https://www.unz.com/runz/israeli-assassinations-and-public-scrutiny/
** AUDIO**: https://www.unz.com/CONTENTS/AUDIO/runz/Unz-IsraeliAssassinations.mp3?_=1
EXCERPT: The ongoing Israel/Gaza conflict just passed the six month mark, an astonishing development that almost no one would have imagined at the time it first began.
The length of the fighting is without precedent across the last seventy-five years of Israeli military history. In 1956, Israel allied itself with Britain and France and suddenly attacked Egypt, conquering the Sinai in a war that lasted little more than a week. Israel’s 1967 surprise attack against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan achieved complete military victory in just six days. Then Egypt and Syria returned the favor in 1973 and came close to overrunning Israel until an unprecedented American military resupply airlift allowed Israel to turn the tide and win a decisive military victory in less than three weeks. The main fighting in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon only took a couple of weeks, while its 2006 invasion of that same country lasted about a month and its 2008 assault on Gaza was even shorter. Most of these previous half-dozen campaigns were fought against heavily-equipped conventional armies but their combined length totaled considerably less than the time Israel has now spent trying to defeat Gaza’s lightly-armed Hamas militants.
Furthermore, Israel’s lack of battlefield success against the entrenched Hamas fighters has become rather obvious. Few if any of the Israelis captured in the October 7th raid have been successfully freed and none of Hamas’ top commanders have been killed or captured. The extent of Hamas’ battlefield losses is unclear, but since the group consists entirely of adult males and the demographic profile of the Gazans reported killed seems very close to that of Gaza’s general civilian population, it seems likely that only a small fraction of Hamas’ 30,000 combat troops have fallen. Indeed, Israel’s failure to capture almost any Hamas members has led to grotesque incidents in which the Israelis seized and stripped male Gazan civilians and falsely paraded them around as captured Hamas militants for a propaganda video.
WHO IS RON UNZ? A theoretical physicist by training, Mr. Unz serves as founder and chairman of UNZ.org, a content-archiving website providing free access to many hundreds of thousands of articles from prominent periodicals of the last hundred and fifty years. He also served as publisher of The American Conservative, a small opinion magazine, from 2006 to 2013 and had previously served as chairman of Wall Street Analytics, Inc., a financial services software company which he founded in New York City in 1987. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, and is a past first-place winner in the Intel/Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was born in Los Angeles in 1961.
He has long been deeply interested in public policy issues, and his writings on issues of immigration, race, ethnicity, and social policy have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, The Nation, and numerous other publications.
In 1994, he launched a surprise Republican primary challenge to incumbent Gov. Pete Wilson of California, running on a conservative, pro-immigrant platform against the prevailing political sentiment, and received 34% of the vote. Later that year, he campaigned as a leading opponent of Prop. 187, the anti-immigration initiative, and was a top featured speaker at a 70,000 person pro-immigrant march in Los Angeles, the largest political rally in California history to that date.
In 1997, Mr. Unz began his “English for the Children” initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education in California. He drafted Prop. 227 and led the campaign to qualify and pass the measure, culminating in a landslide 61% victory in June 1998, effectively eliminating over one-third of America’s bilingual programs. Within less than three years of the new English immersion curriculum, the mean percentile test scores of over a million immigrant students in California rose by an average of 70%. He later organized and led similar initiative campaigns in other states, winning with 63% in the 2000 Arizona vote and a remarkable 68% in the 2002 Massachusetts vote without spending a single dollar on advertising.
After spending most of the 2000s focused on software projects, he has recently become much more active in his public policy writings, most of which have appeared in his own magazine. Major recent articles include:
Ron Unz-Early life and career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Unz
Ronald Keeva Unz was born in Los Angeles, California, on September 20, 1961, to a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant, and raised in a Yiddish-speaking household in North Hollywood. His mother was an anti-war activist who raised her son as a single mother. Unz has said that his childhood as a fatherless child in a single-parent household which received public assistance, was a source of "embarrassment and discomfort".
He attended North Hollywood High School and, in his senior year won first place in the 1979 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and ancient history. He then took graduate courses in physics at the University of Cambridge and began a Ph.D. at Stanford University before abandoning the program.
Unz worked in the banking industry and wrote software for mortgage securities during his studies. In 1988 he founded the company Wall Street Analytics in New York City, moving it to Palo Alto, California, five years later. In 2006 the company was acquired by the ratings firm Moody's.