This deserves condemnation

[Lovepeaceunderstanding]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12605083/hamas-gunmen-kidnap-israeli-grandmothers-gaza-strip-reports-civilians-golf-carts.html

Agree with everything you say, but that just makes it all the more important to thrash put a peaceful and permanent solution that acknowledges both Israel's right to exist and the Palestinians' rights to live as equals in terms of rights and responsibilities. That would take a major fuse out of the Middle Eastern powder keg. There would need to be major concessions on both sides and right now I think both are sitting at an extreme position in terms of the people in charge.

@pointythings yes - though so many of the armchair Twitter pundits don’t get that it isn’t just a matter of offering the Palestinians a nice state and them saying Great, Thanks! The entire Arab region has to buy in for it to work. The only way of achieving a two-state solution, or ANY kind of peaceful solution, is if the impetus comes from the surrounding Arab countries. Only they can defang Hamas — and they don’t want to.

And now you've found out that everyone is condemning it.

Explanations are not approvals - any more than observing that a pan of water boils when you put it on a hot stove is an approval of physics.

@swimsong

And now you've found out that everyone is condemning it.

They're not, though, are they.

Currently 25% of voters on this thread disagree that it should be condemned.

The entire Arab region has to buy in for it to work

And the Persians. Iran is pulling everyone’s strings and laughing.

The shah was a despot but there are seemingly worse consequences when the Islamist nutters are in charge.

That's partly the size of it. As for the other Arab nations, there might well be a reluctance to run the gauntlet between Iran and its two bulldog proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

At present all eyes are on Hamas, the Gaza strip, and the south. If this is a well-orchestrated attack, and it's to be suspected it is, watch the north/Syrian border and Hezbollah. There is the potential for one gigantic mess here, sadly.

And it's one that's been coming for a long time. I visited Israel and the West Bank in 2009, and the place was like a festering sore. The West bank has a populace of 2.7 million people living in an area the size of Delaware. Israel controls the utilities - electricity etc (which has now been cut off in Gaza) and there is insufficient clean water, a persistent problem in the region. It's like a gigantic open prison, in some places an open sewer, and it's landlocked with Jordan controlling the airspace to the east and Israel to the west, south and north. The people lived in fear and abject poverty. There was an atmosphere like a boiling cauldron, which had the capacity to spill over at any moment. My only surprise is that it's taken this long.

All I see is male extremists and ideologists creating war, and women being the collateral who are dragged off, raped, murdered, and their bodies displayed in a grotesque victory parade like something out of a medieval horror show. Of course this is horrific.

And in the absence of any solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, it's an outcome that was all-but inevitable. The culpability falls in a variety of directions for this.

A number of people might well also have voted 'YABU' because they recognise the history, nuances, and sheer complexity of the situation.

If you're expecting the statement "I condemn it" in every post, then it's a lot more than 25%. Absolutely no one has condoned it - which you seem to be implying. Everyone is in agreement that the violence is abhorrent.

If you can't tell the difference between explanation and an excuse that's on you.

Settlers throw stones at young Palestinian children walking to and from school, aiming for their heads. You can explain why you think they do this (it was recently reported by an independent observer on BBC radio 4). I'll assume you're not a monster, even if you don't start by saying "I condemn it".

@pointythings , it’s not true Arab people living there were given zero voice in the partition plans. The Arabs opposed the first partition plan proposed by the 1938 Peel Commission and condemned it unanimously. Then according to wiki, “UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine] arrived in Palestine in June 1947. While the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Arab Higher Committee charged UNSCOP with being pro-Zionist, and decided to boycott it. It announced a one-day general strike to protest its arrival, and Arab opposition figures were threatened with death if they spoke to UNSCOP. The Arab public was warned against making any contact whatsoever with UNSCOP and Arab journalists were prohibited from covering their visit. UNSCOP first heard evidence from two British representatives and the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, Moshe Shertok, who submitted documents and were questioned by the committee's members.”

Dr Martin Kramer agrees with this, “If you believe Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, you'll take it as fact that Palestinian Arabs "were either not consulted, or were effectively ignored by the various international efforts that culminated in this resolution." This is false and deceptive. The Palestinian Arab leaders boycotted UNSCOP, which was eager to meet with them. There was no UNSCOP "failure to consult the people," there was a Palestinian failure to engage UNSCOP. Henry Cattan, a Jerusalem jurist and advocate for the Palestinian cause, thought this decision "unfortunate," since it allowed the Zionists to present their arguments "without contradiction from the Arab side." But he couldn't get it reversed:…

….Not only did the Arab Higher Committee then reject the majority report of UNSCOP, which recommended the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; it also rejected the minority report, which recommended a federated, binational state. In the Arab view, the Jews had no right to anything -- not a single immigrant, not a shred of self-government. Once the Mandate ended, the Arabs believed they could set the clock back to 1917. Their leaders and thinkers, lost in a fog of wishful thinking, had no way to gauge the strength of the yishuv, which had gathered near-sovereign force under their very noses.”

Between 1878 and 1947 through waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine the Jewish population grew significantly from around 20-30,000 in 1878 to 630,000 by 1947. Correspondingly, the Muslim Arab population was 386,000 in1878 and 1,324,000 by 1947. Sources show the Muslim Arab leaders seeing themselves as the larger population were not willing to agree to dividing the land into two states wrongly believing they could dominate and create an Arab state across the whole land when the British left.

Even when the British 1938 Peel committee (established after serious clashes between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1936 and were to last three years) suggested the Jewish population should gain statehood in 20 percent of the territory of Palestine the Muslim Arab leaders refused to agree. The 1948 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine proposed a more even split but half of the Jewish portion was the mostly inhabitable Negev desert in the south.

But as I know you agree what matters now is best said in the 2014 piece I linked to previously written by a young Israeli woman.

“Israelis and Palestinians both have the right to exist. We must all accept that. The past is gone, the people, the present is now. Israelis (especially those in the Southern communities) have the right to live without fear of constant rocket attacks. The Palestinians have the right to live in security and socio-economic prosperity in their own state without fear of Israeli strikes.”.

It’s tragic this still hasn’t been achieved and the cycle of violence continues. I of course agree the appalling terror attacks by Hamas on civilians on Saturday should be thoroughly condemned.

@Statice a good post, thank you - I think a lot of people who I see going about on social media with soundbites about colonialism and the British and this and that, don’t realise the longer history of the region, in which there was a sizeable Jewish population under the Ottoman Empire, and persistent efforts between 1917 and 1947 to engage the Arab leaders, surrounding states and the Arab League in all number of plans for statehood in Palestine.

Then after 1947 Jordan and Egypt occupied the West Bank and Gaza; and, for example, Jordan annexed Palestinian territory rather than create a Palestinian state. The way that Palestinians have been used and betrayed by the surrounding Arab nations, and how much responsibility they bear for creating the situation with Israel, always gets a free pass from the social media warriors who don’t really care about informing themselves on the real history of the region — only about sharing memes and slogans that make them sound good and righteous.

Thanks @asterel. Yes, many unaware of the longer history of the region.

What on earth are you talking about?

There is a vote on this thread.

At the time I posted, 25% of people had voted against OP's assertion that "this deserves condemnation".

It's simple enough.

Thank you @Statice , very enlightening. I fully agree with the 2014 statement. We can't turn back time.

@pointythings, glad it was helpful. So true we can't turn back time.