President Biden on Thursday walked back a prediction he made earlier this week that a ceasefire in Gaza could be reached by Monday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas’s demands “delusional,” signaling a hostage deal is not close.
“Hope springs eternal,” Biden told reporters when asked if he still thought a ceasefire by Monday was possible. “I was on the telephone with the people in the region. I’m still — probably not by Monday, but I’m hopeful.”
When Biden first predicted a ceasefire by Monday, both Hamas and Israeli officials said he spoke too soon. Hamas officials have said the main gap between the two sides is that they want a permanent ceasefire, while Israel and the US only want to pause the slaughter of Palestinians.
In Tel Aviv on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu placed all the blame for the lack of a deal on Hamas. “We face a brick wall of delusional, unrealistic Hamas demands,” Netanyahu said, adding that Hamas “knows its demands are delusional and is not even trying to move close to an area of agreement. That’s the situation.”
The deal that’s on the table would involve Hamas releasing 40 Israeli hostages in exchange for a six-week ceasefire and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. According to The Times of Israel, both Israeli and Hamas representatives are discussing the potential deal with Qatari officials in Doha, and Qatar has said there have been no breakthroughs.
Earlier this week, Haaretz reported that Netanyahu was complicating negotiations by adding an additional demand to have the Palestinian prisoners deported to another country and for his vow that after any ceasefire, Israel would resume its brutal operations in Gaza and invade Rafah, which is packed with 1.5 million Palestinians.
Palestinian children have started starving to death in the Gaza Strip, and UN officials and famine experts are warning that if conditions don’t change on the ground, mass starvation will happen soon. Over 100 Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza on Thursday when Israeli forces fired on a crowd gathered around an aid convoy.
From Tiberius on X:
@ecomarxi
The old world is no longer dying, it is dead.
There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags.
I know what the inside of skulls look like now.
I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off.
I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know.
I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive.
There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear. But it’s not just the horrors of the moment—those horrors aren’t new. In spite of the increased severity, Palestinians have known these horrors for longer than I’ve existed.
It’s what this horror means, as well. It means that any single tyrant can murder any of us at will with our entire families, neighbourhoods and communities and world leaders will not act to stop them.
It means that savages in suits can kill us all with advanced drones and we can share the corpses of our children with billions of people, and the media will excuse it, scapegoat our kin and divert attention away by any means necessary.
It means the legal apparatus set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent another Holocaust from occurring is meaningless, because the very nations who ratified it in law will ignore its clear imperatives and even subvert and attack those who try to enforce it.
In this moment, Israel’s actions have cost the entire world more than anyone can quantify, and the depraved and twisted Western coalition that has supported the Israeli regime has ensured that cost is deep and that we all must bear it.
We will either drift further into chaos and warfare that will touch us all, or we will achieve material change that denounces and fundamentally alters the mechanics of power—those that currently deem the blood of tens of thousands of children an insufficient currency for purchasing peace.
This, I believe, is the great battle of our time, and it’s not going away. The old world is dead, that’s for sure, and the monsters are fully in control. The question is, what can we do about it?
One gets a sense of what Western Europe felt after WWI … God is dead, Enlightenment is dead, Marx is dead, Scientific/Technology (Progress) is dead, … post-modern nihilism rules.
except ‘marx is dead’ wouldn’a had the same meaning a year after the russian revolution as today
Right. My construction wasn’t clear. My point was that for us today, it’s not just Nietzsche, but all the salvation myths of modernity, are dead, … that, ironically, ben-Gvir is right, we are all nothing more than animals …. consuming, defecating, and reproducing in jungle and barnyard.
“it’s not just Nietzsche…all the salvation myths of modernity, are dead”
hopes for the russian revolution notwithstanding…
…(‘notwithstanding’ because, for some anti-democratic modernists too, the russian revolution – like the french revolution – did not support a secular ‘salvation myth,’ but was – like secularist modernity itself – a reason for cultural despair)…
…i’d argue – as neitzsche and yr post-war nihilism analogy suggest – that yr contemporary ‘post-modern’ nihilism was already present – an important strand – in modernism
not my idea alone, btw…think i’ve run across that in habermas…
Could you give an e.g. of a seular modernist nihilist thinker …. Heiddeger I’d argue is post-modern…??
well…for one…most famously…the ‘secular modernist nihilist’ nietzsche! who did use the word nihilism, and for whom the ‘the problem of nihilism’ was central – the big post-christian-belief prob’ of modernity…
…true, nietzsche pictured ‘going beyond nihilism’ – his ubermensch bravely celebrating the freedoms of the traumatic ‘death of god’…
…but yr ‘post-modern’ death of all values outlook is central to that squarely “modernist” thinker…
so to repeat myself – the so-called post-modern ‘death of all salvationist narratives’ is already fully present and a recurrent problem in modernist culture.
i suspect the ‘death of marx’ underlies yr comment – ie, a likewise traumatic death: the lack of a believable, greater left narrative…ie, no real-life socialist models, and seemingly no possibility of left advance from this present…indeed, that is a problem…
…but maybe there’s a left nietzchean way of thinking about it – the idea that – as a deceased uncle once said to me – ‘all value is created.’
For me “modernist” miss-labels Nietzsche. His thought is intuitive, mythopoaeic, not Cartesian; and the superman is a primitivism, Dionysos/Achilles. The moderns finesse the nihilism deficit with Benthem and Mill, scientism and liberalism, no need for absolutes, just pleasure/pain. And, Kant to Habermas, the Enlightenment only succeeds in founding a liberal bourgeois democracy.
Your uncle’s aphorism has great appeal for me, homo faber, the marxian labor theory of value.
Anyway, given the simultaneous imminence of armageddon and genocide, nihilism is the elephant in the room for this list .
“For me ‘modernist’ miss-labels Nietzsche. His thought is intuitive, mythopoaeic, not Cartesian.”
Modernism is not purely “cartesian” – that’s my point:
Anti-rationalism is one major part of modernism’s intellectual/cultural reaction to modernity – modernity being the industrial-capitalist society Bentham speaks for (though I’d argue not Mill since his ‘intellectual freedom’ sets itself – in modernist fashion – in inner opposition to the instrumental state).
To be clear, not saying the cultural reaction to capitalist modernity is only anti-rationalist modernism…
…Freud is a major rationalist modernist, after all… + Habermas as you suggest…+ Mill I think I’d argue.
For me, that which you’re describing is the cultural dialectic of modernism, enlightenment v Xtianity, … perfectly hit off in the person of Freud, a therapist with a technique intended to ‘cure’ the ontological ‘illness’ (Meaning or Nothing), not to face it. With others it takes the form of reactionism, Rousseau’s noble savage to Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. To bring it full circle, Freud brings to mind Wittgenstein and there’s the real thing (recently watched “The Oxford Murders”).
Anyway you did find me out right off. Though, not the Russian Rev (wonderfully quixotic ab ovo), but the failure of the ’60’s that disappoints. … a Xtian Communist (i.e., synthesizing the poles of Western Civ.) … turning Thatcher on her head, it’s either xtianism marxism, or capitalism will destroy the species, …TINA.
Walked back his prediction? More like he got his new script on a card.
Remember Feb 20th. That was the day the US decided to let the genocide continue with their veto of a temporary cease fire. Here we are 10 days of death later. So, Joe, hope doesn’t spring eternal for those 100+ massacred trying to prevent their own starvation while the IDF opened fire on them. Maybe Karma will kill that old fucker. One can only hope.
Karma strikes many ways, wishing death on someone risks you being in Karma spot light. Come on wars you better than that.
No, I’m not better than that. I wish death on ANYONE who condones genocide let alone one who bankrolls it. No apologies.
Which puts you in the same world as those who condone genocide.
Yes, I want all those who don’t have a problem with brutally killing woman and children and creating conditions of widespread famine to die and rot in hell (if there is one). Guilty.
The Press needs to turn some of their focus on Congress, they are the ones who give the money/lethal weapons to Israel’s Genocide of Palestinians. The Press needs to confront every Member of Congress and ask them “why do you continue to support the Genocide”? Ask them “do you know your actions make you complicit of War Crimes”? Ask them “is slaughtering defenseless women, children a War Crime”? Congress is in charge of declaring War, handing out the money for War and every one of them needs to be called out on their support, before the Elections in November.
“The press” are facilitators and stenographers.
And if Congress says that number civilians deaths in Gaza is consistence with Urban warfare, what will you say? The deaths in Gaza are direct response to Hamas building its forts under civilian structures. No forts, no need to bomb civilian areas. Blaming the US Congress for an war started by Hamas is silly. Hamas started this battle on Oct 7. That is a fact. And than Hamas has been hiding under civilians since then. Can you deny that?
I will deny everything coming from Zionist Propagandist!
He got the big payoff from Zionist donors in California. Nothing will change.
Tamara Nassar @TamaralNassar
20h
Activists protested outside @nytimes headquarters this morning to demand the retraction of the fraudulent atrocity propaganda article, doused with scandal, claiming Hamas “mass rapes” on 7 October. This is one of the biggest media scandals of this genocide.
https://twitter.com/TamaraINassar/status/1763277386060116150?
BBC distances itself from 7 October “mass rape” claims
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/bbc-distances-itself-7-october-mass-rape-claims
The statement about a Monday deadline was probably another senior moment from Biden. He has now been given the directive from Bibi with accompanying note cards.
“‘Hope springs eternal,’ Biden told reporters”…
…’I really did hope my ‘imminent breakthrough’ lie would lower the uncommitted vote in Michigan.’