To ask if we can please try to have Palestine and Israel thread where we acknowledge how awful it is for everyone, but try not to throw shit at each other?

[theotherfossilsister]

Please

From someone who does have 'skin in the game.'

*Look at how Palestinians have suffered.

Is it really any surprise?*

Well, yes. Surely they'd be desperate for a change to the status quo.

The solution, when and if it comes, will be a fair and equitable two state solution. At the moment there's no appetite for that in Israel. Maybe one day.

The solution, when and if it comes, will be a fair and equitable two state solution. At the moment there's no appetite for that in Israel. Maybe one day.

Would you say Hamas has such an appetite though?

@fioritura
@W0tnow

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🤔 was Mossad taken by surprise? Really? Is it a stretch to wonder if Netanyahu welcomed the opportunity to do what he has wanted to do since he came to power?

Egypt have stated they provided him with intel regarding Hamas plans last week and that they were taken aback by his nonchalant manner at the time.

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And the conspiracy theory nutters start.

And Princess Diana was assassinated y the Royal Family, 9/11 was done by the US Gov and the moon landings were faked blah blah.

Seriously this is straight out of the Chinese Communist Party misinformation playbook.

Step 1 - deny
Step 2 - whataboutery
Step 3 - conspiracy theories that sad schmucks who've watched too many thrillers fall for.
Step 4 - once the misinformation seeds of doubt have been planted revert back to denial.

They are entirely trapped.

Trapped in Gaza.

With no other option.

They can't leave.

They are a sitting duck.

It is probably best to not get too heavily into Ukraine comparisons but the pre 2014 annexations, faux republics, and 2022 invasions to take further ground in Sevastopol, Crimea Rep & Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson etc. Oblasts incorporates a population (pre-war) of around 5 million people. Not all of them are still there due to flight and murder. Most of my mother's family are a bit north of the fronts in Dnipro and around, though one group of three have been in occupied Kherson Oblast S West from Nova Kakhovka mostly living in their basement (the son not there as he is in the Ukrainian military, which of course made them a target for brutal treatment). I've posted about this, including relaying things they have said, over many months in the Ukraine War threads. There was a gap when communications were lost followed by a resumption when the front advanced tantalisingly close the other side of the river. Haven't heard from them for some weeks now and assume they are dead.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-was-duped-hamas-planned-devastating-assault-2023-10-08/

You're straying into antisemitism now.

Why was there no appetite for that among the Arabs when it was first proposed back in the 1930's and 1940's? I keep asking people that and they're not answering me. Some of us want to know how far back this goes and what's behind it.

Well, yes. Surely they'd be desperate for a change to the status quo*

Gosh, quite. I do believe that someone should get on the phone to Hezbollah to have a word with the folks at Hamas. Nothing like change to bring an end to decades of violence and oppression. Reckon tea and cake should do it.

If you excuse the mass rape and murder of unarmed civilians, then you have lost your humanity. IMO obviously. And if you insist on going through the reasons why actually this massacre is acceptable because it's somehow different and Israeli civilians do kind of deserve this.....

There have been massacres like this throughout history, yes. And the perpetrators always think they have a justification for it. Just like you see justifications for this. Still, innocent humans have been murdered. Humans like you and your loved ones.

And on the subject of generational trauma, I'm not sure if you've heard of this thing called the Holocaust......

Hamas have no appetite. Hamas are a terrorist organisation run by fanatical nutjobs. There is no negoriating with them. They need to be given no choice in the matter. It’s time for the international community to take some responsibility for the shitshow they have created. The Palestinians need to be allocated a fair amount of land (something broadly in line with 1967 boundaries) and then the international community need to send troops if necessary to ensure Hamas don’t breach those borders.

*They are entirely trapped.

Trapped in Gaza.

With no other option.

They can't leave.

They are a sitting duck.*

Which is surely why having Hamas in charge, with its refusal to negotiate any sort of solution, and its tendency to provoke Israel, is such a disaster for them?

Funny, Hamas signed off on the two state solution during the last peace talks about fifteen years ago…

I don't think you have much knowledge of what's happening in Ukraine if you're trying to paint the Russians as not being too bad.

I spoke to someone who is doing trips to Ukraine, taking medical supplies. They were asked to take some past one of the villages that had been occupied by the Russians who had then retreated. As they came towards the village they saw cars along the road.
As the Russians had advanced, they'd put snipers around so as the families, yes, I'm talking about families, with children, young children like yours, as the families tried to get out of the village the snipers shot the people in the cars one by one. Old people, parents, children, even babies. No mercy for any of them. If you'd been born there that could have been you trying to escape with your family.
That's not a lone crime.

Don't try and pretend the Russians are operating with any code of conduct.

I can respond to your posts how I like, as long as I stick to the forum guidelines. If you are not happy with that, to quote your recent remark to another poster- "maybe you should just stop commenting".

And you should be ashamed. IMO, obviously.

It’s odd they latched onto the original charter from the 1980s. The Hamas original charter isn’t their current objective as their leaders have stated repeatedly since the early 2000s.

I agree, it is a shame that the Egyptians refuse to open the border to their fellow Muslims.

@LemonyTicket
You really are hell bent on trying to make it sound like Israelis are bad guys!

The Israeli government are the bad guys, as are Hamas. Life isn't so simple that you need to have goodies and baddies, you've been watching too many westerns.

Yesterday you were attemting to re-characterise Jews living in the middle east through history as a kum bay ya brotherhood of some sort that was only broken down by the evil Jews demanding a state when this could not be further from the reality of living in Dhimmi status.

Why are you bringing this up ? In a subsequent post I acknowledged that your experiences gave you a more rounded view and that initially I may have had a rosier view than the reality.

And you are somehow trying to re-characterise Hamas (terrorists) taking the fantastic facilities provided that their own people desperately needed, for food, jobs, education, medical care and utilities and wilfully destroying them for spite as also being the fault of the evil Jews who had the gall to take some of their own property with them when they left?!!!

Er no, I wasn't. I acknowledged that some Palestinians looted some of what had been left.

Your main error is that your initial post had presented the withdrawal as being one in which magnanimous settlers left them a beautiful garden. Many of the settlers left kicking and screaming, especially those that didn't get as much money as they had hoped for, for going.

Israeli settlers demolish greenhouses and Gaza jobs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/international/middleeast/15mideast.html?_r=0

Pulling out of Gaza was one of the very good things Sharon did.

But what I find highly objectionable in your response is that twice within it you use the term "evil Jews" with the subtle suggestion that that is my view. I have never used that term, nor would I.

They agreed to it in 2009, Israel vetoed it.

@SomeCatFromJapan I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer but my feeling is that it suits those who fund Hamas very well to have continued strife with Israel, so no, I doubt there is a huge appetite for a two state solution there either. However I do think the majority of Palestinians do have an appetite for exactly this - far more than Israelis do (although even in Israel there are deep divisions over this point).

“Key junctures in Hamas’s post-election political history were the 2006 Hamas government program, the 2007 Mecca Agreement, and Hamas’s 2017 policy document. Hamas attempted to resolve this quandary by implementing a strategy that amplified its resistance credentials to provide it with a political bulwark. This allowed Hamas to modulate its positions on recognising the Israeli state and on the two-state solution, from ones that opposed these issues to positions that conditionally accepted them.
Hamas’s strategy exhibits ideological flexibility, incrementalism, and compromise, while simultaneously placing caveats on these compromises to provide it with political room to manoeuvre. This has induced a sense of gradualism to these compromises, meaning that Hamas has avoided any internal schism or significant loss of popular support.”
https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/hamass-modulating-positions-on-the-two-state-solution-and-israel/

Because they’d been promised independence by the British during the first world war in return for helping the allies fight against the Ottoman Turks.

Britain promised that land to the Arabs and then agreed to carve up the Middle East with other European powers and also made the Balfour declaration promising to support a Jewish state. Effectively we fucked everything up by promising the same land to different groups.

The Arab leadership at the time refused to agree because they believed that it was not legitimate for other countries to vote to give away the land that they felt was theirs and that they had been promised by the British for their help in the war against the Ottomans.

However, the international community had the power to enforce it without their agreement. They managed to put a DMZ in between north and South Korea in 1953 without the agreement of North Korea. They just didn’t give enough of a fuck to get the creation of Israel right at the start. The cynic in me thinks that a lot of European countries voted for it so that Jewish refugees where somewhere other than Europe and didn’t much care if they were leaving them to a violent fate in the Middle East.

The problem is extremism on both sides: Netenyahu's own words reported in Haaretz: He supports Hamas.

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-09/ty-article/.premium/another-concept-implodes-israel-cant-be-managed-by-a-criminal-defendant/0000018b-1382-d2fc-a59f-d39b5dbf0000?v=1696853967094

https://archive.ph/Vseng

I, among many others here, are trying to understand the roots of this historically. As far back as we need to go. Lemony has set out a long history and as far as I can tell she's doing her best to be honest and clearly knows a lot about it. In that context, obviously a charter from the 1980's is as relevant as things that happened in the 1920's, or millennia earlier for that matter.

What I'm not seeing is any of you on the other side actually addressing what she's said about the history of this. I don't know if she's right or wrong, but none of you are helping us to work that out. It's starting to look suspiciously as if you don't want to...

Israel says retaliation ‘has only just begun’.
Hamas is threatening to execute hostages.

It is just hopeless. I feel sick when I think about how terrified many of these people must be. Seeing injured and bloodied Palestinian kids, or the innocent faces of the Israeli children taken hostage just makes me despair. I was always critical of people who avoided watching the news as it felt cowardly. But I can see the merits now.

Does anyone see a resolution in the next few days? I don’t think so.