In one paragraph can you summarise the Israel / Hamas conflict?

[curmudgeonlydoesit]

as if I was 12 please?

The history in so many ways is just a deterrent from recognising what is happening right now and resolving it. The history is complicated but in many ways not crucial to understand to know what is happening now is wrong and needs to stop.

The status quo (the situation before the current war) is the issue. Israel needs to just stop being such a bully, let Palestinian people eat earn live and enjoy and that distracts everyone from their history and doesn’t give enough space for radicalisation to grow and if it does, not enough to be a full grown movement, just the one off crazy person.

Yes. Lots of history lessons right now, telling us that it’s ok to murder civilians because someone else did it 3000 years ago.
We’re the ones who are currently alive. We and only we are responsible for what we do.

Hippyhippybake· Today 12:44

are you seriously suggesting that all people who are kicked out of a country or indeed even choose to leave are automatically settlers / colonialists when they arrive in their new country?

They're immigrants and if they intend to stay, they're settlers. If they kick out the people already there, or move into land cleared of people who were already there, then they're 100% colonists.

How else could you possibly describe them?

I am not saying that it wasn't a tragedy and a travesty that some were forced out of North Africa and Mesopotamia, that's a given. Can you explain why someone else had to suffer the same fate, in order to accommodate them?

Can you justify one injustice by carrying out another one, on people who had nothing to do with the first one? Unless you think that the Palestinians are Iranian, Tunisian, German?

Ok so I am a settler too as is the prime minister. We came from other countries. Wonderful. My DH's great grandfather came from Russia to London to escape the Tsar's conscription of Jewish boys in the army, guess he is a settler as well.

They were expelled from their countries in response to the founding of Israel, which was not even their doing. Where else could they go?

If you break it down based on your definition, most people in the UK are settlers. What a racist dickhead you are.

By that logic, the Pakistani British are colonists.

Would Israel have become such a ‘bully’ if the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries hadn’t been consistently trying to kill their citizens and wipe them off the map do you think?

This is soooo true.

The problem goes way back in history from 1517 when the area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire (Turks).

In 1918 the Ottoman Empire dropped a blooper and sided with the Germans in WW1, which caused it's downfall and dissolution.

It suited Great Britain to support the Arabs in their fight against the Turks and when WW1 was over helped them to secure an Arab homeland.

Unfortunately the Arabs couldn't agree and there was a big fallout between the House of Saud, and the Hashemite Dynasty as to who would be the guardian of the Holy Places. (Mecca and Jerusalem)

So to keep them happy, and as thanks for their support against the Turks, when the Holy Land/Palestine was partitioned the Hashemites were given a huge slice of land known as "Transjordan".
It was also agreed that no Jews would be allowed to settle beyond the Jordan river to the East.

So now the Saudis had Mecca and the Hashemites had Jerusalem.

Were they happy ? Nope.

As soon as the State of Israel was declared Jordan plus other Arabs countries attacked Israel.

🙄

Do the members of Hamas have a different religion to the Muslim Palestinians?

Thing is imv is that none of the countries surrounding Israel want Israel there and are allowing Palestinians to be killed whilst claiming to be innocent bystanders.
Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon ,Syria,Iran could cobble together an arrangement to allow IandP to live side by side but won’t.

That's a bit like saying 'are all Christians the same'?
The answer is 'no'.
You can get liberal Christians that support gay marriage and have drag story-time in churches and at the other end of the scale you can get 'hardliner' Christians like the Westboro Baptist Church.

Hamas has a charter/manifesto that is committed to the Destruction of the State of Israel.

The inhabitants of Gaza were aware of this when they voted Hamas in.

You mean when the 50% of Gazans who are under the age of 19 voted them in during the last election in 2006?

Sarcasm is not required.

What about the other 50%?

If the citizens of Gaza are not happy with the status quo them they should raise it with their MPs or whatever is the equivalent in that in Gaza.

Though the definite origins of the word “Palestine” have been debated for years and are still not known for sure, the name is believed to be derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet, which appears in the Tanakh no fewer than 250 times. Roughly translated to mean rolling or migratory, the term was used to describe the inhabitants of the land to the northeast of Egypt – the Philistines. The Philistines were an Aegean people – more closely related to the Greeks and with no connection ethnically, linguistically, or historically with Arabia – who conquered the Mediterranean coastal plain that is now Israel and Gaza in the 12th Century BCE.
(from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/origin-of-quot-palestine-quot)

The Romans gave the name Palestine to Judea when they conquered it.

The current Palestinians are probably not related to the ancient Philistines/Pelishtim.

What about the Israelis who recently voted in their current government which failed to defend its borders despite the billions of aid the US gives them and is now slaughtering thousands of innocent children in revenge? The rest of us hope they are also writing to their MPs.

Because it looks to most of us as if Israel’s charter is to kill or drive out the Gazans and take the Gaza Strip for itself

Are the Israelis happy with the status quo?
Will they be happy with the greatly increased levels of generational trauma and hatred they will have caused throughout the ME? Will they still want the US to keep on paying to defend them?

My very short history.

Jews are mostly exiled from Judea by the Romans. Small numbers remain and a yearning to return to the land of Israel remains strong in Jewish tradition, along with a retention of the hebrew language. A five year old Israeli child can quite easily read and understand ancient inscriptions found scattered around Israel. (Unlike, say Spanish colonisers of Inca lands). The land is ruled over by a series of empires - Byzantine, Crusaders, Mamluk, Ottoman, British. The non Jewish indegenous people don't seem to have objected to being ruled over by any of these countries. They did start complaining when Jews began moving to the area in the early nineteenth century. They rejected a Palestinian state in 1948 and Arab countries invaded and kept invading for the next 25 years. They didn't complain when the West Bank ws ruled over by Jordan. (also technically a Palestinian state, parts of which were once ruled over by Jewish people 2000 years ago) There are probably many wiser ways the State of Israel could have dealt with with this issue. Ironically the Arab inhabitants of Israel seem to a lot happier (with some exceptions)

Wasn't Samson 'eyeless in Gaza' after Delilah had betrayed him. His eyes had been gouged out. No. I know it's not an answer to OP's question. I know Bible stories can be bloody and so few people know them, but all life is there.

Abraham came from 'Ur of the Chaldees' - one of my relations loved those words.

I thought @lavender2023 's longish summing up was very useful.

I have been looking up several things on Wiki. They might not be perfect but I would trust them more than many sources.

lol I guess you don't know that until about 7am on October 7th Israel was a deeply divided nation politically with lots of anti government protests. This government has really struggled to form a government and there were multiple elections in the last few years.

Turns out that one way to unite Jews is to kill a lot of them. (Of course, Israelis still differ on many points but it is true they are more united then before)

Right, so Israel (which we are told we must protect because it is a democracy) is NOT to blame for the actions of its elected government.

But Gaza IS to blame for her actions of Hamas which was last voted in in 2006.

"I think it goes back to Abraham c 3000bce doesn't it?"

Yup. You got that right.

When God began working with Abram (his name was later changed to Abraham), God gave him a command and an amazing promise. The command was, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1).
Explaining the promise He would give Abraham in exchange for his obedience, God continued: “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (verses 2-3).

Now it seems that Sarah, Abraham's wife, was infertile and no child was forthcoming, so Sarah thought she'd help thing along a bit. She suggested that Abraham have a 'liason' with her (Sarah's) maidservant called Hagar who was an Egyptian slave.
This happened and Hagar has a son called Ishmael.
Everything was tickety-boo until Sarah herself got pregnant and had a son called Isaac.
At this point Hagar was banished with the child under God's instructions to Abraham.
The story can be read in Genesis 21 v 9-21
However God said "As for the son of the slave-woman, I will make a nation of him, too, for he is your seed.”

Now, everything went quiet until Islam was created in the 7th century.

Ishmael is recognized by Muslims as the ancestor of several northern prominent Arab tribes and the forefather of Adnan, the ancestor of Muhammad.

The Hashimites (Jordanian Arabs) claim descent from Ishmael.

So if you are still with me so far, you can see why both Arabs and Jews have a religious claim to the land in question....

@upinaballoon 'Abraham came from 'Ur of the Chaldees' - one of my relations loved those words.'

In Genesis Chapter 11, Abraham is born in Ur Kasdim. There are different opinions about its location, some associating Ur Kasdim with the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq, and others with Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey. Both of these cities are in Mesopotamia.
Abraham’s father took his family to Haran. Haran is a city mentioned the Bible’s prophetic book Isaiah and in 2 Kings, and has been positively identified with Altinbasak, Turkey.

If you re-phrase your post in factual terms without the emotive rhetoric, I'll respond.

The definition of a bully is one which harms people who they perceive as more vulnerable. It doesn’t bully Egypt and Jordan. It bullies the vulnerable Palestinians and as it has guns, arms and the backing of the west it is stronger and they are vulnerable.

It’s not emotive at all, it’s quite factual.