Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/5185724
Original link is here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/israel/gaza-war/63691/alan-rusbridger-gaza-war-israel-hamas
The big thing is the Hamas attack wasnt the start of all this. It wasnt Israel minding their own business and Hamas invading for the glory of Islam. The warning cries of a humanitarian crisis were going off long before this recent war, from international humanitarian agencies like Unicef. Gaza was being militarily oppressed by Israel, blocking humanitarian aid, international trade, even denying access to their own waters for fishing.
Civilians were dying off already as a result of Israel, and Israel ignored the warnings, the international community ignored the warnings, and then its shocked pikachus all around as a dying people fight back for survival.
You can point out back and forth violence going into the 1800s. Nobody has clean hands in this conflict.
Yeah, but siding with Israel here is the logical equivalent of siding with Andrew Jackson and supporting the Indian Removal Act as he committed genocide against the native people.
The power imbalance and how Israel has used it is what makes it imperative that Israel be held accountable by the international community.
I’m glad you bring up the power imbalance. The “both sides have been doing horrible stuff” only works if both sides have equal footing, which they clearly do not. This does not negate the crimes commited by Hamas, but extremism doesn’t come from nowhere and Israël has a responsibility in that.
Except jews, christians and muslims lived pretty much peacefully together during ottoman rule. The violence worsened when britian controlled palestine and then became a lot worse during the nakba and israeli occupation. It’s not about ‘having clean hands’. It’s about stopping genocide and understanding that occupation and colonialism leads to violent pushback. It always has and always will.
Wasn’t the Ottoman period occupation/colonialism too? Not that I am in favour of imperialism but you do raise a fascinating point I wasn’t aware of.
I dont know anything about this. We’re they all living in the same neighborhoods or we’re they in different neighborhoods in the same city or like different towns in the same Provence?
Just curious how closely bound their networks were. In my home town folks of different faiths are neighbors and mostly go to the same schools and share a government. There’s not much segregation at all. Sure, there’s racism among all groups, but it gets much weaker and much less frequent with each generation.
Oh yeah and fuck the ole British state. Bunch of tossers meddling all about so they can exploit everyone’s resources. Their emancipated colony, all-grown-up now, isn’t much better.
Mostly it goes back to the 1940’s. There was more history of Zionism beforehand, Jewish settlers gradually coming in to live in the holy land. But after WW2 was the large influx and big push for a Jewish ethnostate. Aaand the people living there already opposed it from the start. And since then it’s been very apparent why, because Israel pushes beyond the borders they were already given from Palestinian land, and militarily occupy the Palestinian land they dont yet claim.
It was Arabs who did not accept those borders. They lost and Israel expanded.
What I have more of a problem with is the settlers in the WB and that seems to be Bibi’s doing without much pushback from USA. Fascists gonna fasche.
It was not Palestine at that time though and Jews always lived in the area.
You can go back much much further than the 1800s, back to the start of zionism.
I do agree the Hamas attack wasn’t the start of this. However tactically it was incredibly silly, honestly what did they think would happen?
They gave Netanyahu, who was finally fumbling at the reigns after almost thirty years aan excuse to execute his wet dreams and all of Israel uniting behind him.
I see no way how they could have thought the attack would benefit their cause.
I dont think people are appreciating the context of Gazans dying off. It wasnt a stable situation that was fine to continue as it was going, imagine youre locked in a room with a lunatic with a knife trying to kill you. Youre not likely to beat the lunatic, but youre gonna try, you dont have any other options.
Waiting didnt work, protests didnt work, pleading with the international community didnt work, they cant leave. Everyone keeps saying they shouldnt have fought back, but what should they have done? Nothing is not available as an option.
I appreciate that and I have equated the current war to the Warsaw ghetto uprising. I’m not an apologist.
However, as Sun Zu said, you must not interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake. Netanyahu’s might was failing. Israeli youth was rising up against him.
It’s not like they absolutely needed to do this right now, and they could’ve quite easily understood what the response would be (maybe not the entire extent).
Tactically it was stupid.
Should they have protested instead? How about in the land of the free?
They did a little more than simply “fight back.” They also engaged in widespread and utterly gratuitous acts of violence and torture in ways that can only have been calculated to trigger an overreaction on the part of Israel. They knew exactly what they were doing and what would happen. They obviously don’t give a fuck about their own people.
Because Israel will never let them back in if they leave. That is not hypothetical; it happened to thousands of Palestinians during the 6-day war, and their families are still stuck in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon today.
It’s also because Hamas has its origins in the Muslim Brotherhood which for obvious reasons means that Egypt is very leery of accepting Palestinians from Gaza.
I’m not defending their position, just explaining it; Egypt is basically a military dictatorship at this point and the Muslim Brotherhood is enemy number one for them.
They don’t want them either.
All the Arab world may be united in it’s hatred of Israel, but that doesn’t mean they like each other…
@Blackmist it’s not about “like” it’s about realpolitik.
2 million refugees into Egypt would be like suddenly allowing 6 million refugees into the US. Political suicide for anyone that did it.
Especially if it meant you were likely going to get a border war with a notoriously land-stealing nation as well.
Israel occupies that border too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphi_Route
@FaulerFuffi assuming that’s a genuine question there are a bunch of reasons and one is they don’t want to open themselves up to being attacked by Israel.
Why Egypt Won’t Open The Border To Its Palestinian Neighbours.
500 people came through recently iirc.
It all started when Israel showed up on the block and forcibly removed 700000 Palestinians from their homes. There’s no history before that worth discussing as it is archeological records, not history.
Areas that were once 90% Palestinian, suddenly became 90% Jewish. Those people are still fighting to get their homes back, and Israel is continuing to evict Palestinians daily.
The first step to a solution is to recognize that Israel’s goals are to ethnically cleanse the area and then work from there.
This is a false equivalence. Most of the rhetoric I’ve seen about Hamas is that it’s an inevitable consequence of Israel’s treatment of restricting the Palestinian people to an open-air prison. Saying “We can’t support either Hamas or Israel” ignores the fact that most people in favor of Palestine are in favor of the civilians, the people who did nothing and are still bombed and tortured and executed. Not to say that Hamas deserves to be bombed and tortured, they’re citizens as well that shouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, but the large majority of support is in favor of the Palestinian people more broadly that are just unfortunate enough to be adjacent to the conflict and are forced to deal with the consequences of Israel’s bloodlust
to be clear: I do think Palestinians have a right to fight for their own freedom. But with the amount of disinformation at play here i don’t know how many atrocities are actually committed by Hamas and how many are the result of Israeli misinformation campaigns. But the amount of any of that doesn’t change how I feel – Innocent civilians should never die in a conflict like this. I don’t care if Hamas is doing it, Israel is very clearly ALSO doing it, and it’s abhorrent and gross no matter who. But in terms of the conceptual “high ground” the west likes to bandy around, Palestinians have a right to fight for its freedom from an occupying colonial force.
Ok, so if I just take quite exactly your argument and say: I don’t care if Israel is doing it, but Hamas is using violence, and THAT is abhorrent. Then what?
Sorry, but this abstraction and contextualisation is exactly wrong. This conflict is never ever going to be resolved if people do obviously wrong things for some abstract justification from A past they conceive.
Also your conspiracy take which makes you simply discard large chunk of information based on your gut feeling is just crazy. I find it quite audacious to say stuff like that and still fake a reasonable argumentation.
I don’t care who is doing it because it’s abhorrent from both ends, regardless of the frequency or scale. It’s bad no matter what.
But the ends don’t justify the means in either case, so in stead we need to evaluate what’s being fought for in the first place for context, because both sides are commiting atrocities on various scales so you can try to one up whichever side you disagree with so we need to look at the context of the fight and what’s being fought for. Under that lens, israel is an occupying colonial force by any metric and was given it’s current territory by other colonial, imperial forces. It’s claim to the state of Palestine is tenuous at best and isn’t even consistent with the Jewish faith, where Jews see themselves as perpetually in exile until their Messiah comes. Israel leverages it’s position as a colonial ethnostate to make people correlate support of the Jewish faith with support of their apartheid ethnostate, which is also a false equivalence. None of this is a conspiracy theory, it’s rooted in fact and also agnostic to which side is committing more atrocities. I’m not saying Hamas is doing nothing wrong, I’m saying relative to this point it doesn’t matter if they are or not. Hamas are Palestinians that had their homes robbed from them, Israelis are not.
Your view, if I’m parsing this correctly, is that because Palestinians were wronged 75 years ago by the creation of Israel, the Israeli state should not exist - and that while violence is wrong, Palestinians inherently have a more legitimate right to violence - is that an accurate framing of your view?
If I have that right, is there a point in time, or a number of generations of living on the land, that grants Israelis rights or determination or legitimacy to the land, in your view?
Nothing justifies bombing children. Noone’s ‘right to defend themselves’ should include this.
Hamas also killed children and fires at Israel, so is Libanon. That children die is a consequence of the bombing. People pretend as if Israel is explicitly targeting groups of children to throw bombs at them. What you are saying is that people should not be at war and I agree.
“Your honor, I know it might seem oddly coincidental that I mostly shoot at criminals that are standing next to schools, but I assure you that the large number of child casualties is not my intent. In fact, it’s the kids’ fault that they let the criminals stand next to them!”
Except Hamas aren’t solely fighting for freedom, they specifically want ALL of Israel gone and ALL Jews killed, they literally want a theocratic dictatorship under Islam. And they won’t stop until they get it.
IDF and netanhayu are real dirty here, but Hamas and the (maybe) majority Palestinians that support them are like the anti thesis to a free society. Plus they’re violent homophobes that stone LGBTQ people to death.
That tips me to Israel’s side in this, minus the far right Jewish extremists that literally killed an Israeli prime minister because he was succeeding in brokering peace.
Even the misinformation is very one-sided.
The article opens with “what about America’s response to 9/11?”. JFC, what a shitty justification. America was clearly wrong to war crime all over Iraq just as Israel is in the wrong for warcriming all over Palestine. I refuse to “both sides” imperialists and their victims. Frankly, “both sides” is the trap one should avoid.
Iraq was also a consequence of 9/11. It would never have happened without it.
Arguable, Iraq was Bush Jr. finishing what his father started in the late 80s. It may well have happened even without 9/11. Afghanistan however was a direct consequence of 9/11, and is a more apt metaphor for what Israel is doing now.
Yes, first was Afghanistan. But the Iraq invasion was still under the “war on terror”. Besides, I was simply referring to the author’s argument:
But he added that we had to consider what the US did when attacked on 9/11: it invaded Iraq, with 200,000 [his figures] killed in three years.
Iraq may well have been invaded even without 9/11, as it was Bush Jr. finishing what his father started in the late 80s.
The direct consequence of 9/11 was Afghanistan, and thus is a more apt metaphor for what is happening with Israel right now.
MAS*H was an amazing show and it was moments like that that had a lasting effect on my world view. I did not realize it as a kid watching it, but I do now.
The organizations are the ones that can fuck off. It’s the people that are suffering.
