I think a lot of people misunderstand this aspect of the situation re why civilians are staying in Gaza

Can I remind you that we (UK) declared war on Germany after they invaded Poland ? Prior to that Hitler didn't have any plans in our direction.
Does that sit OK with you?
Germany didn't start WW2, we did, by declaring war on Germany when they invaded Poland

Palestinans didn't exist until 1964 when the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation). was founded.
Prior to that they were ethnically classed as Syrians or Arabs.
Have a look at the flag of Palestine and note how similar it is to the flag of Syria.

I don’t know what history book you are reading but it must be something like How the British caused all the Wars.

Germany started WW2 by invading Poland. That was the act of war that started the war. UK and France simply announced the fact that due to Germany invading Poland, we were now at war with Germany. The Germans knew we were allies with Poland and had pledged military support in the event Polanf were attacked.

But Egypt were already mobilising their forces.
Historians debate whether Egypt was actively planning an immediate invasion in May and June 1967, but Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's escalating military steps and explicit threats created an imminent danger that led Israel to launch a preemptive strike.

Key Actions Leading to the War;-
Expulsion of UN Forces: Nasser ordered the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) out of the Sinai Peninsula on May 16, 1967.

Blockade of the Straits of Tiran: Egypt closed the straits to Israeli shipping on May 22, cutting off Israel’s southern oil supply and primary sea route to Asia, which Israel officially considered an act of war.

Military Buildup: Egypt mobilized roughly 100,000 troops and hundreds of tanks in the Sinai Peninsula directly on Israel's border.

Alliances: Egypt signed a mutual defense pact with Jordan on May 30 and placed Jordanian and Syrian forces under Egyptian military coordination.

Inflammatory Rhetoric:* *Nasser and other Arab leaders publicly stated their goal to eliminate Israel, raising fears of an impending multi-front assault.

Are you serious? Homosexuality is illegal in 33 African states, and 5 have the death penalty as the ultimate punishment. I have been to some African countries but I'm married and straight so it would hardly affect me would it? Ask any of your gay friends if they would hold hands or kiss their partner in public in Uganda.

When Yasser Arafat coined PLO he was using an older term for the region that predated the Ottoman Empire name of the Levant. Palestina- the Roman province. We sometimes hear Iranians and Iraqis refer to themselves as Persians. So the name for the land did exist long before the PLO came into being.

Much like many Israelis call the West Bank Judea and Samaria as those are older names for the same land.

Britain was once called Albion.

Strained diplomatic relations isn’t starting a war, it is just a matter of fact that whoever attacks first is the one who started the war.

No need to get snippy.
Lets look at some facts.
The major reason for the Second World War was the Allies' failure to stop Hitler's aggression through their policy of appeasement. In 1935, Hitler reintroduced conscription. Then, on March 7, 1936, he remilitarised the Rhineland. Despite these actions violating the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies did nothing, hoping that giving Hitler what he wanted would prevent future aggression. However, this inaction had the opposite effect.
In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria.
The Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia that contained mostly German speakers, was then annexed in the autumn of 1938, * followed by an invasion of the rest of the country in early 1939.
Don't forget Neville Chamberlain famously declared "peace for our time" on September 30, 1938,* after returning from signing the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler this was after Hitler had annexed Sudetenland.
Ultimately, the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, was the final straw for the Allies, with France and the United Kingdom (UK) declaring war on Germany days later.

Yes, the Romans renamed the region of Judea (the ancestral land of the Jewish people) to Syria Palaestina in 135 CE.
Following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba Revolt (a major Jewish rebellion against Roman rule), Emperor Hadrian sought to punish the local Jewish population.
The Romans wanted to break the historical and religious connection between the Jewish people and the land by officially removing the name "Judaea" (meaning "Land of the Jews").
They adopted "Palaestina"—derived from the Philistines, an ancient coastal rival of the Israelites from biblical times—and combined it with Syria to form Syria Palaestina. - so basically it was an insult.

I think Egypt's actions went a bit beyond "strained diplomatic relations".

It is clear Germany started WW2

Whatever. They didn’t start the 1967 war with an ‘unprovoked attack on Israel’ as you originally posted. Glad you’re being pulled up on your parallel universe history.

So you don't think Egypt's actions amounted to an Act of War ? Well Israel did.
Viewing these combined actions as a direct casus belli (an act of war), Israel launched a pre-emptive Six-Day War strike on Egyptian airfields on June 5, 1967
And please stop with your snippy remarks, which just go to show you don't understand the chronology of events.

I'm beginning to wonder....

Maybe in your mind, but history says different.

November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour

Not familiar with the concept of a pre-emptive strike then?

My goodness, how willfully blind to you have to be not to get what happened in 1967, and it's build up.

Gamal Abdel Nasser publicly talked about destroying Israel in the run up to the Six Day war. In May 1967 was quoted as saying our : “Our basic objective is to destroy Israel.” And that wasn't defensive rhetoric.

Nasser moved Egyptian forces into Sinai, expelled the UN peacekeepers and closed the Straits of Tiran, while Egypt and Syria aligned militarily against Israel; realising it was about to be annihilated, Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against Egypt on 5 June, beginning the Six-Day War. Israel weren't the aggressor.

Honestly, this is sub-GCSE level history 🙄

fathomjournal.org/1967-nassers-antisemitic-war-against-israel/

That document ^ was a 117-word letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild for the Zionist Federation.
It was aired to rally Jewish support for the Allies and protect the Suez Canal.
It safeguarded non-Jewish civil and religious rights, but omitted Arab political or national rights.

This is true but the reason I posted it was to show you that Palestine wasn't invented in the 60's as per original assertion. Now I could also quote William Shakespeare as well if you like or perhaps we can go back to Herodotus, well before the Romans as you claim invented the name. We could also go back to the Assyrians who used the name Palastu. Now other than a fairy tale story about a delicate spoiled mummy's boy who deceived his father to steal his brothers inheritance and then became the progenitor of some tribes hiding in the mountains, how often was the land referred as Israel prior to 1948.

Palestinian national identity was invented in the 1960s by the PLO and the Soviet Union (the KGB to be precise).The name Palestine has existed for centuries as a regional designation—used under Roman, Islamic, Ottoman, and British mandate rule—but it was never a sovereign Arab country or independent nation-state prior to 1948.

On the other hand, Jews are the only people who ever created a nation state there. At all other times in the past 3,000 years it was merely an administrative district in an empire whose centre was elsewhere: the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Alexandrian, Roman and Byzantine empires, the Crusaders of the Holy Roman Empire, the various Muslim empires such as the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Mamluks and Ottomans, and finally the British. Jews are the only people who have maintained a continuous presence in the land. They are its indigenous, original inhabitants.

Historical Timeline of the Name "Israel"-

1200 BCE (As a People): The Merneptah Stele is the oldest known artifact to mention "Israel" as a collective group.
According to the Hebrew Bible, the name originates with the patriarch Jacob, who was renamed Israel after wrestling with an angel. His descendants became known as the "Children of Israel".
1000–722 BCE (As a Kingdom): The term later became the name of the ancient Kingdom of Israel in the northern region of the Southern Levant, existing alongside the southern Kingdom of Judah until the northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrians.
1948 (As a Modern State): The modern nation formally adopted the name upon the Creation of Israel

“His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

There are two important things to keep in mind when it comes to the Balfour Declaration: (1) in 1917, Palestine was not yet under British rule; thus, the British had no actual power to assign it to anyone, and (2) by the time the British were given administrative powers over Palestine, they’d already changed their tune in favor of the Arab aspirations. You also have to understand that the Balfour Declaration never specified the exact nature of this “national home for the Jewish people,” and, as such, the British felt that this promise did not actually contradict the earlier promise they had made to the Arabs in 1916 regarding a unified Arab state in Greater Syria.

The causes for the Balfour Declaration are subject to speculation. Some historians believe the British wanted to reward Chaim Weizmann, one of the most active proponents for a Jewish state, for producing acetone, which was critical to the British war effort during World War I. Others believe the British were desperate for the Americans to enter World War I, and because they held the antisemitic view that Jews had a great deal of power over the American government, they thought that in rewarding the Jews, the Jews would reward them. Others claim Lord Balfour was a Christian Zionist (not to be confused with a Christian who is a Zionist) and he felt that the returning of the Jews to the Land of Israel would hasten the Second Coming of Jesus. Others think the British “embraced” Zionism because they felt that it would justify their colonization of Palestine over the French colonization of Palestine, as the French were also vying for control of that strip of land.

Fundamentally, before the British even set foot in Palestine, they had made contradictory promises of sovereignty to Jews, Arabs, and other Middle Eastern minorities.

But, by the time that the British actually were in Palestine, they actively did everything they possibly could to appease the Arabs, actually working to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state.

Had a Jewish state not become a reality in spite of the British, the Balfour Declaration would have long been forgotten, just like the unfulfilled promises the British made to the Assyrians and Kurds.

The fact of the matter is that virtually every border in the Middle East was carved up by the British and French, yet only the Jewish state is delegitimized on that basis. In fact, some countries were invented by the British entirely. For example, the British aided in the creation of Saudi Arabia by funding and supporting the Al Saud family, which, with their help, came to dominate a large chunk of the Arabian Peninsula. The British quite literally invented Iraq when they created the Mandate of Iraq in 1921 in part of what had long been known as other regions, including Assyria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. And, of course, the British created Jordan when they handed an enormous piece of the Mandate of Palestine over to the Hashemites in 1922. The Hashemites are from Arabia, not Transjordan.

So you can do the hack thing of trying to delegitimize the State of Israel as a British colonial project by decontextualising one single paragraph-long, non-binding statement (Balfour Declaration) and ignore everything that happened before and since full, but you’re on a hiding to nothing.

The fact of the matter is that by the time the British actually occupied the territory that now encompasses the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories, they actively worked with the Arabs against the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state.

Anyone familiar with the complicated history of the conflict beyond the same tired propaganda talking points knows this.

Try harder.

I’ve lived in the Middle East, there are thriving gay scenes and there’s a lot of gay sex taking place. It’s a different culture to gay culture in the west especially in terms of identity and discreetness but you’d be surprised how normalised it is.

It would be fantastic for the current anti Semitism problem we have in this country, just brilliant