I am very pro Israel, but also support a 2-state solution. I realize this is much easier said than done, but the Palestinians deserve a country, too.
I have never liked Netanyahu because of his hardline stance. His most important job was to keep Israelis safe, and he failed spectacularly. And he’s the last person I’d turn to to direct Israel’s response specifically because of his failure.
Israel is entitled to respond to the Hamas barbaric and criminal behavior. IMO, Israel should secure their borders and then figure out how to best free the hostages. Then, as past administrations have done, hunt down and kill their enemy. Even if it takes years. Israeli’s have long memories.
Invading Gaza creates nothing but problems for Israel.
many Israeli soldiers will be killed as Hamas has had time to plan for this response
it exposes Israel to a 2 or even 3 front war
it will cause, even inadvertently, the deaths of many Palestinian civilians including children. Killing innocent civilians is wrong. Period.
it is inhumane to force millions of civilians to abandon their homes causing undo stress and deaths.
it will help Hamas (or their successor) to recruit the next generation of terrorists.
I think it is wrong to respond while emotions are on fire. This makes for emotional and poor judgment. The response should take place after thinking through options carefully, intelligently, with cold calculation, and with laser-like focus.
That is never ending with Hamas and many of the Palestinians and right in behind you a Palestinian is saying we have long memories.
The Gaza Strip is an open air prison. Time for the prisoners to disperse. Not right this minute but the lot of them need to go elsewhere. Freedom matters more. We need a wide gulf between us and the history of the territories. Regardless of Netanyahu that has been Israel’s only long game.
And on that theme, while everyone blames Israel for the Palestine problem, the fact is that pretty much everyone has screwed them. The Europeans dumped the problem on the Israelis. The Arabs have cruelly used them to support their own interests. The Iranians use them to further their ambitions. On and on.
Heck, if the Saudis wanted to solve the problem they probably could have done it with their lunch money.
There is no wide gulf in the Middle East to set up. We have to keep trying to figure this out.
A second state has been put on the table at various times over the years (most recently at the end of the Clinton administration), but those proposals have not met Palestinian demands or Israeli demands. Sticking points usually include the borders and the status of Jerusalem. There has probably never been acceptable deal space at any single point in time for an agreement to be reached.
There are minorities of both Palestinians and Israelis who do not want a two-state solution, and who recognize that all that’s needed to prevent that from happening is to instigate violent clashes that make the security conditions that are a pre-requisite to two-state solution impossible to achieve. And because one of those minority parties - Hamas - has been the de facto government in Gaza for the last two decades or so, that has eliminated all recent consideration of the two-state solution. The inclusion of another of those minority parties into the ruling coalition in Israel makes it even more dead, for now.
The balance of power in the region has been re-ordered after the Second Iraq War. Where Iraq used to be a regional check on the ambitions of Iran, the overthrow of the Ba’ath government has eliminated that check. This has led various Sunni nations in the area to be more open to alliances with Israel as a check on Shi’a Iran, which increases the stakes for Iran to keep Israel and Palestine (which is majority Sunni) unstable and in conflict with each other.
Growing support in the West - especially among the Western left - for a one-state solution. That a two-state solution is neither a fair nor sufficient remedy for the Palestinians, and a demand for a solution where all the former British Mandate area is open to both Palestinians and Jews in a multi-ethnic democracy.
Taken together - especially that last one - and my personal belief is that a two-state solution is probably dead for at least a generation. Hamas knows that Israel can never truly “win” as long as Hamas (or a successor organization) keeps committing significant acts of terror against them. Israel cannot allow acts of terror to go unchecked, but any measures that have a realistic chance of checking them will infuriate the global left. As long as they never agree to ‘half a loaf,’ eventually the world will decide that they’d rather have a Palestine than an Israel, and they’ll get the whole thing, and the jews will be expelled. Since Iran will never stop supporting their efforts, they will never lack for resources - and the only cost is the immisseration of a few more generations of Palestinians, which is a small price (to Hamas).
The first requirement for a two state solution is that Palestein agrees that Israel has a right to exist. Once they recognize Israel, peace negotiations might be possible. Until then very unlikely.
The US and USSR split the world, Syria went with the USSR. The Palestinians at the end of the day are Greater Syrian. There are only Syrian tribes. The Christian Lebanese found that out. Israel paid attention.
It is not just a matter of hatred. It is power politics. Power politics won’t go away just with goodwill.
reading down…
US power politics. An off shoot of British power politics.
Why because we have a choice of power to keep us safe or giving up power to some that would not dream of keeping us safe. Is that prefect or even good? Not at all. Is it real? Totally.
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adding Iran is now speaking up. There is a power politics problem here. There is Iran naturally against SA. There is the US supporting a host of countries and Iran supporting Syria and the players around a Greater Syria to surround Israel and SA.
We can back off? We can get guey-eyed? We can fight directly or indirectly to protect our interests?
Question do the Arabs really end up better off split by Iran? Will that truly help feed the Palestinians? No, because Iran is just using them. If the Syrians win a Greater Syria then Iran will fight them.
The bottom line we have the US and Israel as democracies and SA as opening up from way behind. We have a worse situation with Iran.
Yet as human beings Iran and SA I believe do not want to go nuclear. The countries know the governments can not be guaranteed to be responsible ten years from now with nuclear weapons. The people value their children’s lives. Basic goodness definitely exists.
The US and Israel for basic goodness? Things are getting pushed. Democracies develop a hard edge when things go a certain way with aggression against them.
Wrong! The Palestinians wanted a two-state solution. The right wing Israeli Jews did not want to give up there gains of territory since 1966. It has always been one sided solution on Israeli terms. Netanyahu led the right wing Israeli Jews and Israel to abandon the Oslo Accords and the two-state solution.
Palestinians have already agreed that Israel has a right to exist on the original lands given to them in 1948. Israel wants to keep what the took by force and occupation: West Bank, Golan Heights, Gaza and all their Settlements. Israelis have squeezed the Palestinians into smaller and smaller pieces of Palestinian land.
And I didn’t say otherwise. I just noted that there is (and has been) a minority of Palestinians who did not want a two-state solution. See below. This is hardly surprising - any group with millions of members is never going to have a monolithic opinion on any issue, let alone one as complex as this.
One notable, and consequential, minority of Palestinians who reject the idea of a two-state solution is Hamas. There’s only about 20K-30K active members of Hamas (about 1% of the population of Gaza). But because Hamas is the de facto governing body over Gaza, their opinions about Israel have far greater impact than the unrepresented and politically powerless Palestinian majority. Hamas can prevent a two-state solution simply by engaging in sufficient provocations and atrocities that Israel knows that a two-state solution, where one state is governed by Hamas, will not bring peace. Just a more lopsided extension of the status quo.
Similarly, on the Israeli side the nature of parliamentary politics, combined with a somewhat balanced split between the major parties on other issues, allows a minority of Israelis to sabotage prospects for a two-state solution. The small, but deeply motivated, minority of Israelis that are against returning any portion of the West Bank (much less displacing existing settlements) to Arab control are able to use their small representation in the Knesset to torpedo any prospective two-state deal.
That’s why we don’t have a two-state solution in place today. There’s majority support for it (in theory) on both sides, but both sides have a powerful enough minority that is able to keep it from happening.
The issue is power politics. How do you like them in Ukraine? Because we are on the same page different playing fields up against Russia.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows.
Put another way that matters to me. If you were to see all of it as Greater Syria and Greater Syrian forces you know Syria joined up with the USSR. There is no other global power play in the ME. Meaning Greater Syrian forces include Hamas if not all of the claims of the territories. At the end of the day, it is not to build Greater Syria but to build Russia and tear everything else down including Ukraine.
It is not to be seen as the Cold War.
It is the US against Russia or against China. It is some form of power sharing against dictators. I could care less about who is to blame as the little guy I need some power in the equation just like you do. You get zero from Russia or China. I do care that all of the Greater Syrian tribesmen have no real power. Choosing Russia will do that.
Another poll has similar numbers. https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/15/politics/cnn-poll-israel-hamas-war-americans/index.html
Half of Americans (50%) say that the Israeli government’s military response to the Hamas attacks is fully justified, another 20% say it’s partially justified and just 8% that it is not at all justified, with 21% unsure. Republicans are far more likely than independents or Democrats to say the response is fully justified (68% of Republicans say so compared with 45% of independents and 38% of Democrats), and older Americans are also much likelier than younger ones to say it is completely justified…
This group of Israelis is not small because it has attracted many Israelis to their side and have gained a majority in the Knesset. Therefore, this right wing Israeli population has driven the Arabs to a boiling point.
Perhaps - but from your question above, where you asked why a two-state solution doesn’t already exist, I inferred that you were not just talking about the immediate political situation, but rather why a two-state solution has eluded both parties for so many decades.
Again, there are a lot of factors. But one of them has always been that while there has mostly been majority support among Israelis for a two-state solution, there has always been a minority of Israelis that opposed it. That minority is much larger today than in years past. In the dozen or so years when a two-state solution might have been possible (after the PLO agreed to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist in 1993, but before Hamas seized control of Gaza), opposition to a two-state solution was smaller. But never non-existent - just as there has never been a time when there wasn’t some minority opinion amongst Palestinians against a two-state solution.
As with any group that numbers in the millions, there’s no credible statement that “Palestinians support X” or “Israelis believe Y” about the situation. There will always be differences of opinion - and oft-times stark disagreement - within those groups. And even if the majority of both groups supports a two-state solution, if the minority opinion has the ability to block an accord, then no resolution will be reached.
It is too early to have meaningful surveys of a single country. The rest of the world is siding with the Palestinians who want freedom from Israeli terror and oppression. Protests around the world supporting Palestinians and their freedom.
There have been pro-Palestinian protests around the world, including:
Geneva, Switzerland, Turin, Italy, Dublin, Ireland, Rabat, Morocco, Baghdad, Iraq, Beirut, Lebanon, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Other places where protests have taken place include:
Germany, Turkey, Canada, United States, Egypt, Sudan.
Some countries that have expressed support for Palestine include: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar.
It is not the time element of doing a poll. It is a time to find out the facts from the propaganda. People in USA are being feed one sided stories currently. We need time to digest the facts from the fiction.
