By Henri Astier BBC News
Israel has suggested that the long-term aim of its military campaign in Gaza is to sever all links with the territory.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said that once Hamas had been defeated, Israel would end its “responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip”.
Before the conflict, Israel supplied Gaza with most of its energy needs and monitored imports into the territory.
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Tell me this, place yourself in the shoes of an average Gazan at the age of 18. With all the destruction, violence, and oppression you’ve witnessed, would you not become a “terrorist” against your oppressor? There won’t be an end to Hamas without an end of the abysmal material conditions and violence. Hamas was literally funded and legitimized by Israel to manufacture consent for their ethnic clensing campaign.
They will continue to blockade as long as Palestinians exist, I gaurentee it.
“Tell me this, place yourself in the shoes of an average Vietnamese at the age of 18 (in 1974). With all the destruction, violence, and oppression you’ve witnessed, would you not become a ‘terrorist’ against your oppressor?”
Feel free to replace with Japanese in the US in 1945 in interment camps, or Jews in Europe in 1945, or Mexicans in the 1930s, etc.
There’s quite a lot of populations throughout history that have been harmed by others, and yet within a generation live in peace next to them. People of the generation that were harmed often have prejudice and distrust towards those who carried out the harm, but rarely themselves harm in turn.
Don’t normalize terrorism and violence targeting civilians. It’s not a normal part of the cycle of things, and the exceptional factor here is religious orthodoxy, which does have a long history across many forms of barbarism carried out on innocents.
If we want peace in the middle east, the only path to it is promoting atheism in the middle east.
Because as history has shown over and over and over, you are 100% wrong about what humans might do to one another in retribution when the self-righteous entitlement to harm one another religion provides is taken out of the picture.
There’s so many problems with this take.
This is primarily not a religious conflict, it’s territorial and racial.
Please tell me you would be super chill with having your home stolen by some fucking white guy from Brooklyn because the newly formed government wants to form an ethnostate, because I sure fucking wouldn’t be.
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Something like 80% of the water they get from Isreal is contaminated.
The Israeli government counts the calories of the food they receive so they get the minimum amount to sustain their life.
The health care isn’t great (obviously)
And if you don’t know what “mowing the lawn” is, look it up.
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The IOF literally seal water wells with cement.
On top of that, you can’t get cement to build with in Gaza in order to build desalination facilities, even if they wanted to.
No, it’s never the option, and always has blowback that harms the very people in whose interests it was rationalized in the first place.
Go ahead and point to when guerilla attacks on civilians achieved the original aims and didn’t result in retaliatory violence.
Did you read my comment before going off on a rant?
The point of discussion was that people being harmed by other people inevitably results in generational retributive violence. And that’s simply not correct.
Nowhere am I saying that the initial violence is a good thing. I’m just pointing out that this sort of rationalization is BS. That’s not how it actually works. (Normal people realize that bad people of an identity group doing bad things doesn’t reflect all people of that identity group, so even if there’s a desire for justice against the specific people that did bad things, that doesn’t translate into a desire to do bad things to any member of that identity group for non-psychopaths.)
Most civilian victims of violence want nothing more than to avoid future violence. They don’t want to commit their lives to more violence.
The exception is religious violence, where there’s a long history of commitment to violence (retributive or not) out of a sense of justice inherent to it and an ‘otherness’ and superiority over anyone that isn’t part of the same religious group.
Oh really now? So how many of the Hamas terrorists attacking civilians in their homes and burning children alive were atheists do you reckon? 50%?
And how many Zionists who refuse to consider any kind of compromise regarding Palestine’s existence are atheist? My guess is not much more than the relative number of atheist Zionists in 66 CE who thought it would be a great idea to rebel against Rome because God was going to be on their side in the resulting conflict.
This is primarily a longstanding religious conflict.
Racial!?! WTF are you talking about? The DNA of Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians is effectively identical. They are the same people. The difference is primarily religious, and extends a bit beyond that to cultural differences. Sure, Ashkenazi and Sephardic only share half the DNA. So that portion of the population are simply partial relatives of the Palestinians, as opposed to effectively the same people ‘racially’ - the equivalent of a half Palestinian.
If at a snap of one’s fingers both sides suddenly became 100% atheist, there’d be nothing more to be fighting about. Just like the many, many peoples throughout history who have had atrocities committed against them by neighbors and yet generations after live in complete peace with one another.
This is almost exclusively a religious conflict, with Jews and Muslims at each other’s necks and with Christians only giving a crap because they think Jerusalem must be inhabited by the Jews for their zombie to float down from the sky. The underlying reasons are much more insane than the more palatable reasons that get talked about publicly by the parties involved, but those insane underlying reasons are the real ones, and the ultimate driving force behind why there will never be peace in the region as long as any of those three motivations have a seat at the negotiating table.
Look, you’re obviously a debate pervert. I’m not going to engage your entire diatribe, but a few things to note…
The blowback was the Hamas attack. The Israelis are the ones who created and have control over the conditions. The attack was the response. History did not start on Oct 7th.
This is an imperfect example, but if you mistreat a dog for long enough and it lashes out, who is at fault?
If it was religious, why would they be sterilizing Ethiopian jews?
If I’m a Palestinian, and I become a convert, can I join Israel?
What percent of Isreal has a Jewish faith, and what percent is non-religious?
Pretty sure the dog gets put down, even if the owner was negligent.
Good first step. Now look at whether attitudes towards expulsion of Arabs from Israel is a minority view or majority view depending on that identification…
Huh? I don’t see sterility listed as a side effect for the medication they were given. So “why were the Ethiopian Jews given birth control with ambiguous degrees of informed consent” is certainly a topic worth exploring, but is quite different from what you stated.
No, and that’s messed up, especially given the risks they face in Palestine.
The harm has to stop before anyone lives together though… Also Jews did rise up against Hitler’s regime several times but weren’t successful.
There’s a big difference between resisting a regime that’s harming you and carrying out violence against the people long after.
The Vietnamese also fought against US soldiers when they were invading their homes.
But they don’t go beheading US citizens afterwards, do they?
I’m exclusively talking about the notion of terrorism against civilians, not about resistance against the agents of active oppression.
Yes, Israel is currently oppressing the people of Gaza as I said. It’s basically a big open air concentration camp.
The civilians are?
Was 9/11 was justified against the people of NY because of the actions of the US government oppressing peoples in the Middle East?
And the discussion was on multi-generational commitment to violence, not whether or not there’d be resistance to oppression in the here and now.
Multi-generational commitment to violence is quite anomalous in history as I was saying.
Resistance against opposition oppressive military is not, and extensively patterned throughout history.
I’m not too familiar with 9/11, I’m not American and it wasn’t a big deal here. It’s probably bad to target civilians exclusively in every situation but those terrorist groups usually crop up due to oppression and despair.
No, it’s not. Like multi generational attempts at fighting your oppressor are very prevalent in history, even in my country Estonia the people here were enslaved for like 600 years after the crusades here and there were numerous uprisings, one that is celebrated to this day is when Estonians rose up and set fire to a huge amount of mansions owned by slave owners. Same for native Americans in the US, they fought for like 300 years.
So you’re saying that given the suggested trend that after the USSR fell, most ethnic Estonians were carrying out terror attacks against the Russian immigrants moved in during Soviet occupation in retribution of the persecution and deportation which occurred during those years?
While they were denied political influence and the ability to vote in representatives, they weren’t exactly lined up against a wall and shot. Why do you think that was?
And how’d that end up going for them? Every instance where a number of civilians were killed was used to justify retaliatory attacks that far exceeded the attacks being retaliated against.
Just as 9/11 was used as justification for an overkill response that negatively impacted many civilians who had nothing to do with the attacks.
Not exactly a great strategy.
There are instances of violent groups taking violent actions spotted throughout history, but far less instances where entire populations were taking part in violent retributive attacks - which was the original proposal - that broadly Palestinian youths today are going to grow up to be the next Hamas attackers tomorrow.
And that simply isn’t the case. People resorting to hyperviolence in mass numbers are a minority occurrence outside of very specific conditions where their own survival depends on their mob participation.
The majority of Palestinians surviving the current human rights violations by Israel will likely go on to focus on living beyond the present experiences much as the majority of Holocaust survivors did the same instead of going around beheading random Germans. That generation didn’t tend to care for them much, but it wasn’t worth sacrificing the life they and less fortunate loved ones fought so hard to preserve.
That’s not even slightly what I said, I have no idea how you misread that. The USSR occupied Estonia for like 60 years but before the first Estonian republic Estonians were slaves and they fought against the slavers over that period of like 600 years. Including burning down residences of said slavers. During the USSR occupation we had groups that attacked the USSR as well, you can look up the forest brothers. But you wanted multi generational so the 600 years of slavery prior seems like a better example.
You were saying this kind of resistance is an anomaly but as I said it’s not. During oppression people tend to rise up against their oppressor, that seems like the general trend. It’s sometimes effective and sometimes it’s hopeless but if you leave that as the seemingly only option for a group of people you are going to get terrorist groups with extreme views. Israel will most likely now kill a ton of civilians making even more terrorists because it’s the only recourse for the people there.
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A. You don’t know that, especially if the terms are seen as fair and just. An apartheid or an open air prison is neither.
B. What’s the alternative? Genocide and ethnic cleansing?
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I’m sure you got a credible source which confirms Hamas was funded by Israel
I don’t know if times of israel is credible or not, but you can find your own sources.
Thank you for the link. It does not mention however that Israel actively funded Hamas. It does mention the legitimisation but there is no proof of Israeli money flowing into Gaza. It’s very likely but it could also have been any other nation funding while Israel watches.
You’re right, to my knowledge that proxy nation was Qatar.
You don’t even need sources. Countries do it all the time. They want to destabilize their current enemies so they fund their enemies enemies. They fund the enemy successors. If they do it very, very, very well the successors are fractured and no one becomes stronger than the previous enemy. But that’s not usually the case. Usually there’s a runaway success, consolidation of power, and now you haven’t even more extremist enemy. And that might be a good thing for you, it might give you an excuse to cut diplomatic relations, or to not honor previous treaties, or to send in military units to take over resources.
I’m not gonna lie, ever since the fall of the ottoman empire Arabs have been getting their asses kicked left and right. There is simply no respect for them at this point, no non Arab nation actually thinks they are not beneath them.
If Israel actually does this, this is Palestines best chance to do a hard reset, take the L, and rebuild on the principle of “no more terrorism”.
That would necessitate Israel not engaging in state / settler-colonial terrorism, and that isn’t happening.
True Israel is an apartheid state.
Apartheid states breed violence.
Apartheid is never justified.
Oh yeah they’re not gonna do it, I’m just saying if it was true this is the chance to start over.
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No not “the jews”, Israel, don’t make this antisemitic. Dont try to turn what he said into racism.
Because it’s true, their jewishness is irrelevant to the conversation. Israel DOES control their open air prison by definition.