Alito pro-Trump upside down flag another blow to Supreme Court judicial and political credibility

by | May 18, 2024 | Politics, The Moderate Voice

Last August the Supreme Court’s approval rating dipped to a new low. Last month the Court’s approval rating improved considerably. Expect it to go way down again. Half (or more) will now see the once-venerable court as a group with at least two members not only with their thumbs overtly on the scale, but virtually sitting on one side of the scale.

The latest scandal to hit the court: The New York Times reported that right after the January 6 coup attempt Alito had an upside down flag on display at his home. Alito blamed it on his wife putting it upside down to answer a neighbor’s F*** Trump sign. This was a non-answer: no matter what the provocation, a flag was flying at Alito’s home clearly communicating a position since the upside down flag was used for the “Stop the Steal” post-2020 election movement. It had come to symbolize The Big Lie. Election denying.
CNN:

An upside-down American flag – a symbol used by some supporters of former President Donald Trump who challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory – hung outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after the election, The New York Times reported Thursday.

The revelation is almost certain to prompt calls for Alito, a member of the court’s conservative wing, to recuse himself from several high-profile cases pending before the court this year involving the election and subsequent attack on the US Capitol, including the blockbuster question of whether Trump may claim immunity from federal election subversion charges.

The Times published a photo of the inverted flag, which it said was seen at the justice’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, on January 17, 2021.

A spokeswoman for the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNN, which has not independently verified the flag’s use.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in an emailed statement to the Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The upside-down flag became a symbol of the “Stop the Steal” movement in the weeks and months following the election, in which Trump’s supporters falsely claimed that Biden’s win was illegitimate due to widespread fraud. The inverted flag was widely seen during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

The Times said it was not clear how long the flag flew outside of Alito’s home.

The story will heap further scrutiny on the high court at a time when it is already facing considerable blowback. Justice Clarence Thomas has been the subject of significant criticism and calls for recusal in election-related cases after his wife, conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, acknowledged she attended Trump’s rally before the Capitol attack and supported White House efforts to discredit the election results.

Thomas recently accused his critics of “nastiness” and “lies” in remarks to a judicial conference in Alabama.

Esquire’s Charles Pierce writes:

Right now, the Court is deliberating the concept of sweeping presidential immunity, a legal absurdity concocted by the former president* and his lawyers in an attempt to sabotage once and for all special counsel Jack Smith’s case against him concerning his actions on January 6, 2021. The entire Republican party is engaged in a massive act of historical vandalism concerning the events of that day, and the guy in the special counsel’s crosshairs is the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. And the angriest, most arrogant member of the carefully cultivated conservative majority had the ultimate symbol of wing-nut vengeance flying above his house. That is not the flag that the Constitution follows.

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte:

Gross and undeniable in its meaning, of course. But Alito, who has never been interested in honesty with the public, offered a glib rebuttal, telling the New York Times, “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag.” Instead, he blamed his wife, saying she flew the inverted flag as a “response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

As Joe Scarborough on MSNBC retorted Friday morning, “nobody believes him.” There’s no universe, Scarborough noted, in which the upside-down flag is used as a way to throw the finger to neighbors you’re in a spat with. This is Alito lying by omission. As Kantor swiftly discovered, the argument the Alitos were having with their neighbors wasn’t over loud parties or defecating dogs, it was over Jan. 6, which the neighbors in question vociferously objected to. Martha-Ann Alito took offense to a neighbor who “displayed an anti-Trump sign with an expletive” around the election. Things escalated, and, as neighbors and documentary evidence show, the inverted flag was up in the days after the riot.

A more honest description of the conflict would be that the Alitos rejected their neighbor’s right to express their political opinions freely. In order to convey their disapproval of this use of First Amendment rights, the Alito household sent a message of support to people who used violence in an attempt to destroy American democracy. As more than one commentator pointed out, Alito continues to run around pretending he’s a champion of “free speech,” but when his neighbors expressed an opinion held by most Americans, he (or his wife, if you believe him) responded with an endorsement of violence to end constitutional democracy as we know it.

When asked about this by Shannon Bream of Fox News on Friday, Alito doubled down on the faux outrage over curse words and claimed his wife only expressed support for the Jan. 6 rioters after neighbors said mean things to the couple about how violent insurrections are, in fact, bad.

There have been calls for Thomas to recuse himself on cases related to the 2020 Presidential election and its aftermath. Thomas has ignored them. There are now calls for Alito to recuse himself.

And guess what he will (or won’t) do…

As Daffy Duck might say: “Credibility, shmedibility, what does it matter if you have power?”

The post Alito pro-Trump upside down flag another blow to Supreme Court judicial and political credibility appeared first on The Moderate Voice .

Florida mom speaks out, asks for prayers after daughter detained in Turks and Caicos for carrying ammo

by | May 18, 2024 | Fox News

The mother of a Florida woman shared her plea for help after her daughter was arrested for carrying ammunition at an airport in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Sharitta Shinese Grier, 45, was the fifth American to be arrested and detained in TCI after being caught with ammunition in an airport since February, along with Ryan Watson of Oklahoma, Tyler Wenrich of Virginia, Bryan Hagerich of Pennsylvania and Michael Lee Evans of Texas.

Willie Lucas, Grier’s mother, said that it was heartbreaking leaving her daughter at the island and returning to their home in Florida.

“I didn’t want to come home,” Lucas told FOX 35 .

FLORIDA WOMAN BECOMES 5TH AMERICAN ARRESTED IN TURKS AND CAICOS FOR CARRYING AMMO

Lucas shared her hope that her daughter would stay safe, asking people to keep her family in their prayers .

“Be safe when you go out of town. Just be safe. Be careful and keep us in your prayers, cuz God knows we sure gonna need it,” Lucas said.

Chanchy Willis, Grier’s cousin, said that the ammunition that was found was “just a horrible mistake.”

“Just for two bullets? It was just a horrible mistake for all five,” Willis said.

3 US GOVERNORS ASK TURKS AND CAICOS TO RELEASE AMERICANS DETAINED OVER AMMO

After posting bail, Grier joined four other Americans in a rental property on the island as they awaited an uncertain future.

The five could each potentially face up to 12 years in prison. 

“Watching the others and how they are close-knit, and reaching out to her, showing her that she’s not alone, they are all in this together, that brings joy to my heart,” Willis said..

Watson, Hagerich and Wenrich’s father previously spoke with Fox News Digital about their arrests over stray ammunition found in their luggage.

All three men have said they were traveling home from their respective vacations when TCI airport security officials found stray bullets in their bags. 

The three men have also said they had no intention of bringing ammo to the islands but had forgotten it in their bags from prior hunting trips. 

“We had no intentions of ever bringing anything into this country. . . . It was just trying to pack board shorts and flip-flops, and that was all we were concerned about bringing,” Watson previously told Fox News Digital. “So … it never dawned on us to research any of these things. And there are a lot of locals that have been just such a blessing and have had such gracious hearts.”

The detainees must argue before the TCI Superior Court that they were arrested under “exceptional circumstances,” which includes proving they have no prior criminal record , they did not intend to bring ammunition into the airport and why a 12-year sentence would be excessive in their cases.

Grier is scheduled to appear before a judge on July 5.

Fox News Digital’s Audrey Conklin contributed to this report.

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Sony Puts AI Companies ‘On Notice’

by | May 18, 2024 | Outside The Beltway, The New York Times

FT (“Sony Music warns global tech and streamers over AI use of its artists“):

Sony Music is sending warning letters to more than 700 artificial intelligence developers and music streaming services globally in the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle against tech groups ripping off artists.

The Sony Music letter, which has been seen by the Financial Times, expressly prohibits AI developers from using its music — which includes artists such as Harry Styles, Adele and Beyoncé — and opts out of any text and data mining of any of its content for any purposes such as training, developing or commercialising any AI system.

Sony Music is sending the letter to companies developing AI systems including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Suno and Udio, according to those close to the group.

The world’s second-largest music group is also sending separate letters to streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, asking them to adopt “best practice” measures to protect artists and songwriters and their music from scraping, mining and training by AI developers without consent or compensation. It has asked them to update their terms of service, making it clear that mining and training on its content is not permitted.

Sony Music declined to comment further.

The letter, which is being sent to tech companies around the world this week, marks an escalation of the music group’s attempts to stop the melodies, lyrics and images from copyrighted songs and artists being used by tech companies to produce new versions or to train systems to create their own music.

The letter says that Sony Music and its artists “recognise the significant potential and advancement of artificial intelligence” but adds that “unauthorised use . . . in the training, development or commercialisation of AI systems deprives [Sony] of control over and appropriate compensation”.

It says: “This letter serves to put you on notice directly, and reiterate, that [Sony’s labels] expressly prohibit any use of [their] content.”

It’ll be fascinating to watch this play out. Offhand, it seems to me that either using copyrighted content to train AI models is fair use or it isn’t. Given the radically transformative nature of it, I would lean toward it qualifying under existing law.

If it’s not fair use, large language models simply can’t work under American law. If the only content available is government publications, works released under an unrestrictive Creative Commons model or equivalent, or extremely old works in the public domain, it would be practically useless. If it is fair use, I don’t know why a Beyonce single differs from an article in the New York Times.

The main precedents that come to mind are the various copyright infringement lawsuits against Google, all of which the company has won. Google’s search engine crawls the Internet and indexes copyrighted materials , monetizing this content to sell ads. That’s fair use . Google Images indexes copyrighted photos and artwork, displaying thumbnails of them. That’s fair use. Google Books directly scans the content of copyrighted, well, books . So long as they only make a limited amount of the text available in any given search, that’s fair use . (And note that the whole book is scanned.) They even won a recent case where they used bits of Oracle’s possibly copyrighted (that court didn’t even decide that question) code in its products.

While this is all “emerging technology” in DoD parlance, the contours of the future and its implications are visible. It may well be that Congress should craft new laws to deal with AI, in that it’s in many ways fundamentally different from previous Internet-based cases. But, of course, it has not been known for effectively legislating in recent years.

Zac Brown granted temporary restraining order against estranged wife after suing her: report

by | May 18, 2024 | Fox News

Zac Brown was reportedly granted a temporary restraining order against estranged wife Kelly Yazdi after suing her over an Instagram post.

The 45-year-old filed a lawsuit in Georgia Friday requesting “an emergency temporary restraining order, injunctive relief, and damages arising out of several past and threatened violations” of a confidentiality agreement that Yazdi had signed, Fox News Digital confirmed. 

On Saturday, Entertainment Tonight reported that Brown had been granted the restraining order against Yazdi, which would require her to remove an Instagram post that he claimed had violated the confidentiality agreement and damaged his reputation.

The “Keep Me In Mind” singer also asked that the order prevent Yazdi from “making any defamatory, false, untrue, or otherwise damaging statements” about him, his family and members of the Zac Brown Band, according to documents obtained by NBC.

ZAC BROWN SEPARATES FROM WIFE KELLY YAZDI AFTER FOUR MONTHS OF MARRIAGE

The documents did not indicate which of Yazdi’s Instagram posts Brown was seeking to have removed from her account, according to NBC.

The lawsuit said Yazdi had signed the confidentiality agreement during her employment with the Zac Brown Band from August 2022 to February 2024. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Yazdi and a representative for Brown for comment.

Brown told NBC in a statement he “took the steps necessary to enforce an agreement between us to maintain personal and business affairs in confidence and to protect my family from online harassment and speculation.”

The musician said his “only hope is for us to keep private matters private and to move forward with the mutual respect we had agreed to show one another when we parted ways.”

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In December, Brown and Yazdi announced they had separated after four months of marriage. 

“We are in the process of divorce. Our mutual respect for one another remains,” they said in a joint statement to Fox News Digital.

“We wish each other the best and will always appreciate our time together. As we navigate this personal matter, we simply request privacy during this time.”

The former couple married in August in Georgia and hosted a wedding celebration in November at a bowling alley, sources told Fox News Digital.

Brown, 45, proposed to Yazdi in 2022 on a vacation in Hawaii. A source shared with People magazine the proposal was “very intimate, and the couple has kept it very private.”

The musician was previously married to ex-wife Shelly Brown for 12 years before announcing their divorce in 2018. They have five children.

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Brown is the lead singer of his country music band. The three-time Grammy Award-winning group has released seven studio albums, two live albums and one greatest hits album with massive commercial success from the hit song “Chicken Fried.” 

Their first album, “The Foundation,” is certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, and its follow-ups, “You Get What You Give” and “Uncaged,” both went platinum.

Yazdi’s website says she is a “SAG-AFTRA actress & stuntwoman, professional model, huntress and brand ambassador.” The website also notes she is the founder of Ride Wild, a platform for female powersport riders.

Yazdi’s credits include appearances in the TV series “Hawaii Five-O” and the movies “The Beautiful Ones” and “The Martial Arts Kid.”

After their split, Yazdi followed Brown on social media and deleted all photos of him from her Instagram page, according to ET.

,Fox News Digital’s Tracy Wright contributed to this report.

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The Day After in Gaza

by | May 18, 2024 | NPR, Outside The Beltway

NPR (“Israel has no plan for Gaza after Hamas rule, the Israeli defense chief says“):

Amid growing frustration in Israel over where the war is headed eight months in, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Wednesday accused Israel’s leadership of ignoring his requests to discuss a replacement to Hamas rule in Gaza.

“Since October, I have been raising this issue consistently in the Cabinet, and have received no response,” Gallant said.

His speech, broadcast live, is the harshest rebuke yet of Israel’s war strategy in Gaza from within Israel’s three-man war cabinet. It set off a political firestorm that could threaten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on power.

The debate over the “day after” in Gaza erupted when Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari was asked at a news conference  Tuesday whether Israeli troops had been sent to retake areas of Gaza they had retreated from because there were no governing alternatives to Hamas. Hagari said a replacement for Hamas would pressure the militant group, but that it was a question for Israel’s political leaders.

Netanyahu then said in a video released by his office  Wednesday that discussions about a “day-after” strategy are meaningless until Hamas is defeated, and said some of Israel’s efforts to replace Hamas are covert.

Gallant appeared to refute Netanyahu’s claims, saying no efforts were being made to establish an an alternative to Hamas in Gaza. He called on Netanyahu to declare that Israel would not establish civil or military rule in Gaza for the long term.

“The ‘day after Hamas’ will only be achieved with Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza, accompanied by international actors, establishing a governing alternative to Hamas’ rule,” Gallant said in his live speech . “Unfortunately, the plan was not brought for discussion, and worse, an alternative discussion was not raised in its place.”

In response, several hard-right members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition called for the defense minister to be replaced.

[…]

With Netanyahu failing to articulate a clear plan for replacing Hamas rule, several thousand Israeli settlers and their supporters — including senior ministers in Netanyahu’s government — rallied Tuesday for Israel to build Jewish settlements atop the ruins of Gaza’s destroyed cities, and to encourage Palestinians to emigrate.

The rally took place next to the Gaza border in the city of Sderot, as large pillars of smoke rose across the border in Gaza.

It was held on Israel’s 76th Independence Day, which Palestinians commemorate annually as the Nakba, or catastrophe, when many Palestinians were dispossessed of their homes and exiled in Israel’s founding war. Palestinians rallied this week in commemoration in parts of Israel and the occupied West Bank.

In a speech at the pro-settlement rally, far-right lawmaker Zvi Sukkot celebrated the immense destruction the Israeli army has wreaked on Gaza in the more than seven months of war, saying Israel’s enemies must relinquish land as a consequence of attacking the country.

Far-right Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir also addressed demonstrators.

“To be a free people in our country,” Ben Gvir said to a cheering crowd, referencing Israel’s national anthem, “is also to say to Biden, ‘Mr. President, this is ours. We’re going home to Gaza.’”

[…]

Netanyahu has said Israel does not intend to reoccupy Gaza for the long term or to resettle it, but he has also resisted U.S. calls for Gaza to be governed by  a revitalized Palestinian Authority, a more moderate Palestinian leadership.

“In various Cabinet meetings and consultations, Netanyahu has talked about some kind of a self-rule by the Palestinians that will involve Arab countries such as the [United Arab Emirates] and Egypt, with some sort of an international coordination,” says Eyal, the writer. “He was very resolved to make sure that this would not include the Palestinian Authority or Fatah, which is the party that’s most dominant within the Palestinian Authority and is, of course, a competitor of Hamas in the Palestinian society. But he did not present any plan for that.”

Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser under Netanyahu’s predecessor, Naftali Bennett, and is now a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says, “Nobody’s talking about a two-state solution. We’re talking about a prospect of self-governance by the Palestinians, something that gets the support of the vast majority of Israelis. And Netanyahu, for his own political reasons, isn’t capable of saying that.”

WaPo (“As Hamas returns to the north, Israel’s Gaza endgame is nowhere in sight“):

It was last December when the Israeli military declared victory in the Jabalya refugee camp, saying it had broken Hamas’s grip on its traditional stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip.

“Jabalya is not the Jabalya it used to be,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of Division 162, said at the time, adding that “hundreds of terrorists” had been killed and 500 suspects arrested.

Five months later, Israeli forces are back in Jabalya. Ground troops are pushing into the densely packed camp, backed by artillery and airstrikes — one in a string of recent “re-clearing” operations launched by the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas, whose fighters have rapidly regrouped in areas vacated by the IDF.

Israel’s fast-moving offensive in Gaza has given way to a grinding battle of attrition, highlighting how far it remains from its chief military aim — the complete dismantling of Hamas. As an adaptable militant organization that has easy access to recruits, an expansive tunnel network and is deeply embedded in the fabric of Gaza, Hamas has shown it can weather a protracted and devastating war.

The resumption of heavy fighting in the north comes as the IDF presses ahead with its heavily criticized campaign in the southern city of Rafah  — long framed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a final battle against Hamas’s last intact battalions. Now, American officials  and some of the prime minister’s fellow cabinet members  are offering increasingly blunt assessments about the resilience of the militant group and Netanyahu’s failure to plan for postwar Gaza.

In striking remarks Wednesday night, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called on Netanyahu  to make a public commitment that Israel will not end up governing Gaza after the war, amid mounting fears in the IDF that its mission is creeping toward reoccupation of the territory.

“Hamas might regain its strength as long as it maintains civilian control,” Gallant said. Failure to create an “alternative governing authority,” he said, “is equivalent to choosing between the two worst alternatives: Hamas rule or Israeli control of Gaza.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan sounded a similar note on Monday: “Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas,” he told reporters. “If Israel’s efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza, and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back.”

Netanyahu said last week that Israel has killed 14,000 Hamas militants; the IDF put its estimate  at 13,000 last month. The numbers are not possible to independently verify — and no evidence has been offered to support them — but even the high-end figure would amount to less than half of Hamas’s estimated fighting force before the war. Thousands of other militants belong to smaller groups that vie with Hamas for local influence.

[…]

“It would be astounding for me if it wasn’t incredibly easy for Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza to recruit,” said H.A. Hellyer, a scholar specializing in Middle East security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Royal United Services Institute.

While Hamas has been “significantly and substantially degraded,” he said, an organization that has been active in Gaza since the 1980s and governed it for more than 15 years is not going to “simply disappear.”

After seven months of bombardment and ground operations by one of the world’s “most powerful armies,” he said, “Israeli forces still haven’t been able to come close to victory.”

When Israeli troops withdrew from Jabalya last year, Hamas began a recruitment drive for jobs securing aid and setting up a new headquarters there, according to residents. “There is the presence of policemen, but without a police uniform, and they are all in civilian clothes,” said a 42-year-old Jabalya resident, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

Not only does the killing of innocent Palestinians make it easier for Hamas to recruit but the fact that the terrorist organization violates the laws of war by hiding among the civilian population and failure to wear identifying uniforms means that any escape outlet allowed for said civilians to escape the depredations of war likewise allow the targeted fighters to escape right along with them. All of which has been obvious from the outset.

As much as I disdain Netanyahu—going back to his first stint as premier in the late 1990s—he has no politically feasible options. It’s not just that he’s a hardliner and a jerk but it’s just about inconceivable to offer an end state for the war where Palestinians are better off than they were before. Israeli Jews would, quite understandably, see that as a reward for the October 7 massacre.

But, of course, failure to craft a better state of peace acceptable to both sides guarantees that killing will resume at some point in the future. WaPo’s David Ignatius (“This ‘indispensable’ Israeli leader has a proposal for ‘the day after’ in Gaza“) thinks Gallant points to a way.

It’s time for Israel to begin building a Palestinian security force in Gaza that can provide stability there after the political power of Hamas is broken, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in a blunt briefing this week.

“The idea is simple,” Gallant told me. “We will not allow Hamas to control Gaza. We don’t want Israel to control it, either. What is the solution? Local Palestinian actors backed by international actors.”

Gallant’s frank comments mark a turn in the Israeli government’s debate about governance and security issues in Gaza, known by the shorthand phrase “the day after.” His views are widely shared by the defense and security establishment but opposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition.

The defense minister presented these arguments to the Israeli public in a speech Wednesday, following our embargoed briefing Tuesday. This open, public campaign for a new approach to postwar Gaza that includes Palestinian security forces could split the Likud party, of which Gallant and Netanyahu are both members, and increase what has been growing talk in Israel and the United States that Gallant could be a future prime minister. Gallant said in his speech: “I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make a decision” and support “a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.” He said that “indecision is, in essence, a decision — this leads to a dangerous course.”

Gallant’s approach aligns with that of the Biden administration, which has been urging Netanyahu for months to start building Palestinian forces that can eventually take over security responsibility in Gaza. National security adviser Jake Sullivan explained the administration’s view in a meeting with reporters Monday. “Any military operation … has got to be connected to a strategic endgame that answers the question: What comes next?” Sullivan said. “We want an outcome in which the page gets turned.”

Biden administration officials say Gallant has taken a larger role in U.S.-Israeli dialogue in recent months, as relations have soured between Netanyahu and President Biden. One U.S. official described Gallant as an “indispensable” problem-solver in the increasingly tense debate about how to end the war in Gaza.

[…]

In January, Gallant released a public plan that stated his central point : “Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against Israel.” He proposed a multinational task force to help stabilize Gaza including U.S., European and Arab partners, with Egypt playing a special role as a “major actor.”

Gallant didn’t say so, but defense officials recognize that any new Gaza security force will have some links with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. As one senior Israeli defense official put it: “In Gaza, the color of the flag is either Hamas or the PA. There is no other option. We will have to build local forces, but they will look to Ramallah.” Israelis who take this pragmatic view share the American demand for a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority that is less corrupt and more efficient.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, is already assessing possible recruits for a Gaza security force from the more than 8,000 people there who are linked to the Palestinian Authority, Israeli and American officials told me. In going through the names, Israelis are asking “how many are too Hamas, too old or too dead,” one official explained.

Gallant said of his proposal to rely on Palestinians for basic postwar security: “This is not a perfect solution. I have been fighting Palestinian [terrorism] since 1976. I know the risks. But the other option is to have Israel or Hamas controlling Gaza,” which are both unacceptable, he said.

The bottom line is that “any military action has to end in a political solution,” Gallant told me. What I took away from the conversation is that significant new debate is beginning in Israel — and with its partner, the United States — not just about ending the war in Gaza but also creating stable Palestinian governance there after it’s over.

I’m highly skeptical that this plan is sellable to Israeli Jews. For that matter, Hamas is likely to reject it as well, either at the bargaining table or at the barrel of a gun later on.

At the same time, that “any military action has to end in a political solution” is axiomatic. That the Israeli government does not have an end state in mind beyond the quixotic “destroy Hamas” is more than a bit problematic.