presidential debate post mortem from God’s Courtroom

   I’ve been seeing news reports of Trump saying he loves the Ten Commandment being in Louisiana schools. 

    Heh, The Liar in Chief had violated all Ten Commandments, including thou shall not kill many times as Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces.

    An old lawyer friend emailed me yesterday, “Your abstention is a vote for Trump."

    I thought that since I live in Alabama, whose electoral votes Trump easily will get, my vote is irrelevant. But what I wrote back to my close lawyer friend was, "I can vote for a mass killer or a Nazi insurrectionist, or vote for someone else, or not vote, is how I see it.” 

    I watched the presidential debate on CNN last night. Anyone who didn’t watch it will have to take the word of people who watched it, which will be about the same as the Tower of Babel.

    Here's my take.

     Any notion that the debate was rigged in favor of Joe Biden was dashed to smithereens.

    CNN’s moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did a good job of not making the debate about themselves. 

    They didn’t fact check.

    They let President Biden off the Gaza war crimes hook.

    They let former President Trump dodge questions.   

    Any notion that the debate was rigged in favor of Biden was dashed to smithereens.

   Trump cannot  be trusted to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about anything.

    Perhaps it was my old ears, but I was able to hear what Trump said much better than I was able to hear what Biden said. Biden's voice was low, hoarse. He sounded and looked like he needed oxygen. At one point, he forgot what he wanted to say and that went on for about 20 seconds and he ran out of time.

    Trump did not act out like the raging asshole he was in the first 2020 debate against Biden.   

    Biden said Trump is a convicted felon. Trump said Hunter’s son is a convicted felon. Biden did not say Hunter is not running for president. 

    Trump said Biden is a criminal and he should be prosecuted. Trump dodged a question about him seeking retribution if he is elected, by saying his being elected will be retribution.

    Trump hammered Biden for opening America’s borders to immigrants. Of all the things Biden did inside America as president, that was the absolute dumbest. Everything else Trump said about immigrants from south of the border was lies.

    Both candidates defended Israel’s obliteration of Gaza.

    Trump said, if he was president, Hamas would not have launched the October 7, 2023 raid, and Russia would not have invaded Ukraine, because he would not have pulled American troops out of Afghanistan in the disgraceful way Biden did it, which convinced Vladimir Putin that America had gone soft. The truth is, there was no way for America to get out of President draft dodger George Bush’s war in Afghanistan cleanly, and that’s why President draft dodger Trump didn’t pull America out of Afghanistan when he was president. I give Biden credit for doing what draft dodger Trump, Barack Obama and draft dodger George Bush wouldn’t do- get American troops out of Afghanistan.

    President draft dodger Trump said he was responsible for NATO countries in Europe paying their fair share of NATO’s cost, but everything Trump said about Russia’s war in Ukraine was bull shit, and draft dodger Trump denied he said American soldiers killed in France during World War II were suckers and losers.

    President insurrectionist Trump said Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi had stepped up and taken the blame for the January 6, 2021 peace demonstration getting out of hand in the national Capitol, because she turned down his offer to have 10,000 National Guardsmen at the Capitol. But President insurrectionist Trump dodged explaining why he waited so long to tell the insurrectionists to stand down and go home, and he denied he incited them to use violence. He said they were patriots and should not have been prosecuted. [A post-debate fact check said Trump asked for 10,000 National Guardsmen to protect him and his mob.]

    A close friend, who voted for Trump in 2016 and is a US Army Special Forces combat veteran, told me after the January 6, 2021 riot in the Capitol, that the rioters all should have been shot dead, and I could quote him. He did not say the rioters' leader should have been shot dead. 

    Trump continued his rich white spoiled brat crybaby whine that the 2020 election was stolen, and he dodged saying he will abide by the results of the 2014 election, if he loses.

    Neither candidate said anything during the debate that I felt would help America internally and overseas.

    After the debate, CNN reported Democrats saying it was not good for Biden and the Democrats need to come up with a new  strategy.

    I say Biden has no business being in the White House for 4 more years.

    I say Biden and Trump both should be in prison. Or hanged. 

    I say, if the Democrats are smart, they will go into their prayer closet and come out with Michelle Obama as their presidential nominee this year, which will shake up everything.

    Halfway into the debate, I told God I'd had enough politics to last me for the rest of forever. Angels trained me to do other things, and it always felt to me like putting me into politics, which I detested, was a default program. 

    Anyone interested in the main program, which perhaps can be described as what goes on in God’s Courtroom, can read my books at the free internet library: archive.org, which is run by American colleges. The free library specializes in out of print books and books donated by authors not seeking payment. Thanks to modern technology, the free library’s digitized books can be read in English and about 35 other languages. A similar library operated by Cambridge University in England can be used by people in Great Britain and Europe: bodlean.eu

afoolsworkneverends.blogspot.com also is a place to read about what goes on in God’s Courtroom.

    The other day, I told a woman friend, who keeps trying to figure me out and put labels on me and pick me apart, that no label fits me. The women I loved and lived with knew me, and another way to get to know me is read my books, but that’s not my job.

    She and I agreed, regardless of what Julian Assange is, he did humanity a favor by releasing the dirt he had on America, and President Obama should have hired Edward Snowden to advise him in exchange for a pardon.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

a call to America’s shokka poets on the eve of a presidential … debate

 

    Once upon a time in Key West, after I recited a couple of my poems at a poetry reading in Sippin’ Internet cafe, a black woman I recently met and told about the gathering walked over to me and said, “You a shokka poet.” 

    I look forward to reading Erik Rittenberry’s daily posts at his Poetic Outlaws Substack newsletter, because they set me to ruminating and sometimes to writing. Here’s his offering today, about some shokkas no longer among the living, followed by where my thoughts went with it.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality…

— W. B. Yeats

Frank Kermode (1919 – 2010) was a prominent English literary critic known for his profound contributions to the field of literary theory and criticism. 

In his thought-provoking book, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Kermode takes on the idea that fiction often reflects deep-seated cultural and philosophical concerns about time, apocalypse, and the ultimate meaning of life. He discusses how literary works from different periods respond to these themes, and how endings in narratives help to provide a sense of understanding and resolution.

In the words of one NY Times critic, “Kermode argues that our apocalyptic views of disorder, of crisis, and perpetual transition in the contemporary world are contemporary ways of making sense of the world, of giving it an intelligible order.”

Below is a passage from his work in which he discusses “the end of a century” and how Yeats, whom he deems an apocalyptic poet, saw the impending horror, trepidation, and decadence that inevitably takes hold during a time of rapid transition. It’s how we try to give some “order and design” to the past, present, and future. 

In the words of William Blake: “…the Last Judgement begins, and its Vision is Seen by the Imaginative Eye of Every one according to the situation he holds.”

It’s all so relevant still today. I hope you enjoy it. 

---

You sometimes hear people say, with a certain pride in their clerical resistance to the myth, that the nineteenth century really ended not in 1900 but in 1914. But there are different ways of measuring an epoch. 1914 has obvious qualifications; but if you wanted to defend the neater, more mythical date, you could do very well. 

In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. 

Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. 

1900, like 1400 and 1600 and 1000, has the look of a year that ends a saeculum. 

The mood of fin de siècle ["end of century”] is confronted by a harsh historical finis saeculi. There is something satisfying about it, some confirmation of the rightness of the patterns we impose. But as Focillon observed, the anxiety reflected by the fin de siècle is perpetual, and people don't wait for centuries to end before they express it. Any date can be justified on some calculation or other.

And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. 

Yeats will help me to illustrate them.

For Yeats, an age would end in 1927; the year passed without apocalypse, as end-years do; but this is hardly material. 'When I was writing A Vision,' he said, 'I had constantly the word "terror" impressed upon me, and once the old Stoic prophecy of earthquake, fire and flood at the end of an age, but this I did not take literally.' 

Yeats is certainly an apocalyptic poet, but he does not take it literally, and this, I think, is characteristic of the attitude not only of modern poets but of the modern literary public to the apocalyptic elements. All the same, like us, he believed them in some fashion, and associated apocalypse with war. 

At the turning point of time he filled his poems with images of decadence, and praised war because he saw in it, ignorantly we may think, the means of renewal. “The danger is that there will be no war... Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilization renewed.” 

He saw his time as a time of transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre. There was horror to come: 'thunder of feet, tumult of images.' But out of a desolate reality would come renewal. 

In short, we can find in Yeats all the elements of the apocalyptic paradigm that concern us.

Sloan Bashinsky

I have great respect for Yeats, Blake and other harbinger poets of old, whom I doubt could have possibly imagined what lay ahead in Europe, Russia, America, Japan, China, etc. 
Since I’m an American, and since I was born and grew up in a rich white conservative family in the upscale white Mountain Brook AKA Tiny Kingdom southern suburb of Birmingham, and since I spent a lot of time in Birmingham churches and talking with Alabama Christians, and since today I have ongoing interaction with the religious and political right and left in Birmingham, and elsewhere because of the Internet, I think I can say with some chance of certainty that the harbinger poets of old have nothing helpful for what has become of America. 
As a poet, I think I can say with some chance of certainty that the poets today should be shrieking about what has become of America, even though it might not have any effect, and even if it brings them physical harm, loss of friends, loss of gainful work, etc.
When I lived in Key West, I attended monthly Key West Poetry Guild meetings where local and visiting poets recited or read their own poetry. We were not allowed to read other poets’ poetry, unless it was a special occasion, say a poet had died. Occasionally a poet recited or read a poem with religious or political tone. Otherwise, the poems were personal, existential. 
After President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace while continuing to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started by his predecessor, the 2nd President George Bush, my bowel shut down. It took me a month to figure out what that was about. I had been told in my sleep after Obama received the Democratic nomination in 2008 that he had the potential to be the AntiChrist. Now I understood what he had been told, and at the next Poetry Guild meeting I read a really violent poem I had written about Obama accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace while waging two wars started by his predecessor. I saw nothing in the audience’s eyes or demeanor that indicated any sympathy or agreement with the poem, but my bowel released. When I told other people about that, with a couple of exceptions, it was as if I had not even spoken.
Three nights before 9/11, a very familiar voice asked me in my sleep, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I woke up and wondered what that was about, and then I made the prayer and went back to sleep. On 9/11, my concern was the 2nd President Bush would start a Vietnam-like war that America could not win. It did not occur to me that he might start two such wars. As I walked out of the Key West post office about a week later, the owner of the voice that had asked me to make the prayer said to me, “America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether and let Israel and Islam fight it out, or work it out, and in that way learn, which, if either, are God’s chosen people.” When I told other people about that, with a couple of exceptions, it was as if I had not even spoken.
I ran ten times for local public office when I lived in Key West and on Little Torch Key, 2003-2018, mayor, county commission and school board. Thankfully, I never came close to being elected. I detested politics, but I was dragooned by something much bigger than me to do it, if I knew what was good for me. I said nobody who wanted to be elected should be allowed to run for public office; citizens should draft candidates via the write-in process. At candidate forums and in media interviews, I was the out of the box candidate. I was the status quo’s adversary. 
So, back to the future. Two old white men, one my age, 81, the other about 3 years younger, want to be President of the United States of America. In my view, neither man is fit to be president. In two nights, they will debate on CNN, and their mics will be muted when it is not their time to speak, because the younger of them did not let the older talk much when they debated the first time in 2020. I blamed that on FOX News’s anchor Chris Wallace, who did not man up and get Donald Trump’s mic turned off when it was not time for him to speak during that debate.
Here’s my take on the Trump and Biden factions.
The Trump faction reminds me of Adolph Hitler and his National Socialist Party leading up to World War II. The Biden faction reminds me of the mythical Fukawi tribe, who are forever getting lost and gathering together and sitting down and holding hands and closing their eyes and chanting, “Where in the fuck are we? Where in fuck are we?”
I voted for Joe Biden in 2020, because he did not remind me of Adolph Hitler and pre-World War II Germany. Before 2020, I had not voted for a Republican or a Democrat candidate. I will not vote for Biden this year, because he has aided and abetted Israel committing massive war crimes in Gaza. This old lawyer, who clerked for a US District Judge in Birmingham, who presided over every criminal prosecution in north Alabama, is no fan of Hamas. I say its leaders, and Israel’s leaders, and Joe Biden should be prosecuted for war crimes together. 

I like taking time off by hanging out at Poetic Outlaws, where truth, beauty and love still show up, which seldom happens on CNN or FOX News, but I wonder if what America needs today is a massive march of Poetic Outlaws into every nook and cranny, and perhaps the place to begin is the same route taken by Trump’s Ayran army on January 6, 2021. If anyone doubts it was Aryan, google photos of the Charlottesville Confederate Monuments removal protest, MAGA rallies, and the January 6 coup attempt.

Patris
Patris’s Substack
Absenting yourself in a time of real crisis seems an abdication of moral responsibility. We are all guilty of war crimes, wherever we were born in the United States. No country is exempt, other than those fighting against the depredations of the Nazis and the Japanese dehumanization violence.
Consider what another presidency of the Hitler admirer could mean. This is not a time to sit home.

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
I see now that I should have included in at the end of my diatribe, that when the poetic outlaws march to the national Capitol, they also shriek that Joe Biden is a war criminal, and he and the members of Congress who voted more money and weapons to Israel, along with the leaders of Hamas and Israel, should be hanged for war crimes. 
Yesterday, New York’s very left member of the US House of Representatives Jamaal Bowman, a Hamas apologist, was routed in New York’s Democratic primary by a centrist Democrat who sided with Israel. I say Bowman’s mistake was not that he condemned Israel’s leaders and President Biden and Congress, but that he did not condemn Hamas’s leader’s, too. Bowman would have lost either way, but the way he went about it, he lost in God’s Courtroom, as well.
The October 7 attack was obvious bait to provoke Israel to do precisely what it did in Gaza, and to provoke President Biden and the US Congress to give Israel the money and weapons it needed to do it, and to provoke many Americans to cheer Israel on.
A German theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship, in which he compared what he called “cheap grace” to the real thing. Bonhoeffer is attributed with saying, “Silence in the face ot evil itself is evil, God will not hold us guiltless.” He joined like-minded German men who tried to kill Hitler. They got caught and that was the end of them.
You know very well, Patris, that I do not stay home. You know very well that I put my life and limb in the crosshairs of the American right and left day after day, week after week. I do it on Facebook, at my and other people’s Substacks, and at my google blogspots and The Redneck Mystic Lawyer for President Podcast, which were banned in Russia, Belarus, India, Islamic countries, India and Red China. And in Australia, because I kept taking the widely read Australian Substack columnist Caitlin Johnstone to task for giving Hamas a free pass.
Joe Biden disenfranchised me when he did not cut Israel loose but instead gave Israel what it needed to level Gaza. It’s that simple. Yes, we all are war criminals. But you and I do not have the means to stop President Biden and Congress from sending Israel money and weapons to obliterate Gaza.

Patris’s Substack
I respect you because I respect the fact you are principled. My fear is that you might tip the balance to a man as close to evil than you believe Biden to be by virtue of his support of an ally in a region rife with a united hatred of them. Netanyahu is not representative of the majority of Israelis any more than Trump is representative of the majority of decent and moral
Americans. I urge you to see this but will respect you regardless.

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
This is really difficult for me, Patris, because I confess to hoping Biden is elected in November, if he and Trump both are still candidates, and I suppose that says everything, doesn’t it? 
Not for a heartbeat do I think Biden is anywhere close to the threat to America, or to the world, that is Trump and his base, which are about the same size in numbers as Biden’s base. I imagine maybe 40 percent of Americans, I am one, wish neither of the two men were on the ballot.
You are correct about the hatred of Israel in Palestine and in much of Islam, and even in a large segment of America. I do not hate Israel, but there is no way I can like it after seeing what it has done in Gaza, and Joe Biden still provides Israel money and weapons to continue with it, which makes him Israel’s accomplice. 
I think if Trump had been president on October 7, 2023, the attack would have occurred and the outcome would have been the same, and Trump would be Israel’s accomplice in mass murder and maiming and displacement and starvation of unarmed civilians.
Hamas doesn’t care what happens to the unarmed civilians in Gaza. It only cares about trying to bring down Israel and its benefactor America, and the October 7 raid was designed to provoke Israel and America to do what they did, and Joe Biden didn’t have the good sense to see that and decline to participate.
Instead, he allowed Israel to raid the warehouses in Israel where large amount of US Military munitions were stored for the American military’s future use, and he kept sending money and weapons from America to Israel. Biden knew if he did not do that, he would for sure lose to Trump in November. 
I asked God to take a life for a life, my life for Trump’s life. 
I asked God to take my life for Trump and Biden’s lives.
I asked God to take my life for Trump, Biden and RFK Jr’s lives.
I admitted to God that my offer was selfish, because I wish every day that this is my last day on this world. But I’m still here, so God doesn’t want me yet. 
And I sure as hell don’t want my children and their families living in a country with Donald Trump and his base in charge of it. So, I suppose that says it all, doesn’t it? 
Thank you for helping me get to the nasty awful truth, but I just don’t seen how I can vote for someone who is guilty of mass murder and maiming and displacement and starvation of unarmed civilians, which Trump is not.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

The Bible is why Israel exists and there never will be peace in Palestine

    I told an amiga the other day that the Bible is why Israel exists and there never will be peace in Palestine. 

    More particularly, the Bible’s Old Testament, in which it is said God promised the Israelites land in Palestine.

    From Got Questions, Biblical Answers:

There is probably no more disputed real estate on earth than the land of Israel. Even calling it “Israel” will raise objections from some quarters. The Jewish people lay claim to the land because they first held possession of it millennia ago and because God directly gave them the land, as recorded in the Bible.

In Genesis 12:7, God promises Abram, who had just arrived in Canaan, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Later, in Genesis 15:18, God expands on that unconditional promise: “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates” (NASB). Then, in Genesis 17:8, God reiterates the promise to Abraham, adding that the land gift is irrevocable: “The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.” God later repeats the promise to Abraham’s son Isaac (Genesis 26:3–4) and Isaac’s son Jacob (Genesis 28:13), whose name God later changed to Israel.

In the Abrahamic Covenant, then, God laid out the extent of the land that would belong to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—a territory including all of Canaan and stretching from Egypt to modern-day Iraq. Several centuries later, when it came time for the Israelites actually take possession of the Promised Land, God again spoke of a vast area “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites” (Joshua 1:4, NLT).

    The Old Testament is taken from the Jewish Scriptures.

    In the first chapter, or book, of The Old Testament, known as Genesis, God promises Abraham a son, whose seed will become a great nation. Abraham is very old and his wife Sarah is barren. Sarah tells Abraham to lie with her slave Hagar and produce the promised child. Abraham does that and Hagar gives birth to Ishmael. Sarah then becomes with child and she gives birth to Isaac. God then tells Abraham to take Isaac up on a hill and sacrifice him to God. Abraham takes Issac up on a hill and is about to kill Issac with a knife and an angel of the Lord stays Abraham’s hand. Sarah comes to regret Ishmael and she tells Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness and let the wild animals have them. Abraham does not want to do that, and God tells Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness and they will be looked after and Ishmael’s seed will become a great nation and that will cause Isaac’s seed trouble. 

    From Issac descended Moses and Jesus, and from Ishmael descended Mohammed. Judaism and Christendom say Issac was the child God promised to Abraham. Islam’s bible, which I grew up calling the Koran, has the same story, except Ishmael is the child God promised to Abraham, and Islam is the one true religion and has a sacred duty to God to prove it.

    The Old Testament is why Israel was created after World War II, after the surviving Jewish refugees in Eastern and Western Europe were not offered safe harbor by any nation in Europe, nor by Great Britain, America, nor by any other country. 

    There is another reason why America has always sided with Israel. The New Testament says Jesus was born in Bethlehem, grew up in Palestine, taught and was crucified in Jerusalem by the Roman government at the behest of the Jewish religious leaders, and Palestine is Christendom’s Holy Land, and Israel’s  karma requires it defend Christendom’s Holy Land, and in Bible America that translates into the American government giving Israel whatever it needs to do that. 

    There is something else in play. 

    After the 9/11 attack in New York City, Bible America wanted every Muslim in the Middle East dead, and they wanted Israel to fight Islam with the money and arms Israel received from the American government.

    All the while, Israel kept nibbling and taking more and more land in Palestine, and making Islam madder and madder at America for enabling Israel to exist.

    Three nights before 9/11, Archangel Michael asked me in my sleep if I would make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity? I woke up wondering what that was about and made the prayer.

    About a week after 9/11, as I walked out of a U.S. Post Office, Michael told me: “America needs to get out of the Middle East altogether and let Israel and Islam work it out or fight it out, and in that way learn, which, if either, are God’s chosen people.

    Instead, America started two protracted unwinnable land wars  in Afghanistan and Iraq, although Iraq had zero to do with 9/11. A relatively small number of Islamic militants multiplied exponentially, and their common enemy was The Great Satan, America.

    I think it was in 2002 that I read online an open letter to America from Osama bin Laden, in which he told Americans that he launched the 9/11 attack because his country Saudi Arabia had allowed the infidel America-led coalition to liberate Kuwait stage in Saudi Arabia, Islam’s most holy land. Osama  told Americans that their president was easy to bait and they needed to get a new president.

    On October 7, 2023, which was my 80th birthday, Hamas's military strategist Yahya Sinwar baited Israel, and thus America, to become viewed like Nazi Germany. President Biden defended Israel’s response to the October raid, and he kept giving Israel money, weapons and munitions. 

    I repeatedly wrote at my blogs that Sinwar didn’t care what happened to the civilian population in Gaza, because the more dead and maimed Gaza civilians, the worse Israel and America looked to the world. I wrote that many times at the widely read Substack Newsletter of the Australian Caitlin Johnstone, and that I wondered why Caitlin was not coming down hard on Hamas, too, and I wondered if she was on Hamas payroll?

    The Australian government banned this blogspot and The Redneck Mystic Lawyer for President podcast in Australia, even though I also kept saying at Caitlin's Substack that President Joe Biden should be prosecuted, along with Hamas and Israel’s political and military leaders, for war crimes against Gaza civilians.

    To see just how insane it is in Israel, and just how easy it is for Sinwar and Hamas to yank Israel around, and thus yank Joe Biden, Donald Trump and America around, read the chilling June 20, 2024 CNN article below, and then read the chilling October 18, 2011 CNN article below that. 

    In a perfect world, or if you wish, in God’s Courtroom, Israel’s leaders, Joe Biden, Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas leaders are prosecuted for war crimes together.

He saved the life of Hamas’s leader. Then they murdered his nephew

By Sophie Tanno and Tal Alroy, CNN

 5 minute read 
Updated 2:02 PM EDT, Thu June 20, 2024

CNN — 

Hamas’s surprise October 7 attacks stunned Israel. But not everyone was caught unaware. When he learned the news, Dr. Yuval Bitton says he felt it was coming – and knew immediately who was behind it.

“I know the person who planned and conceived and initiated this criminal attack,” Bitton told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “I have known him since 1996 – not only him but the entire Hamas leadership in Gaza – and it was clear to me that this is what they were planning.”

Bitton spent years working as a dentist in Israel’s Nafha Prison. It was there he met “the person” – Yahya Sinwar, a Hamas militant convicted of murder who would go on to become the group’s leader in Gaza – saying he saved his life by helping diagnose a brain tumor.

Bitton says he spent hundreds of hours conversing with Sinwar, providing him with rare insight into the mind of the top Hamas official.

But his actions have left him tormented. Bitton blames Sinwar for the murder of his nephew, who was killed after Hamas militants raided his home on October 7.

In 2004, Sinwar had come to the prison’s clinic complaining of neck pain and losing his balance.

“When he explained to me what was happening to him, I diagnosed it as a stroke, and together with the general practitioner, we decided to take him to the hospital,” Bitton said.

“He arrived at the hospital, the diagnosis was that he had an abscess in the brain and he was operated on that day, thus saving his life because if it had exploded, he would have died.”

Sinwar was appointed leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2017. Born in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza in 1962, to a family displaced during the Arab-Israeli war, he joined Hamas in the late 1980s. In 1989, he was sentenced to four life sentences in Israel for the abduction and killing of two Israeli soldiers.

After being freed in 2011 as part of a prisoner swap, he returned to Gaza where he began his rise in the militant organization, becoming notorious for the violent treatment he would dole out on suspected collaborators. 

 

Israel has publicly accused Sinwar of being the “mastermind” behind Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on October 7 – though experts say he is likely one of several – making him one of the key targets of its war in Gaza.

The attack was the deadliest assault in Israel’s history. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups killed more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and also took some 250 people hostage into Gaza.

Following his recovery, Sinwar told Bitton that he owed him his life – a sentiment he repeated when he was released in the 2011 prisoner swap, which saw Sinwar and more than 1,000 other Palestinians freed for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

“He also told me that on the day he was released in [Gilad] Shalit’s deal in 2011, that he owed me his life, and one day he will repay it.”

But years later that connection meant nothing.

“And as you understand, he made up for it on October 7 in that he was also directly responsible for the murder of my nephew in Kibbutz Nir Oz,” said Bitton.

Nir Oz was one of several kibbutzim that bore the brunt of Hamas’ attack on October 7, with many residents murdered or taken hostage.

Bitton said his nephew, Tamir, was “seriously injured” trying to fight off the attackers.

“There were only five of them, they didn’t really stand a chance, and he was kidnapped while he was still seriously injured, unconscious, and died after a few hours in Gaza.”

A close connection

Bitton – who later joined Israeli intelligence – came to know Sinwar well during his time in prison, spending “hundreds of hours” talking to him.

Sinwar, Bitton says, believes Jewish people have “no place” on “Muslim lands.”

Bitton therefore saw it as “only a matter of time and timing that they [Hamas] will act against us and try to expel us from the place where we live.”

Despite eight months of Israeli fighting in Gaza, which has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, Sinwar remains at large, and thought to be sheltering somewhere in the territory.

The remains of Bitton's nephew's home in Nir Oz, after it was targeted by Hamas militants. Yuval Bitton

Asked for his assessment of Sinwar’s mindset, Bitton says the Hamas leader is mainly concerned with staying in power.

He believes Sinwar would be “willing to sacrifice even 100,000 Palestinians in order to ensure the survival of his rule.”

“He is willing to pay with the lives of militants, Hamas members, civilians. He doesn’t care.”

Israel’s plan for ‘tactical pause’ for aid raises questions and deepens rifts. Here’s what we know

With this in mind, Bitton believes that Israel made a mistake by not creating an alternative to Hamas’s rule, which could have undermined Sinwar’s power.

Bitton says that Sinwar still “feels he is in a powerful position.”

“He is running the negotiations while still operating from within Gaza, and still controls the areas from which the IDF evacuates, he also controls the humanitarian aid, and therefore he feels strong and won’t sign an agreement to release the hostages unless the IDF withdraws from Gaza and the fighting ends.”

Sinwar spent his more than two decades in prison studying his enemy, including learning Hebrew.

It is a lesson Israel should have taken too, says Bitton, who believes the government and intelligence service “did not know and learn Hamas well enough.”

“Our attitude towards Hamas was arrogant. We dismissed Hamas. And Hamas said everything it intended to do, but we didn’t want to listen.”

Why Israelis believe one soldier is worth 1,000 Palestinian prisoners

Peter Wilkinson, CNN
 7 minute read 
Updated 10:05 AM EDT, Tue October 18, 2011

Gilad Shalit back in Israel
05:01 - Source: CNN
 — 
Israel is freeing more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, including hundreds serving life sentences for attacks on Israelis, in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who was captured by Hamas in 2006. How and why has the controversial deal come about?

Why is Shalit considered important enough by the Israelis to be exchanged for so many Palestinian prisoners?

Militants captured the young sergeant in June 2006 after tunneling into the Jewish state and attacking an Israeli army outpost. Israel immediately launched a military incursion into Gaza to rescue Shalit, then 19, but failed to free him. 

As the Israeli attacks continued, the Palestinians death toll steadily grew – hundreds killed, many militants, but also, according to Palestinian sources, innocent men women and children. 

Shalit’s captors, affiliated with the Islamic Hamas government, demanded a prisoner swap, but the Israeli government said no – at least in public.

Until Tuesday, when Shalit was freed and returned to Israel, he was held incommunicado by Hamas, which controls Gaza.

Efforts to free him became a rallying cry for thousands of Israelis who urged the government to secure his release. Shalit’s supporters feared that if a deal was not reached, his fate could have become similar to that of Israeli Air Force Navigator Ron Arad, who crashed his warplane in Lebanon 25 years ago. He was captured by a local Shiite Amal militia and later handed over to Hezbollah, Shiite militants strongly influenced by Iran and now in de facto control of Lebanon.

Despite reported attempts to negotiate his return, Israel failed to free Arad and the trail went cold. Over the years he became a symbol of the failure of successive Israeli governments to strike a deal that would bring him back alive. In June 2008 Hezbollah announced Arad was dead. 

Who are the Palestinians being freed by Israel?

Israel Monday announced it would release 1,027 prisoners and it identified the first 477 to be freed Tuesday. The group includes two prominent female prisoners: Ahlam Tamimi, serving life terms for being an accomplice in the 2001 bombing of a Sbarro pizza restaurant that killed 15 people; and Amneh Muna, who plotted the killing of a 16-year-old Israeli boy in 2001 and received a life sentence. Twenty-five other women will also be freed.

The most notable name not on the list is that of jailed Palestinian lawmaker Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences for murder and other charges related to his role in planning attacks on Israelis during the second Intifada.

He had been considered by many Palestinians the most important prisoner who might have been released in exchange for Shalit.

How is the handover taking place?

The first swap took place Tuesday, with a second stage scheduled for later this year. Israel freed 477 Palestinian inmates from Israeli jails shortly before Shalit was released, the first group of a batch of more than 1,000 Palestinians being swapped for Shalit’s freedom.

Freed prisoners praised Egypt’s role as a mediator in interviews on Palestinian television after they were released.

Some are being sent to the West Bank and others to Gaza, while just under half are being sent abroad. A handful are going to homes in Jerusalem, elsewhere in Israel or to Jordan.

Once freed, they will be under various restrictions on a case-by-case basis: Some will not be allowed to leave the country, while others will have restrictions on their movement or be required to report their whereabouts to local police according to Justice Ministry spokesman Moshe Cohen.

Hamas later handed Shalit over to Egyptian security forces, and he later crossed into Israel. Egyptian television showed a short clip of Shalit walking unaided with an escort of about half a dozen people soon after his release was announced. He looked thin and dazed, wearing a dark baseball cap and collared shirt.

Shalit will undergo medical tests and debriefing at an air force base, the Israeli military said. Once that is complete, he will be flown to his home at Mitzpe Hila, north of Haifa.

Why is this happening now?

Speaking to his Cabinet this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that with so much change sweeping the region, he did not know whether a better deal for Shalit was possible, and warned that he didn’t act during this window of opportunity, it could close indefinitely.

It represented a vast change in outlook and rhetoric for the combative prime minister, who seems to have calculated that a softer approach was the more politically expedient road to follow.

Whether it was the prospect of going down in history as the Israeli leader who missed the chance to free Shalit, the calculation of larger geopolitical changes in the region, or a mere reflection of public sentiment, Netanyahu has chosen a path that has taken him away from much of what he has spent decades preaching.

The Hamas rulers of Gaza also felt pressure to make the deal now. The rival Palestinian Authority that governs parts of the West Bank is enjoying increased popularity following its recent United Nations bid for recognition of an independent state and a large scale prisoner release was seen by many in Hamas as a way of seizing back the political initiative. Hamas is also contemplating moving its headquarters out of Damascus and concluding the Shalit deal would make it easier to negotiate a possible relocation to Cairo with the post-Mubarak Egyptian government.

What is the reaction in Israel and the Palestinian territories?

The deal to free Shalit was backed by a commanding Israeli Cabinet majority of 26-3 and enjoys wide support from the Israeli public, but there was extensive debate about whether so many Palestinian prisoners should be freed.

Families of victims of terror, as well as some members of the Israeli government, have expressed fierce opposition to the deal. One minister who voted against the agreement called it “a great victory for terrorism,” and there are fears that the release of convicted murderers will lead to further attacks on Israeli civilians – a fear that, critics say, is borne out by statistics. According to the Israeli association of terror victims, Almagor, 180 Israelis have lost their lives to terrorists freed in previous deals since 2000.

For Palestinians the issue of prisoners in Israeli prisons cuts deep. For several decades human rights groups estimate that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have spent time in Israeli prisons for a wide range of alleged crimes. In many cases Palestinians face incarceration without any formal charges, and children under the age of 18 are frequently detained for offenses like rock-throwing. Most Palestinians see these inmates and those convicted of violent crimes against Israeli citizens as political prisoners detained within the course of an ongoing liberation struggle.

Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza welcomed the prospect of so many prisoners being released but there are reservations about the conditions requiring many of them to be exiled from their homeland.

One Palestinian in Ramallah told CNN, “If I was a prisoner and I am released, I need to go to my family, my country, to my city. Why send me to Turkey or Venezuela whatever – why?”

How will this affect the peace process?

Israelis are equally split on whether “the release of terrorists” will harm Israeli security, with 50% saying Yes and 48% saying No – a statistical deadlock given the margin of error for the number of people polled.

One expert, Ronald W. Zweig, the Taub Professor of Israel Studies at New York University, said the deal showed that both sides had made concessions. “And that is a sign of hope.”

“Pessimists will point to the dangers of rewarding terror – both the terror of those released from jail and the act of kidnapping Israelis to have future terrorists released. Cynics will ask if Israel’s willingness to conclude the deal was not an attempt to punish (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud) Abbas for pushing ahead with his policies in the U.N., despite Israeli and American opposition,” Zweig wrote in a recent commentary for CNN. 

“But there are other considerations which give grounds for optimism. Any movement in the stalled peace process might be enough to get the wheels of this heavy cart out of the rut in which it is trapped. It appears that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a role in the final deal, perhaps indicating a return of Turkey to constructive dealing with Israel. And the fact that Israel and Hamas have talked – albeit indirectly – is a welcome development. Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza might have had more positive long-term effect had this channel of communication been used then.

“Even more significant, the release of these prisoners removes a major obstacle from any future peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.”

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com