"But Israel gave them prime waterfront land!". A life in Gaza thread.

[feralunderclass]

"But Israel gave them prime waterfront land, and they still wouldn't accept a two state solution".

A poster said this on another thread and I literally can't get this out of my head. It's probably the best (and worst) case of gaslighting hasbara I have seen on any of the threads.

Just incase anyone has the notion that Gazans were reclining on their sunloungers, admiring the sea views from their luxury penthouse apartments, this is a thread to discuss life in Gaza pre 7/10.

Some facts:

Gaza fact sheet

@feralunderclass who was the initial aggressor in the current conflict? Do you think that Israel would now be bombing Gaza if they hadn't suffered the hideous slaughter, torture, rape and kidnap of their own citizens? The loss of life on October 7 in Israel was equivalent to 6,000 Britons in terms of population.

I do not condone the actions of Hamas, but can I just ask what you think about this graph showing the number of Palestinian and Israeli deaths and injuries prior to these recent events (2008-2020)? Can you let me know your thoughts on the massive discrepancy between Israel vs Palestine deaths in the figures?

https://www.statista.com/chart/16516/israeli-palestinian-casualties-by-in-gaza-and-the-west-bank/

By the way, I absolutely abhor the Hamas attacks.

Thanks for sharing this, it's really important to remember that these "Gazans" are individual people, with hopes, dreams, fears like the rest of us. Last night by chance I came across Miko Peled, an Israeli American activist. He grew up in Jerusalem in a very pro Zionist household (his grandfather signed Israel's Declaration of Independence) but after his niece was killed in a suicide attack he changed stance and now speaks up for Palestinians. Anyway, he was saying that as a child he used to holiday several miles from Gaza every summer, and it never occurred to him once that these 'animals' had a culture, could experience joy, or even went to school. He went into OPT as an adult and said how shocked he was to learn that Palestinians had parties, enjoyed music, and had a culture. His mind was literally blown when he discovered the 'animals' in Gaza even had a university.

German casualties in WWII were a multiple of British deaths. Does that mean Britain was wrong to defeat them?

There will be no solution to this conflict until Hamas, Iran, The Palestinian Authority etc abandon their commitment to murdering Jews.

There will be no solution to this conflict until Israeli govt abandon their murdering of innocent Palestinians and giving them back their human rights.

@gratedbluecheese All the Palestinians have to do is to stop attacking Israel and this will happen.

Once again, the aim of Hamas, The Palestinian Authority and Iran and other supporters is to eradicate the State of Israel and murder all Jews. The State of Israel seeks to defend itself against this.

Please can you give details of one attack by Israel that wasn't preceded by a rocket/ terrorist / suicide bombing.

Of course it will 🙄. Because of Hamas, Israel detains 800 children every year. Rapes women in administrative detention, sodomizes men. Imprisons them with no legal rights or charges. Murders women, children and men. Hundreds die of "natural causes" in prisons. Children are denied medical permits. Calorie rationing is inflicted upon them. 50% of children have chronic PTSD. Palestinians are subjected to a discriminatory criminal justice service. Settlers can torture and murder them with impunity. Houses are destroyed, land confiscated, farms set on fire, olive trees hundreds of years old ripped up. Sewage pumped (illegally) into the sea where Palestinians fish. Boats destroyed.

I cannot wait until Israel destroy Hamas, as they've promised, and then see the Palestinians live a free life, with equal rights and resources to Israelis,free from oppression, harm and murder.

Maybe if Israeli govt gave Palestinians human rights and stopped stealing their land in the West Bank and all the other things you conveniently forget about, Palestinians might not be so upset. No I do not condone Hamas or any of their actions, but if you forcibly steal land, imprison millions, treat people as second class citizens, torture and imprison their children etc people are going to get pissed off and react (no I do not condone Hamas). Do you not understand this?

I totally agree re the settlers but the rest is a response to decades of aggressive and constant attacks.

What do you think of the position that the State of Israel has no right to exist?

What do you think of the position that the State of Israel has no right to exist

What does that have to do with this thread? Should we all pile on to the antisemitic placard thread and start demanding whether they think the bombing of a refugee camp for the sole purpose of killing one man was a clever move?
should we?

Just give it a rest

That's already happened.

That people cannot voice any criticism against Israel without condemning Hamas first is tiring. Yes, we all condemn Hamas.

The zionist undertones in a lot of these posts regarding this conflict are unnerving. The word antisemitic is thrown around like confetti.

It is not antisemitic to want Israel to stop committing genocide, to stop bombing hospitals and refugee camps, to stop them cutting out comms, to stop with holding water and electricity, to stop them slaughtering children and babies in their 100s.....to stop ethnic cleansing. It's really not.

But the question of whether Israel has the right to exist or not is central to the whole issue and in particular the horrendous conditions on the Gaza Strip. This is the issue behind the whole conflict.

One side is a failed terrorist state led by people who consider the other side animals whose lives are worthless.

The other side is an apartheid state led by people who consider the other side animals whose lives are worthless.

I keep questioning why, when Israel's narrative is that all of this is about destroying Hamas, they are NOT targeting the leadership living lives of luxury in Qatar and Iran.

Gaza is an easy target, a punching bag to quell their desire for revenge and prop up Netanyahu's deeply unpopular government. To actually address the problem with Hamas would be to target those other countries.

The UK gets quite a substantial amount of electricity from France and Norway, and if they turned off our supply would you blame them or our own government for not providing our energy security? But, but, Israel.

We're under fairly frequent attack in the UK from Muslim extremists (other terror organisations are available, but let's stick to one for this conversation); do we blame the country they come from, or do we expect our government and security services to keep us safe? But, but, Israel.

Allied forces killed hundreds of thousands of innocent German civilians during WWII; were we the baddies?

There are fewer Jewish people alive on the planet now than there were before 1939. Never again.

it would also mean they couldn't take the Palestinian land after, wouldn't it?

Straightforward question - do you condemn war crimes?

That's already happened.

So? would you like to convert this thread into a space to complain about that?

We are quickly approaching 10,000 dead due to IDF war crimes in the last three weeks alone. As bad as Hamas was/is, the scale of their repression is dwarfed by that of the Israeli government.

They likely would as it’s an annual thing for Israel to do airstrikes and incursions to destroy civilian infrastructure and farms. Pretty much since the ink dried on the Oslo Accords. I agree not as many would have died, but the trend is pretty obvious that Palestinians are killed by Israel regardless of whether they kill any Israelis when you look at the conflict over the past 23yrs. It’s when there is a bit of retaliation that Israel then inflicts an ever increasing escalation.

2000-2012 infographic from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israelgaza-violence-timel_b_2178903

Also this one from 2000 to 31st October 2023
https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/charts/

more on deaths
https://israelpalestinenews.org/palestinian-resistance-launches-surprise-attack-on-israel-updates-to-come/

Such a telling graphic! thank you for sharing.

Who is actually murdering whom though? It’s one thing to claim self-defence, but it’s another to kill nigh on 10,000 people, 4,000 of whom are children due to a fear of being murdered for being Jewish.

I am Jewish btw- I get the fear, but religiously and ethically fear doesn’t excuse killing children nor does it excuse the Defence Minister Lieberman saying things in 2018 like You have to understand, there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas. in response to criticism regarding IDF shooting and killing peaceful protesters, including children along the inside of the Gaza wall.

”For much of 2018 and 2019, Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded with excessive lethal force to weekly “Great March of Return” demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side.[10]Israeli snipers killed 214 Palestinian demonstrators, including 46 children, many of them more than one hundred meters away.[11] Israeli forces shot 619 children with live ammunition at the demonstrations in 2018, and injured more than 1,000 children at the demonstrations in 2019.[12] Some protesters tried to breach the fences or threw rocks at Israeli forces, but the vast majority of casualties posed no imminent threat to life. A UN Commission of Inquiry concluded Israeli forces shot at “unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are.”[13] In May 2018, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected petitions by human rights groups against the military’s live-fire orders during the demonstrations, without applying the clear standard on the use of lethal force set out in international human rights law, and substantially deferring to the government’s discretion.[14]”

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/12/israel-submission-un-committee-rights-child

I think we are beyond that. The right of Israel to exist is unassailable. Israel isn’t going anywhere. It’s under the wing of the most powerful nations on Earth. The question for this century and the root of the past 23yrs of conflict is Palestine’s right to exist as a state.

Israel and Palestine agreed they both had a right to exist in 1993, but then once the Israeli PM had been assassinated by a right wing Zionist, and a new PM installed Israel reneged on Oslo. Now we have had a succession of Israeli PMs & officials that have declared either that Palestine has no right to exist as a State and/or that Palestinian people do not exist. Hamas then came into power and made it mutual- as we are being shown we have no right to exist, then neither do you have a right to exist.

@usernamealreadytaken do you condemn war crimes?

Note for example even though IDF shot 1,619 Palestinian children with live ammunition (not rubber bullets, but real bullets) participating in peaceful protests in 2018/19 killing 46 of them (and this has been investigated and declared a war crime by the UN), no Israeli person, IDF soldier or civilian was killed in retaliation. Not one.

Then more Palestinians were killed in 2020, 2021,2022….still no retaliation.

This is what the UN Secretary General meant when he said that the 2023 attack did not happen in a vacuum.