Gershom Gorenberg 🟣 Profile picture
Sep 9, 2020 5 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Particularly love the picture here of the Free French colonial soldiers at Bir Hakeim. They defended that spot in the Libyan desert against Rommel as if it was the last redoubt on earth.
#War_of_Shadows
When the Germans finally took Bir Hakeim, 44 nations were represented among the prisoners - incl. soldiers from Senegal & Cameroon, Tahiti & Madagascar, Czechs, Poles, Spanish Republicans who never gave up. The "French" force was an international legion.
Most of the FreeFrench escaped through gap at night in German line. Gen. Pierre Koenig's driver, Englishwoman Susan Travers, received Croix de Guerre for “bravery in the face of several barrages of intense artillery fire, numerous bullet strikes of her vehicle & pitch blackness.”
Bir Hakeim: Rommel reported facing "fanatical resistance" from Free French. Message sent in Enigma was decoded at Bletchley Park. Image

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More from @GershomG

Aug 15
Israeli legal officials tell Netanyahu: an independent state commission of inquiry into the war is the only way to avoid arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. (Because the ICC’s jurisdiction applies only when national judicial systems fail to act.)
Legal officials told Netanyahu in meeting today that he needs to establish a state commission of inquiry.
News item says Netanyahu didn't decide.
What item left unsaid: Netanyahu desperately wants to avoid independent commission of inquiry with full judicial powers.
Reason is obvious: an independent judicial inquiry into war is likely to assign megatons of responsibility to Netanyahu.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 4
I understand Joe Biden's frustration, but asking Netanyahu to stop bullshitting is like asking the sun to rise in the west.
"A person who lies is... responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it...The bullshitter...does not reject the authority of the truth... He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
The quote is from Harry Frankfurt's immortal essay, "On Bullshit."
Required reading!
Read 4 tweets
Feb 23
US Sect of State Blinken saying that Israeli settlements in West Bank are "inconsistent with international law" is indeed important symbolically.
However, news items on this are mixing up the history of US policy on settlement illegality.

@BarakRavidreuters.com/world/middle-e…
The Carter administration wasn't the first to label settlements illegal. That was US policy from 1967 onward. As seen in this cable of 8 April 1968 from the State Dept to the US embassy in Israel: Image
In 1976, the US ambassador to the UN, William Scranton, said in the Security Council that settlements violate IV Geneva and are illegal. Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 12, 2023
This @washingtonpost deep dive, like others, confirms Hamas deliberately provoked the invasion of Gaza, knowing that it was sacrificing countless Palestinian lives.
Image
@washingtonpost The deaths of thousands in Gaza are as much part of Hamas's plan as the deaths of Israeli civilians on October 7.
The goal was to set off greater conflict, in the name of achieving Hamas's goal - both cruel and utterly without a chance of success - of destroying Israel. Image
@washingtonpost Hamas fought its way through the thin line of Israeli soldiers on the border in order to reach civilians - to kill, take hostages, and commit other atrocities. Image
Read 9 tweets
Aug 24, 2021
#OnThisDay 24 Aug. 1941, in a radio speech, Winston Churchill says that the Germans are carrying out mass executions on Russian soil.
"We are in the presence of a crime without a name," Churchill says.
ibiblio.org/pha/policy/194…
@waitmanb @EquusontheBuses @YehudahMirsky (1)
Churchill's knowledge of Nazi mass murder in occupied Soviet territory came from Bletchley Park, where master codebreaker John Tiltman's team had cracked the cipher used by special German police units to report how many people they'd shot. (2)
@calder_walton @spyhistory
Like this message from 18 July 1941, in which a Nazi police regiment reports that it had shot "1153 Jewish plunderers."
The reports were coldly bureaucratic.

@oferaderet @SpitfireFilly
Read 10 tweets
Jun 25, 2021
#OnThisDay: 25 June, 1942: The hidden turning point in the war for North Africa and the Middle East in WWII---

@calderwalton @spyhistory @IntlSpyMuseum @DrJamesRogers @dahliasc @waitmanb @CamIntelligence
@spyhistory @IntlSpyMuseum @DrJamesRogers @dahliasc @waitmanb @CamIntelligence …As of 25 June 1942, Bletchley Park's codebreakers had silenced the Axis "Good Source" in Cairo - its best source in the war - who had been providing Rommel with British Army's most valuable secrets from Cairo…
@spyhistory @IntlSpyMuseum @DrJamesRogers @dahliasc @waitmanb @CamIntelligence …That day, British Gen. Claude Auchinleck made one of key strategic decisions of war: to mount defense of Egypt and Middle East at El Alamein, just 60 miles west of Alexandria…
Read 7 tweets

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