Over 100 Israelis have died and more than 900 were injured after rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas militants, Israeli officials said Saturday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 198 were killed in Gaza and at least 1,610 were injured Saturday in retaliatory attacks from Israel.
“We are at war. We will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.
The Israeli Defense Forces earlier declared “a state of alert for war,” according to a statement issued by the IDF.
“Over the past hour, the Hamas terrorist organization launched massive barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and its terrorist operatives have infiltrated into Israel in a number of different locations in the south,” the IDF said early Saturday.
Thinking my statement had anything to do with Hamas is exactly the sort of thinking that leads to the alienation of all Palestinians. The USA should not ever give any support to Hamas, I have never said otherwise. However, the USA has made it very clear that protecting Palestinians is not a priority in this conflict, they will only use force to defend the Israeli troops and command.
But these two things aren’t as separate as we’d like to think. Just like how most Russians support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, most Palestinians support Hamas’s terrorism. There’s a lot of footage showing your average Palestinian civilian in Gaza cheering as Hamas launches rockets with many hoping it would kill as many Israelis as possible. There’s also a lot of footage showing Palestinian civilians celebrating and throwing candy at the militants who dragged around the naked corpses (including the elderly and kids) around in their trucks. Keep in mind Hamas was voted into power by the Palestinian population, and the government in the West bank paused elections because they feared that Hamas’s popularity might make them takeover the government entirely.
I don’t wish any civilians to get harmed, but it seems out of touch to not see the ties. After all, every terrorist groups has a base of support that keeps them going. Even ISIS was cheered on in many towns and cities in Iraq because they were sunni and hated the shia majority. The point that I’m making here isn’t to call every Palestinian a terrorist, but to demonstrate the nuance of why the US focused exclusively on Israel in its official statements. In an environment as volatile and informal as Gaza, it’s simply too risky to mention them because if anything goes wrong, and there’s always a high chance of that happening, that could end up wiping years of diplomacy. It’s simply not worth it from a political perspective.
This sounds like a defense of the Nazis if you just replace a couple of words.
In what way does that sound like a defense of the nazis? Do you just call anything you don’t like nazi?
I tried to make the example work and I admit “complaining about a small subset of the population of rich oligarchy” doesn’t really compare at all with “literal murderers” but in both cases you try to say that a minority is responsible for everything wrong and you want to eradicate the larger race of people. Does that not sound like the Nazi’s? If you want to understand why I’m saying the things I am saying, then you might want to try to understand that what drives people to Hamas, what forces people to violence and hatred, is very largely because of how they have been treated. I don’t mean today and yesterday, either, I mean how they’ve been treated as third or even fourth class citizens for decades. I think the establishment of Israel after WWII was largely a mistake to begin with, all it did was alienate people and cause constant infighting in the region, but now that they’re here they can’t just keep expanding and taking away the family homes of others. They can’t just keep demolishing buildings with airstrikes in a perpetual loop. They can’t just shut off power to the entire Gaza Strip permanently. Because it isn’t hurting Hamas. It is growing Hamas. I don’t think Hamas is the fault of the Palestinian people, I think it is a plague put on them by the surrounding powers in Israel, Iran, Saudi, the whole UAE, and even the USA. If respect and rights were allotted better, and education and resources were plentiful, if the Cold War didn’t treat the entire region as collateral, then Hamas would never have even begun.
That is not at all what I said, not even close. I don’t think the average Palestinian civilian is responsible for Hamas, let alone have them be eradicated for it (literally what?). I was just pointing out the fact that terrorist groups don’t pop into existence out of thin air. Hamas didn’t come into existence by passing through from another dimension. They were created and put in power by the Palestinian population. Maybe not all of them, but enough to keep them in power for as long as they have. The Nazis wouldn’t have come to power without the help of the German population. ISIS wouldn’t have grown as big as it has without the help of the sunni populations in Syria and Iraq. The Taliban wouldn’t have gotten into power again without the support of the Afghan population. All of these ended up suffering
There has to be a population behind them that gives them support, protection, and recruits. You said that Hamas and the Palestinian people are two completely separate entities, I’m pointing out that’s not necessarily the case.
You understand that this swings both ways, right? Do you think Israel is treating the Palestinians in Gaza the way they do for no reason? Israel is a modern democratic country, and such countries don’t resort to such tactics unless they feel like they have to. This isn’t some dictator going on power trips, Israel has legitimate reasons to keep Gaza in check.
This is just pure ignorance. Do you think that Israel was established by the British magically snapping their fingers and opening the floodgates of European Jews to come in and take over like in some cartoon plot? Do you seriously believe there was no infighting in this region before Israel? Are you out of your mind?
Towards the end of WWI, the British promised the Arabs that they would gain independence if they drove out the Turks and they promised the Jews that they would get a national home. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of WWI and the British assumed control of what is now Israel/Palestine, they created the Palestinian Mandate as per the recommendation of the League of Nations. The mandate was basically a legal status given to certain territories that were having their control being transferred from one country to another. The mandate was meant to be temporary so the British didn’t technically break their promise, but the Arabs saw this as betrayal anyway, and so they started insurgencies and riots.
In 1922, the British conducted a census to understand the demographics of the region. The results showed that most of the regions that occupy modern Israel were heavily Jewish while the areas that are now Palestine were mostly muslim Arabs. Therefore the modern notion that this region was entirely Arab and the Jews came from Europe and stole it all away is false. The Jews were always there. Just because they’ve been oppressed and abused for centuries by various islamic empires, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t exist. The Jews have resisted the Ottoman and the previous islamic empires before them that repeatedly tried to wipe them out. Regardless, the British thought they could kill two birds with one stone by both giving the Arabs their independence and giving the Jews a national home so they started scheming up ways to partion the lands.
When the muslim Arabs heard about the British plans to allow the Jews to get their own state, they lost their minds went on to start a series of revolts over the course of the next two decades that ended up claiming the lives of thousands. The muslim Arabs rejected every proposal for the Jews to have their own state or have any sort of power in the region. Having the Jews be equal to muslims goes against the teachings of islam. Meanwhile, the Jews of the region watched all these events go down and so they started organizing their own communities for protection. The Jews from the surrounding regions migrated towards the areas that were heavily populated by Jews and they started buying up homes and other property from the Arabs. Over time these areas became controlled by the Jews, and the different areas started coordinating.
The British saw this, and went to the UN for help, and the UN came up with the 1947 borders which basically split the land more or less along the lines of where the Jews and muslim Arabs lived. The Jews agreed to this plan and declared indepedence, but the Arabs rejected it and declared war. The Arabs called for the destruction of this new state and an expulsion of Jews from the region. The Jews ended up shocking everyone by actually winning, and their victory secured their independence.
Everything that I’ve said up to this point except for the partition plan proposed by the UN happened before the end of WWII. This proposal happened two years after WWII ended, and people were just starting to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust during this time. This is when many Jews from Europe and around the world started migrating to either the US or Israel for protection, fearing another Nazi regime may arrive at some point in the future. During the same time, the creation of Israel made the Arab world even more anti Jewish than they already were. Just about every Arab country expulsed their entire Jewish population (same as large as 200k individuals), and they had nowhere to go but Israel. About 800,000 Jews from accross the Middle East and North Africa were displaced by this.
From this point on the Arabs have stayed stuck in the same mentality of wanting to destroy Israel, eradicate the Jews from the region, and establish an islamic Palestine. I’m not making this up, this is the actual goals of just about every single Palestinian political organization, including Hamas. The Palestinians would sprout new terrorist groups that attack Israeli civilians, which would lead Israel to retaliate, which would lead the West to back Israel and the Arab would to back Palestine. The Arab countries would either give money to Palestine or they would declare war on Israel on the behalf of Palestine and end up losing. Their loses would lead them to make concessions to Israel like the Palestinians giving more land to Israel or the Arab countries recognizing Israel or something like that… then the Palestinians would get bitter about their loss, become radicalized, sprout more terrorist groups, and the cycle repeats. This has been going on for a century now.
The point of me telling you this is to help put things in perspective just how nuanced, complex, and deep this conflict is. This conflict can’t be oversimplified and you can’t skip over details. Your view on Israel is so artificial that I don’t think you grasp why things are the way they are. The creation of Israel isn’t a mistake in itself, but there have been a lot of mistakes along the way from all the sides involved. Also the infighting isn’t new and didn’t start because of Israel was created, hatred and oppression of people of different ethnicities/religions is a rich tradition in that region of the world that goes back thousands of years.
This would’ve been a valid point if we were talking about the West Bank, but we’re not. We’re talking about Gaza, and Gaza has not been occupied by Israel for a loooong time.
Why would Israel still provide power to them when they’re at war? Keep in mind, Hamas is the one that declared war. They knew this was going to happen and still did it. Why should Israel provide electricity to a hostile region that wants to use this resource against them?
This has already been tried. You sound like a person with a good heart, but you severely lack the context of this conflict. The world has already tried doing everything you suggest here. Dozens of countries around the world gave Palestine billions of dollars annually for decades to aid them fund schools, hospitals, cultural centers, create businesses, and build infrastructure but that never materialized. All that money either went to the pockets of the Palestinian leaders or it went straight into funding terrorist operations. Israel has also tried on several occasions tried to loosen restrictions to improve relations, but every time, the terrorist exploit whatever opening they see and they start massacring as many civilians as they could.
Like what is Israel even supposed to do? It’s easy to sit behind the screen and wag your finger at them, but if you were in their position, what would you do? The Palestinians reject your peace offers, they refuse to sit down and negotiate, they have no interest in diplomacy, they don’t offer their own proposals for coexistence, and they’re hellbent on destroying your country and people. This is on top of constantly dealing with threats from rogue states and other terrorist groups like Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, etc who all want to you destroyed AND the international pressure by countries who have an oversimplified overview of the conflict and they condemn everything that you do. How do you deal with that? That’s a serious question, what would be the appropriate course of action?
You must have forgotten the conversation we just had previously if you don’t remember advocation of eradication of all Palestinians.
Unless you’re completely braindead, I think my point was pretty straightforward. Most Russians support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Is Russian society enabling the war in Ukraine? Yes. Should be they be eradicated for it? No. Likewise, Palestinians are enabling Hamas, but that doesn’t they should be eradicated for it. This myth that societies are entirely different entities from their government is stupid. Even in the most authoritarian of countries, there’s always a portion of society that support the regime in power. Regardless, supporting criminals and being criminals are two different things. The ones that matter are the actual criminals are directly responsible for the suffering of others. Those are the ones who should pay, not civilians, regarldess of their views.