline of the several hundredth article associating Jeremy Corbyn with anti-Semitism, on the basis of the quite deliberate conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel.

The corporate press serves the government, and the government serves the wealthy corporate elite, a simple identity statement that leaves out almost everyone else.

Newspapers are organized mostly around the identification of official enemies, like Russia, Venezuela, "the animal Assad," Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orban, Jeremy Corbyn, et al. Normal people are treated as un-people, not really material, usually just victims, hopeless, embarrassing. Then there is the constant boosting of the marvels of technology, the right-around-the-corner splendor of AI and autonomous vehicles.

That's it. That's the news.

Silent Intifada Redux: Israel Ponders an Arab Quarantine in Jerusalem

Violence is cascading out of control in Jerusalem a year after Operation Protective Edge. Then the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank was used as an excuse by the Netanyahu government to crack down on the Palestinian civilian population. Eventually the crackdown was widened to Gaza, resulting in the collapse of the ceasefire with Hamas and a month-plus orgy of violence by the IDF directed against the people of Gaza. Israelis referred to Operation Protective Edge as "mowing the grass."

This time around it is hard to mow the grass when that grass is in Jerusalem, 35% of which is Palestinian and nearly half Jewish. The following from today's story by Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner, "4 Attacks by Palestinians Leave at Least 3 Israelis Dead," is a convenient summation of the violence that some are calling another intifada:

There have been more than 20 attacks, mostly stabbings, already this month, killing a total of seven Israeli Jews. At least 11 of those suspected of being assailants have been shot dead by Israeli security forces or, in one case, a victim who pulled out a pistol. Most of the attacks have been in Jerusalem, but violence has also struck in Kiryat Arba, an Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank; in the cultural and financial capital, Tel Aviv; and in far-flung, normally peaceful towns.

Simultaneous to the IDF "mowing the grass" last year in Gaza there was a spate of "lone wolf" Palestinian-on-Jew attacks in Jerusalem; so many that they were given their own name, the "Silent Intifada." These attacks appeared arbitrary and desperate -- ramming a car into a line of people at a bus stop or flailing about at passersby with a knife -- the sign of a people who have been traumatized for so long that immediate, senseless violence is the only solution.

A very bad sign. And that is what have again now this fall. In this repeat of the Silent Intifada, Palestinians of Jerusalem are merely emulating their overlord's penchant for arbitrary force. Police, who invariably arrive at the scene of a attack answering Palestinian knifes with a hail of hot lead, ratchet up the conflict by a disproportionate response. The "lone wolves" multiple.

In another bad sign, Israeli officials are actually considering an Arab quarantine in Jerusalem, possibly something like a 21st century Warsaw Ghetto. According to Rudoren and Kershner,

“Why not put them under curfew?” Ms. Ben Zichri, 59, asked of the city’s 300,000 Palestinian residents. “I should be able to walk freely.” 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called an emergency meeting of top security officials and ministers for Tuesday afternoon. A police spokeswoman said the steps to be considered included a complete closing of Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, whose residents are generally not citizens of Israel but can freely roam the country and often work in Jewish areas, and an easing of gun-licensing procedures. 

At the scene of the bus attack, Mayor Nir Barkat of Jerusalem called for new restrictions on Arab neighborhoods in the city. 

“We have to stop and place a curfew,” he said. “We must widen and upgrade the steps taken up until now.”

Mr. Barkat, who last week urged residents with licensed guns to start carrying them in the streets, added: “This has to stop, even if residents pay a price in their quality of life. We need to stop this and take control of the reality we live in.”

Soon, I believe, the intifada will find its way to the West, whose leaders are kings of the fantasy of force. There is no indication that there will be any reassessment here. Reports say that U.S.-supplied TOW missiles are now flooding Syrian battlefields. War is on the horizon as far as the eye can see. Eventually it will come home to roost.

Iran Nuclear Deal No Chickenshit

From my perch in the early morning dark of a 100-plus-year-old apartment building, located in a city by the sound that used to be known for its jets and now is synonymous with an online retail giant, the tectonic plates of global governance seem to be grinding into motion. A slight realignment is in the offing. What are the signs?

To begin with let's start with the ridiculous, the "chickenshit" feud between USG and Israel over anonymous disparaging comments made by an Obama official to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic magazine about Bibi Netanyahu's manliness. As Jodi Rudoren summarized in a story the other day, "Israel Jabs Back After U.S. Official Calls Netanyahu a Coward," the barroom beer-muscle persiflage is all about a deal with Iran over its nuclear program:

Israeli politicians spent most of Wednesday responding with outrage and concern to an article in The Atlantic quoting a senior American official calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “coward” — and also using a more colorful but vulgar synonym that starts with “chicken.” Mr. Netanyahu and his allies denounced such a personal attack as inappropriate, while his critics declared it evidence of the dangerous deterioration of the state’s most treasured alliance that Mr. Netanyahu has caused.

Then, in late afternoon, a senior Israeli official offered a new spin. “It appears that someone in the administration is trying to pre-empt Prime Minister Netanyahu’s criticism of an imminent and highly problematic deal with Iran,” said the official, speaking on the condition that he not be named, since that is how this game is played. “It is a transparent attempt to discredit the messenger instead of dealing with the substance of his criticism.”

It would be easy to write all this off as what Aaron David Miller, a veteran Washington observer on all things Middle East, called “the nanny-nanny-boo-boo kindergarten school,” where “they call each other names.” But there are serious underlying differences in Israel and the United States regarding the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, and the downward dip between their leaders comes at a critical juncture. 

With a Nov. 24 deadline looming, Israelis have watched, with rising concern, signs of an international deal that would allow Iran to preserve at least some of its nuclear program and would bring about the lifting of crippling economic sanctions. Worse for Jerusalem, President Obama’s aides have indicated that they will try to bypass a vote on the deal in Congress, where Israel’s support is strongest and Mr. Netanyahu has occasionally made direct appeals. 

Mr. Netanyahu, who has spent much of his career arguing that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel, insists that allowing Iran to continue to enrich uranium at any level leaves it on the threshold of producing a bomb, and that a flawed deal is worse than no deal. 

“There is no way to bridge this gap, because whatever is acceptable to America is not acceptable to us,” said Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser. “So there could be some kind of deliberate attempt to put Netanyahu in some kind of uncomfortable position, so when he says whatever he says in a month, it will be less relevant or attract less attention.”

The magisterial Gareth Porter outlines the deal taking shape between Iran and the P5+1 (the UN Security Council permanent five members plus Germany) in an article that appeared yesterday on the Counterpunch web site, "Is an Iranian Nuclear Deal in the Works? A Compromise on Enrichment":

US and Iranian negotiators are working on a compromise approach to the issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment capabilities, which the Barack Obama administration has said in the past Iran was refusing to make concessions on. 

The compromise now being seriously discussed would meet the Obama administration’s original requirement for limiting Iran’s “breakout capability” by a combination of limits on centrifuge numbers and reduction of Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium, rather than by cutting centrifuges alone. 

That approach might permit Iran to maintain something close to its present level of operational centrifuges. 

The key to the new approach is Iran’s willingness to send both its existing stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU) as well as newly enriched uranium to Russia for conversion into fuel for power plants for an agreed period of years. 

In the first official indication of the new turn in the negotiations, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Marzieh Afkham acknowledged in a briefing for the Iranian press October 22 that new proposals combining a limit on centrifuges and the transfer of Iran’s LEU stockpile to Russia were under discussion in the nuclear negotiations. 

The briefing was translated by BBC’s monitoring service but not reported in the Western press. 

Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, who heads the US delegation to the talks, has not referred publicly to the compromise approach, but she appeared to be hinting at it when she said on October 25 that the two sides had “made impressive progress on issues that originally seemed intractable”. 

Despite the new opening to a resolution of what had been cited for months as the main obstacle to a comprehensive agreement, the negotiations could nevertheless stall in the final weeks over the timing of sanctions removal. 

Iran’s willingness to negotiate such arrangements with the US delegation will depend on Russia’s agreement to take the Iranian enriched uranium. 

The beginning of discussions on the new approach was reported in September – just days after Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Russian President Vladimir Putin had met to discuss key issues in Iranian-Russian cooperation on the building of two nuclear power plants and fuel supply for Bushehr.

Russia is the key to any successful bargain over Iran's nuclear program. But what about the New Cold War? Isn't this an impediment to securing Russia's help? As James Kanter reports, "Ukraine and Russia Reach Accord on Natural Gas Deliveries," one of the main casus belli of the New Cold War, Europe's vulnerability vis-a-vis its dependence on Russian natural gas, has been resolved, at least nominally:

BRUSSELS — Russian and Ukrainian officials reached an agreement on Thursday night to resume Russian deliveries of natural gas to prevent shortages over the winter. 

The deal caps months of laborious talks under the aegis of European Union authorities on how much, and how soon, Ukraine needed to pay Russia for gas it has already consumed, and on the terms for future deliveries. 

The standoff between Moscow and Kiev also prompted concerns in Europe that Russian gas piped across Ukraine, a former Soviet state, could be interrupted.

The particulars of the deal are as follows:

• Ukraine will pay $3.1 billion by the end of the year to cover its outstanding debts. These payments are based on a price of $268.50 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas.

• Going forward Ukraine will purchase "Russian gas at a cost of $378 per 1,000 cubic meters until the end of the year, and at a cost of $365 per 1,000 cubic meters from January to March next year."

Of course, this assumes a lot. To begin with, can Ukraine come up with the loot? Secondly, is the government in Kiev stable enough to last until March?

In any event, the deal signed is significant. The health of Gazprom is inseparable from the rise of Russia under Putin; hence, Moscow has always been preoccupied with making sure the crisis in Ukraine doesn't impact the long-term soundness of the energy giant's operations.

There is one more development that augurs a global tectonic shift is underway -- Egyptian bulldozing of homes in the Sinai along the Gaza border. According to a story yesterday by the superb reporter Kareem Fahim written in tandem with Merna Thomas, "Egypt Flattens Neighborhoods to Create a Buffer With Gaza":

CAIRO — With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gazain a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier. 

The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.

That assault was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.

*** 

The border clearing came as the authorities have signaled a growing determination to expand their security reach throughout Egypt, to counter militants, they say, but also to crush outbreaks of ordinary dissent, rights advocates say. It was also the latest instance of the government using the overwhelming force of its security apparatus to confront what it sees as a threat to Egypt’s existence, whether the growing strength of militants or the demonstrations by thousands of Islamists during the overthrow of the government of Mohamed Morsi. 

Some of the recent measures, including a crackdown on university protests and a presidential decree issued Monday putting public facilities like power stations and roads under the protection of the military, were “confirmation of a conviction we have had for months,” said Gamal Eid, the head of the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights Information. “Egypt is solidifying the rule of the police and the military,” he said.

There have been two responses to the Arab Spring by the U.S. chaos-inducing unipolar system of global governance. One, is co-optation by means of Wahhabi-exported Salafists. This is on display in Libya and Syria. The other, in states to be maintained whole and not cracked into pieces, there is the Sisi option, a massive police state crackdown on any dissent. Egypt is leading the way on this with fulsome support from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and, regardless of a bit of meek pro forma mewling, the United States.

Israel cannot pursue another Operation Protective Edge-type genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. One more and the BDS Movement will reach critical mass. Now what appears to be in the offing is a plan by Israel to create a "Greater Gaza." As Jonathan reported in September, "Is there a plan to force Palestinians into Sinai?"

Desperately overcrowded, short on basic resources like fresh water, blockaded for eight years by Israel, with its infrastructure intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing campaigns, Gaza looks like a giant pressure cooker waiting to explode. 

It is difficult to imagine that sooner or later Israel will not face a massive upheaval on its doorstep. So how does Israel propose to avert a scenario in which it must either savagely repress a mass uprising by Palestinians in Gaza or sit by and watch them tear down their prison walls? 

Reports in the Arab and Israeli media – in part corroborated by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas – suggest that Egypt may be at the heart of plans to solve the problem on Israel’s behalf. 

This month Israeli media reported claims – apparently leaked by Israeli officials – that Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, had offered the Palestinian leadership the chance to annex to Gaza an area of 1,600 sq km in Sinai. The donated territory would expand Gaza fivefold. 

The scheme is said to have received the blessing of the United States. 

‘Greater Gaza’ plan 

According to the reports, the territory in Sinai would become a demilitarised Palestinian state – dubbed “Greater Gaza” – to which returning Palestinian refugees would be assigned. The Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas would have autonomous rule over the cities in the West Bank, comprising about a fifth of that territory. In return, Abbas would have to give up the right to a state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

The plan, which would most likely result in significant numbers of Palestinians moving outside the borders of historic Palestine, was quickly dismissed as “fabricated and baseless” by Egyptian and Palestinian officials.

It could be that what we are looking at here is an elaborate game of musical chairs. Peace with Iran will be achieved at the price of a Greater Gaza solution to the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The future of the caliphate in all this seems to be in the form of Sunnistan, which the odious Thomas Friedman riffed on this week in the disinformation manifesto, "ISIS and Vietnam." Sunnistan, so the thinking goes, is to balance Kurdistan and Shiastan.

Sullied Israel Embraces Ceasefire + Emerging Zeitgeist Spotted in Afghanistan

A ceasefire went into effect in Gaza this morning. The IDF has announced its complete withdrawal from the territory. Now negotiations with Hamas will begin in Cairo. The ceasefire is to last for 72 hours. Steven Erlanger recites the numbers in "Cease-Fire in Gaza Begins as Israel Says It Pulls Troops":

Gaza officials say that 1,834 Palestinians have died in the conflict, most of them civilians. Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed since fighting began on July 8. 

*** 

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, the Israeli military spokesman, said that Israel had completed the destruction of “approximately 32 tunnels” built by Hamas into Israel, and that Israeli forces had killed “approximately 900 militants in combat.” He said that Israel had destroyed more than 3,000 rockets belonging to Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad, that those groups had launched more than 3,300 rockets toward Israel, and that Israel believed they had remaining stocks of 3,000 rockets.

Erlanger opines that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were ready to call it quits. No evidence or analysis is provided other than "They accepted an Egyptian proposal little changed from one that they had rejected earlier in the conflict; an earlier American attempt at a similar cease-fire also broke down quickly." Given that Netanyahu's cabinet unanimously rejected the previous ceasefire, one could just as easily say that it was the Israelis who were ready to call it quits. International public opinion was overwhelming opposed to Israel's assault on Gaza and its attacks on UN sanctuaries. Israel had also succeeded in alienating its benefactor in the White House. Mark Landler has the sordid details in "U.S. Diplomacy on Gaza Has Little Sway on Israel":

When the State Department condemned Israel’s strike on a United Nations school in Gaza on Sunday, saying it was “appalled” by this “disgraceful” act, it gave full vent to what has been weeks of mounting American anger toward the Israeli government. 

The blunt, unsparing language — among the toughest diplomats recall ever being aimed at Israel — lays bare a frustrating reality for the Obama administration: the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed diplomatic efforts by the United States to end the violence in Gaza, leaving American officials to seethe on the sidelines about what they regard as disrespectful treatment.

Even as Israel agreed to a new cease-fire with Hamas, raising hopes for an end to four weeks of bloodshed, its relationship with the United States has been bruised by repeated clashes, from the withering Israeli criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peacemaking efforts to Mr. Netanyahu’s dressing down of the American ambassador to Israel.

“This is the most sustained period of antagonism in the relationship,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel who now teaches at Princeton. “I don’t know how the relationship recovers as long as you have this president and this prime minister.”

Landler then goes on to admit that the U.S.-Israel relationship is essentially unchanged:

The White House seems determined to tamp down the latest eruption in tensions. “The nature of our relationship is strong and unchanged,” the press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Monday, pointing to comments by Mr. Netanyahu over the weekend, in which he said, “I think the United States has been terrific.” 

The two statements are part of a recurring pattern for this administration: an angry outburst, followed by calmer words and the grudging recognition that little is going to change in the fundamental relationship between the United States and its closest ally in the Middle East.

Israel has the political establishment and media monopoly wired. That is a given. But I believe what hastened its withdrawal from Gaza along with an acceptance to begin negotiations in Cairo is that the disconnect between public opinion on the one hand and the captured media and political elite on the other was gaining too wide a purchase. As Robert Fisk pointed out last week, readers were in open rebellion against their newspapers' false-equivalence portrayal of the conflict. The slaughter of innocents, particularly those located in UN sanctuary schools, could not be papered over with crude and specious arguments about "terror tunnels" and human shields. And when the pro-Israel media monopoly attempted to do just that, it had the effect of confirming to a mainstream audience all that we on the "lunatic fringe" have been saying about Zionist domination of Western public discourse. Also, I would imagine, the BDS Movement, which I am sure Israel keeps a close eye on, received and is receiving a big boost.

No, the Zionist domination of public discourse was too much on display in this the latest orgy of war crimes inflicted on the people of Gaza; hence, the ceasefire. Now the pressure will be on the Palestinians to avoid the outcome that followed the last two Israeli assaults, after which the ceasefire held but so too did the blockade. Hamas will have to deliver; the blockade will have to end. Otherwise, Israel wins and the death of 1,800 Gazans will be just another episode of Israel "mowing the grass."

Ramzy Baroud, in article last week, "The War Netanyahu Cannot Possibly Win," thinks that at the very least the old leadership of the Palestinian Authority, represented by Mahmoud Abbas, will be swept away. As Baroud says, "[T]here is much more to Palestine than the whims of the aging Palestinian Authority ‘President’ Mahmoud Abbas and his Ramallah-based henchmen, or even Hamas’s regional calculations following the rise and fall of the ‘Arab Spring.’ " I hope so.

Before signing off this morning, Matthew Rosenberg and Harris Kakar are reporting, "Three NATO Officers Killed at Afghan Military Academy, Officials Say," a big green-on-blue attack at the Afghan National Army Officer Academy outside Kabul:

The Afghan official and a coalition official said that it appeared that the foreign casualties were high-ranking officers who were taking part in a meeting at the academy.

Lt. Gen. Afzal Aman, the director of operations at Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry, said that the academy’s commander, Brig. Gen. Ghulam Saki, was wounded in the shooting along with two other senior Afghan officers.

General Aman added that it was only American officers who were present during the shooting, but said that he could not provide any additional details because the entire academy was under lockdown and information remained scarce. 

The attacker was killed, the defense official said.

The Afghan Defense Ministry declined to comment, saying it was still investigating the incident. 

Sher Alam, an Afghan soldier guarding the entrance to the academy, located at Camp Qargha, said that senior Afghan and coalition officers had been meeting there on Tuesday, and that reports from inside the camp indicated that a number of the foreign officers were killed in the attack. He said that soon after the shooting, coalition helicopters landed inside the academy to evacuate the dead and wounded. 

Tuesday’s shooting was the first so-called insider attack in Afghanistan in months. Such attacks, in which Afghan troops open fire on unsuspecting coalition forces, at one point posed a serious challenge to the war effort, sowing distrust and threatening to upend the American-led training mission that is vital to the long-term strategy for keeping the Taliban at bay. 

Though the number of attacks has dropped sharply since 2012, when dozens occurred, they remain a persistent threat for coalition troops serving alongside Afghan forces.

As Afghanistan falls back under the sway of the Taliban and the U.S. moves towards its exit, I am going to try to keep a watch on events there. The Iranian Revolution and U.S. funding of the mujahidin in Afghanistan mark the entryway at the end of the 1970s to our current exhausted neoliberal paradigm. Events in both countries will reveal the way forward to the new Zeitgeist emerging.

Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice

What I have started doing, which so far seems to have been pretty effective, is write a list of things I would like to see accomplished by the end of the weekend. I put it on the smallest size post-it note and affix the post-it note on my kitchen calendar. When I go to the kitchen I take a look at the list and cross the items that I have completed.

One of those items was to donate to the Rachel Corrie Foundation. Rachel Corrie was murdered by an IDF bulldozer while she defended Palestinian homes in Rafah, which Israel is saturating with bombs since this past Friday following the breakdown of the ceasefire. Ten more innocent Palestinians are reported to have been killed by another  Israeli strike on a United Nations school.

Rachel Corrie Foundation is part of the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel. This is direction we need to go for those of us who live within the countries of the Western core.

Novorossiya is Being Born + Netanyahu in Trouble

It is is easy to get discouraged nowadays. Global order, what of it that there was, is coming undone. Regardless of who is to blame for blasting Malaysia Airlines MH17 out of the air -- and I am not convinced that Russia's guilt is a foregone conclusion, which is the position espoused in the main American news organs as they parrot the Obama administration -- it seems to me unbalanced, dangerously divisive, and potentially catastrophic to pin the whole thing on Moscow as part of a strategy to commit Europe to tougher sanctions.

The hope that more and greater sanctions will somehow lead to the Kiev junta's victory seems to me an illusion. If anything, generalized sanctions could have the opposite effect -- committing the Kremlin to go all in and wipe out the fascists once and for all. And there is much to the idea that planners in Washington see this as the ultimate jackpot: dividing Europe from Russia, keeping the military North Atlantic alliance firmly in control.

I think Germany is mindful of this, as is France. Trade with Russia and China represents the future. The United States is the past. That is why it is a safe prediction that no new sanctions will be immediately levied at the outcome of the meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels today. There will be a reprise of last month's performance where tough new sanctions will be threatened in order to appease the U.S. warpig but nothing will actually be done.

In the meantime, the U.S. will have to cast about for new targets of its over-the-top invective. The black box is in possession of Malaysia. The bodies are in transit, allowing for another ghoulish lede in the Gray Lady. But already the story of junta military excess in Donetsk is surfacing. The headlines obscure the real import of the reports, which is that the junta is indiscriminately slaughtering its own civilians.

There is a price to pay for such atrocities. Novorossiya is being born out of all that innocent blood. It is hard to see how Donetsk and Luhansk can ever be reintegrated into the Ukraine other than as a territory subjected to open-ended occupation like Palestine.

It appears that Israel is looking at another failed operation. Each day that passes -- particularly now that Hamas has taken an Israeli soldier prisoner -- Israel's invasion of Gaza is looking more like its botched war with Hezbollah in 2006.

Netanyahu has overreached. How will he get out of the box he has created? The Israelis talk of a deal the likes of which Assad signed in giving up Syria's chemical weapons. They want international inspectors to search out and confiscate Hamas' rockets and close down the tunnels. This is not going to happen. Hamas fighters are proving more worthy adversaries than the IDF anticipated. Western governments are broadcasting their duplicity, constantly hectoring China and Russia and other official enemies about human rights while they defend Israel's slaughter of innocent women and children. Now Kerry, a clown out of Hogarth print, is in Cairo trying to get the Egyptians to craft a ceasefire. But the Sisi dictatorship is a sworn enemy of Hamas. Why would Hamas trust anything that Sisi comes up with? No, Netanyahu is in trouble. His only way out is to yield ground; something he better do quickly because the earth is shifting under his feet. It might be another tunnel.