Your are weaving a narrative that ignores that the Palestinians were and are the oppressed, illegally occupied, systematically murdered and raped, and continually having their lands and rights taken away. Shame on Israelis for a 1000 years.
The right wing, anti two-state solution, has governed Israel since the Oslo Peace Accords. Your calling them a minority is false - they were voted into power by the Israelis. They are the majority.
The majority of Palestinians have been begging Israel and the world for a two-state solution. After years of over 60 years of occupation and imprisonment some violent factions have arisen in Palestine due to the inhumane conditions that Israelis have forced on them with tanks, rifles, missiles, bulldozers, ships and aircraft.
What is justified regarding Israel, Hamas, and Gaza ought be seen as almost totally irrelevant. Same regarding popular opinion whereever of whomever. What matters is what will do most to prevent more death, devastation, and horror haunting, preventing, and poisoning possible far better futures for all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine and the surrounding neighborhood so long trapped by war and hatred.
Political wisdom is possible, but very rare. Nevertheless, that is the only thing I will accept, let alone applaud.
I rarely fully agree with Thomas Friedman, but this time I do:
Murderous thinking and behavior builds its evil momentum and is very hard to stop, but that MUST be stopping it must be the primary goal, as it is the prerequisite to all else.
david fb
(of my good old friends in the area
Both the Israelis, the elder a retired communications expert and the other a middle aged medical tech, have been mobilized and are unable to communicate even with their families, let alone me.
One West Bank friend asked me in a message apparently sent to many to “Be patient with me as I am too angry and sad to eat or sleep or even scream, let alone write like a civilized human…”
The other said he wished I could “come and eat olives and bread and we get drunk and tell stories and argue all night but that life has vanished. Good Bye.”
The vast majority of the participants are Muslim coming from full-on dictatorships. Great!
As far as the two state solution the Gaza Strip is not big enough to be a state for the population there. The Palestinians in the Gaza are aching for much more. I agree but find it elsewhere. Israel won’t be taking them back in. It is impossible for Israel to do.
Which brings to mind something I have been wondering about: how is Gaza sustainable? Looking at satellite pix, all the buildings destroyed by previous Israeli operations seem to have been replaced. I see plenty of newish cars on the streets in Gaza, as well as newish ambulances and fire trucks. The hospitals look modern and well equipped. Where is all the money coming from? If Gaza had to depend on the products of the few farm fields I see in the pix, the place would be a backward dirt pile.
You totally ignore that Israel is responsible for the Palestinian problems and uprisings in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at all the Palestinian lands stolen by the Israelis since 1947. The Gaza Palestinians have the legal right to return to their homes and properties inside Israel.
The Geneva Conventions of 1949. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3236 which “reaffirms also the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return”.
From 2014-2020, U.N. agencies spent nearly $4.5 billion in Gaza, including $600 million in 2020 alone… Qatar has provided $1.3 billion in aid to Gaza since 2012 for construction, health services and agriculture…The Palestinian Authority says it will spend $1.7 billion on Gaza this year, mainly on salaries for tens of thousands of civil servants who stopped working when Hamas took over in 2007… Egypt pledged $500 million in aid after the May war…Germany and other European countries will spend nearly 70 million euros ($80 million) on water projects in Gaza this year, in addition to their contributions to UNRWA…The U.S. has spent at least $5.5 million in Gaza this year on cash assistance and health care, in addition to contributing $90 million to UNRWA operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
You’re simply wrong. The two-state solution has historically polled very well among Israelis, garnering strong majority support. The fact that Likud wins majorities doesn’t erase that fact. Republicans keep getting elected in the United States, even though an overwhelming majority of Americans express support things like gun regulation or abortion rights.
That is true. As have a majority of Israelis. Tragically, that’s not always - or even usually - what determines political outcomes. Your narrative conveniently omits all of the other actors who have had significant impacts on how events have unfolded over the issue of a two-state solution: the British, Arafat, Nasser, Abdullah I, the Arab League, Arafat and the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and a host of other regional and global actors to greater or lesser extent.
Early regional focus was more on eliminating Israel rather than establishing a second Palestinian state alongside Israel. The era of Nasser and Pan-Arabism was aimed at dislodging Israel, and indeed the idea of multinational Arab unity drew a lot of its framing as being in opposition to Israel. A two-state solution was utterly impossible during that era, at least through the 1973 war, which precipitated the decline of pan-Arabism and the rise of religious and nationalistic factions. There was a brief window between 1973 and the 1979 Iranian Revolution where regional factors might have delivered a peaceful solution (it’s no accident that Camp David took place during that time).
But since then, there have been just too many regional actors that have significant interests in the area for a two-state solution to be implemented. For decades, they’ve had a vested interest in the Palestinians’ plight being unresolved (or at least, unresolved with any outcome other than the destruction of Israel).
What has happened to the Palestinians is a horrible tragedy - but it’s one that has been shaped by many actors other than just Israel, and certainly not due to the general Israeli populace being against the idea of a two-state solution for most of the time when that was on offer.
In 1974, the question of Palestine was re-introduced in the Assembly’s agenda. Resolution 3236 (XXIX) reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty, and the right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property.
At that time the majority of countries in the UN were and still are Muslim.
89 voted for 8 voted against37 abstained
If you can guarantee Israel will be okay working with the people on the Gaza please explain that.
I will ask do you excuse in any way what Hamas just did? Regardless of anything Israel did? Because if you do excuse it in any form Israelis can not accept your terms.
Years ago this was not my intention or in a way my hope. The West Bank is very carved up. That is not leading to a solution either.
The bigger issue the Palestinians and Israelis have wasted so much time not setting a stage for peace. What are the Israelis supposed to do now? Say okay here is your country on our borders. We know you will never attack us again because you are now totally happy. There will never be proof the Syrian forces are happy.
Does Iran give us an excuse for war? The pressure is being ratcheted up on all sides.
If we get an excuse I do not think we put boots in Iran. Except to use special forces to take out some targets possibly. We are positioning firepower that can do a serious amount of damage to Iran’s military.
Last week became a turning point.
Russia is preoccupied and has nothing to offer Iran as support.
I’d love to know our positional strength against China in the Pacific. We only put two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean. I’d think Japan, SK, Australia, India, France, and UK moved forces into the Pacific to counter China.
Our public fun-showing war games never include our allies in the full description. Wonder if the Chinese are quiet.
The list of countries responsible for the Palestine problems is quite long. To try and blame Israel as the sole source is, at best, naive. Frankly, even the Palestinians hold some responsibility.
True. And most of them ‘democracies’ and not Muslim. It’s not a religious struggle.
It starts with Western guilt over the holocaust leading them to assign a ‘safe place’ for the Jews to live.
Of course, it was unmonitored, and the displaced indigenous people were angry and denied the right for that country to exist.
Nothing has really changed except ‘safe place’ has kept expanding and squeezing them more and more. Those who remained live in an apartheid society.
It does not seem likely a solution will be found short of eliminating Palestinians (which might cause other issues…).
There is increasing chatter about “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” of the Pals in Gaza. Seems there is a truck convoy of relief supplies in Egypt, which is not allowed to cross into Gaza, and foreign nationals on the Gaza side, that Egypt will not let cross into Egypt. Even though Israel told people to move south, out of Gaza City, Israel also says there is no cease fire south of that line and feels free to attack anywhere in Gaza. Gaza residents are afraid if they did cross the border into Egypt, they would not be allowed back to their homes in Gaza.
For those who may have wondered, Gaza has no airport. It used to. Israel bombed it into a ruin, and scavengers have been picking over the rubble for years.
Just two years after Clinton’s visit, with the Oslo process seemingly collapsed and Clinton’s effort to broker a permanent accord between Arafat and then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak unsuccessful — a failure the US president blamed on the PLO leader — the second Palestinian intifada broke out. The uprising, characterized by a strategic onslaught of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israeli targets, was to last five bloody years.
In 2001 Israeli warplanes bombed a runway in response to a Palestinian terror attack that killed four soldiers, and badly damaged several of the buildings.
In 2005 Israel pulled out all its residents and military forces from the Strip. Some saw the so-called “disengagement” as an opportunity for Palestinians to practice self-rule.
However the territory almost immediately became a launching pad for rockets attacks by Palestinian terror groups. In 2007 the Hamas terror group took control of Gaza. Hamas, which is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, fought three wars with Israel in the intervening years, and the airport was further devastated by Israeli bombing…"
The window for a two state solution was still open, but according to Clinton, Arafat balked. Then Hamas, committed to Israel’s destruction, made sure the window never opened again…just as they are doing now.
I would propose that the Israelis give not one whit what the Pals want. If they did, they would evacuate all their settlements in the west bank, instead of building more, annexing more land, and building walls around the Pal enclaves. That difference in treatment tells me their intent in Gaza was to create a free fire zone.