Israel shuts UN Schools for Palestinian refugees

When I was a student, my friends went on work programmes in Israeli kibbutzim. We cheered when during the Six Day War the Israelis turned the tables on their Arab aggressors. I shall put this crudely: history’s shame, the West’s remorse, have been a massive subterranean resource for a brave and outnumbered little country to draw upon. Victimhood has been a formidable weapon in the Israeli armoury.

As I write, that resource is haemorrhaging away. It’s imaginable — even likely — that Israel will emerge a bigger and more powerful country than before. It’s imaginable that nothing will halt the pursuit of a Greater Israel, annexing, after Gaza, the West Bank, where a stealthy but relentless consolidation of settler land-grabs proceeds with tacit government acquiescence.

To many in the Israeli coalition this has always been the bigger picture and Gaza only a sideshow. The moral stain seeps almost imperceptibly through civil and military policy until, one day, Israelis may wake up to find themselves counted alongside a dozen other nasty Middle Eastern countries: like their neighbours, just another vaguely unsavoury regime. “Never glad confident morning again!” wrote the poet Robert Browning, but I shall be more prosaic: there is a price tag to lost innocence — a price that should worry a people who may one day need again to call on goodwill from abroad.

It’s customary at this point in a column about Gaza to insert a carefully outraged paragraph about Hamas’s unprovoked incursion into Israel on October 7, and the slaughter and kidnapping that ensued. Take that as read, but I’m sick of whataboutery. What, indeed, about October 7, what about Sudan, what about Ukraine … as though further horrors can diminish a horror staring us in the face.

Full article - https://archive.ph/eSbne

Now where did I say that? Please copy and paste so I can see exactly where I said it?

What is your response to that fact there are zero/very few Jewish people in the areas that I mentioned. Why do you think that is?

What is your evidence that Israel ‘threatened’ little children with guns? Soldiers commonly carry guns and Palestinian children will have been very used to seeing armed IDF soldiers sadly. It rather begs the question that if the school administration were worried about the children being scared of the IDF, why they told the kids to come to school that day knowing they was going to be closed, doesn’t it? They were given notice.

My 2nd paragraph is a fact and it’s not ridiculous at all. Are you refuting it? The ICJ can only prosecute States, not organisations like Hamas and the PLO. Funny that,

The only ones who are denying their children their right to an education, and traumatising their children are the Palestinians and their supporters, who have created this situation causing these schools to be closed.

It didn’t happen in a vacuum.

https://cbn.com/news/israel/un-run-schools-jerusalem-teaching-pro-terror-curriculum-kids-so-israel-shutting-them

That is certainly worthy of discussion.

Statistically 'normal' is defined by your population. What sample size/ demographic are you talking about?

Every normal person now knows that Israel’s behaviour is despicable. Even people with no political interest say it these days, and no propaganda will change that.

I am not clear about what you mean at all.

Your first paragraph is a bit Dolores Umbridge, strange how subliminal suggestion works.

Sorry are you trying to say Palestinians deserve to be illegally occupied and be victims of racial segregation and apartheid because it really sounds like you are? You condemn apartheid and racial segregation right even if you have spent this thread so far defending Israels right to threaten little children with guns and take their education away?

Your 2nd paragraph is ridiculous, the ICJ have ruled that Israel are guilty of racial segregation and apartheid. There has been no such ruling against Palestinians.

This thread though is about Israel breaking International law again, picking on the most vulnerable in society again, attacking Palestinians right to an education again, traumatising children again. I think that that is worthy of discussion.

How did that land come to be ‘occupied’ though? Why didn’t the Palestinians (then known as Arabs) declare their own sovereign State when Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan after1948 and before the 1967 war where Israel took the land in a defensive measure? Why haven’t they taken the numerous opportunities to declare one since instead of launching constant terrorist attacks and declaring intent to annihilate Israel and kill all the Jews.

What about the apartheid in Gaza and Area A in the West Bank where there are no Jewish people living at all, at risk of being lynched? How many in Lebanon and Syria?

How many Arabs living in Israel again?

You can insert replace the IDF with Hamas in your last paragraph. Would you gladly tell them, and their many supporters, what you think of them?

No idea .

Never checked.. presume it is.

Don't want to derail the thread about very serious issues facing 800 schoolchildren who are left without an education.

I didn't say you supported hamas. I asked if the republic designates it as a terrorist organisation as @xenia stated in their post. That part wasn't propaganda according to the EU.

I never said I/Ireland supported Hamas .
I said I don't support Israel.

Big difference.

The EU designates hamas as a terrorist organisation (along with a few other palestinian jihad groups), as a member of the EU the republic does too doesn't it?

Well I'm Irish and we don't support Israel so there is no unanimous bottom line.

And the rest of your answer is regurgitating propaganda.

Most Israeli soldiers day to day are posted in occupied territory, land that isn't theirs enforcing apartheid practices upon people they feel aren't equal to them and protecting Israeli settler terrorists as they commit 3 attacks each and every day against Palestinians. That's just how it is.

And if they stuck to their own land instead of illegally occupying how many places now Palestine, Lebanon, Syria they might find they have less to 'protect' themselves from.

And yeah I'd gladly tell the 1000s of people serving in the IDF what I think of them being part an organisation that carries out rape, torture, murder, crimes against humanity. Not they they would care, we've all seen them boasting about and filming their crimes across social media which once again begs the question where did they learn to behave like this and have no shame in doing so?

We will never reconcile the two different views on this on MN nor the UK but the bottom line is the UK supports Israel and Hamas is a terrorist organisation. UNWRA has brought this issue upon itself just as Hamas is to blame for what resulted from its actions.

So the IDF’s No 1 job is not protecting Israeli citizens and maintaining security for Israel? Perhaps you should tell all the thousands of people serving in it that.

It’s not as if there’s any threat against them is there? They’ve made it all up to treat the poor, peaceful Palestinians like dirt?

I’m sure a lot more Israelis would have been killed over the last 77 years without the IDF and Israel probably wouldn’t exist today.

The more some people post, you can see the mask slip.

Maybe you can tell me what ‘lies’ I have perpetuated about Oct 7th, perhaps you can evidence that rather than me who you are accusing of it?

Meanwhile, you believe every word that comes out of Gaza?

If you continue to perpetuate lies about October the 7th you are doing a great disservice to those who did suffer on that day.

Or can you give evidence of the multiple burnt babies and children to maintain some form of credibility to your posts or it appears to negate all you have to say.

Yet Israel has 1000s and 1000s of people in their military whose no 1. job is to treat Palestinians like dirt and that includes murder, torture and rape. Almost 10% of their population are willing to live off stolen land and profit off Palestinian resources,they are willing to turn their backs every single day as they see the above military treat Palestinians in an apartheid type manner. Where did these people learn that that behaviour is ok?

All of this is beside the point though that once again the Israeli government and the IDF are breaking international law and picking on the most vulnerable in Palestinian society and here you are defending it.

https://www.facebook.com/IsraelMFA/videos/979549694086718/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

Oct 7th was the CAUSE of the WAR that the Palestinians deliberately started, causing the further needless deaths of their own children.

It didn’t happen in a vacuum and the WAR is justified after Oct 7th (even forgetting about decades of Palestinian terrorism and rocket attacks against Israelis).

What is not justified is the Palestinians sacrificing their children as collateral damage in a war they know they cannot win militarily.

You said ‘burning and kidnapping babies’

The eight burned babies story was debunked.

How many babies died on Oct 7?
How many 1000 Palestinian babies have died since then?
Neither is all right.

Israeli treatment of Palestinians did not justify Oct 7.

Oct 7 does not justify the continuing 18 months Israeli slaughter/actions against a whole people since.

Wow! You are that dismissing that Palestinian, including civilians, tied people together, including babies and children and burnt them alive? There were lots of burned bodies from Oct 7th. I remember the burned body of a woman who’d obviously been sexually tortured and her body burnt.

Are you conflating the IDF with Israeli civilians in your last comment?

Sadly in a war, civilians are killed.

My comment was in relation to @Mylegishangingoff’s post about Israeli children being indoctrinated in the same way as Palestinian children stating quite clearly that Israeli civilians have never behaved the way Palestinian civilians did on Oct 7th so there’s no comparison.

The burned babies again?

Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. And burned a lot of children.