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I watched an interesting interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast not too long ago that offered an alternative perspective of what it’s like for an ordinary person to live under Israeli occupation and also has to live with Palestinians and Hamas.
Israel isn’t helping itself using this conflict to support its ulterior designs for expansion to create a Greater Israel in the region. You can argue who started the fire and draw your lines in the sand wherever you want but to me there’s no doubt Israel is pouring more gasoline on it at the moment than Palestinians are.
After the tidal wave of gasoline that was Oct 7th, I'm not ready to point fingers at Israel for not deescalating.
If you think that qualifies as a tidal wave of gasoline what do you think about the vast numbers of Palestinian hostages? Sure, some of the small children they arrest get charged with crimes, but some of the Oct 7 hostages were "kidnapped from their tank" etc - actively serving in the military. October 7th is a rounding error when compared to what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians beforehand, and if you want to claim that it justifies what happened next then you unfortunately also have to justify everything the Palestinians have done in revenge.
Which is why they're being treated as POWs, with all the rights involved, right? As opposed to being treated as... well, hostages?
If you feel so strongly about people being taken as hostages, I assume you're aware of the vast numbers of Palestinians that have been kept hostage by Israel as prisoners? If that's your actual objection and you're concerned about violations of international law there's actually a lot of ground to go over with regards to Israeli violations of it. If that's your actual point, I'm more than happy to go over it with you.
But if your point is just who/whom (taking hostages is fine and legal when the Israelis do it but a warcrime when the Palestinians take a tenth of that number) then I'm not really interested in a discussion, or what passes for one when your criteria is just "if it is my side it is good, if it is the other side it is bad".
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What are you basing that opinion on?
Its reaction to October 7th?
Right, so Hamas fires literally thousands of rockets at Israel for no discernible end for decades, stages October 7th as a last-ditch effort to get the world to pay attention to them (fully cognizant of the fact that the Arab world is growing increasingly tired of the Palestinian cause), Israel responds by waging war on Hamas to reclaim the Israeli hostages, Hamas fights back, using various repugnant strategies designed to maximise Palestinian civilian casualties, and persists in firing rockets at Israel throughout (along with the occasional indiscriminate terror attack inside Israel's borders while they're at it)-
And your gloss of this is that Israel bears more responsibility for escalation of hostilities than Hamas?
The obvious next question is - if the fashion Israel responded to October 7th was excessive or inappropriate or whatever, what, in your estimation, ought they to have done instead?
Hamas didn’t fire off thousands of rockets against their peaceful neighbors. They fired off thousands of rockets at people they’re being occupied by.
The entire debate being had is the one Israel gets to play by imposing the framework of discussion to make Hamas take blame for things they aren’t primarily at fault for.
Yes because Israel is the military occupier. You can’t be fair to an occupier. How can you?
As far as a comprehensive program at this point, I really don’t know. But I can tell you where Israel should start. Halt any further military incursion tomorrow and rethink its plans for the region. There would be a good place to start. Hamas should end its violent campaign as well and the easiest way for both sides to do that is to stop participating in it.
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Hamas persisted in firing rockets at them for the next two decades. And far from these rockets being aimed at military targets, there's no real guidance system to speak of, and the goal is solely to sow terror among Israeli civilians who themselves bear no more responsibility for this state of affairs than the civilians in Gaza do.
Hamas isn't to blame for the thousands of rockets they fired at Israel over the last few decades? Hamas isn't to blame for the suicide bombers they sent into Israel, or the water pipes they dug out of the ground in Gaza to use to manufacture rockets?
To reiterate: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
How many military incursions did Israel make into Gaza between 2014 and October 7th, 2023? Your brilliant suggestion was Israeli policy for the better part of a decade. Hamas responded to this cessation of hostilities by committing the worst pogrom since the Holocaust. At this point "complete and total destruction of Hamas, root and branch" strikes me as an entirely reasonable goal for Israel to pursue.
Israel never "withdrew" from Gaza in 2005. Israel redeployed from the heart of Gaza to the periphery. And Israeli experts themselves have even admitted this. The "withdraw" with an expressed attempt kill any chance of Palestinian Statehood. Back in 2004 while the plan was still being discussed in the Knesset Dov Weisglass waa senior adviser to Ariel Sharon and straight up said to his face “The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” By “freezing” the political process his claim was that you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem”.
And by their own admission the “withdrawal” from Gaza didn't entail ceasing to make life hell for the Palestinians and would keep the Gazans on a "diet." If you call being blocked from export, blocked from import, fishermen not being able to go out to fish, the naval vessels driving them back to shore, and ignore the statements of the Israelis themselves, etc., then yeah; they withdraw. Just over a third of Gaza’s arable land is barred from entry to Palestinians. It’s called a “barrier.” They want to keep them on that, meanwhile separated from the West Bank, and continue the ongoing project of taking over.
Do you actually mean to tell me the ongoing presence of a military occupation doesn't amount to a military incursion?
It seems to me that if Israel wanted to take over Gaza, they could have just - done so, at any point in the last twenty years. Israel doesn't want Gaza, and offered the territory back to Egypt on at least one occasion. Egypt doesn't want it either, of course, and constructed a massive wall along the Gazan border which extends several metres underground specifically to stop Gazans from tunneling under. If the blockade is an indictment of Israel, it's just as much an indictment of Egypt. And yet Hamas rarely, if ever, fires rockets at the other enforcers of this blockade.
And as for how awful it is that Israel places strict limitations on which products and goods go into Gaza - I will reiterate that Hamas is an entity which literally digs water pipes out of the ground in order to fashion crude rockets out of them. When Hamas officials say they hate Jews more than they love life, they are not being hyperbolic. People tut-tut about the invasive and humiliating procedures Gazans are subjected to when they want to travel into Israel for work, but seriously - if you were an Israeli official, and there was a group of people who hated you this much on your doorstep and who will resort to any underhanded tactic just for a chance to hurt one of you (up to and including employing women and children as suicide bombers), what would you do differently? Tear down the security checkpoints so Gazans can come and go as they please, immediately resulting in hundreds of Israeli civilians being killed in terror attacks? Allow the free flow of industrial products and fertilizer into Gaza, so that Hamas can use these to manufacture rockets and suicide vests? I genuinely want to know what you'd do differently if you were in their shoes.
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What was pulled out in 2014? I thought they left in 2005.
You're absolutely right, I'd just woken up from a nap when I wrote that comment.
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