I despair at Israel sometimes

[AndHarry]

Well, often really. I have family out there who have a bomb shelter in their house and have had to evacuate for weeks at a time so I have great sympathy for ordinary Israelis trying to go about their lives. What happened to 3 sch

[donnie]

Why not head over to the charity websites to read about the chronic food shortages in Gaza? Oxfam has info as well as the DEC website. AFAIK neither of these are 'Islamic Jihadist' organisations .

[Bilberry]

Gaza is a ghetto - ghettos were originally Jewish (about a thousand years ago) but the term spread to other areas where other ethnic minorities were contained by oppression, economics, force etc. hundreds of years ago. The Nazi ghetto's were terrible but they are not the only ghettos. Yes Gaza is a ghetto but not one comparable to those of the Nazi's.

[Shakshuka]

No, you said that there are many many news organizations with evidence of starvation in Gaza. Please provide a link to such evidence. There may be food shortages of certain food items but that's not starvation.

No one is starving in Gaza. Fact.

[Shakshuka]

The Gaza Strip is not a ghetto. It shows a lack of understanding of the whole idea behind the ghettos and how they operated to claim otherwise.

Why should Israel let Palestinians from Gaza into Israel? Why can't the Palestinians enter Egypt????

The whole ghetto analogy is only used because Israel is a Jewish state. I've never seen it used in any other situation.

And of course the premise behind the analogy is to tie in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the Holocaust and the Nazi ghettos. It's naive to suppose otherwise.

[Bilberry]

Never heard of the New York ghettos? Ghetto is the correct word. The word may be heavily laden with Nazi connotations within this context but history didn't start in the 1930s nor the use of the word 'ghetto'.

[Shakshuka]

Oh, OK. I didn't realise you meant that Gaza is like Harlem.

[TheSarcasticFringehead]

Gaza is a ghetto. Not in the same way- not even close- to the Nazi ghettos, but it is one. And my grandparents both survived the ?ód? ghetto. Most of their family did not. I still think it is a ghetto, not on the same scale of course, but surely it is a ghetto according to the dictionary definition? Many countries have had similar set ups for minorities and they have not been called ghettoes in the same way, it's very specific to Israel, I think, but I don't think that means Gaza isn't a ghetto...just a lot of other places are too.

It's a shitty situation all round. I feel for the ordinary Palestinians who are in no control and suffer so much. I feel for the Israelis who are being bombed and die too...but it is different to living in Gaza. I can't see any way for it to be resolved without one side completely destroyed, and it's a terrifying thought.

[AndHarry]

Sorry, I need to backtrack on some careless wording earlier. I do not think that the situation in Gaza is comparable to the Holocaust. I do think that it is comparable to the ghetto aspect of the Holocaust because of certain parallels that can be made e.g. a walled settlement with very restricted access through heavily fortified checkpoints, people attempting to leave other than through checkpoints shot on sight, registration of individuals, nominal 'authority' within the settlement, period indiscriminate attacks of the settlement, food, water & medicine shortages during arbitrary military attacks, heavy restrictions on trade, the vast majority of the population requiring humanitarian aid, smuggling of essential goods (construction materials).

The Holocaust is surely the bench line for atrocity and human suffering but I do believe that parallels can be drawn without diminishing its importance. I compare the ghetto situation along the same lines as, say, the rounding up and mass murder of Muslims at Srebenica could be compared to the concentration of Jews into the football stadium prior to their deportation to death camps when the Nazis tool control of Paris.

[Shakshuka]

Gaza wasn't set up to contain an ethnic minority. That's a key difference. In fact, Gaza wasn't 'set up' at all. It was under Egyptian occupation until 1967 but Egypt didn't want it back (understandably) when it got back the Sinai.

It's a disputed stretch of land which should form part of any future Palestinian state and which borders on to two countries - Egypt and Israel. You could be shot crossing any border illegally, especially in countries where there is conflict.

Yes, there is a blockade on certain materials and there isn't freedom of movement - which is pretty bad in and of itself.

That doesn't make it a ghetto. The use of the word ghetto is deliberately inflammatory.

[Shakshuka]

Here's one UN interpreter who had enough!

[AndHarry]

Oops, fail on the mic!

To answer a question, I didn't post a thread about this when the boys were first missing because I didn't know about it. Now an Arab boy from the West Bank has been kidnapped and killed. All four murders are foul acts and should be dealt with through the criminal justice system, not through antagonistic rhetoric, retaliation, blowing up houses and blaming entire governments for the actions of killers who have been disowned and condemned by their governments.

[Shakshuka]

To be accurate, Hamas, which is part of the National Unity Government, supported the killing of the 3 Israeli teenagers.

Although full kudos to Mahmoud Abbas for condemning it as that won't win him popularity among the Palestinians.

[AndHarry]

I haven't seen anything to say that Hamas supported the killings? I thought they denied any involvement?

[Shakshuka]

They didn't take responsibility for it but still thought it was a great idea and supported it (not exactly surprising).

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4533751,00.html

[TucsonGirl]

Hamas raison d'etre is the destruction of Israel. As long as they are in control of Gaza, there can be no peace in the region. And no, Israel should not give up a single inch of land that they hold, it is their land. Why on earth would it not be? Did Palestine hold it from the beginning of time? No, of course not. It's ridiculous that the same people that laud Palestinians also deny that there is any such thing as "native Britons".

You would think that after over 70 years, Hamas would have realised that Israel simply are not going to give up and leave. Jews are business minded people, not warriors. Given the choice of peacefully doing business with Palestine or going to war, Israel would choose peace every time, but Hamas simply aren't interested in doing business, and neither are Palestinians, hence Hamas getting voted into power consistently. Look at what Israel has become. It's a modern, westernised country, by far the most free country in the entire middle east. So why on earth liberals hate it so much is beyond me. You can be liberal in Israel, criticism of government policy is common there. It's a lot harder to be critical of the government in Palestine, or Iran, or Iraq, or Saudi, or Syria, or Egypt, etc etc. Not if you want to stay alive, anyway.

[Shakshuka]

I think Tuscongirl that it's not a question of who was there first. That one has been done to death.

Both the Palestinians and Israelis have to live in Israel/Palestinians and somehow have to get along and share. The Palestinians aren't going anywhere and neither are the Israelis. It's all childish wishful thinkig to suppose otherwise on either side.

The Palestinians are absolutely entitled to self-determination and all the civil liberties that Israelis enjoy (at least, it shouldn't be Israel denying it to them). If Israel doesn't want to give up one inch of land to allow for a two state solution, then the only other long-term option is a one state solution with equality for all. The status quo can't continue with the Palestinians in some kind of legal limbo with a military occupation and no real state of their own.

I've got to say though that I don't know what you mean by Jews (or Israelis which is what we're talking about really) are a business like people and not warriors?! I think Jews are just like any other people. Some are business people and some are not, some are milataristic and some aren't.

[AndHarry]

I have heard Israel claim moral superiority over the Palestinians based on the fact that they are a democratic society, however the Palestinians also had elections and Israel refused to accept the result because the people voted for the wrong people. So that wasn't good enough. Then they claimed they couldn't negotiate because the Palestinians were split, now they're united and still Israel won't sit down to negotiate. I don't see that as choosing peace every time.

Israel has many things to be proud of, among them being one of the most egalitarian societies for women in the world. Their government cannot be proud of failing to establish peace by breaking the spirit of every agreement made on the path towards peace.

It's also true that people are free to protest, however the consequences for doing so can be far-reaching. Without saying too much on a personal level, a relative of mine was denied a civil service job because of their attendance at a peaceful student demonstration many years before the application. Peaceful protest is often met with violence in the Palestinian Territories, where Israel has an internationally agreed duty to provide conditions for a normal life for the inhabitants.

The lands that are now Israel were British back in the day.

[Shakshuka]

Sorry, I don't believe for a second that someone was denied a civil service job in Israel for having taken part in a peaceful demonstration. Someone hasn't told you the full truth. I don't want to completely out myself but I do know about the Israeli civil service and how it works.

It takes more than one round of free elections to create a democratic society. Palestinian society is very very far from democratic. However, it did have relatively free elections and Israel accepts that the Gazans freely elected a gang of murdering child-killers as their chosen leaders. It just doesn't want to deal with them.

And, while Israel has throughout the years often taken steps which do not further peace, the Palestinians are equally responsible for having caused the current situation. They've chosen, time and time again, the path of terrorism and violence. They had no reason to start the second intifada which caused such misery for them at the end of the day. Ehud Barak was close to giving them nearly all they wanted in 2000 but Yasser Arafat couldn't do it. And then Ehud Olmet - he also offered them nearly all they wanted in 2008 but this time Mahmoud Abbas was too weak.

You can't blame the whole situation on Israel.

[AndHarry]

For crystal clarity, I think the Palestinian leaders are dreadful too. Arafat I think could have settled it but he was very constrained by his own precarious hold on power. He couldn't have done it with Bibi. Both sets of leaders are far too short-termist, at a great cost to their own people and to the security of the rest of the world.

I do think though that Israel is more to blame. The Palestinian leadership is so weak that I doubt they could stop the rocket attacks for long unless there was a credible chance of achieving an agreement. The Israeli government could do everything is has promised overnight: stop expanding the settlements, including 'organic growth', working towards providing the conditions of a normal life for people living in the Gaza Strip, restart negotiations without preconditions that are impossible for the PA to meet. They claim moral superiority, they should step up and deliver.

Going back to the civil service point, I'm not going to go into great detail on here for obvious reasons but I have no reason to doubt what I've been told.