Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[southernhybrid]

I'm sharing an article written by an Israeli military officer who is having trouble justifying what he the fight he is about to become involved with. I think he makes a lot of good points and I hope some of you will read the entire thing and comment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/13/...iHZHH-0U1wj62XPl3Bx-6R5BTCBZrQ&smid=url-share

I was in Austin, Texas, for work on Saturday when I received a call from my commander in the Israel Defense Forces to return to Israel and head to the front line. I didn’t hesitate. I knew that the citizens of my country were in real danger. My duty first and foremost is to join the fight against those who unleashed a massacre on my people. I boarded the first flight I found out of Austin to head home to join the I.D.F. reserves, where I serve as a brigade operations command officer.

For 56 years Israel has been subjecting Palestinians to oppressive military rule. In my book “Love Israel, Support Palestine,” I wrote: “Israeli society has to ask itself very important questions about where and why the blood of its sons and daughters was spilled. A Messianic religious minority has dragged us into a muddy swamp, and we are following them as if it were the piper from Hamelin.” When I wrote these words last year, I didn’t realize how deep in the mud we were, and how much more blood could be shed in so little time.


I am now going to defend my country against enemies who want to kill my people. Our enemies are the deadly terrorist organizations that are being controlled by Islamic extremists.

Palestinians aren’t the enemy. The millions of Palestinians who live right here next to us, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan, are not our enemy. Just like the majority of Israelis want to live a calm, peaceful and dignified life, so do Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians alike have been in the grip of a religious minority for decades. On both sides, the intractable positions of a small group have dragged us into violence. It doesn’t matter who is more cruel or more ruthless. The ideologies of both have fueled this conflict, leading to the deaths of too many innocent civilians.

As a major in the reserves, it is important to me to make it clear that in this already unstoppable new war, we cannot allow the massacre of innocent Israelis to result in the massacre of innocent Palestinians. Israel must remember that there are more than two million people living in the Gaza Strip. The vast majority of them are innocent. Israel must do everything in its power to avoid killing innocent people and to focus on destroying the militant army of Hamas.

 

[steve_bank]

In the past I looked at English language media across the region.

Israel has opposition to conservative politices and settlements. We do not generally hear hem over here. We mostly see the conserve government spokespersons.

I don't think Israelis are monolithic.

 

[Harry Bosch]

White House walks back Biden’s claim he saw children beheaded by Hamas

US president spokesperson says comments were based on news reports and claims of Israeli officials.

www.aljazeera.com

Sounds as credible as FOX News, but then Uncle Joe has a long history of making off the cuff gaffes. Followed by the WH walking it back,

Sorry fellow Seattle home buddy (love Seattle!); but I've corrected you on this before. The Joe always cutting gaffes is a fox news meme that is false. He said what appeared to be true. My mind is totally changed after finding out that Hamas killed the babies with bullets rather than by beheading...

Harry, I did not take you for a died in the wool supporter of Biden.

His gaffes are well document and I have seen a few of them.

That goes back before being president.

He made a serious gaffe on direct military action if China stacked Taiwan. His staff walked it back. Not nearly as bad a Trump, Biden has a penchant for making things up on the spot..

His new cliche is ' I/we have your back'. Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and the situation of the moment.

Biden warns China to leave Taiwan alone and sells weapons to Taiwan. China wants to take over and make it part of the CCP system. Then Biden ignores the colonization and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israel knows when it comes down to it the US would fight to save Israel. It emboldens Israel.

Bibi over decades has developed personal relationships with important American politicians. He is a very skilled politician and manipulator.

I'm not a Biden hack. I did vote for him (of course, will not vote for Trump). He's done a surprisingly good job. He's exceeded my expectations. But yes, I was talking about your post regarding Taiwan/China. I responded back to you in the post, and you never responded back (can't believe that you'd disrespect a fellow Mariner! Kidding!). Of course Biden states the occasional gaffe. All presidents do. Does Trump say gaffes - yes! Every day. So did Obama, so did Bush. But here's the deal: many of Biden's gaffes aren't gaffes! They are actual policies positions that fox news doesn't like. So they call them gaffes. It's okay if you disagree, but I don't think that Biden's statements on defending Taiwan were gaffes. He said it three times. His specialty while in congress was Taiwan. While he is making statements that are harder than official policy (which presidents do all the time); it's very deliberate. If China were to attack Taiwan, we have to respond. We can't allow an adversary to control 90% of our chip supply chain. Don't fall for the fox news memes.

 

[steve_bank]

What stands out to me is the size of the area where this is all happening. Look at it on a map.

The words that come to mind is WWII Warsaw Ghetto,

With Israel's arms resupplied by the USA it is shooting fish in a barrel.

See the map.

What is the Gaza Strip? Here's how big it is and who lives there.

The Gaza Strip is a densely populated stretch of land. More than 2 million people live in the territory. It has been under the control of Hamas since 2007.

www.cbsnews.com

The strip is about 139 square miles –that's slightly more than twice the size of Washington, D.C. Its border with Israel is about 36 miles and its border with Egypt is about eight miles. There are about 24 miles (40 kilometers) of coastline on the strip, but it has been blocked by the Israeli Navy since 2009 and is closed to all maritime traffic.

I
How wide and long is Israel?
Long and narrow in shape, the country is about 290 miles (470 km.) in length and 85 miles (135 km.) in width at its widest point.

 

[Toni]

And what evidence does Israel have that being kinder and gentler towards a terrorist organization would be effective? When it is surrounded by countries who literally want it to be obliterated. Not because of anything that has happened in the last 80 years but because they are Jewish.

Why was Israel created?

Nevermind why. The problem, as you yourself note, is the where.

The British gave them a big chunk of Palestine, but as with so much of what the British gave people (and/or helped themselves to), it wasn't theirs to give.

If Israel had been created in Wales, that would have been better, though you'd likely have the Sons of Glyndŵr launching attacks on illegal settlers. Perhaps the English could have given them Lancashire instead, though that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Better yet, Israel could have been created in the USA. There's plenty of big tracts of semi-desert that look a lot like Palestine. Or they could have just been given governance over New York City, which already has a large Jewish population.

Creating a homeland for Jews, well away from Europeans who hated them, sounds like a good plan post WWII. But creating it in a place where even more of their neighbours are antisemitic than was the case in Europe, seems pretty stupid.

Perhaps the Allies should have just given them Prussia, as a massive "fuck you" to the surviving Nazis. If you think they deserved to be given a big tract of land as a consequence of attempted genocide, then it makes little sense to give them land that didn't belong to the perpetrators of that genocide.

Sure any of those could have been done. Of course, Israel was founded on lands that had traditionally, historically belonged to Jews. The British did not ‘give’ land that was not theirs. The Ottoman Empire abandoned claim to those lands. A jewish homeland was intended to be part of Palestine from the beginning of the mandate, as laid out by the League of Nations following WWI.

If we want to ‘give back’ land the British gave to people, you and I would probably end up as next door neighbors in Great Britain.

 

[Toni]

Just gonna leave this here. Rest in power Michael Brooks.

4:20 - It's not complex. It's just that. How much can a people suffer?

Almost everyone condemns Hamas' slaughter of almost a thousand people. Of course Israel must and will retaliate by slaughtering ten thousand people, many of them innocent. We understand that. But shouldn't there be some limit? Israel's planned response borders on genocide; why isn't this also universally condemned?

In the long lists of Palestinian grievances and Israeli misbehavior that led to Hamas' attack, oppression at the Al-Aqsa Mosque is a minor item. Still I found this YouTube interesting.


Everybody knows that Muslims kneel toward Mecca when they pray. What I didn't know is that this was a later development: Originally they prayed to Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, the site where Mohammed, praise be unto him, rose to Heaven. For centuries this holy site was treated with respect by all religions. That changed as right-wingers seized control of Israel and its occupied territories.

I would hardly call it "minor" though. It is a great indignity among decades of indignities suffered by the Palestinian people.

European Jews created Hamas. Ultranationalist Jews created Hamas. Netanyahu created Hamas. In 1947 the United States under the guise of the United Nations created Hamas. All along the Palestinians just tried to survive, suffering indignity after indignity.
What would you do?

Really? All that enmity began in…1948?

This is not that much different than saying that the North created the KKK and that Obama is responsible for Trump. Different scales, of course.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Just gonna leave this here. Rest in power Michael Brooks.

4:20 - It's not complex. It's just that. How much can a people suffer?

Almost everyone condemns Hamas' slaughter of almost a thousand people. Of course Israel must and will retaliate by slaughtering ten thousand people, many of them innocent. We understand that. But shouldn't there be some limit? Israel's planned response borders on genocide; why isn't this also universally condemned?

In the long lists of Palestinian grievances and Israeli misbehavior that led to Hamas' attack, oppression at the Al-Aqsa Mosque is a minor item. Still I found this YouTube interesting.


Everybody knows that Muslims kneel toward Mecca when they pray. What I didn't know is that this was a later development: Originally they prayed to Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, the site where Mohammed, praise be unto him, rose to Heaven. For centuries this holy site was treated with respect by all religions. That changed as right-wingers seized control of Israel and its occupied territories.

I would hardly call it "minor" though. It is a great indignity among decades of indignities suffered by the Palestinian people.

European Jews created Hamas. Ultranationalist Jews created Hamas. Netanyahu created Hamas. In 1947 the United States under the guise of the United Nations created Hamas. All along the Palestinians just tried to survive, suffering indignity after indignity.
What would you do?

Really? All that enmity began in…1948?

This is not that much different than saying that the North created the KKK and that Obama is responsible for Trump. Different scales, of course.

No. It seems most of it came along with Jews from Europe singing This Land is my Land.
Lacking any western news sources and not wanting to take as gospel the writings of Al Jazeera and the like, I've resorted to reading at the United Nations website. So far they don't seem to much favor Israel.
United Nations The Question of Palestine

 

[pood]

By injuring children? That is just barbaric.

Not intentionally. Sometimes children get injured or killed. But unlike with Hamas, I have not seen any evidence Israel targets children.

According to UNICEF, Isreal has now killed 750 Palestinian children and wounded about 2,450.

Oh, but, hey, they weren’t targeted! They’re simply collateral damage — hey, “sometimes children get injured or killed.” Shit happens, amirite?

 

[TomC]

According to UNICEF, Isreal has now killed 750 Palestinian children and wounded about 2,450.

Oh, but, hey, they weren’t targeted! They’re simply collateral damage — hey, “sometimes children get injured or killed.” Shit happens, amirite?

Correct.
IDF didn't target civilians. Makes them very different from Hamas.

Hamas killed those children. On purpose, because it's politically expedient to create "martyrs for the Cause"
Tom

 

[pood]

According to UNICEF, Isreal has now killed 750 Palestinian children and wounded about 2,450.

Oh, but, hey, they weren’t targeted! They’re simply collateral damage — hey, “sometimes children get injured or killed.” Shit happens, amirite?

Correct.
IDF didn't target civilians. Makes them very different from Hamas.

Hamas killed those children. On purpose, because it's politically expedient to create "martyrs for the Cause"
Tom

What a nice distinction without a difference. IDF knows perfectly well that their acts will result in the deaths of many children, but that’s OK, because they’re ”collateral damage.”

 

[TomC]

What a nice distinction without a difference. IDF knows perfectly well that their acts will result in the deaths of many children, but that’s OK, because they’re ”collateral damage.”

I suppose you think Hamas is unable to understand that they caused this humanitarian disaster? They did it on purpose to create more Palestinian martyrs, including children? Palestinian and Israeli?

I don't think Hamas leaders are stupid. I think that they're unconcerned about humanitarian disasters unless that suffering keeps them in power. If it does, they're all about mass suffering.
Tom

 

[laughing dog]

According to UNICEF, Isreal has now killed 750 Palestinian children and wounded about 2,450.

Oh, but, hey, they weren’t targeted! They’re simply collateral damage — hey, “sometimes children get injured or killed.” Shit happens, amirite?

Correct.
IDF didn't target civilians. Makes them very different from Hamas.


Hamas killed those children. On purpose, because it's politically expedient to create "martyrs for the Cause"
Tom

The IDF kills civilians out of indifference because it is politically expedient to get revenge.

Saying the IDF is very different than Hamas is neither setting the bar very high. Especially given the IDF kills a lot more civilians than Hamas.

 

[bilby]

In Palestine, Hamas dug up water pipes and turned them into rockets to send into Israel.
Enmity between Jewish people and Palestinians has existed for many generations prior to the establishment of Israel.

Sure. So how do you plan to defeat an enemy who are prepared to take on a twenty-first century technologically advanced enemy, armed with weapons improvised from water pipes?

You can't win. So you have to stop being enemies.

Neither side seems willing to treat the other with anything like kindness and any such attempts at kindness are met with hostility and suspicion and usually a lot of violence.

Yup. So is this an indication that previous attempts were too kind; Or that they were nowhere near kind enough?

Of course the unstated assumption is that neither side will slap away the proffered hand. Unfortunately that is highly likely from either side.

Sure. Why should that stop it from happening?

The people advocating violence don't want to just quit at the first sign of opposition; Why do you think that those advocating kindness should do so?

 

[Swammerdami]

And as early as 1907, serious consideration was given to creating a [] Jewish homeland in the Kimberley region in the northern part of the state of Western Australia.
...
But apparently God preferred them to have the far less useful and valuable Negev instead. Shit, He didn't even bother to mention Australia in his Big Book of Everything (whether you look at the Torah, Quran, or Bible for your definitive divine work). Kangaroos and Wallabies bad an epic journey to and from the Ark, but got nary a nod from Noah, or at least none that was recorded.

The King James Version of the Bible mentions Australia five times, using the euphemism "upside down." All those references are missing from the Douay-Rheims translation, produced a few decades before KJV and which, although an English translation, was prepared in France. For example KJV Isaiah 29:16 starts "Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay ..." while D-R starts "This thought of your is perverse: as if the the clay should think against the potter ..."

...
The British gave them a big chunk of Palestine, but as with so much of what the British gave people (and/or helped themselves to), it wasn't theirs to give.
...
Creating a homeland for Jews, well away from Europeans who hated them, sounds like a good plan post WWII. But creating it in a place where even more of their neighbours are antisemitic than was the case in Europe, seems pretty stupid.

The foundation of modern Israel traces back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Is there any reason to treat the Palestinians as "anti-semitic" at that time? They became anti-Zionist of course, since the Zionist specifically wanted land that had been in Palestinian hands for centuries.

Serious question: Am I missing something? Were the Palestinians in 1920's and 30's anti-Semitic? Does anyone claim that anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist are synonyms?

The British plan was always that free elections would be held to choose government(s) in the Palestinian region. How the Jews eventually acquired a majority is a story beyond the scope here. Exodus, starring Paul Newman, tells part of the story, with desperate and heroic Zionists acting in defiance of Britain. But trying to resolve a legal quarrel by one incident a century ago is just silly. Two four ten fifty wrongs don't make a right.

 

[Arctish]

And what evidence does Israel have that being kinder and gentler towards a terrorist organization would be effective? When it is surrounded by countries who literally want it to be obliterated. Not because of anything that has happened in the last 80 years but because they are Jewish.

Why was Israel created?

Nevermind why. The problem, as you yourself note, is the where.

The British gave them a big chunk of Palestine, but as with so much of what the British gave people (and/or helped themselves to), it wasn't theirs to give.

If Israel had been created in Wales, that would have been better, though you'd likely have the Sons of Glyndŵr launching attacks on illegal settlers. Perhaps the English could have given them Lancashire instead, though that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Better yet, Israel could have been created in the USA. There's plenty of big tracts of semi-desert that look a lot like Palestine. Or they could have just been given governance over New York City, which already has a large Jewish population.

Creating a homeland for Jews, well away from Europeans who hated them, sounds like a good plan post WWII. But creating it in a place where even more of their neighbours are antisemitic than was the case in Europe, seems pretty stupid.

Perhaps the Allies should have just given them Prussia, as a massive "fuck you" to the surviving Nazis. If you think they deserved to be given a big tract of land as a consequence of attempted genocide, then it makes little sense to give them land that didn't belong to the perpetrators of that genocide.

Sure any of those could have been done. Of course, Israel was founded on lands that had traditionally, historically belonged to Jews.

The land historically belonged to the indigenous peoples of the region, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Jews were only about 10% of the population in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Even with hundreds of thousands of mostly illegal immigrants they were only about 30% of the population when the State of Israel was declared to exist on more than 50% of the land.

The British did not ‘give’ land that was not theirs. The Ottoman Empire abandoned claim to those lands. A jewish homeland was intended to be part of Palestine from the beginning of the mandate, as laid out by the League of Nations following WWI.

The Ottoman Empire did not abandon any claims; it lost a war and lost power in the region. And the League of Nations had no authority to create a new State in Palestine. The people in the various provinces of the former empire wanted to create their own States to govern their own affairs. No one wanted some outside power to force them to accept a government at gunpoint, and they certainly didn't want to be forced out of their homes by armed, militant immigrants.

If someone had a time machine and an army they could prevent much of the conflict by forcing the Zionist immigrants to become part of Palestinian society and work their way up to prosperity, not steal every bit of productive farmland and every commercial enterprise they could get their hands on and force the local population into refugee camps. But we live in the real world where actions have consequences. The consequence of the hostile takeover of most of Palestine by mostly European immigrants, and the explicit racism and religious bigotry that is the foundation of the State of Israel, was war. The consequence of thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian State in a negotiated peace treaty, or securing equal rights and equal treatment for the people of Israel and Palestine regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion, is the ongoing violence and injustice of apartheid, oppression, insurgency, and terrorism.

If we want to ‘give back’ land the British gave to people, you and I would probably end up as next door neighbors in Great Britain.

Or we could use the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act as a template and negotiate a peaceful agreement on land sharing and ownership for all of the United States and its Territories. We could at least try to be fair and work for justice, not against it.

 

[steve_bank]

Going back to what Jews did in Palestine, Israel does not have a leg to stand on by labeling Palestinian armed resistance terrorists.

Mencham Begin destined to be a PM of Israel was part of it.

King David Hotel bombing - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing[1] of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack[2][3] on 22 July 1946 by the militant right-wing[4] Zionist underground organization the Irgun during the Jewish insurgency.[5][6][7] 91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured.[8]

The hotel was the site of the central offices of the British Mandatory authorities of Palestine, principally the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Palestine and Transjordan.[8][9] When planned, the attack had the approval of the Haganah, the principal Jewish paramilitary group in Palestine, though, unbeknownst to the Irgun, this had been cancelled by the time the operation was carried out. The main motive of the bombing was to destroy documents incriminating the Jewish Agency in attacks against the British, which were obtained during Operation Agatha, a series of raids by mandate authorities. It was the deadliest attack directed at the British during the Mandate era (1920–1948).[8][9]

Disguised as Arab workmen and as hotel waiters, members of the Irgun planted a bomb in the basement of the main building of the hotel, whose southern wing housed the Mandate Secretariat and a few offices of the British military headquarters. The resulting explosion caused the collapse of the western half of the southern wing of the hotel.[9] Some of the deaths and injuries occurred in the road outside the hotel and in adjacent buildings.[9]

Controversy has arisen over the timing and adequacy of any warnings.[9] The Irgun stated subsequently that warnings were delivered by telephone; Thurston Clarke states that the first warning was delivered by a 16-year-old recruit to the hotel switchboard 15 minutes before the explosion. The British Government said after the inquest that no warning had been received by anyone at the Secretariat "in an official position with any power to take action."[10]

The leaders of Haganah opposed the idea initially.[15] On July 1, 1946, Moshe Sneh, chief of the Haganah General Headquarters, sent a letter to the then leader of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, which instructed him to "carry out the operation at the 'chick'", code for the King David Hotel.[note 1] Despite this approval for the project, repeated delays in executing the operation were requested by the Haganah, in response to changes unfolding in the political situation. The plan was finalized between Amichai Paglin (Irgun alias 'Gidi'), Chief of Operations of the Irgun, and Itzhak Sadeh, commander of the Palmach.[9]

 

[laughing dog]

The past explains how the situation came to be.

The past does not justify current or future behavior. Peace will arrive when a vast majority on all sides focus on trusting each other sufficiently to live in peace. That means forgoing blaming _____ for ______ in the past.

 

[Toni]

And what evidence does Israel have that being kinder and gentler towards a terrorist organization would be effective? When it is surrounded by countries who literally want it to be obliterated. Not because of anything that has happened in the last 80 years but because they are Jewish.

Why was Israel created?

Nevermind why. The problem, as you yourself note, is the where.

The British gave them a big chunk of Palestine, but as with so much of what the British gave people (and/or helped themselves to), it wasn't theirs to give.

If Israel had been created in Wales, that would have been better, though you'd likely have the Sons of Glyndŵr launching attacks on illegal settlers. Perhaps the English could have given them Lancashire instead, though that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Better yet, Israel could have been created in the USA. There's plenty of big tracts of semi-desert that look a lot like Palestine. Or they could have just been given governance over New York City, which already has a large Jewish population.

Creating a homeland for Jews, well away from Europeans who hated them, sounds like a good plan post WWII. But creating it in a place where even more of their neighbours are antisemitic than was the case in Europe, seems pretty stupid.

Perhaps the Allies should have just given them Prussia, as a massive "fuck you" to the surviving Nazis. If you think they deserved to be given a big tract of land as a consequence of attempted genocide, then it makes little sense to give them land that didn't belong to the perpetrators of that genocide.

Sure any of those could have been done. Of course, Israel was founded on lands that had traditionally, historically belonged to Jews.

The land historically belonged to the indigenous peoples of the region, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Jews were only about 10% of the population in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Even with hundreds of thousands of mostly illegal immigrants they were only about 30% of the population when the State of Israel was declared to exist on more than 50% of the land.

The British did not ‘give’ land that was not theirs. The Ottoman Empire abandoned claim to those lands. A jewish homeland was intended to be part of Palestine from the beginning of the mandate, as laid out by the League of Nations following WWI.

The Ottoman Empire did not abandon any claims; it lost a war and lost power in the region. And the League of Nations had no authority to create a new State in Palestine. The people in the various provinces of the former empire wanted to create their own States to govern their own affairs. No one wanted some outside power to force them to accept a government at gunpoint, and they certainly didn't want to be forced out of their homes by armed, militant immigrants.

If someone had a time machine and an army they could prevent much of the conflict by forcing the Zionist immigrants to become part of Palestinian society and work their way up to prosperity, not steal every bit of productive farmland and every commercial enterprise they could get their hands on and force the local population into refugee camps. But we live in the real world where actions have consequences. The consequence of the hostile takeover of most of Palestine by mostly European immigrants, and the explicit racism and religious bigotry that is the foundation of the State of Israel, was war. The consequence of thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian State in a negotiated peace treaty, or securing equal rights and equal treatment for the people of Israel and Palestine regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion, is the ongoing violence and injustice of apartheid, oppression, insurgency, and terrorism.

If we want to ‘give back’ land the British gave to people, you and I would probably end up as next door neighbors in Great Britain.

Or we could use the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act as a template and negotiate a peaceful agreement on land sharing and ownership for all of the United States and its Territories. We could at least try to be fair and work for justice, not against it.

Sure, and that would award Israel to…the Jews. Of course it depends on how far one wants to go back, but if one goes back as far as one can, by most historical scholars reckoning, Israel is sitting pretty much where it first began.

 

[Arctish]

The land historically belonged to the indigenous peoples of the region, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Jews were only about 10% of the population in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Even with hundreds of thousands of mostly illegal immigrants they were only about 30% of the population when the State of Israel was declared to exist on more than 50% of the land.

The British did not ‘give’ land that was not theirs. The Ottoman Empire abandoned claim to those lands. A jewish homeland was intended to be part of Palestine from the beginning of the mandate, as laid out by the League of Nations following WWI.

The Ottoman Empire did not abandon any claims; it lost a war and lost power in the region. And the League of Nations had no authority to create a new State in Palestine. The people in the various provinces of the former empire wanted to create their own States to govern their own affairs. No one wanted some outside power to force them to accept a government at gunpoint, and they certainly didn't want to be forced out of their homes by armed, militant immigrants.

If someone had a time machine and an army they could prevent much of the conflict by forcing the Zionist immigrants to become part of Palestinian society and work their way up to prosperity, not steal every bit of productive farmland and every commercial enterprise they could get their hands on and force the local population into refugee camps. But we live in the real world where actions have consequences. The consequence of the hostile takeover of most of Palestine by mostly European immigrants, and the explicit racism and religious bigotry that is the foundation of the State of Israel, was war. The consequence of thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian State in a negotiated peace treaty, or securing equal rights and equal treatment for the people of Israel and Palestine regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion, is the ongoing violence and injustice of apartheid, oppression, insurgency, and terrorism.

If we want to ‘give back’ land the British gave to people, you and I would probably end up as next door neighbors in Great Britain.

Or we could use the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act as a template and negotiate a peaceful agreement on land sharing and ownership for all of the United States and its Territories. We could at least try to be fair and work for justice, not against it.

Sure, and that would award Israel to…the Jews. Of course it depends on how far one wants to go back, but if one goes back as far as one can, by most historical scholars reckoning, Israel is sitting pretty much where it first began.

That is Netanyahu's reason for claiming all of the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel. But what he doesn't say is that over the past 2,000 years Jews in the area accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and some Jews and Christians accepted that there is One God and Muhammed is His Prophet, and some folks believe aliens from outer space colonized the Earth and will soon return to Bless the Faithful with rides on Their Holy Comet.

The cleansing of Eretz Israel is bigoted self-serving tribalism based on nothing more than religious woo and European chauvinism. The only path to peace is to set aside all that bullshit about Chosen People and land consecrated to Allah and the Second Coming of Jesus, and to remove proven enemies of a negotiated peace like Netanyahu from positions of authority.

Peace happens when people are treated fairly, justly, and with genuine concern for their well-being. It doesn't happen when bomb and murder them. The indigenous people of Palestine have human rights, one of which is to live in their homes in peace and security, and not be treated like shit by a better armed group of people who want their stuff.

 

[Toni]

And what evidence does Israel have that being kinder and gentler towards a terrorist organization would be effective? When it is surrounded by countries who literally want it to be obliterated. Not because of anything that has happened in the last 80 years but because they are Jewish.

Why was Israel created?

Sure any of those could have been done. Of course, Israel was founded on lands that had traditionally, historically belonged to Jews.

The land historically belonged to the indigenous peoples of the region, the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Jews were only about 10% of the population in Palestine at the beginning of the 20th century. Even with hundreds of thousands of mostly illegal immigrants they were only about 30% of the population when the State of Israel was declared to exist on more than 50% of the land.

The British did not ‘give’ land that was not theirs. The Ottoman Empire abandoned claim to those lands. A jewish homeland was intended to be part of Palestine from the beginning of the mandate, as laid out by the League of Nations following WWI.

The Ottoman Empire did not abandon any claims; it lost a war and lost power in the region. And the League of Nations had no authority to create a new State in Palestine. The people in the various provinces of the former empire wanted to create their own States to govern their own affairs. No one wanted some outside power to force them to accept a government at gunpoint, and they certainly didn't want to be forced out of their homes by armed, militant immigrants.

If someone had a time machine and an army they could prevent much of the conflict by forcing the Zionist immigrants to become part of Palestinian society and work their way up to prosperity, not steal every bit of productive farmland and every commercial enterprise they could get their hands on and force the local population into refugee camps. But we live in the real world where actions have consequences. The consequence of the hostile takeover of most of Palestine by mostly European immigrants, and the explicit racism and religious bigotry that is the foundation of the State of Israel, was war. The consequence of thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian State in a negotiated peace treaty, or securing equal rights and equal treatment for the people of Israel and Palestine regardless of race, ethnicity, and religion, is the ongoing violence and injustice of apartheid, oppression, insurgency, and terrorism.

If we want to ‘give back’ land the British gave to people, you and I would probably end up as next door neighbors in Great Britain.

Or we could use the Alaska Native Land Claims Settlement Act as a template and negotiate a peaceful agreement on land sharing and ownership for all of the United States and its Territories. We could at least try to be fair and work for justice, not against it.

Sure, and that would award Israel to…the Jews. Of course it depends on how far one wants to go back, but if one goes back as far as one can, by most historical scholars reckoning, Israel is sitting pretty much where it first began.

That is Netanyahu's reason for claiming all of the West Bank and Gaza belong to Israel. But what he doesn't say is that over the past 2,000 years Jews in the area accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and some Jews and Christians accepted that there is One God and Muhammed is His Prophet, and some folks believe aliens from outer space colonized the Earth and will soon return to Bless the Faithful with rides on Their Holy Comet.

The cleansing of Eretz Israel is bigoted self-serving tribalism based on nothing more than religious woo and European chauvinism. The only path to peace is to set aside all that bullshit about Chosen People and land consecrated to Allah and the Second Coming of Jesus, and to remove proven enemies of a negotiated peace like Netanyahu from positions of authority.

Peace happens when people are treated fairly, justly, and with genuine concern for their well-being. It doesn't happen when bomb and murder them.

The indigenous people of Palestine have human rights, one of which is to live in their homes in peace and security, and not be treated like shit by a better armed group of people who want their stuff.

AFAIK, ancient Jews were indigenous to the Palestinian/Israeli land. I am not an historian but my reading of the history of thst region seems to indicate such.

You are correct: Peace happens when all people are treated fairly and justly and with concern for their well being. Bombs and rockets come from all directions and cross all borders. It is much easier to count only one side’s wrongs and feed grudges than it is to decide that there will be peace.