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Post by juju on Oct 16, 2023 23:18:19 GMT
Is just awful, isn't it? đ
I know there's a long and complex history for both sides in that region, but the humanitarian crisis is horrific and heartbreaking.
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Post by Moose on Oct 17, 2023 0:15:34 GMT
Yes it is. I know it's easy to blame religion - and to a large extent I do - but I guess that we'd be fighting about something else if it wasn't that.
I know that the Palestinians have grievances and legitimate ones but I can't justify what has happened.
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Post by juju on Oct 17, 2023 7:57:11 GMT
The trouble is that there are enough people on both sides that want the other wiped from the land. Where do you even go from there? đ
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Post by JoeP on Oct 18, 2023 7:20:02 GMT
I suspect a majority of the people don't want the others wiped out. This is stirred up by governments and military, and fanatics and terrorists, on both sides.
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Post by whollygoats on Oct 19, 2023 13:21:22 GMT
It is indeed a quagmire. An exceedingly sad and protracted quagmire.
What I believe I am seeing is a rhyme of history. This looks to me to rhyme with Warsaw 1943 and the jackboot is on the other foot.
Gaza is a desperate ghetto, a seething concentration camp of a dispossessed and dislocated people who have been abused for sixty years. What does Israel expect?
It seems to me that Israel has forgotten what it said it would never forget.
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Post by kingedmund on Oct 20, 2023 15:17:52 GMT
I suspect a majority of the people don't want the others wiped out. This is stirred up by governments and military, and fanatics and terrorists, on both sides. Itâs always government and media. They (being Middle East and Israel)only broadcast what the want the masses to follow so you end up with this happening. Then you throw in âPay for slayâ and ooops. We have a bigger mess. A good part want nothing to do with their government and media lies or a war.
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Post by whollygoats on Nov 20, 2023 16:05:22 GMT
This, from historian and social commentator Heather Cox Richardson, on this topic:
November 17, 2023 (Friday)
In an NPR piece yesterday, Bill Chappell noted that âthe war between Israel and Hamas is being fought, in part, through disinformation and competing claims.â Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamasâs leadership team currently in Qatar, told Ben Hubbard and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times that Hamasâs goal in their attack of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists crossed from Gaza into Israel and tortured and killed about 1,200 people, taking another 240 hostage, was to make sure the region did not settle into a status quo that excluded the Palestinians. In 2020 the Palestinians were excluded from discussions about the Abraham Accords negotiated by then-president Trumpâs son-in-law Jared Kushner that normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain (and later Morocco). More recently, Saudi Arabia and Israel were in talks with the United States about normalizing relations. Al-Hayya told the reporters that in order to âchange the entire equation and not just have a clash,â Hamas leaders intended to commit âa great actâ that Israel would respond to with fury. â[W]ithout a doubt, it was known that the reaction to this great act would be big,â al-Hayya said, but â[w]e had to tell people that the Palestinian cause would not die.â âHamasâs goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such,â al-Hayya said. âThis battle was not because we wanted fuel or laborers,â he added. âIt did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.â
Hamas media adviser Taher El-Nounou told the reporters: âI hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.â Hamas could be pretty certain that Israel would retaliate with a heavy hand. The governing coalition that took power at the end of 2022 is a far-right coalition, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to hold that coalition together to stay in power, not least because he faces charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Once it took power, Netanyahuâs government announced that expanding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank was a priority, vowing to annex the occupied territory. It also endorsed discrimination against LGBTQ people and called for generous payments to ultra-Orthodox men so they could engage in religious study rather than work. It also tried to push through changes to the judicial system to give far more power to the government. From January 7 until October 7, 2023, protesters turned out in the streets in huge numbers. With the attack, Israelis have come together until the crisis is resolved. Netanyahuâs ability to stay in power depended in large part on his promises that he would keep Israelis safe. The events of October 7 on his watchâthe worst attack on Jews since the Holocaustâshattered that guarantee. Polls show that Israelis blame his government, and three quarters of them think he should resign. Sixty-four percent think the country should hold an election immediately after the war. Immediately after the attack, on October 7, Netanyahu vowed âmighty vengeanceâ against Hamas, and Israeli airstrikes began to pound Gaza. On October 8, Israel formally declared war. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the countryâs retaliation would âchange the reality on the ground in Gaza for the next 50 years,â and on October 9 he announced âa complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closedâŚ. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.â Israel and the U.S. have strong historic and economic ties: as Nicole Narea points out in Vox in a review of their history together, the U.S. has also traditionally seen Israel as an important strategic ally as it stabilizes the Middle East, helping to maintain the supply of Middle Eastern oil that the global economy needs. That strategic importance has only grown as the U.S. seeks to normalize ties around the region to form a united front against Iran.
For Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and other envoys, then, it appeared the first priority after the October 7 attack was to keep the conflict from spreading. Biden made it very clear that the U.S. would stand behind Israel should Iran, which backs Hamas, be considering moving in. He warned: â[T]o any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Donât.â
The movement of two U.S. carrier groups to the region appears so far to be helping to achieve that goal. While Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon and Yemenâs Houthis have fired missiles and drones at Israel since October 7, Iranâs leaders have said they will not join Hamasâs fight and are hoping only to use the conflict as leverage against the U.S. Militias have fired at least 55 rocket and drone strikes at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria since October 7 without killing any U.S. soldiers. In retaliation, the U.S. has launched three airstrikes against militia installations in Syria, killing up to seven men (the military assesses there were not women or children in the vicinity) in the third strike on Sunday. The U.S. keeps roughly 900 troops in Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq to work with local forces to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State.
At the same time that Biden emphasized Israelâs right to respond to Hamasâs attack and demanded the return of the hostages, he also called for humanitarian aid to Gaza through Egypt and warned Netanyahu to stay within the laws of war.
Rounds of diplomacy by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who flew to Israel and Jordan initially on October 11 and has gone back repeatedly, as well as by Biden, who has both visited the regionâhis second trip to a war zoneâand constantly worked the phones, and other envoys, started humanitarian convoys moving into Gaza with a single 20-truck convoy on October 21. By early November, over 100 trucks a day were entering Gaza, the number the United Nations says is the minimum needed. Yesterday the Israeli war cabinet agreed to allow two tankers of fuel a day into Gaza after the U.N. said it couldnât deliver aid because it had run out of fuel. The U.S. has insisted from the start that Israelâs military decisions must not go beyond the laws of war. Israeli officials say they are staying within the law, yet an estimated 11,000 civilians and Hamas fighters (the numbers are not separated out) have died. Gaza has been crushed into rubble by airstrikes, and more than a million people are homeless. That carnage has sparked protests around the world along with calls for a cease-fire, which Israel rejects. It has also sparked extreme Islamophobia and antisemitism exacerbated by social media. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Islamophobia inspired a Chicago man to stab a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy to death; more recently, antisemitism has jumped more than 900% on X (formerly Twitter). On Wednesday, Elon Musk agreed with a virulently antisemitic post on X. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates responded: âWe condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.â Advertisers, including IBM and Apple, announced they would no longer advertise on Muskâs platform.
While calling for humanitarian pauses in the fighting, the Biden administration has continued to focus on getting the hostages out and has rejected calls for a cease-fire, saying such a break would only allow Hamas to regroup. In The Atlantic on November 14, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who negotiated a 2012 cease-fire between Hamas and Israel only to see Hamas violate that agreement two years later, explained that cease-fires have only kicked the can down the road. âIsraelâs policy since 2009 of containing rather than destroying Hamas has failed,â she said. Clinton called for the destruction of Hamas on the one hand and âa new strategy and new leadershipâ for Israel on the other. âInstead of the current ultra-right-wing government, it will need a government of national unity thatâs rooted in the center of Israeli politics and can make the hard choices ahead,â she wrote. Central to those choices is the long-neglected two-state solution that would establish a Palestinian state. Biden and Blinken and a number of Arab governments have backed the idea, but to many observers it seems impossible to pull off. Still, at the same time Clintonâs article appeared, King Abdullah II of Jordan published his own op-ed in the Washington Post titled: âA two-state solution would be a victory for our common humanity.â
â[L]etâs start with some basic reality,â he wrote. âThe fact is that the thousands of victims across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank have been overwhelmingly civiliansâŚ. Leaders everywhere have the responsibility to face the full reality of this crisis, as ugly as it is. Only by anchoring ourselves to the concrete facts that have brought us to this point will we be able to change the increasingly dangerous direction of our worldâŚ. âIf the status quo continues, the days ahead will be driven by an ongoing war of narratives over who is entitled to hate more and kill more. Sinister political agendas and ideologies will attempt to exploit religion. Extremism, vengeance and persecution will deepen not only in the region but also around the worldâŚ. It is up to responsible leaders to deliver results, starting now.â
My kudos to King Abdullah II. I personally agree, wholeheartedly.
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Post by tangent on Nov 20, 2023 16:30:02 GMT
Thanks for that, it is very welcome. I have tried to do a lot of research into the background but have come up against a brick wall. Everywhere, I have found only biased commentaries. Do you have a link to the article?
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Post by whollygoats on Nov 20, 2023 18:36:41 GMT
Thanks for that, it is very welcome. I have tried to do a lot of research into the background but have come up against a brick wall. Everywhere, I have found only biased commentaries. Do you have a link to the article? heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-17-2023She regularly posts up commentary on US topics. She is wise indeed. One of the best, and I've never seen her 'pull her punches'.
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