Why Can't Gazans Leave?

[miniaturepixieonacid]

There is probably a very simple answer to this that I missed in early news reports.

It's so awful watching News Feeds that essentially seem to say that Gazans are having to move around in a cat and mouse game with the IDF to avoid bombs but have nowhere left to go.

I am very aware that war has casualties and other countries are at war. I am not necessarily saying that IDF should stop fighting.

But this war is different in that all civilians seem to be trapped. Normally war creates refugees. Ukrainians, Afghans, Syrians - they were able to get out. Not all, I know, but movement was an option and it kept civilian casualties down. Why can't Gazans leave Gaza?

The UN calling for a ceasefire

And Israel asking for guterres to resign for asking for a ceasefire as per BBC

Haha. Bananas stuff from the ones committing genocide.

Respect to Guterres.

@cauliflowerwaterfall I've got to admit, your posts on the history of the region has made me really think and slightly change how I view Israel's thinking. All my life, I have absorbed the narrative that 'Israel was given to the Jewish people who needed a homeland by Western nations who felt guilt and shame for the holocaust. And that this would have been except it was not 'our' land to give but already belonged to the Palestinans living there.' I actually did not know how many other people or nations this had also happened to post WWII. It's made me realise that, much in the same way as the last few years have taught me that I (and almost everyone) do have subconscious racist bias to counter and deal with, that I do in fact also have subconscious antisemtitic attitudes too. I genuinely didn't think I did. And that horrifies me. So thank you very much for your considered, polite and informative analysis. I have learned from it and adjusted my prejudices.

I can't so far as to agree that the current bombardment of Gaza is justified and still feel that the majority of ordinary Gazan citizens are innocent. I think they deserve and need to be able to be resuced to safety if they want to go. I also think that Palestinans have as much 'right' on their side as Israel does. But my thinking will be a lot less critical towards Israeli policy in general in future.

Even tho I don’t agree with the reason they’ve blocked it. I’m glad they’re not sending extra cash. Thought Israel was a rich country and didn’t need help from anyone as per some comments!

Will either side willingly give up though ? I don’t think so at the moment..

The USA are duplicitous Snakes. They're saying one thing in public, whilst secretly planning to assist Israel displace the Palestinians.

The reason why it took them so long after October the 7th to ask Israel to consider civilian casualties (aka you can kill them but please not so publicly, it's making Biden look bad) is because Anthony Blinken was running around threatening Arab states to take Palestinian "refugees" who thankfully stayed united and refused.

The plan was and still is to displace the Palestinians to the Sinai. Egypt was offered $20 billion to wipe it's debts if it accepted.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/11/29/senior-us-lawmakers-review-plan-that-conditions-aid-on-arab-countries-receiving-gazans/

@miniaturepixieonacid thank you for being so open. The history is definitely more complicated than it’s presented. Jews are indigenous to the land but colonisation displaced millions and the Jews who remained became a persecuted minority in their own homeland for thousands of years. The Jews who were expelled or displaced never really found a new home, they were persecuted in every country they went to. Jews were even expelled from England at one point. So it’s frustrating that now Jews DO have a homeland, antizionism means in effect that we are neither wanted here nor there, which doesn’t feel great. And the Jews who have lived in the Levant uninterrupted for thousands of years, being massacred & persecuted, are often written out of history for convenience. That they were small in numbers but had an equal stake in the future of the land and of course were more than happy to accept Jewish people fleeing pogroms or genocide in Europe and then Jewish refugees afterwards. As well as there being many nice, kind, humanitarian Arabs too who didn’t feel threatened by desperate Jewish refugees. So there was in fact a second opinion held by the people who lived there at the time. And the idea of Israel being a colonial project is misguided: it could only be created because the land was colonised, but the British were not particularly keen on the creation of the state of Israel. Both Arabs and Jews were carrying out terrorist attacks on British occupiers at that time. It was more of a UN project. Sadly the UN has changed beyond recognition but it did used to try to do good. And of course at the end of the 1940s there were millions and millions of people being settled, plus the division of the Levant was no different to the carving up of all colonised lands after the great empires collapsed.

That doesn’t mean of course not caring about Gazans today. Their situation is desperate. But people talk about Israel in existential terms, and then they are surprised when Israel acts like it faces an existential threat.

I see what you are saying and absolutely support a homeland for Jewish people. Israel (as a government) have treated Palestinians appallingly though. I've only started to read into the Zionist Movement deeply fairly recently and it seems that the initial intention was to wipe them out. At the beginning of this conflict a spokesman for the Balfour Project said looking back it was never supposed to be like this, Palestinian land was supposed to stay that way, and that the Palestinians have had to pay the price for Britain signing the Balfour Declaration. Israel, bolstered by UK and US has oppressed the Palestinians beyond belief, and it has been a purposeful, apartheid regime.

On the news: Gaza is the most dangerous place on earth to be child. A child is still dying every 10 minutes. More than 85% of the population have been displaced, more than 69 schools destroyed, only 9 hospitals out of 35 partially functioning. UN High Commissioner is saying Gaza is skin to apocalyptic conditions.

@feralunderclass I'm not going to be very popular for saying this but I think it's time to get whoever can be saved out of Gaza now

I know they can't come back once they leave but the only other alternative seems death and I don't say this lightly

Despite everything that has been done to highlight the absolute catastrophe that is happening in Gaza right now, if nothing changes soon then I only see inevitable death of much more civilians than where we are now

That is for whoever wants to leave

There are many who will choose to die in their homeland than leave

Yes they're damned either way. They'll either die in Gaza or be banished to a refugee camp in Sinai 💔

@cauliflowerwaterfall
thank you, once again for such well informed and clear posts. I think they really help people to understand the complex history involved.

@cauliflowerwaterfall
"And of course at the end of the 1940s there were millions and millions of people being settled"

I find it interesting that you never really mentioned how these Jews were settled in Palestine in the late 40's, and how Israel was established in 1948 to be exact. I'll explain how for those reading, by forcefully expelling 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. And by committing massacres against Palestinians killing more that 13,000 of them and destroying 350 villages. Genocide. It was named "the Nakba" which means the catastrophe which will never be forgiven nor forgotten. You can't tweak history to serve your narrative.

There is a misconception though that 19th century European zionists are the people occupying the land of Israel now. The vast, vast majority of them and their descendants are sadly dead. A very small proportion of the original population of European Jews survived the Holocaust. Most of those who did ended up in the United States or other western countries. I think only 100k of them went to Israel. Israel in 2023 is populated predominantly by people descended from MENA Jews, nothing to do with European zionists.

So when you talk about the original zionist movement and what those people specifically wanted - I mean this is before the Holocaust, before the Weimar Republic, etc. An entirely different world for everyone but ESPECIALLY for Jewish people. You’re talking about comfortable, middle class, European academics pontificating about what should happen to people and land thousands of miles away. Not unlike the comfortable, middle class, white academics in the west today that like to pontificate about what should happen to Israelis thousands of miles away and whether we should move all the Jews to Ohio or whatever. Those people are not massively important or influential today and they weren’t back then either. The odds of Israel being reestablished at that time in any form was virtually nil. The Israelis of 2023 are not carrying out the will of a random European guy from over 100 years ago.

And regarding the circumstances of innocent Palestinians, why is nobody putting pressure on the people elected to govern Gaza? Why are demands made to Israel? Why not “Hamas, stop trying to wipe out the Jews and sort the water out, sort the electricity out, re-lay the pipes you stole, rebuild the greenhouses you destroyed”. A Gazan woman was bravely raging at Hamas on Al Jazeera today for stealing aid meant for civilians, likely at great risk to herself. You never hear those Gazan voices amplified though.

That was a reply to @feralunderclass by the way I am too slow at typing

And it’s interesting how you never mention that it all could have happened entirely peacefully and Israelis agreed to the peaceful option. The Palestinians chose to start a war (in which a lot of Jews were also killed by the way) and lost the war. The so-called Nakba was entirely avoidable and resulted in a worse outcome for the Palestinians than they would have had if they’d chosen peace. Don’t start wars is the lesson.

Because it highlights that Israel wasn't simply a safe place for Jews to live, it was intended to be a takeover from the beginning. Obviously not every Jew who lives in Israel holds these views, but there is an increasing right wing who have elected the horrid, racist government. They have not held back their views on Palestinians as worse than animals that deserve to be wiped out.

And you can't talk about the conception of a safe homeland for Jewish people without addressing the facts that @Whatamidoinhere has mentioned. It has been built on the strategic oppression of an indigenous people (and I'm not saying Jewish people weren't indigenous, they were a tiny minority) and this is being surfaced now into mainstream media due to this conflict. More and more people are becoming aware. Israel is the primary concern for the Gazans, Hamas was born out of the despair of the oppression.

@cauliflowerwaterfall thank you for your post: I particularly agree with the last paragraph. It seems the excepted narrative where Hamas and the Palestinians are concerned is ' what do you expect they are terrorists?' Instead of the elected government of an area that gets billions in aid.

Why should they not be responsible?

There will be no concession on any inch of the land. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation, and therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel… We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

@feralunderclass not just the 'oppression' then.... far more than that.

And I think people don’t realise Hamas is not universally beloved in Gaza, or that they’re not the only terrorist org operating in Gaza, or even that the West Bank is governed by completely different people. I think not only would eliminating Hamas be extraordinarily good for Palestinians, but actually demonstrating that a tyrant like Hamas can be removed is important too. Everyone thought ISIS were invincible and unstoppable until they weren’t.

Israel has never agreed to be peaceful. What is 'peaceful' about the nakba? They say "they can live with us in peace" but that 'peace' means an acceptance of oppression, subjugation and apartheid.

Latest figures: 16,000+ Gazans killed, 7k+ of which are children.

@cauliflowerwaterfall
So your saying in the 40's Israel could've been built peacefully if the Palestinians just left their homes, but they chose not to, so poor Israel had to kill them, displace them and steal their land because Israel had no other options?