Why Can't Gazans Leave?

Well you are absolutely wrong about that. They are genocidal fundamentalist terrorists, and proudly so. They are Holocaust deniers. They are a proscribed terrorist organisation.

One bit of audio published after October 7th is of a terrorist Whatsapping his family from the phone of a woman he murdered. He sounds elated, “Look how many Jews I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! Mum, your son is a hero!”

”From the river to the sea” means all of Israel. They want one state, only Palestine, with no Jews. They are explicit about it, it’s not a hidden agenda.

I mean… you don’t have to take it from me, take it from them:
https://www.adl.org/resources/news/hamas-their-own-words

@cauliflowerwaterfall perfect! So next time the homeless person in your town asks for just 20% of your house, just a bedroom you know, give it to them! Don't you dare refuse because then they'll beat you up and claim 75% of your house because they won the fight. Then they'll have you live in the shed and give you a bit of food and water and call you ungrateful. Have a peaceful day!

That should say the Gazans will always be oppressed under Israeli occupation no matter who is ruling, amd you can look at it how you want and frame it how you want but Gaza is to some extent occupied. The people there are severely restricted.
Israel, under this government will never allow the Palestinians the right of self determination.

We need to stop comparing Israel, which is supposedly the gold standard of a civil state, with Hamas, who are a proscribed terrorist group. Of course we should expect higher standards from the former.
To be fair I don't know that much about Hamas, when I have been there I didn't hear much about them and I certainly don't recognize what posters on here are saying about how they terrorise, coerce and tyranize Gazans. From what I've read though of their most recent charter I don't see they are saying that they want to kill all Jews though. They want freedom from the occupation of Israel, and I'm sure most Gazans want that too.

I know people will disagree with me on this.
But for me preserving life should come over preserving land
The Gazans will always be oppressed, whether Hamas is ruling or anyone else
Look at the way the lives of those in the occupied territories is.
And how over times its getting worse and worse for them
What use is a US visa ban when majority of the settlers are not even charged for their offences.
What sort of life is that
And I don't see it changing. Not after yesterday when a further 1700 homes for settlers have been approves
It is clear that even though it is likely that Hamas will be removed, the current Israeli government have no intention of allowing a Palestinian state to form

To be fair, that is also Hamas’s narrative that they keep shouting about

”Hi, Hamas here, we are terrorists, we don’t want to live in peace we want all the Jews gone”
”I can’t believe the Israeli government thinks Hamas are terrorists who don’t want peace and want to kill all the Jews”

I have never thought of Hamas as good people or leaders
But it's clear to me now that Israel will stop at nothing to get rid of Hamas and will not look at the cost of human life in Gaza in the process
Even when the war is over Gaza will be largely uninhabitable
Did you see the Quran Ayah they air dropped to the citizens yesterday? I feel that is foreboding that there is worst to come. Its almost psychopathic, I would have thought it was a scene out of some sort of dystopian hunger games, but it is the reality

Which is why I think it's time to save and get out whoever can be saved as the other inevitable is death
I don't see any future for a two state solution although that is one thing I would gladly be proven wrong over

When you listen to the government this is very much their narrative. "We wanted to live in peace with them!" (ie for them to voluntarily leave) "but they were terrorists" (ie wanted to stay) "so we had no choice to kill them because they hate Jewish people!"

If they had accepted the UN proposal as Israel did even though it gave only 20% land to the 30% Jews it would have been peaceful. Instead, Palestine started a war which they then lost. As victor, Israel was able to get a better settlement. Ironically the UN plan which Palestine rejected is now seen as the gold standard for what is Palestine that Israel supposedly took from them. And you’re still ignoring the Jews that were displaced too. Jewish settlements thousands of years old were abandoned in the name of creating 2 cohesive, stable states.

The occupation is the oppression. I've been there myself, in Occupied East Jerusalem. If I had been born there and lived under the constant oppression of the occupation, I would not see the occupiers as a legitimate state either. As an outsider, I recognize Israel as a state from a legal perspective, but do I think it's legitimate, as in fair and just? No, absolutely not, in the same way any occupying force is not legitimate.

@cauliflowerwaterfall
So your saying in the 40's Israel could've been built peacefully if the Palestinians just left their homes, but they chose not to, so poor Israel had to kill them, displace them and steal their land because Israel had no other options?

Israel has never agreed to be peaceful. What is 'peaceful' about the nakba? They say "they can live with us in peace" but that 'peace' means an acceptance of oppression, subjugation and apartheid.

Latest figures: 16,000+ Gazans killed, 7k+ of which are children.

And I think people don’t realise Hamas is not universally beloved in Gaza, or that they’re not the only terrorist org operating in Gaza, or even that the West Bank is governed by completely different people. I think not only would eliminating Hamas be extraordinarily good for Palestinians, but actually demonstrating that a tyrant like Hamas can be removed is important too. Everyone thought ISIS were invincible and unstoppable until they weren’t.

There will be no concession on any inch of the land. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation, and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel… We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

@feralunderclass not just the 'oppression' then.... far more than that.

@cauliflowerwaterfall thank you for your post: I particularly agree with the last paragraph. It seems the excepted narrative where Hamas and the Palestinians are concerned is ' what do you expect they are terrorists?' Instead of the elected government of an area that gets billions in aid.

Why should they not be responsible?

Because it highlights that Israel wasn't simply a safe place for Jews to live, it was intended to be a takeover from the beginning. Obviously not every Jew who lives in Israel holds these views, but there is an increasing right wing who have elected the horrid, racist government. They have not held back their views on Palestinians as worse than animals that deserve to be wiped out.

And you can't talk about the conception of a safe homeland for Jewish people without addressing the facts that @Whatamidoinhere has mentioned. It has been built on the strategic oppression of an indigenous people (and I'm not saying Jewish people weren't indigenous, they were a tiny minority) and this is being surfaced now into mainstream media due to this conflict. More and more people are becoming aware. Israel is the primary concern for the Gazans, Hamas was born out of the despair of the oppression.

And it’s interesting how you never mention that it all could have happened entirely peacefully and Israelis agreed to the peaceful option. The Palestinians chose to start a war (in which a lot of Jews were also killed by the way) and lost the war. The so-called Nakba was entirely avoidable and resulted in a worse outcome for the Palestinians than they would have had if they’d chosen peace. Don’t start wars is the lesson.

That was a reply to @feralunderclass by the way I am too slow at typing

There is a misconception though that 19th century European zionists are the people occupying the land of Israel now. The vast, vast majority of them and their descendants are sadly dead. A very small proportion of the original population of European Jews survived the Holocaust. Most of those who did ended up in the United States or other western countries. I think only 100k of them went to Israel. Israel in 2023 is populated predominantly by people descended from MENA Jews, nothing to do with European zionists.

So when you talk about the original zionist movement and what those people specifically wanted - I mean this is before the Holocaust, before the Weimar Republic, etc. An entirely different world for everyone but ESPECIALLY for Jewish people. You’re talking about comfortable, middle class, European academics pontificating about what should happen to people and land thousands of miles away. Not unlike the comfortable, middle class, white academics in the west today that like to pontificate about what should happen to Israelis thousands of miles away and whether we should move all the Jews to Ohio or whatever. Those people are not massively important or influential today and they weren’t back then either. The odds of Israel being reestablished at that time in any form was virtually nil. The Israelis of 2023 are not carrying out the will of a random European guy from over 100 years ago.

And regarding the circumstances of innocent Palestinians, why is nobody putting pressure on the people elected to govern Gaza? Why are demands made to Israel? Why not “Hamas, stop trying to wipe out the Jews and sort the water out, sort the electricity out, re-lay the pipes you stole, rebuild the greenhouses you destroyed”. A Gazan woman was bravely raging at Hamas on Al Jazeera today for stealing aid meant for civilians, likely at great risk to herself. You never hear those Gazan voices amplified though.

@cauliflowerwaterfall
"And of course at the end of the 1940s there were millions and millions of people being settled"

I find it interesting that you never really mentioned how these Jews were settled in Palestine in the late 40's, and how Israel was established in 1948 to be exact. I'll explain how for those reading, by forcefully expelling 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. And by committing massacres against Palestinians killing more that 13,000 of them and destroying 350 villages. Genocide. It was named "the Nakba" which means the catastrophe which will never be forgiven nor forgotten. You can't tweak history to serve your narrative.

@cauliflowerwaterfall
thank you, once again for such well informed and clear posts. I think they really help people to understand the complex history involved.

Yes they're damned either way. They'll either die in Gaza or be banished to a refugee camp in Sinai 💔

That is for whoever wants to leave

There are many who will choose to die in their homeland than leave

@feralunderclass I'm not going to be very popular for saying this but I think it's time to get whoever can be saved out of Gaza now

I know they can't come back once they leave but the only other alternative seems death and I don't say this lightly

Despite everything that has been done to highlight the absolute catastrophe that is happening in Gaza right now, if nothing changes soon then I only see inevitable death of much more civilians than where we are now

On the news: Gaza is the most dangerous place on earth to be child. A child is still dying every 10 minutes. More than 85% of the population have been displaced, more than 69 schools destroyed, only 9 hospitals out of 35 partially functioning. UN High Commissioner is saying Gaza is skin to apocalyptic conditions.