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So, the Knesset has voted to ban the UNRWA from operating in Israel over claims that 10% of its staff have affiliations to terror organisations.
What is interesting here is the way the votes went.
One of the bills passed 92-10 (with eight MK missing or abstaining), the other 87-9.
The Knesset has ten members representing Israeli Arabs which I assume voted against the bills. Otherwise, it seems that most Israeli parties, even the ones much more moderate than Netanyahu's coalition, voted for it.
I find it a bit reminiscent of the post 9-11 unanimity towards GWB war on terror, were some bills were literally only being opposed by a single representative.
Personally, I think that it is likely that Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA. If your organisation worked in pre-war Gaza where Hamas ruled uncontested, you were not really in the position to tell them to go fuck themselves if they require that you extend paychecks and diplomatic privileges to a few jihadists.
However, I also think that this organisation plays an important role in securing basic humanitarian necessities to the people in Gaza.
The steelman might be that unlike other aid organisations (which will be infiltrated by Hamas in short order once they operate in Gaze), UNRWA has special privileges as a UN organisation. However, if this is the case, I don't get why it would not be sufficient to make a law to take away their privileges, making their activities in Israel fully subject to Israeli interventions (e.g. for passing propaganda material), instead of banning them outright.
The big trend with the GWB was the abolishment of the rules of war. There were no prisoners of war, only terrorists who can be tortured in any which way. There can be no negotiation because the enemy are terrorists and are just fundamentally evil. Pashtuns can't have any reason to oppose the Afghan government.
Palestinians are completely justified in having armed resistance and participating in an armed conflict. They are not terrorists, they are armed combatants participating in an armed conflict. There is no special terrorist clause in the Geneva convention.
Israel is an occupying force and is responsible for the people they are occupying. Israel is clearly trying to depopulate Gaza in order to steal the land.
From actual Israeli supporters to transparent pro-Israel astroturfing, the insistence on the 'terrorist' angle is striking. Does this really resonate with American normies?
I would think 'terrorism' a discredited label, counterproductive in most cases, especially in the context of distant desert squabbles. Is it not the 'common sense', dominant narrative in the US that the 2000's were a mistake born out of lies and a hysteria? Of course the actual costs to the Americans were miniscule, practically irrelevant, so I don't expect emotional investment, just disinterest and cautious 'this will not work on me twice' attitude.
Terrorism still probably has purchase among boomers who are Israel's biggest fans in the west anyways. But everyone else can just read about what Israelis say amongst themselves and realize that the distinction is meaningless at this point.
“You entered Gaza (after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught) to take revenge — as much as possible. [Against] women, children — everyone you saw. As much as possible. That’s what you wanted,” said Uriah Ben-Natan, the brother of 22-year-old Sgt. First Class (res.) Shuvael Ben-Natan, from the northern West Bank settlement of Rehelim.
Quotes like this put the Onion out of business:
Yeah Israel has a real problem with all these villainous live quotes. 90% of the time they manage to stick to the approved lines: 'we have a right to defend ourselves' 'counter-terrorism action' 'Iraq Iran Iran WMDs, nukes in 6 months' 'human shields'.
But 10% of the time government officials declare enthusiastic support for torturing prisoners by shoving metal rods up their anuses. Or we see the vigorous anti 'investigating soldiers for rape' protests. Or well-directed music videos where young children sing:
Reminds me a bit of Teufelslied, though it was intended as a marching song and I doubt children got to sing it:
At some point Israel is going to have to take on the villainous role with the face-concealing helmet and the glowing red eyes, accept what they are, what they want and what they'll sacrifice for the path they're on. They can't have it both ways. You can't be both the defender of freedom and justice, the unprovoked righteous who deserves sympathy and aid from others - and also go around burning people's houses down for fun, shooting children in the back as they flee, gunning down unarmed protestors, obliterating your enemies and taking their land.
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Gee, it's almost like the Israelis were angry or something after over a thousand of their countrymen were killed or abducted. Next you're going to tell us U.S. Marines landing on Okinawa had some off-color things to say about Japanese people.
If this is a justification, why does the same reasoning not work to justify the Palestinian Oct 7 attack? There is an obviously truthful reading of the situation, which is that Israelis and Palestinians are locked into a multigenerational civil war/blood feud that can only end by one side being wiped out or someone stronger swooping in and separating the combatants, and then there are the two competing narratives that aim to marshal support for one of the sides by selectively word-gaming away the justifications that the other side invokes when turning the ratchet.
What was the inciting incident demanding recompense on the scale of kidnapping, raping, and murdering partiers at a disco festival?
Israel has offered peace multiple times, and when its offers were accepted it honored those agreements. Meanwhile the Palestinians continue to refuse to take "yes" for an answer and insist on further fighting. That's not the recipe for "a pox on both their houses."
Settlement expansion, supported by the Israeli state, is essentially enough for me to conclude Israelis were never serious about peace with Palestinians.
Goal always the same - dispossession and/or expulsion. Slowly with settlements, domestic opposition mostly unserious - happy with the end result, only preferring the optics of serious concern and stalwart disapproval. Faster with aerial bombing campaigns.
So the Palestinians get to demand to live in a judenrein society? When did that become a reasonable demand?
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If we just want to go one step back, that's easy. Per the first Google hit, Israel killed something like 43k Palestinians since Oct 7 attack, establishing that the alleged appropriate revenge ratio is somewhere around 40:1. So we just need to find ~1000/40=25 Palestinians that Israel killed before Oct 7. More were killed by Israel just in 2022, and many more in 2021. I don't think being at a disco festival conveys a uniquely high value to your life, as opposed to, say, just being blown up in your home.
The relevant timeline just around settlements has plenty of evidence to the contrary, including from Israeli sources. Either way, it's easy to offer peace from a position of overwhelming strength.
That's not how any of this works, and a clear isolated demand for rigor. No-one ever analyzes any other armed conflict using this framework. The objective is not "revenge killings of undifferentiated Palestinians," but the destruction of the armed terrorist group that attacked Israelis - Hamas - either through elimination or forcing them to surrender and disperse, with a secondary objective of recovering the individuals who Hamas kidnapped on 10/7.
From your own source:
PIJ has a strong presence in West Bank cities like Jenin and Nablus. During the period between March and May, attacks by Israeli Arabs and Palestinians killed 17 Israelis, most of them civilians, and two Ukrainians. As a result, the IDF increased its raids against armed Palestinian factions throughout the West Bank. By July, at least 30 Palestinians were killed, including journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and 3 of those responsible for killings in Israel. On 1 August, Israeli forces arrested the PIJ West Bank leader Bassem al-Saadi. In the aftermath of that operation, amid heightened tensions, roads were closed in the south of Israel by the Israeli-Gaza border wall and reinforcements were sent south after threats of attack were made by PIJ sources in Gaza. The same day, Israeli communities in southern Israel were placed in lockdown by the military as a security precaution against potential attacks from Gaza, as, according to Israel, the PIJ had positioned anti-tank missiles and snipers at the border to kill Israeli civilians and soldiers.
Haaretz reported on 2 August that Egyptian intelligence officials "are holding talks with the leaders of the factions in Gaza in order to prevent escalation" and that "all parties told Cairo they aren't looking for escalation." On 3 August, Khaled al-Batsh, head of the politburo of the PIJ in Gaza said: "We have every right to bomb Israel with our most advanced weapons, and make the occupier pay a heavy price. We will not settle for attacking around Gaza, but we will bomb the center of the so-called State of Israel."
Again, from your own source:
Hamas delivered an ultimatum to Israel to remove all its police and military personnel from both the Haram al Sharif mosque site and Sheikh Jarrah by 10 May 6 p.m. If it failed to do so, they announced that the combined militias of the Gaza Strip ("joint operations room") would strike Israel. Minutes after the deadline passed, Hamas fired more than 150 rockets into Israel from Gaza.
In each of these incidents, Hamas started the violence. FAFO.
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