62% of British adults are not taking a side in the Israel-Gaza conflict

[lavender2023]

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/10/16/b8bd3/1

Personally as a Jewish person (with family in Israel), I feel heartened by the results as it shows we are a compassionate country who can feel sympathy with both sides or are sensible enough to tick 'don't know' when they feel like they can't understand a complicated foreign conflict. I personally would probably tick 'both sides equally' or 'don't know' because i have such mixed feelings! I was reading some posts yesterday about Jewish people who want to move to Israel because apparently anti-semitism is worse than rockets. There are very valid concerns but we should at least take heart that the majority of people are far more nuanced and not taking sides like one would pick a football team, or are anti Israel . Social media isn't real life

There are regional variations but even in London, 56% of people are not taking sides. The one age group which is pro palestinian is the 18-24 group which is 39%, but at the same time, the combined numbers of 'don't know' and 'both sides' are 40%.

@Ecdysiast thing is we don't know everything do we? We like to think we do because we are watching a war in real time but we have no idea what is being talked about and discussed as that would be stupid
On both sides. I don't believe the Middle Eastern counties are just sat on their hands People will be talking.

I am not pointing the finger at who is worse but death to all Jews.... all Jews.... is part of hamas' charter. If we believe democracy is prevalent in Israel (and why people are raging at why they aren't adhering to rules) we have to believe democratically Bibi and all the right wingers will go. We know from history people rarely have an appetite for war long term....look at the apathy over the situation in the Ukraine. So they will want a resolution.

They aren't bombing indiscriminately but I get that's my opinion. They are a military superpower. That's not indiscriminate.

I would just like them to say if they are dead or alive. Give people some hope or allow them to grieve. Let him have the bodies. On both sides.

Thing is some of Israel citizens are singing as well death to the Arabs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_Arabs

a good government would not be allowing / supporting this idea neither , specially not one like Israel

@Stomacharmeleon Agreed, there may be things going on behind the scenes that we are not privy to. But cutting off water to a population of 2.2 million people has an impact on hostages too. Based on what the freed hostage Yocheved Lifshitz has said, Hamas was making an effort to take care of their needs in terms of food, medicine and hygiene. But that obviously becomes more difficult to maintain when 95% of Gaza does not have access to drinking water.

🙄😒

I am not making excuses but there are extremists on both sides.
There is lots I don't agree with.

Given the nature of how corrupt regimes like Hamas operate, they likely have months of supplies stored up. They've been planning this attack for years and will have guessed the likely response. Dead hostages aren't much use to them, so caring for their basic needs is going to be one of their priorities for the time being. The ordinary people of Gaza are the ones suffering.

Well if the hostages are blown up by Israeli bombs, I don't think there's much Hamas can do to help, @Itllbefine6 .

Excerpts from a FT article on the state of Israel's economy:

Loyal customers of Israel’s Atlas Hotels recently received an unusual email — a desperate plea for donations to save the company from collapse. Atlas has opened its 16 boutique hotels to 1,000 evacuees displaced after Hamas’s deadly rampage through southern Israel on October 7. When the government failed to defray the cost, it started a whipround. “We asked suppliers, contacts abroad, our employees and the Atlas A-list — our best customers — for help,” operations manager Lior Lipman said. The message was stark, he added: “If we can’t fund ourselves, the business will collapse.”

“A lot of building sites have been closed down by municipalities,” Tomer said. “They don’t want to have Palestinian workers there. They say people are upset at the sight of Arab workers holding heavy tools.”

Evidence is already mounting of the war’s destructive impact on economic activity. A survey of Israeli businesses by the Central Bureau of Statistics found that one in three had closed or were operating at 20 per cent capacity or less since it began, while more than half had reported revenue losses of 50 per cent or more. The results were even worse for the south, the region closest to Gaza, where two-thirds of businesses had either shut or reduced operations to a minimum. Meanwhile, the labour ministry says that 764,000 Israelis — 18 per cent of the workforce — are not working after being called up for reserve duty, evacuated from their towns or forced by school closures to look after children at home.

Evidence is already mounting of the war’s destructive impact on economic activity. A survey of Israeli businesses by the Central Bureau of Statistics found that one in three had closed or were operating at 20 per cent capacity or less since it began, while more than half had reported revenue losses of 50 per cent or more. The results were even worse for the south, the region closest to Gaza, where two-thirds of businesses had either shut or reduced operations to a minimum. Meanwhile, the labour ministry says that 764,000 Israelis — 18 per cent of the workforce — are not working after being called up for reserve duty, evacuated from their towns or forced by school closures to look after children at home.

And they are still spending money on packages to increase religious observance in schools. I guess we can pray for victory rather than boosting the economy to support the war effort.

Also you can't help stupid. Israel already has a shortage of 100k apartments every year and they are now refusing builders on account of their ethnicity. they can welcome higher rents after the war in addition to no or lower income on account of the war. A flat in Bat Yam (poorest city in central israel) with same number of bedrooms/square footage has the same value as my 2 bed flat in north london and israeli incomes are far less than London incomes so the crisis is already bad without people cutting off their noses to spite their face

One of the reasons for taking hostages is to make it more difficult for Israel to attack without killing their own people. I'm not sure what your point is ....

@Itllbefine6 My point is that Israel's war on the Palestinian people is not about getting its hostages back. It is about carrying out the political design of Israel's extreme, fascist, homophobic, settler right wing party (Google Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's Finance Minister). It's about solving 'the Palestinian question' by eliminating the Palestinian people from their land. This is happening at speed in Gaza, and more slowly in the West Bank, but it is ethnic cleansing. And Palestinian citizens of Israel are being threatened for daring to say anything.

Release them?

@SharonEllis Maybe Hamas will release some hostages if Israel agrees to release some of the 5,000 Palestinian political prisoners currently held hostage in Israeli jails. For a start, maybe Israel could release the 160 Palestinian children currently locked up in its prisons...

How convenient for them then that Hamas were so obliging as to take hostages in order to give them an excuse to launch a war on Gaza. Obviously, Hamas can't be the problem, because they're lovely people who give water and medicine to the hostages.

It's impossible to know how Israel would behave if allowed to live in peace with their neighbours. The experiment has never been tried.

@Itllbefine6 It's hard to expect people to want to exist peacefully with you when you forcibly remove them from their land and then occupy and oppress them.

As Einstein told the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1929, if Jews could not coexist peacefully with Arabs, “then we have learned absolutely nothing during our 2,000 years of suffering.”

On the contrary, I think what the Israelis have learnt from 2000 years of suffering is that the minority cannot rely upon the goodwill of the majority - they need to look after themselves and their own interests. I do understand why the surrounding peoples objected to the State of Israel at its inception, but they would have been better to cut their losses, rather than instigate this decades-long conflict. Imagine if India kept losing land by attacking Pakistan, and then claimed they were the victims - they would get some support, but the majority of people would soon grow weary of their warmongering.

@Itllbefine6 This minority/majority argument is so flawed and ridiculous.
Gay people are a minority that have been subject to persecution throughout history. Is the answer to give them a state of their own and tell them to go live in it as a majority? Hm what country could we give them? Maybe a Spanish speaking country in South America - the locals could be evicted to another Spanish speaking country instead - they wouldn't know the difference. And if they resist, we'll condemn them as homophobic. Would that solve homophobia in the world?

I don't think that's a very helpful analogy. A better analogy is Pakistan. The muslims were sick of being second-class citizens and wanted their own country so that they wouldn't be oppressed by the Hindus. I know it's a bit different because you didn't get mass immigration of muslims from other parts of the world who then wanted more land that hindus had previously live on, but then mulisms have plenty of countries to safely practice their religion, which brings us back to the original problem that Jewish people face ....

@Itllbefine6 What's wrong with my analogy?

Suggesting Pakistan as analogy just shows that you have no understanding of either conflict.

And do you need reminding that the European Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust, not the Palestinians?

Anyway, the point of the analogy was that having a state in which one group is a majority does not solve the problem of antisemitism/homophobia/what have you for that group in the world. And it is especially unhelpful when you displace another population when creating that state.

I actually looked up Hamas' most recent charter and it isn't "death to all Jews". It seems to have been amended in recent years. They make a distinction between Jews worldwide and those who have occupied Palestinian territories. Not that that makes them great or anything, but I think it's important to keep arguments factually correct.

Israel does not want peace. Hence the ongoing Israeli settler violence in ‘peace’ times. Hence the ongoing shooting of Palestinian journalists in ‘peace’ time. Hence Netanyahu presented a map of his “New Middle East” to the UN General Assembly in September, with Palestine eradicated entirely. I could go on.

Also enough of the victim-blaming Palestinians for being violently evicted from their own land. Who on earth would willingly “cut their losses”? May I have your house in that case? You just have to get over it.

I didn't say Pakistan was an exact analogy - in fact, I acknowledged there were significance differences. It's a better analogy than the gay community analogy. Your dismissal of the analogy is because you wish to deny a) that there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Middle East with a valid claim to a homeland. b) that Jewish people in the Middle East have historically been treated as second class citizens. Muslims in what is now Pakistan = victims in need of a homeland. Jewish people? Never victims - no matter what happens to them. They always deserve it.

I agree.

Ok @Itllbefine6 , how about a gay state in the Greek Island of Lesbos? It historically had gay residents. We could encourage all gay people to emigrate there so they can become a majority there. And the local population could just find another Greek speaking Island to live on and get over it. Would this solve homophobia in the world?

I should also add that there has a continuous Jewish presence in many places in the world, not just the Middle East. Likewise, there has been a continuous presence of many other groups in the Middle East as well.