Israel - Palestine Discussion | Post Respectfully | Discuss more, tweet less

For those who don't consider this a genocide, do you consider the Rohingya situation as genocide?

Myanmar isn't killing everyone, the number of deaths is around 25k, the main focus is in displacing people. No one hesitates in calling this a genocide, so I wonder do you see as different.
 






Difficult to post the whole thread but there’s more.
 
fergieisold said:
No it isn't justified if Israel is deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza, is there evidence of Israel doing this? I kind of thought they'd be targeting Hamas and not giving a shit about civilians in the cross fire. Not that it makes it much better...
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It's like blowing up a supermarket then saying, "We're trying to protect grocery carts in the process".
 
langster said:
Everyone can see what's going on and knows why, if they say otherwise they are either lying, blind, stupid or incredibly naive. Netenyahu wants the entire territory for Israel and that includes the West Bank. Then they can either kill or force the remaining Palestinians out. They have been doing It for decades, it's just now they can use the Hamas attack as justification. As you say they are acting with impunity and they won't stop.

Let's not pretend Hamas wouldn't do the same if they had the chance and that's why this whole fecking shit show is an absolute nightmare and utterly depressing. If this Israeli campaign succeeds and irradicates Hamas then they will just have created a couple of generators of Palestinian fighters who will just have a different name. The way Israel has responded ensures that Hamas or any group following will be even more determined to rid the region of Jews and make it a singular state of Palestine.

All the while the US and to a lesser extent the UK and EU are playing fecking politics and too scared to stand up and intervene or do the right thing because of 'optics' and votes.. Worse is the defence contracts and guaranteed rebuilding contracts that are also going on behind the scenes. Their inaction is fecking disgraceful and as per usual the only people who suffer are the innocent civillians on BOTH sides.

This is so similar to Tony Blair blindly following Bush in to war. It's just this time Israel are Bush and the US and UK are Blair.
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I agree with everything you've said - but there's a couple of bits I want to expand on in this paragraph:.

Let's not pretend Hamas wouldn't do the same if they had the chance and that's why this whole fecking shit show is an absolute nightmare and utterly depressing. If this Israeli campaign succeeds and irradicates Hamas then they will just have created a couple of generators of Palestinian fighters who will just have a different name. The way Israel has responded ensures that Hamas or any group following will be even more determined to rid the region of Jews and make it a singular state of Palestine.

Hamas have agreed to a 2 state solution as recent as 2017 under 1967 borders. We've had the PA agree to it way before then, so the only stumbling block to peace (or rather a 2 state solution) has been Israel. On your secondary point, I wholeheartedly 100% agree - you won't eradicate the Hamas ideology by indiscriminately killing, brutalising, subjugating, and maiming Palestinians. I said a while back that if Israel were seen to work with the PA in the West Bank, to provide statehood for the Palestinians living there and rights, they could almost make Hamas obsolete overnight. But what have they done there? They've atomised it, and terrorised the native population living there. There were 200+ Palestinians killed in the WB prior to October 7th, I think that number is around 300 now. It's just disgusting - and I hate that my government is so weak about it.
 
The Corinthian said:
Hamas have agreed to a 2 state solution as recent as 2017 under 1967 borders
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They haven’t. The relevant section of their rebranded charter states:

“without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

The text immediately preceding that states:

“There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.

Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
 
2cents said:
They haven’t. The relevant section of their rebranded charter states:

“without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

The text immediately preceding that states:

“There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.

Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
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I stand corrected. I think in any case, it's a more pragmatic direction to what they've previously said.

The other side of it is that Hamas and Israel are both sides of the same coin - Hamas won't recognise Israel, and Israel won't recognise Palestine, regardless of who is governing it.
 
The Corinthian said:
It's a strange article. There isn't a single piece of evidence mentioned that has been independently verified by the BBC.






This one says they have a body of evidence (unspecified) but hadn't done any interviews.







That's from the article itself - there's also been a few retractions to date about rape:



and here:
Amid war and urgent need to ID bodies, evidence of Hamas’s October 7 rapes slips away
Despite definitive witness testimony, global skepticism persists about the terrorists’ sexual crimes. ToI investigates how a mass-casualty event in a war zone made forensic determination impossible
https://www.timesofisrael.com/amid-...vidence-of-hamass-october-7-rapes-slips-away/

and there’s also Israel already smearing a UN led investigation into rape as antisemitic:



So, I’d exercise some professional judgement on that BBC article.
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It is a very strangely worded article. I went into it expecting clear evidence or the bbc having seen clear evidence but most of it seems to be things the BBC have been told by the Israeli camp rather than actually independently confirmed or confirmed by the BBC. Not saying it didn't happen but I'm left even more confused. Unless I'm missing something.
 
The Corinthian said:
I think in any case, it's a more pragmatic direction to what they've previously said
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Rhetorically it’s a different kind of document to their original charter. For example it explicitly rejects the idea that antisemitism is the basis for their opposition to Zionism, where the original fully embraced that idea.

More importantly it attempts to encompass and reflect the primary aspects of the mainstream Palestinian national impulse rather than the narrower Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood-shaped 1988 charter. Indeed there is no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood and just one reference to jihad.

I can’t think of any good reasons to give them the benefit of the doubt that this represents a genuine, significant shift. The rebranding seems to me to be a product of the circumstances Hamas found itself in at that time, with a regional crackdown on Islamist movements underway. Having said that, it would only be fair to understand the original charter as a product of its particular time too.
 
It is pointless playing the blame game in this conflict. It is complicated. Look back in history to 1917 when the UK Government issued a statement declaring support for the establishment of 'A National home for the Jewish people in Palestine' which was then part of the Ottoman empire. In 1947, the UN passed a resolution basically dividing up the former British Mandate land into Israel and Palestine. Various conflicts over the years saw Israel hold most of the area but in 2005/6 they left the territory known as the Gaza strip which was then taken over by the Islamist militant group Hamas. According to an International Lawyer Natash Huasdorff, Hamas threw their Fatah opponents in the 2006 democratic elections of the roof of the Parliament building and, naturally, won the election. In 2012, Hamas declared they were the government without bothering with elections. So a dictatorial region run by an Iranian funded bunch of thugs that the US security people say tax anything that enters or leaves the country including foreign aid. Nice people. Now the Israelis are rightly very angry with the sneak attack on Oct 7th and are after Hamas. The BBC question a Ms. Huasdorff, an specialist on International Law and conflicts, by starting the interview by saying 'Clearly Israel has broken International law by not allowing supplies into Gaza'. In fact they hadn't and this interview was a car crash for the BBC. What the law says about shelling civilians I don't know but she said 'Israel had dropped leaflets two days before warning people to leave and Hamas wouldn't let them go'. Whether that is true, I don't know but it is plausible given the record of Hamas. It is disgusting that civilians are being killed as it is in Ukraine. What is even more disgusting is Erdogan the President of Turkey accussing Israel of war crimes but not Hamas. The same Erdogan whose army is fighting Syrian Kurds by bombing civilians and treats Turkish Kurds badly. None are blameless.
 
fergieisold said:
I find it hard to believe Israel is targeting these places for a laugh. They must be targeting Hamas, or attempting to. What's the latest on the hospital? I'm guessing US intelligence was not great?
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I'm guessing all the children they're shooting is also because they're targeting Hamas right? Or the ambulances they're blowing up. etc etc
 
fergieisold said:
I find it hard to believe Israel is targeting these places for a laugh. They must be targeting Hamas, or attempting to. What's the latest on the hospital? I'm guessing US intelligence was not great?
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The IDF shoots and arrests kids for throwing rocks. We have evidence of them killing journalists. They aren't as 'holy' as people think.
 
fergieisold said:
Reading the BBC article made me sick. It's almost hard to believe human beings could commit such crimes. I'm afraid your skepticism is likely unfounded - the BBC state clearly at the very beginning of the article -

"The BBC has seen and heard evidence of rape, sexual violence and mutilation of women during the 7 October Hamas attacks"

Despite the awful civilian toll endured by the Palestinian people in Gaza there is only one side to blame in all of this - Hamas.
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It means you've lost all context and thinking that it all started on October 7th. You're basically saying you're okay with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You're basically saying collective punishment (while killing women and children) is probably justified during a resistance movement. Hamas didn't just occur out of thin air. They aren't decent, but context is everything.
 
nickm said:
This makes the argument better than I can:

"Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition. Zionism was a movement of desperate, idealistic Jews from Eastern and Central Europe bent on immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not “another” country, and regaining sovereignty over it. The settlers were not the sons of an imperial power, and the settlement enterprise was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire."

Now did the early zionists think there were colonising a land? Yes, in the narrow sense of establishing new settlements for a jewish homeland. But it wasn't a "colonisation" in above, bigger, sense - the sense people are using to try to imply the foundation of Israel was somehow illegitimate.
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I'd like you to change the word "Zionism" or "Zionist" to the word "Nazism" in your post. See how absolutely ridiculous this is.
 
fergieisold said:
I find it hard to believe Israel is targeting these places for a laugh. They must be targeting Hamas, or attempting to. What's the latest on the hospital? I'm guessing US intelligence was not great?
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They're targeting those places because their goal is to drive Palestinians out. This includes making the land unlivable via infrastructure destruction. Countless Israeli politicians and officials have stated this.
 
fergieisold said:
No it isn't justified if Israel is deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza, is there evidence of Israel doing this? I kind of thought they'd be targeting Hamas and not giving a shit about civilians in the cross fire. Not that it makes it much better...
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At a certain point, there is no functional difference between deliberately targetting civilians and just having no regard for them when going after legitimate targets. Israel is way past that point, on the off chance that the civilians are actually collateral damage. I don't think they are. I've seen enough from Israel to have no problem believing they're bombing Palestinians for laughs. After all, they also have their snipers kill kids playing in the streets, they jail kids without trial, or try them before military courts, they support settlers in stealing their lands, they deny them access to food, water and other necessities, they besiege hospitals for no reason etc.
Bebe said:
They're targeting those places because their goal is to drive Palestinians out. This includes making the land unlivable via infrastructure destruction. Countless Israeli politicians and officials have stated this.
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It's amazing that they keep posting videos of them blowing up government buildings and people just act as if that's normal. It's so painfully obvious that their goal here is to drive the Palestinians out for good.
 
Racist against people that are essentially the same race...noice
 
2cents said:
They haven’t. The relevant section of their rebranded charter states:

“without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

The text immediately preceding that states:

“There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity. Whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, judaisation or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate. Rights never lapse.

Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full
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What does this mean, exactly? "There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity" seems pretty clear, and they mention "from the river to the sea", but how does the 1967 lines fit into that?
 
berbatrick said:
For the first line - the US was no longer under the political control of the metropole after 1776, yet its settler colonialism - destruction of Native land and people for the benefit of fresh European settlement - accelerated after independence. If the USA isn't settler colonial, nothing is.
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I think the counter-argument there would be that the thirteen colonies became the new metropole after 1776, in the same sense that, say, European Russia was the metropole as the Russian Empire expanded into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia roughly around the same time, or pre-67 Israel is the metropole to the West Bank settlements today.

berbatrick said:
For the line on strategic/political considerations -
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I very much accept that, in practical terms, the Zionist movement adopted the form of classic European settler-colonialism. And that from the Palestinian perspective it could only really appear that way. This is a crucial way to frame the enterprise, and no full understanding is complete without it. But I don't think it suffices on its own.

It is true that strategic concerns helped fuel initial British support for Zionism. And while British-Zionist interests coincided, Zionist leaders were of course happy to exploit this in pursuit of their enterprise. But when those strategic concerns shifted, the British changed course, conclusively so just on the eve of the Second World War. The British government in London and the Colonial Office responsible for Palestine included some individuals who were culturally, religiously, or ideologically sympathetic to Zionist claims; and Zionism was led by men who, as Europeans, regarded themselves as representatives of the superior civilization, of which the British were regarded as the supreme example (and this certainly informed their approach to the Arabs). But the relationship was contingent on the ebb and flow of events, and its breakdown was not that of a maturing child shaking off the control of a parent (as was the case with the white colonies of the British Empire), but the natural consequence of two distinct agendas responding to changing times. British policy was ultimately guided by the demands of British imperial interests, while Zionism was ultimately guided by a nationalist impulse with its own independent agenda.

I think that nationalist impulse provides the primary reason for looking beyond (but not dismissing) the settler-colonial framing for a full understanding of Zionism. Its vision of the proposed Jewish State was modeled on the classic European nation-state in which the character of the state - the names of the streets, the words of the anthem, the faces on the currency, the dates of the holidays, the colors on the flag, etc. - would reflect the majority of the population (with protections and allowances in place for any minorities). And the growing urgency* with which the Zionists pursued it as the interwar years progressed was driven by an understanding of the growing precariousness of the Jews' future in Europe, which itself rested on the long saga of Jewish history which is well known. Although neither of these elements necessarily make Zionism more legitimate or moral than other products of settler-colonialism (that judgement probably depends on your perspective - see for example Deutscher below), they do seem to me to distinguish it in ways that are important. They both feature in Jabotinsky's testimony given to the Peel Commission in 1937. The whole thing is worth reading (see the link) but perhaps the most relevant excerpts are these:

...the "national" character of a State should be guaranteed ipso facto by the presence of a certain majority; if the majority is English, the State is English, and it does not need any special guarantees. So that when I pronounce the words "a Jewish State" I think of a commonwealth, or an area, enjoying a certain sufficient amount of self-government in its internal and external affairs, and possessing a Jewish majority...

...We are facing an elemental calamity, a kind of social earthquake. Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists, among whom there were many great minds...have given much thought to analysing the Jewish position and have come to the conclusion that the cause of our suffering is the very fact of the "Diaspora," the bed-rock fact that we are everywhere a minority. It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer. Of course, there are ups and downs; but there are moments, there are whole periods in history when this "xenophobia of Life itself" takes dimensions which no people can stand, and that is what we are facing now...

...The phenomenon called Zionism may include all kinds of dreams...but all this longing for wonderful toys of velvet and silver is nothing in comparison with that tangible momentum of irresistible distress and need by which we are propelled and borne. We are not free agents. We cannot "concede" anything. Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own party, accused of asking for too much, Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes. We do want a State; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and the humblest, who do not claim any merit, any role in humanity's development, they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people; yet when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same conditions as the Albanians enjoy, to say nothing of the French and the English, then it is called too much. I should understand it if the answer were, "It is impossible," but when the answer is "It is too much" I cannot understand it...We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of re-housing one-third of the Jewish race, half of the Jewish race, or a quarter of the Jewish race; I do not know, but it is a question of millions...

https://pdfhost.io/v/ah.YPpfMh_287215998JabotinskyTestimonytoPeelCommission

Obviously the final words there, spoken in 1937, were truly prophetic, so much so that a staunch sceptic of nationalist and Zionist claims like Isaac Deutscher came to write later:

I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilization, which that society and civilization have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers...

...Zionists may say—and who can deny it? that European Jewry would have survived if it had followed the call of Zionism. The fact is that the European Jews’ hostility or lukewarmness towards the idea of a Jewish Homeland sprang from their trust in the nations among whom they lived, and from their deep confidence in the humanitarian traditions and prospects of European civilization. Zionism saw no future for the Jews in Europe—it was the political epitome of the Jewish distrust of the gentile world. To Europe’s eternal shame, that distrust has proved itself all too well justified.

(Deutscher - The Non-Jewish Jew and other essays)

And even Edward Said recognized the distinct impulse that drove European Jews to Palestine:

I do not doubt that every thinking Palestinian, or those like myself whose trials have been cushioned by good fortune and privilege, knows somehow that all the real parallels between Israel and South Africa get badly shaken up in his consciousness when he reflects seriously on the difference between white settlers in Africa and Jews fleeing European anti-Semitism.

But crucially in terms of today, Said also noted that

the victims in Africa and Palestine are wounded and scarred in much the same sort of ways, although the victimizers are different.

(Said - The Question of Palestine)

*(edit):
I say “growing” because before the First World War and well into the British Mandate the Zionist leadership in Palestine were actually quite selective and discriminatory in terms of the type of Jew they encouraged to come to Palestine and the type of Jew they discouraged. Essentially, they encouraged Jews with capital who could make a real, material contribution to the strengthening of what would evolve into a Jewish state-within-a-state to make the move. Obviously these tended to be less in need of improving their material conditions than the lower-class types who were discouraged.
 
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NotThatSoph said:
What does this mean, exactly? "There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity" seems pretty clear, and they mention "from the river to the sea", but how does the 1967 lines fit into that?
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Israelis would argue that it means establish a Palestinian state in those lines, and use it as a base to fulfil the rest of the charter's stated goals by various means. Some more sympathetic to Hamas might regard it as the first, but limited, step to acceptance of the two-state framework.

I'm not sure it's either, and I'd view it more as an attempt by Hamas to be all things to all people. The context being a bid for regional recognition of their credentials as the mainstream expression of the broader Palestinian national movement, which incorporates a significant faction willing to accept a state in those terms.
 
2cents said:
Israelis would argue that it means establish a Palestinian state in those lines, and use it as a base to fulfil the rest of the charter's stated goals by various means. Some more sympathetic to Hamas might regard it as the first, but limited, step to acceptance of the two-state framework.

I'm not sure it's either, and I'd view it more as an attempt by Hamas to be all things to all people. The context being a bid for regional recognition of their credentials as the mainstream expression of the broader Palestinian national movement, which incorporates a significant faction willing to accept a state in those terms.
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A little bit like Ben Gurion that I read in this thread that he said that the 2 state solution was just the the first step to get all the territory as Israel
 
2cents said:
Rhetorically it’s a different kind of document to their original charter. For example it explicitly rejects the idea that antisemitism is the basis for their opposition to Zionism, where the original fully embraced that idea.

More importantly it attempts to encompass and reflect the primary aspects of the mainstream Palestinian national impulse rather than the narrower Islamist/Muslim Brotherhood-shaped 1988 charter. Indeed there is no mention of the Muslim Brotherhood and just one reference to jihad.

I can’t think of any good reasons to give them the benefit of the doubt that this represents a genuine, significant shift. The rebranding seems to me to be a product of the circumstances Hamas found itself in at that time, with a regional crackdown on Islamist movements underway. Having said that, it would only be fair to understand the original charter as a product of its particular time too.
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I think it's an effort to be taken more seriously on the political stage and to be a bit more pragmatic about its ultimate aim. I don't think we'll ever get to a reality where Hamas recognise Israel, and I don't think we'll ever get to a reality where Israel recognise Palestine (unless they're literally forced to by the US which is even more remote). There's an element, as you mention, to distance themselves from the other Islamist (not a useful term) groups.

Whether it's a genuine shift, or we should believe so, who knows.
 
Any update on today’s march in Jerusalem?
 
What we know about rape and sexual violence inflicted by Hamas during its terror attack on Israel

She said survivors of the terror attack told investigators they witnessed Hamas terrorists perpetrating sexual violence against the victims. She quoted testimonies of several individuals all of whom either directly witnessed sexual violence or saw clear evidence of it.

“There were girls with broken pelvis due to repetitive rapes, their legs were split wide apart in a split,” Richert quoted one survivor of the Nova music festival massacre as saying.
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https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/06/...nce-hamas-israel-what-we-know-intl/index.html
 


Multiple reports of this emerging. Horrific if true.
 
VorZakone said:
This journalist says they're being detained.

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At least one journalist confirmed among them - Diaa Kahlout, the Gaza correspondent for The New Arab. An article by them states that he and the male members of his family were taken and their whereabouts are unknown. It seems that the military-aged males in the area were rounded up.
 
VorZakone said:
This journalist says they're being detained.

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Let's see what transpires. One of the men blindfolded and handcuffed is a journalist and has been identified, if he survives then we'll at least know what went on.
 
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