According to Haaretz , Witkoff has “forced Israel to accept a plan that Netanyahu had repeatedly rejected over the past half year.” Netanyahu had been pushing for a deal that only involved a temporary ceasefire, but according to the reports, the new plan would involve a full Israeli withdrawal.
Anticipation that the US-Israeli relationship won’t quite be so rosy.
Time to move fast!
Thus:
The weekly committee meetings are expected to significantly raise the amount of land seizures in 2025 compared to previous years.
Settlement infrastructure, which has been carved out of lands only Israeli citizens are allowed to access, has been described by several human rights groups as a system of apartheid.
Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law. However, Israel has continued to build settlements across the occupied territory over the past several decades.
Israelis and Jews in general have a problem with some attitudes.
Get over that fact that others are Jewish. Start there.
That goes for the PLA and Hamas. Time to grow a bit not everyone has to be Muslim.
The 19% of Israeli Palestinians who make up Israel’s population were not bigots. They did not pick up arms to fight mostly Jewish Arabs.
The Jordanians 65% Palestinian count Israel as a good friend guaranteeing them freedom.
Below the surface the Syrians today know Israel is a protector. Russia is not.
TFG does all sorts of things. Do not trust this is the only directive.
Hamas needs to go if you want peace in Gaza. The reason is the tribes will negotiate with Israel and a national government in Gaza will negotiate but Hamas won’t hold elections or negotiate.
If you want more wars end it now. Leave Hamas in control with no changes.
Same with the PLA.
Do not pretend like anyone in this is innocent over the age of 18.
The Council’s vote was also a major diplomatic victory for the Trump administration. For the past two years, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas has raged, the United States had been isolated at the United Nations over its staunch support for Israel.
The U.S. resolution calls for an International Stabilization Force to enter, demilitarize and govern Gaza. The proposal, which has attached Mr. Trump’s 20 point cease-fire plan, also envisions a “Board of Peace” to oversee the peace plan, though it does not clarify the composition of the board.
“Imperialist or Peacemaker” – not necessarily exclusive. There is also support from Muslim countries (eight are listed in the NYT…
At one point late last week, objections by China and Russia, which typically coordinate their positions around resolutions by the United States, threatened to derail the U.S. resolution altogether…
The United States made minimal compromises on the resolution and instead rallied the support of Arab countries — Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — as well as Indonesia, Turkey and Pakistan, which is a member of the Council, to pressure Russia and China not to be seen as obstacles to a breakthrough in Gaza.
Of course, Hamas (what’s left of it) is unlikely to want to disarm. We’ll have to wait and see if the plan can continue to move forward with Hamas unwilling to take the next step.
Gaza is being temporarily split by Israel into East and West. In East Gaza the clans are being armed by Israel. The clans will easily get along with Jews.
I have great skepticism this will work - but I remain ever hopeful that they can craft something like they did next door in Egypt:
It still remains unanswered is how it will be governed. Citizens of Gaza can’t go on into perpetuity as second class citizens. A two-state solution is the only viable long term alternative (absent everyone making peace and full integration which seems unlikely in our lifetimes).
I mean…can’t it? Sometimes horrible situations just…continue. The civil war in Myanmar’s about to enter its ninth decade. The Korean War never actually ended.
I think there’s now too many people who have decided that a two-state solution is not a viable alternative. Certainly a great deal of Israelis have reached that conclusion, and I think there’s a substantial number of folks who support the Palestinian cause who have decided that a two-state solution is not viable as well. So however unstable and terrible the current situation might be, it might last indefinitely, if there isn’t a path into an alternative.
To mangle Arthur Conan Doyle, if you’ve eliminated all the alternatives to the status quo, whatever remains, however unacceptable, will be what continues going forward.
You can’t take away the war. I mean, you can take away this particular manifestation of the war, just as there have been interregna between outbreaks of violence in the past. But the war will continue forever, as long as there are minority factions within the Palestinians and the Israelis who want the war to continue. That’s one of the horrors of terrorism - it doesn’t require the consent of the larger group. It doesn’t matter if most Palestinians, or even if nearly all Palestinians, don’t want that war - as long as there are even a mere handful of people who do want the war, the war will go on.
Your example (civil war) I think illustrates that fact. Even with the Korean War, you now have two sovereign countries with self rule.
It make take another generation or two for some of this to fade from memory but this situation is not viable long term - unless we, as you suggest, accept the status quo of ongoing hostilities between them forever.
I don’t think it has anything to do with “acceptance.” If there doesn’t exist an alternative to ongoing hostilities between them forever, then there will be ongoing hostilities between them forever. That may mean that there will be another October 7 at some point. That may mean there will be a repeat of the war after October 7 at some point as well.
If there isn’t a path out of the status quo, then the status quo will continue. Even if that means ongoing hostilities forever.
This assumes that a two-state solution would move the parties beyond the cycle of violence. That assumption might be wrong. And if it is, then there’s no way to move beyond the cycle of violence. Skepticism of whether a two-state solution results in peace, rather than just a different type of ongoing violence, is a big part of what’s motivated Israeli citizens to sour on the idea of a two-state solution.
The Trump plan (which I guess we might call the UN plan now) presupposes that you might be able to move beyond the cycle of violence by recolonizing Gaza. Get a third party(ies) in there to seize control of the area, eliminate Hamas and presumably any other factions or organizations that advocate continued militant resistance against Israel, and just run the place. Try to end the violence without autonomy and self-determination by simply having some international group be the colonizing power.
You can take away the warring. The Israeli Palestinian citizens never have warred over the creation of Israel. The Jordanians who are mostly Palestinians are not warring for decades now.
If the bigots running the PA and Hamas are out of the way odds are there is no warring. It is called peace.
Right now the world mostly blames the Israelis. It has always been the PA and Hamas.
There is a three-state solution. Westerns do not follow this closely.
The Traverse is Israel and Jordan. Gaza is the third state. In 2005, Gaza became a state. The handoff was to an election that will never count because Hamas stopped all future elections and declared war in 2006.
There are two Palestinian states totaling 5 times the land mass of Israel.
The rest of the arguments are ignorant.
Gaza will be the third state again. Israel is working with the clans in East Gaza to arm them. The clans are more democratic.
Israelis get along with Palestinians extremely well. Some people are bigots. There is a difference.
But that’s the point. You can’t just get them “out of the way.”
I mean, it’s kind of facile to note that if you could only get “out of the way” all the Palestinians who believed that the only just resolution of the conflict was a single state occupied and governed solely by Palestinian Muslims and that it is appropriate and necessary to use violence to achieve that just resolution (the position of Hamas, not all of the PA), you would have a better chance for peace. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in a world where some Palestinians believe that (and where some Jews do, but for Jews).
So given that you can’t get the “bigots” “out of the way,” and have to deal with the world as it is, there’s no certain way to take away the warring. The hope in the UN plan is that if you recolonize Gaza for a while, you can try to degrade the organization of Hamas to the point where they no longer are a factor. I’m skeptical of that happening, given Hamas’ power within Gaza and the understandable reluctance of any of the participating countries to get into a ‘hot’ military conflict in Gaza to try to take them down.