Outside of Jordan no Arab leader is truly up for election or reelection.
The entire lot of them are complete bloodthirsty liars. That is intolerable.
We have wars where people in larger numbers die. None of us are innocent. Except children.
The forces of Greater Syria are not going to win a damned thing. All of this could have been resolved if Hamas had stepped aside for democratic rule and institutions.
Ignorance is ignorance.
As far as Ukraine goes it is fighting the same forces as Israel. Talk about a blind discussion that Israel is the problem.
That is true all of the rockets are aimed at civilians by and large. As opposed to military targets.
It is excused because Hamas is the underdog. And that is true.
The rocket that hit the parking lot was a misfire. It was not purposeful to set up a propaganda piece.
It did not become a propaganda piece. It exposed just how low the tyrants in the ME go as complete liars to their own people making Arab lives out as worthless.
American intelligence agencies estimate that a deadly blast at a Gaza hospital on Tuesday killed between 100 and 300 people, but cautioned that their assessments could change, according to U.S. officials and an unclassified intelligence assessment.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the latest information, said that the death toll was likely at the low end of that estimate, but still represented a significant loss of life.
If the Gazans had a democratic republic things would be extremely different. Since 2007 there would be trade deals with Israel. There would be work visas. There would be a path way to fill a quota for citizenship in Israel. There would be free travel out of Gaza. There would be so much more for Gaza.
Instead, we have a dirty little group claiming religion instead of rights. The response has been an impossible situation for Israel to help with rights. To be shot at does not help spread another’s rights.
@jaagu Were you wrong? Did Islamic Jihad send the rocket that misfired?
I fully admit when I am wrong. I think it is cowardice all too often here when very few people admit when wrong and walk away. When they post again I have no faith. I am quick to forgive and forget. But not stupid enough to think people get it right when they get it wrong and won’t say so.
The big reason for that we are talking investing. I can go to any stock broker and forget my money to some user. Not on.
I still do not know the truth. We need an unbiased entity to do a forensic analysis of the whole story.
Could an independent probe help assess blame for Gaza strike?
The Middle East is at a boiling point as Israelis and Palestinians blame each other for the deadly strike at a Gaza City hospital that killed hundreds and wounded others seeking shelter there from Israel’s war against Hamas. Making it worse, the propaganda battle is raging online and on the airwaves**,** with both sides claiming to have evidence supporting their accusations.
Is there any kind of independent investigative team that can resolve the matter by cutting through the politics and examining the forensic evidence to find out who is responsible? The short answer is yes, but with some caveats.
“The essential point is that time is of the essence here for an accurate investigation of the site,” said David Scheffer, an international law expert who served as the first U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. “You would need a Dream Team of forensic scientists skilled enough to look at the evidence on the ground and that which has been put forward by all sides, including Israel, the Biden administration and Hamas.”
Not sure there would ever be a thing that is unbiased even trying an independent organisation as what ever conclusion is, somebody will think it is biased. Think any Organization that firmly concluded the origin of Covid will really be believed?
While I have seen lots of news stories (including Western) blaming Isreal, especially early on. I haven’t really seen the evidence. While that states both sides claim to have evidence supporting their accusations, has the Hamas evidence been produced outside their claims?
Aren’t those pictures bringing used to contradict their claim? Or do they have pictures that contradict what is being used as evidence when describing what looks to have happened?
Also, the picture by itself lack context, showing bodies doesn’t reveal who is responsible.
What a bunch of hogwash! The Israelis are the dictators.
The Palestinians have always wanted freedom and dignity from the occupation of Palestinian territory by Israeli IDF and freedom to travel across their borders, freedom to have open harbors, freedom to have their own airports.
Israel is like Russia. Russia annexes stolen Ukraine territory. Israel annexes stolen Palestinian territory and steals more land every year.
Israel is not a democratic republic - Israel is a religious dictatorship.
People are watching this and only one person other than yourself actually buys any of that. As I said when that other guy likes a post in a debate I know the poster has it all wrong.
Is Israel innocent? Not at all. It is taking territory on the West Bank.
Hamas stripped the Gazans from day one of any freedoms. Israel actually removed the single settlement immediately from Gaza before getting out of Gaza. Israel has not placed any settlements in Gaza since.
Hamas has never once said lets have a better form of government where people have rights and free elections.
So we are only good to defend Ukraine? Do we defend the UK if needed? Do we defend Germany if needed? Poland? Japan? Asians often feel Japan is evil because of its conquests. Do we abandon Japan? Or do we just abandon the “Jews”?
It has nothing to do with any of that. It has to do with the form of government. We would not defend Ukraine without the serious democratic leanings in the country. We won’t be defending Belarus. What is there to defend in Belarus?
We won’t be defending the Russians. Have Ukrainians killed 200k Russians in the military by now? Do you see the pattern? We sent the bullets for those deaths.
And the Israelis have always wanted freedom from the threat of being attacked, freedom from the threat of being expelled from Israel.
The dilemma is how to find a just and lasting peace that gives both parties what they want. Along with the one thing the Palestinians want that you didn’t mention - the right of return, which has generally been one of the most difficult points in the peace process. It’s hard to ensure Israelis’ security when one of the dominant political forces in the Palestinian areas is Hamas, committed to the expulsion (at best) of Israelis from the area.
What has really shocked progressive Jews (at least among the many I know) is the realization that so many of their progressive allies share that belief. The belief that all Israeli Jews are colonizers - not just the ones trying to settle the West Bank. Many of the Jews killed in the 10/7 attacks were born in Israel, lived within the pre-1967 borders, and (being young) many would have been supporters of justice for Palestinians and bitterly opposed to the current right-wing government. But their slaughter was framed as being part of the resistance to occupation. A lot of progressive Jews I know thought that the beef was with the settlers, and that Israeli Jews would be allowed to stay within whatever borders were agreed on under a two-state solutions. Not that every Jew was a colonizer that had to go.
A Palestine “from the river to the sea” leaves no room for Israel to exist as a second state. And regardless of whether one believes that’s a just outcome, there is no conceivable path to Israel agreeing to that outcome.
Israel can either be a democracy, or a Jewish theocracy, but not both, due to the demographics. If the Pals lived where they lived before 48, and had full Israeli citizenship rights, including a vote, Israel could not be a Jewish theocracy. So, the choices are an apartheid state, where the Pals have no vote, or a “two state solution”, or “ethnic cleansing” to drive all the Pals out of all the land that Israel wants. Egypt and Jordan refuse to accept any more Pal refugees. Israel is annexing more and more west bank land, making a viable Pal state impossible. How are the Pals supposed to live?
An easy question when asked in isolation (just expel the Jews). An insanely difficult question when paired with, “How are the Jews supposed to live in Israel?”
Had the countries surrounding Israel accepted the 1948 creation of the Jewish state and not invaded, this would not be a problem, of course. Had Egypt and Jordan given the Palestinians sovereignty over Gaza and the entire West Bank during the two decades when they controlled those lands (and not expelled all the Jews from their countries to boot), this would be certainly less of a problem.
Today, though, Israeli Jews (and their supporters) are keenly aware that if they do not have their own independent state where they have enough of a majority that they can’t be expelled, they are likely to be expelled. Or worse.
So that’s the intractable dilemma. If you force Israeli Jews to choose between being a democracy and being safe from expulsion (or worse), they will choose the latter - after all, they’re not going to consent to their destruction. That’s why the peace process has (generally) sought to find a solution where the Jews are safe from expulsion (or worse) and the Palestinians have a sovereign state. To avoid that choice. But those goals cannot be achieved with: i) a right of return; and ii) Hamas, or any other faction or party committed to the expulsion (or worse) of Jews, having significant political power within the new state.
So the process has been stuck. It’s stuck in a place that’s awful for Palestinians…but no one has come up with a solution acceptable to and capable of being implemented by the Palestinians that isn’t awful for the Israelis.
Remember Moshe Dayan? He was born in a Kibbutz in 1915, when the area was under Ottoman administration. He was not expelled, or worse. After the war, the area was under British administration. He was not expelled, or worse.
Did the real problems start with the post-WWII influx of refugees? Was the pushback the immigrants faced a variation of the anti-immigrant “replacement theory” narrative that has so many USians whipped into a lather now?
Another question, what is Jordan’s problem with Pals? I read, somewhere along the line, that the ruling faction in Jordan is Bedouin, while, somehow, the Pals are regarded as not Bedouin, and the Bedouin don’t want Pals taking over (replacement theory bigotry again)
I agree that the Palestinians are stuck in an awful place, while the Israelis are living the good life behind their walls and fences protected by IDF. Why do the Israelis continue to make life for the Palestinians worse every year by continual harassment, killings and stealing? Israelis could do a lot more to ease the awful life of Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank and Jerusalem.
Neither. Hostility to Jews has always expressed itself in sporadic horrors, where Jews can live in relative normality within a community…until they can’t. So they lived in England, until they were driven out; in Spain, until they were driven out; in Russia, until they were driven out; in Germany and Poland, until…well, you know the end of that story.
That’s what motivated the world to find them a place to live where they could at least have some security from that risk.
Here, the risk is insanely high (from the Jewish perspective) given the immediate reaction in the area to the creation of Israel in the area. Not in response to a recent influx of refugees. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War began literally the day after the handover from the Mandate to the new Israeli state, and broader fighting had already begun in late1947 in response to adoption of the UN Partition Plan. Jews had been moving to the area - lawfully emigrating under the Mandate government - under both the Ottoman and Mandate governments for decades. And there had been clashes between Arabs and Jews for those decades as well, since at least the Balfour Declaration. But the real civil war - which turned into the formal 1948 war - happened immediately after the UN Reso.
Several reasons. The first is simply, “Hamas.” Hamas is a terrorist organization committed to eliminating Israel, and has continually (to greater or lesser degree) been trying to kill as many Israelis as possible for the last forty years or so. For about the last two decades, though, they’ve had de facto control over Gaza - which ratchets up the security risk. As we tragically witnessed last week. Israel has (rationally) responded by imposing security measures that make life miserable for Palestinians in order to counter that threat. For comparison, imagine if Al Qaeda had control of Baja California…and think about what the U.S. response would be to them lobbing rockets into southern California and Arizona. Wouldn’t want to be an ordinary Mexican citizen living in Baja in that context.
BTW, that’s the main reason Egypt doesn’t make life easier for the Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian government is trying to completely crush. So they’re blockading Gaza, too, even though Hamas isn’t generally firing rockets at Arish - just to give you an idea of what another party thinks of the Hamas threat.
The other main one, though, is that there is a faction of ardent zealots within the Israeli population that believes that the West Bank should be annexed into Israel no matter what. This isn’t the majority opinion in Israel (or at least it wasn’t, I don’t know about after 10/7) - but as we all know from a host of issues here in the United States (like gun control), it frequently happens that government policies end up tracking the views of a motivated minority. These folks are also committed to thwarting a two state solution that results in a Palestinian West Bank, so they seek to change “facts on the ground” as much as possible to make that happen.