Ok, this is the situation, we have won. As long as Hamas only option is to use hostages to make deals, and not do any kind of real action. Then we have, by all kinds of meters, won.
What we are looking at, is, essentially the sweep up of the last forces in Gaza.
How do we do that?
We do that by taking control of the territory as fast as possible. As long as Hamas do not have an incentive to trade hostages, as they do not now, they won’t. But if we take all territory above ground, and all they have left is the tunnels, they have incentive to trade again.
So it is time for decisive and swift action, until Hamas has some kind of motive to trade.
Also we need to give the remaining fighters an exit plan.
We need them to know, that if they surrender, they will have some kind of future. There is no future for them IN Gaza, but a fresh start somewhere else, where they can’t reach Gaza is an option.
I get it, that the leadership is not given this chance, but the footsoldiers, should have a way out.
With these measures, we are giving the soldiers a way out, and at the same time optimizing our chances of getting the last hostages out.
It is a simple game of leverage.
If Hamas has a motive to exchange hostages they will. If not, they won’t. So we need to apply as much pressure as possible.
We also need to give access to supplies for the citizens of Gaza. Especially those who are displaced. Give them food, shelter and good living conditions. This is to be humane, and also show that we listen to mr. Biden, who has been supporting us for a long time.
G-d bless the will for a swift victory. We may not be able to get to all the tunnels, but we will be able to hold the ground, so that supplies will run out eventually, effectually leaving a siege battle at hand.
One of the issues, that I have been prodded to try to take an angle on, is the EU.
What are we going to do, with that construct, and how are we going to make it work.
To be honest, I have not really been a great fan of the EU, but we can make it work, if we do things the right way.
Since I have been kicked out of Danish politics in a pretty mean way, I guess, we can then shift gears, and see things from a new perspective.
So I have seen things from a state level, what about the federal level?
I have worked, for a long time with the federal level in the US, and am actually getting somewhere in terms of business and economy. Mr. Biden is swinging the economy around by going back to his union roots. He is doing it pretty well, actually, and I guess that is a lesson we need to think about. How are we going to make a valid impression on business, to make it work? We do it by stopping the outsourcing and insourcing the economy again. It works in the US, and it will work in EU as well.
Then there is another issue, that I have ponderede a bit. What EU really lacks is a public discussion across the nations of the EU.
I have actually delivered a proposal for such a project, using rubicon.dk as a vehicle for cross national dialogue. We are going to make that, but it takes a little time, to get there.
We need to make people feel, that everybody has some kind of voice in the development of the federal level.
There are pressing matters as the growth of the EU and the new plans for an army.
But, to be honest, what the EU really lacks is not new arms or institutions, it needs the public approval of the citizens of the EU, and it needs to be accepted by the citizens of the EU.
How do you make that happen?
By bringing value to each nation, that the citizens can see makes sense.
That is really the key.
G-d bless the peace we can find with a good European Union.
Mr. Henry Kissinger has just passed away, at a high age. The Holocaust survivor. The generation, that saw things through the lens of the second world war.
What are the new things, that are beginning to emerge from that post naziwar?
Well, not much, to be honest. It is, essentially the same mechanism that are at work, but it therefore also the same solutions we have to find.
What did mr. Kissinger bring to the world, in his tenure as an advisor?
He brought stability to the world, through the understanding of the mechanisms of the world. Being a valid, intelligent advisor, who saw things as they could be, and attempted to stop the worst catastrophes, thereby giving the world peace.
I guess the baton has been handed down, to the next generation.
Making peace in the world, is difficult. But through the insight into human nature, a deep understanding of history, and a profound understanding of the mechanisms of politics, we may just end up in a more stable world.
May g-d be blessed by having a keen and wise servant to make peace.
Elon, we have been acquaintances for some time. You have read my ideas here at rubicon, in fact, you have probably been a bit inspired, here and there, I hope.
So, this is my candid advise to you. SHUT UP!
You are ruining your own life by letting yourself be guided by your own anger.
When you are under pressure, you say the most stupidest of things, that are just the effect of your horrible state.
When you do that, then do something else, say that you are sorry, and you are under a lot of pressure, so you say things, that you regret.
And then stop saying things that you regret.
I know how it is, I have just been through a year of horrible pressure.
It gets to you. The best you can do, is to stop all your impulsive reactions, and accept, that you are not really in control.
As one of the old fishermen told, when he was asked about anger, you need to listen to your anger, because it guides you, but you should not be controlled by it.
The best way, to not be controlled by your anger, is to shut up!
This is from a friend, right. You tried to help me, I am paying back.
G-d bless the will to find a positive way in the chaos around you. Come on, Elon, you can do it!!
Ok, we are winning. I know, that the ceasefire is pretty devastating to morale. But there are a number of elements we have to take into consideration, when we do our strategy.
What happens on the ground, is a complex maneuver, that reflects the media situation, that that again reflects the political, international game.
It is a chess board, that we have to consider.
What it all comes down to, is who has the best international support. Maybe not in terms of physical support, but in terms of POLITICAL support.
Hamas has tried to drive the media game with a vicious onslaught of pictures and suffering.
That is a strategy. What I have done, is to reach consensus on the issues we face internationally.
I mean, if there is a consensus on a ceasefire, we do a ceasefire, to support the political process. Not only that, we off cause also get our hostages home. But the ceasefire is a part of the international game. If we do not listen to the opinion of the world, we will, ultimately loose the ability to fight.
There are different expectations to us, than there is to Hamas. We have to be spot free in terms of ethics, to continue the fight. Why? Because we are the chosen people, so there are different expectations. We are in direct connection to g-d, so we have to reflect this. Listen to the voice of spirit in our fight.
If we do that, we will win.
G-d bless the will to fight with skill and cunning on all levels. G-d bless the will to free those hostages.
This is a heads up to the brave soldiers of the IDF. What you are doing, is thoroughly positive and constructive. Saving lives, doing things, as they should be done.
Wars like this, are very difficult to do, because the terrain is so full of booby traps, guerilla warfare, threats everywhere. But due to the new integrated warfare system, even this threat is met, in an amazing manner.
Not loosing the goal in sight either. So, it is really, really well done.
I am, as one, proud og the integral, and amazing job you guys and girls are doing.
Well done!
G-d bless the will to begin saving those kids!
Well, we are now more or less in the middle of the campaign in Gaza. It is going ok, but the international pressure is mounting.
There is the proposal for an exchange of hostages. To me, this is a no brainer. The main objective of the war, was to get the hostages out of Gaza, if there is any way to get them out, we get them out.
It does put us in a bit of a conundrum, because then what, do we continue the fight?
There has been the call for a regime change in Gaza. A two state solution should be democratic. With Hamas at the helm, that is not really the case. Hamas has ruled Gaza with an iron fist.
But that is something we have to figure out.
The two state solution, that the big powers are leaning towards, is difficult to get around.
But, this should also include some rugged and serious security tools in place.
Maybe an international peacekeeping force, maybe something else. But, at the very least, we should be secured against another 7 th october.
G-d bless the peace we will find, and get those kids home!
Well, we are now in the second or third week into the offensive of Gaza.
It is working, some hostages are found, some are released, but at the larger picture, there are still a lot of problems ahead of us.
I am trying to counter some of the problems we have, by initiating dialogue here in Denmark. I know it is not perfect, but we need to be able to have some kind of conversation going on.
Also, we need to discuss the end goal, how are we going to live side by side with Gaza?
There are some ideas floating around. One of them is that an international peace corps is positioned in Gaza, maybe, we will have to see the specific plans.
Russia is gunning for a two state solution, and we can’t, as we I am writing this repatriate all Gazans out of Gaza, that is too unpopular around the world.
So we need to start the dialogue with the different partners as to what we are going to do.
We need security. We need to know, that this will not happen again. We can make that happen, by leaving a deep and destructive net of oppression in Gaza, but that again would not really be our interest, and that would give us so much bad will in the long run, that we need to think about other options.
So, we need to figure out, the things on our plate, and what we wish to do with that plate.
So far, it is going ok, but there is a long fight ahead of us, and we need to stick the plan.
G-d bless the will to do good in a very, very, very difficult situation. G-d bless Israel.
This is a message to Elon Musk, who is a reader here on the blog, I think.
First of all Elon, you tried to help, when I was in trouble, so this is me helping back.
When you are at the end of your rope, tie a knot, and hold on to it. That is a citation of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Where did he learn this?
Well, at a time, he lost his wife, and his mother at the same time. So he was in trouble. What he did was, that he bought a ranch in the middle of nowhere, and took his time, to come back as a whole person. He came back, and became the president of the United States.
So what can we learn from those wise words?
First of all, when you are in trouble, don’t make more trouble for yourself.
You are unpopular, because you have challenged the status quo.
That is what happens, when you challenge the status qou.
I do it all the time, and get A LOT of heat.
Sometimes, when the leadership is right here in Denmark, it works, but right now, I have little support from the leadership, so I get a lot of heat.
That is the way it is, to be a rebel, you need support.
So, what do you do then?
You recuperate, draw a bit back, to regroup.
Don’t worry, and take the challenges one at a time.
Concerning the trouble you have with women. Well women are very much creatures of habit, they prefer mainstream, most of the them. So when you challenge mainstream, you will have problems with them.
So, what you do is, the opposite of what they would expect. Instead of fighting them, work with them.
Don’t pick the fights, that doesn’t make any sense. Besides, who are always the looser when it comes to fighting women over kids, the kids are the losers.
So just be kind, and work with them. Then they will see, that you are not such a bad guy after all.
So, you are having trouble, because you are challenging the status qou.
You are working yourself up, to be a leader of the whole world in terms of development. But beware, that position is the most difficult of all, and you certainly will not be popular.
G-d bless the will to Change the world to a better place, and be honest about these things. If you see Tesla as an idol, you know exactly how his life was, and yours will be the same, if you follow in his path.
Ok, so these are my reflections concerning the current situation in terms of strategy.
How are we supposed to fight? It is quite clear, it says in the Torah, that we are supposed to fight as David against Goliath.
Why?
Well, that is the question we are supposed to ponder.
First of all, this reflects our strengths. We are the best fighters, and we fight with our intelligence as well as our physical strength.
But, we have one serious drawback in war, we are never allowed to fight immorally. That is, we are always forced to be the little guy fighting the big guy. If we are the big guy, fighting the small guy, we are not in the right position. Why? Because oppression, that Goliath represents is wrong, ethically wrong.
So when we find ourselves in fights that are wrong, we have problems. But if we find ourselves fighting unsurmountable odds, we win. Why? Because Hashem fights on our side.
It is like the fight I am fighting with the secret service right now, a classical David vs. Goliath. I am winning, why, because I have Hashem on my side.
So this is the factor we have to factor in, in the fights of Gaza, as soon as we are the Goliath, we may very well loose the momentum, why? You guessed it, because we have to fight ethically, the whole way.
We have to be very, very careful not to end up in the position of the Goliath.
G-d bless the will to be careful, and think about the forces we are moving in and around. G-d bless the peaceful solution.
Ok, it seems to me, that I, with a bit of luck, a great support from many friends, in Denmark, and around the world, I have survived this onslaught on my person by the secret service.
My life has come to a balance of sorts, and actually the secret service of the police has had some major blows to their very existence. Some of my friends in the TV community really hit them hard, and are still hitting them hard. I mean, Denmark comes off as a civilized country after all.
The secret police is still trying to get me down, but the price is mounting, and, to be honest, for now, I will have to concentrate on the international scene. Maybe I will get back into Danish scene of politics, but to be honest, it does not make a lot of sense. It is so poisonous.
I prefer working in environments that are less lethal to a mere blogger.
But we will see, I have received a few invitations by the good journalists here in Denmark, and maybe I will get a job as a TV man again. I mean, are we a corrupted third world country or the leading light of civilization?
So far it seems to me, that the journalists are still holding on to those democratic virtues of a modern humanistic state fighting the corruption of a system that seems to want to drag us down into the mud of corruption and chaos.
So, for now, you are still able to read the words here on the blog. And thank you so much for the support, pretty awful, when the system is trying to close your mouth. But I guess, I was too big a mouthful for these provincial corrupted police.
G-d bless the will to be alive, and spread goodness around the world. And please, we may have to come to a point, where Denmark has to be isolated in police work, to teach the local forces here a thing or two about democracy and freedom of the press.
Ok,so, to understand the strategic situation in the Middle East, we need to truly understand the ethnic make up of the area.
Hamas is not just an Islamic Organization that makes war on Israel, it is a group that is affiliated with the different ethnic groups of the Middle East.
The Middle East is ancient and extremely complex, lets see, if we can unravel some of the complexity to reach some kind of understanding of the issues, at least.
First of all, we need to understand, that Jews are a part of the family of the Middle East, according to my understanding, we Jews are a part Arab and a part Sea Peoples.
Why is this important? Because we Jews are a part of the long history of the Middle East, and we have to find a snug place for us to live in.
The Sea Peoples were ancient sea marauders, that came from the North and made a lot of troubles. There were some ancient kingdoms in the north west of the Middle East, roughly where Iran is today, that were overthrown by these blond marauders some 4 to 5 thousand years ago. This is why, there actuallly is a very deep connection between Iran, Jews, and what we call the northerners still this day today. We are coming from, originally, the same people. Egypt repelled the sea peoples, and they settled in the Mediterranean. That is why we still see a lot of blond Greek, and according to Homer some of the ancient queens were blond.
It goes that deep, we in the West have forgotten, but they have not forgotten in the Middle East.
Arabs are a Semitic people, that are the brethren of the Jews, so we share common ancestry. Jews are in fact a mix between the northern marauders and Arabs.
Today this is formulated in the fact that Iran is a SHIA Muslim country and the Arab countries are SUNNI.
Right, this is in fact a reflection of the ethnic reality of Persia being ethnically different than the Arabs. So, Sunni and Shia fight a lot.
Within the Arab kingdoms, there is the pro western and pro Islamic group. Saudi Arabia is pro Western, Quatar is pro Islamic.
This ties into the connections the Arab countries have to Hamas, since Hamas is a pro Islamic group. Hamas is fighting Israel a SUNNI group, in fact.
This is simplified, I know, that there are a lot of colours in between.
But Qutb, who was a Sunni Muslim Sufi (Usually the leading Sufi scholars are called Qutb), founded an ANTI WESTERN ideology, in Egypt, called the Muslim brother hood, that Hamas is a part of.
This Organization is despised and fought against by the pro western forces of the Middle East, that is Egypt and Saudi Arabia, more or less. And supported by Turkie (I think the new spelling is) and Quatar.
So, Hamas is not just a representative of a people fighting for its freedom, more precisely it is a representative of the Muslim Brotherhood, that is the archenemy of the US.
I mean, this is the fact on the ground.
If we do not see this complexity, we miss out on a lot of the issues that are reigning in the Middle East.
So our friends, the pro western alliance, the Arabs, have proposed, that we repatriate Hamas and the rest of the anti western alliance of Gaza to somewhere else, to kind of end the issue all for once. Because, they want to show solidarity to the West, and keep the peace process going on.
Anyway, these are kind of the things we have to worry about, and some of the factors we have to factor in, to figure out, how to make peace in the Middle East.
G-d bless the peace we will find in the end, G-d bless the will for reconciliation.
Well, we can now have focus on something else than the conflict in the Middle East. The conflict is progressing, slowly but, to the extent it is possible, humanely.
Ok, it is a war, so people die, that is the way war work, but refraining from killing civilians and trying to keep the general populace out of the war, is definitively the right way to go.
The Gazans in general are as much victims as any civilian population in harms way.
So we need to talk China, because 1. It is a problem. 2. It crawls towards a nuclear, massive war.
What are the general traits we need to look out for.
First of all, it is the fact, that China may be arming up, but China needs soldiers who can actually fight. And Chinese are, essentially, too civilised to be very good fighters. Fighting needs rough, annoying, angry men. Not civilised men armed up in nice Kung Fu garb. It is not, that I do not like Kung Fu, in fact, there are many facets of Chinese culture I like. But a heavy tank, spewing bullets while playing Metallica, is not a match for the refined Chinese. A Viking army, that is the American, is really dangerous, when it gets to it.
You may think that the American army is a piece of tech, and it is, but behind the facade there is a certain affinity for the old Norse g-ds, even though that is a secret, and those g-ds are not nit-picking, they are warriors.
That is the truth of it. China is weak militarily, and will always be.
So we, at the one hand, have this Roman, Norse killing machine, believing in freedom, and at the other hand all the tech of China.
When the showdown is over, we will see, who will come on top.
My worry is just the sheer destruction that it will do. I hope, that we can avoid that, but I am not so certain.
G-d bless the will to find peace, at the end of the inevitable conflict.
Ok, so these are the final stages of the war against Hamas. First of all, we need to think about the possible outcome of the war. What is it, that we wish to accomplish?
It should be pretty straightforward. We want to make a lasting peace with the Palestinians, and also the rest of the backers of the Palestinians, that is our adversaries around the world. But, it should be a serious and lasting peace.
Then we want our kids back, and the hostages, that Hamas is still holding.
How do we do that?
That is not easy, because there are a number of elements or perspectives we need to think about and discuss.
First of all, there is the mechanic of the victim. International politics, at least with us, is like this. People support the little guy, they support the victim.
Hamas made a HUGE mistake in killing innocent children, and kidnapping party goers.
They made themselves the bad guy.
So far, with the care we have taken, not to hit civilians, we have not made Hamas or Palestinians victims. We have remained the good guy.
Nuking Gaza, will make us the bad guy.
In other words, in a world, where everybody have a front seat to a conflict like this, you do more than win over Hamas. What you do, is that you make, at the same time, a number of ethical choices, that the rest of the world is weighing. See? Modern warfare has become 100% transparent in a conflict like ours, because everybody is interested in it.
That is why, that we have to be careful about the civilians, and precise.
It seems to me, that the generals have been doing a very thorough and precise work of the strategy. Using precise attacks, ai drones and careful planning, it has has saved lives.
But, correct me if I’m wrong, Hamas has just holed up, and is preparing for its last stand, that it will make sure will be as bloody as possible, to make us look like the villain.
So, we need to continue the way we have been, slowly, deliberately, saving lives, being very, very careful not to target any civilians.
G-d bless the will for Israel and Jews in general to survive. G-d bless our united will to make this as precise and humane as ever possible. G-d bless the peace we will find, if we are very, very, very careful not to tip the balance of who are the victims in this fight.
Well, things are not looking good. First of all, the war is getting closer, it is already here, to some extent.
Essentially the invasion of Gaza, the bombing of Syria by the US, is an escalation of dimensions yet not seen in the Middle East since the six day war.
But, the good development is, that a lot of the Arab states are in it for a lasting peace.
Mr. Putin is angry, and China is dipping its feet in the waters of international politics. Even the UK is flexing its muscles.
But, and this is important, we need to think about what comes after. What will happen, if we end up in a massive war?
Aggression is not a good thing, it ends us up in a place, where we are not really in control of ourselves. There is a certain allure to revenge. Getting back at someone, feels good. The sweet revenge. But essentially, what does it really attain? It just gives you an opponent that is even stronger, viler and more dangerous.
Deescalation requires a clear head.
Think about it, what is the endgame, where do we go?
G-d bless the will to see things from all angles and not loose track of the real end; peace.