Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Loren Pechtel]

Unprovoked in that it's not a response to Israeli acts. Israel doesn't restrict Gazan exports except in that they'll close the border crossings when Hamas attacks them. When you hear about Gazans not being able to export look to the real cause: Hamas.

Are you ignoring the cross border fire and increasing violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories from late Spring to early Autumn, or are you simply unaware of it and therefore think it didn't happen?

Hamas decides when there will be violence. Israel simply responds when there is.

And just how long ago must something have happened to no longer qualify as provocation? Were the rocket attacks against Israel in May a provocation strong enough to justify retaliation by Israel now, six months later? If so, then everything Israelis did during that same time period is recent enough, too.

This has obviously been planned for a long time. They simply wait for a proper pretext (or in this case, probably didn't even try--note the importance of the date) and launch their pre-planned actions in "response" to something that Israel supposedly did (often the claim itself is false.)

If Derec had said the attack was unprecedented, I doubt anyone would have questioned his statement. If he'd said it was unexpected, there probably would have been some discussion about always expecting violence in the Middle East. But calling it unprovoked is absurd. There has been near constant provocation between the Israelis and Palestinians for decades.

Yeah, but nothing on this scale. This is more than Hamas has done in their previous existence combined.

You didn't answer any of my questions.

Were you unaware of the most recent instances of cross-border fire?

Sounds very much like victim-blaming. Ever pay attention? Hamas sends rockets, Israel hits Hamas. Hamas sends suicide attackers, Israel sometimes hits Hamas. It's just you rarely hear about what Hamas does because it's so routine that it's not news.

How much time must elapse before something can no longer be considered a cause for a certain course of action?

Operation Shield and Arrow happened on May 9th. Operation Revenge of the Free happened on May 10th. Do you believe that exchange of fire is part of the provocations that led to the current outbreak of open fighting, or do you think it doesn't qualify since it took place six months ago?

I think the current situation is because Iran wanted to disrupt the peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I would rephrase the above and say that clearly the Israel far religious right does not want peace with Israel. Unfortunately, this attack will embloden the far right; hurt the Israelis who want peace. Not that the Israelis who want peace had been all that successful in the last 10 years or so.

Does not want peace with Israel?? I think you've got something mixed up.

There is basically no peace movement in Israel anymore. Every attempt they make towards peace ends up making things worse, not better. Hamas doesn't want peace and thus ensures any attempts towards peace or better treatment of Palestinians fail, Israel has learned the lesson that they're safer by being tough.

I don't disagree with you. But I said that the Israeli far right dosn't want peace. I have pretty low regard for the religious right in Israel. They want to expand their settlements, study their religious book, won't serve in the military, don't pay taxes, and yet drive all government policy. The people in Israel who want peace haven't had political power in 20 years or more. Having said that, it's not like the people in charge of Gaza want peace either.

The people in power in Israel don't want peace because the Israeli electorate has learned that trying to make peace only ends up hurting Israel.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well if you read the Al Jazeera articles, that’s how they’re painting it. And we’ll get scant, if any information from any western news service.
I don’t mind people clipping a post when they are only addressing a specific point but the Al Jazeera articles are most relevant as to the religious disrespect perpetrated by these Jewish groups. They’re painting it as the spark for this attack.

1) How they're painting it doesn't make it so.

2) Al Jazeera is owned by terrorist supporters at this point. It is no longer a credible news source.

Extending no validity to your comments, if you have some western source that addresses the issue Al Jazeera does, I'd love to read it. Damned if I could find one. Wikipedia's article on the status quo of the Temple Mount seems to support Al Jazeera's comments.

Wikipedia is not remotely credible on politically sensitive things. While the facts will normally be true they'll be cherry picked.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can debate agreements and the British Mandate, bit the bottom line is the Jews armed themselves, tactically illegally, and declared a state. They seized prime business and agriculture prophetess from Arabs without compensation.

The Jews declared a state on the land that was to be allocated to them but which the partition was being stalled.

In the first war Arabs recruited Palest inns to fight against Israel, and when they lost the war they abandoned them. Israel denied right of return for Arabs who had lived in Isreali borders.

Note that most of them were refused return because they would not vow to continue the violence. In other words, traitors to the nation they were in.

After the followig wars which Arabs lost, Plaestinians had no options but terrorism. If Israel had been more magnamous they might have avoided the terrorism.

1) It started with insurgency, not terrorism. Terrorism came after 1973 when it became apparent that destroying Israel on the battlefield was impossible.

2) Israel has never had a meaningful ability to avoid the conflict. There's enough money to fund fighting Israel that there will be fighting.

3) The plight of the Palestinians is mostly due to their own leaders. At one point they were the most prosperous non-oil Arab nation in the world--and blew away 2/3 of their GDP by picking a fight with Israel.

The Arabs did not agree to give up the land they lived on to create Israel.

Jews armed themselves to create a homeland. Over here freedom fighters. Arabs armed themselves to take it back are called terrorists. Today their homes are still being taken by force.

Keep in mind by today's standrds the Jews in Palastine used terroist tactics.

No. 1948 was not terrorism on either side. It only turned substantially to terror when the Arabs realized that Israel couldn't be defeated on the battlefield.

It is usually easy to tell apart terrorism and freedom fighters--look at their targets. Military/government - freedom fighters. Civilian - terrorist. Note that the word "terrorism" often gets applied by politicians to things that aren't terrorism. Mostly this happens when a terrorist group attacks a legitimate target.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Jews declared a state on the land that was to be allocated to them

By whose authority? Were the current inhabitants of that land consulted about this "allocation"?

The allocation was done by the authorities that were in charge at the time. It's a relic of the colonial era.

They attempted to divide up the majority Jewish areas to Israel and the majority Muslim areas to Palestine, then smooth the borders to something reasonable. Had you had very local elections as to which country to be a part of you would have gotten a result similar to the partition lines.

Why are you not objecting about the other great partition of the era, the far more bloody one: India/Pakistan.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nothing in your evidence directly condones any type of violence. Resistance need not mean violence.

Perhaps they do condone violence in resistance. But your post is long on inference and short in evidence.

Don't play stupid. This is obviously in response to Hamas' actions--virtually all of which constitute war crimes. They weren't engaging in combat, they were engaging in mass murder and hostage taking. There is absolutely no question about the hostage taking, do you support hostage taking?

Your hand-waved assertions do not make it so.

As a matter of fact, earlier in the thread there are quotes from members of those groups decrying the violence. So your response is driven by ignorance.

Unlike you, I do not condone violence against civilians if any nation, ethnicity, race or religion.

You are still playing stupid. By now you certainly should know about the hostage taking (Hamas has announced it and streamed executions), yet you completely ignore it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Biden is sending a carrier, he has no authority to arbitrarily engage in combat where we have no mutual defense treaty.

But he does have authority to engage in combat with those who take Americans hostage. (Not that I think he's going to do so.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That's so oversimplified as to be useless. Both sides contain internal power struggles between moderates who'd be willing to accept a two-state solution and extremists who are hellbent on a one-state solution involving destruction of the other side. Both sides are fighting for survival against an enemy who are ruled by their respective extremists because their respective moderates have been sidelined. Any description worth the electrons it's printed on needs to consider why it is that the moderates lost the respective internal power struggles.

No, because Hamas is not a Palestinian power. It's an Iranian puppet. Gaza is de-facto occupied by Iran.

From out here it looks like Israelis who'd accept a two-state solution lost to the extremists because they have nothing to offer, because any land-for-peace deal will lose the land without gaining the peace, and the Palestinians who'd accept a two-state solution lost to the extremists because the Palestinian extremists will always torpedo any deal by committing war crimes and torpedo any attempt to remove them from power by never holding another election.

Even the moderate Palestinians won't agree to a two-state solution--any Palestinian government that did so would lose all the war funding and would be seen as betraying what they were fighting for and would be overthrown. Look at what happened when Arafat was presented with a peace proposal that gave him almost everything he was supposedly asking for--he walked out. He couldn't say yes--and be killed, or say no--and show the world that it's not about a two-state solution. Thus he said nothing.

Israel has all the advantages; Palestinians are left with terrorism or defeat as their only options.

Depends on how you define "defeat". If you're a Palestinian extremist who sees a two-state solution as defeat, then yes. But if you're a Palestinian moderate who sees a two-state solution as a draw, then no. The Palestinians can defeat Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories and be "defeated" only in Israel any time they make up their collective minds to accept a two-state solution and do what they need to do to make it happen: adopt Gandhi-style nonviolent civil disobedience tactics.

"Palestinians are left with terrorism or defeat as their only options" is an artifact of Gandhi-tactics not being part of their cultural toolkit. Culture is destiny.

They wouldn't need Ghandi tactics to get Gaza. Simply stop shooting, the problem would go away.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Palestinians have suffered a lot, for many decades, under Israeli oppression. They are routinely evicted from their land; their homes are destroyed; they are fenced off; embargoed; and so on. Israel's depravities are too obscene and despicable for me to read about, but I did notice that Israel has turned off the electricity in Gaza. Heaven forbid that hospitals be capable of tending to the women and children Israel military is maiming.

Not just electricity, they are blocking food and water now as well.

It's not anti-Semitic to oppose the commission of war crimes. To which category, denying food, water and electricity to millions of civilians in undisguised attempt to starve them into submission certainly qualifies.

From the Fourth Geneva Convention:

"Civilians are to be protected from murder, torture or brutality, and from discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, religion or political opinion. Hospital and safety zones may be established for the wounded, sick, and aged, children under 15, expectant mothers and mothers of children under seven. Civilian hospitals and their staff are tobe protected ... The safety, honor, family rights, religious practices, manners and customs of civilians are to be respected. Pillage, reprisals, indiscriminate destruction of property and the taking of hostages are prohibited. They are not to be subjected to collective punishment or deportation."

You're not looking at the right rules here.

What we have in Gaza is a classic military siege. A siege is not considered a war crime even when civilians are caught within the net. It would become a war crime if they did not allow the civilians to escape--but Israel is telling them to leave and Hamas is preventing it. Hamas needs it's human shields to put their bodies on stage to blame Israel.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Hardly anyone seems to remember when they lived together in peace until the British brandished a piece of toilet paper.

They lived together with the Jews as second class citizens who simply had to take whatever was thrown their way. Look at blacks in the South after the Civil War. That's the sort of "lived together in peace" that existed before 1948.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Was there much of an Israeli population there before that?

No. There were Jews coming from Europe to escape the holocaust. And big influx of Russian Jews in the 90's. Before WW2, there were Jews, but hardly in overwhelming numbers. After WW2, surving Jews in Europe still faced pogroms and murder, and those who survived left hostile parts of Europe, many to Israel

And note that Jews were dispersed around the world rather than in Israel before then because they had been driven out.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yeah, Hamas is part of the problem. So was the IRA in the UK or RAFC in Colombia (the Taliban in Afghanistan). Sometimes pragmatism is a stone cold bitch!

The we aren't negotiating with anyone tactic didn't work. It was an odd opportunity that might not have worked at all, but it was an opportunity. When in a position of leadership, it becomes harder to be obstinate (ignore Trump please), as your actions carry absolute weight with repercussions. But no one even tried. So it is was an aberration of history that provided the world a small chance, that went entirely unanswered.

There was no point in negotiating. The Palestinians never did their side of any agreement. Israel stopped making front-loaded agreements and it switched to demanding Israel make concessions in exchange for talks. That was also proven futile. It's not that Israel won't talk, it's that Israel won't make unbalanced agreements.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When people lose their homes, livelihoods, and sense of stability, they often turn to whichever group offers them hope, protection, or a promise of change, regardless of the methods that group may employ. Simply looking at the USA and it's dirty hand in multiple countries abroad myself and many American's aren't abandoning ship in disgust. But rather we double down by showing up at the polls and lighting fireworks on the 4th. It's undeniable that Hamas has been involved in terrible acts of violence, but I believe many in Gaza don't necessarily support that. They may back Hamas in the hope of gaining some semblance of security or to voice their frustration with the status quo.

Who else could they rely on besides Hamas, considering that the PLO and PA faced constant toilet paper challenges, while Zionist groups, driven more by the ambition to "re-establish" a state than by religious ties to the Holy Land, continued to expand into their territories?

What we're seeing is desperation judging by the borders that are currently drawn.

But OMG I support Hamas for saying this.

No, you don't support Hamas for saying that. Yes, Hamas brought some hope and actual benefit to the Gazans--bought with Iranian money. However, the fact remains that they voted for Hamas knowing it was a vote for the path of war. The war might not have popular support any more but we have no way to know.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yeah, Hamas is part of the problem. So was the IRA in the UK or RAFC in Colombia (the Taliban in Afghanistan). Sometimes pragmatism is a stone cold bitch!

The we aren't negotiating with anyone tactic didn't work. It was an odd opportunity that might not have worked at all, but it was an opportunity. When in a position of leadership, it becomes harder to be obstinate (ignore Trump please), as your actions carry absolute weight with repercussions. But no one even tried. So it is was an aberration of history that provided the world a small chance, that went entirely unanswered.

There was no point in negotiating. The Palestinians never did their side of any agreement. Israel stopped making front-loaded agreements and it switched to demanding Israel make concessions in exchange for talks. That was also proven futile. It's not that Israel won't talk, it's that Israel won't make unbalanced agreements.

So I guess it is murder/defensive killing/taller electric fences for the next couple of decades.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So a conservative friend posted on Facebook that it was time for Israel to retake Gaza and destroy its enemies there.

I get it. They’re mad. I understand the feeling but short of genocide, is there another solution? Genocide might work. There’d be no Palestinians and voila, no more Palestinian problem to solve! Easy! If the rest of the world just sat back and said, “well, life sucks,” then we’d have peace.

Genocide wouldn't solve it because the Iranian money driving it would remain.

Is it even possible for a Gaza Strip to ever be peaceful? It would take an economic miracle of a huge magnitude. It would require a complete change of heart of tens of thousands living there. Just to accept their lot and try to build a society that can function. I doubt it.

Gaza is an economic disaster because Hamas wants it that way. It's much easier to recruit fighters from a population without hope and it's much cheaper to buy their support when they have so little. If you could somehow handwave away the terrorists prosperity would return. (Israel would like to hire a lot of them as guest workers--but not when that lets terrorists in.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

It's evident, isn't it? The British involvement in the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine can be traced back to 1917 with the Balfour Declaration (you just brought up). Alternatively, one could point to the UN resolution of 1947 (which was an attempt to clean up the British stink) but also failed because again, Europeans are complete (and still are) morons when it comes to the Arab world. Regardless of which document one references, they both played roles in the ensuing conflict that has persisted for about a century. I'm not interested in skirting around the issue. It's clear that British actions played a pivotal role in the genesis of this conflict. If it makes you or anyone feel squirmy then kindly add me to your ignore list. I'd appreciate that more than the typical obfuscating gibberish often posted.

No--look at the other great partition of the time: India/Pakistan. Notice any parallels? Hint: The British were not involved. And it was far bloodier but the Jews couldn't be blamed so it's not very newsworthy. (And Pakistan still has plenty of fundies trying to egg them into war even knowing that Pakistan would get the worst of the nuclear exchange.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If the Oslo Accords had succeeded, Arafat would have been hailed as a hero and Fatah would have dominated the elections against Hamas. But the Accords failed and so did Fatah. Hamas promised to do better for the people of Gaza. It hasn't, but that doesn't mean Fatah would have done any better. All you have to do is look at the West Bank to know that Fatah is just as powerless as Hamas to stop the oppression of Palestinians.

Arafat would have been considered a traitor and would have been unlikely to survive.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives.”

As I noted before, that is a stupid demand. Allow Hamas to massacre a thousand Jewish civilians and then have a ceasefire while Hamas revels in its victory.

What would you prefer?

If this is allowed to stand they'll just do it again. Israel has to smash them for it's own safety.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Really good post. I agree with you. Hamas is in the wrong. Attacking a rave. Killing and raping civilians. Kidnapping young kids under the age of 5. I have zero empathy for terrorists. However, Israel in my view is losing the moral high ground. Electing right wingers. Embracing Trump. Expanding settlements. Hurting democracy. Empowering Israeli religious right? As far as I'm concerned, the Israeli religious right are worthless. They push Isrealis to expand into areas that are difficult to defend in the name of following the bible. All they do is study the bible all day; won't work; won't serve in the military; won't pay taxes. And yet these are the people who are running Israel now?

You are victim-blaming here.

This attack didn't come from the West Bank. Fatah doesn't get much terrorist money so it doesn't do much in the way of terror. Most of the trouble comes from Gaza--which is not occupied. The Israeli government moving right is an inevitable result of Hamas' actions, not a cause of them, and had no bearing on what happened anyway.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Israel's response to Hamas is justifiable. The question, however, is whether the intensity of this response enhances or exacerbates the situation. Some appear comfortable with the ongoing civilian casualties in Palestine, mistakenly believing that this shields civilians in Israel from danger. The Arab world is intricate, so it makes sense to be aware that more significant actions create more profound repercussions If the aim is to establish peace.

Israel perfectly well knows it can't establish peace. Nor can it destroy Hamas--military HQ is in Qatar, the paymasters are in Tehran.

What it can do and is doing is smashing as much of Hamas' ability to fight as it can. Blow up the rockets in the houses, mosques, and schools rather than have them land on Israel. Collapse the tunnels. Hit anything else from Hamas they can find.