Israel-Gaza war

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

(Yes, I know that sympathy for the Axis was much more limited in North Africa, where fascist occupation was a real thing that people lived through, than elsewhere in the Arab world. Anti-colonial sympathy for the Axis typically only persisted in places where the Axis was a faraway abstraction, not an actual presence.)

Moncef Bey over in Tunisia is an interesting, and honestly pretty admirable, figure in this context.

[Indy Texas]

Haj Amin al-Husseini did not persuade Hitler to exterminate the Jews, a position which Hitler had advocated decades before he ever met al-Husseini, but he certainly lobbied for it. This is questionably relevant to the modern day (also, al-Husseini wasn't an elected official), except insofar as it goes to show that local anti-Zionism was rooted in deranged violence and hatred from the very beginning, which is broadly accepted anyway.

Also important to add that when the PLO was formed in 1964, Haj Amin al-Husseini was immediately discredited and disowned. He had lost almost all power in Palestinian circles after 1948. Today, very few Palestinians know who he is. He isn't taught about in Palestinian schools.

Sure -- I think the fact of widespread Axis sympathy in Britain's Arab colonies (including the anti-British revolt in 1936-1939, and including the rise and defeat of an Axis-sympathetic government in Iraq) is relevant in discussions of the 1940s inasmuch as it is one of the fundamental facts explaining why the Zionist militias were permitted to become as strong as they became, and why the organization of native militias was generally prohibited.

(Yes, I know that sympathy for the Axis was much more limited in North Africa, where fascist occupation was a real thing that people lived through, than elsewhere in the Arab world. Anti-colonial sympathy for the Axis typically only persisted in places where the Axis was a faraway abstraction, not an actual presence.)

Axis sympathies were present there for the same reason they also had purchase in South and Southeast Asia: they wanted the colonial power running their country to go away, and supporting the powers that were at war with said colonial power was one way to do that. This sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic also motivated many forms of collaboration in Europe. For example, Ukrainian collaborators were generally not people who owned heavily annotated copies of Mein Kampf; they were people who hated what Stalin had done to their country during the Holodomor and saw the Germans as their potential liberators.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

What is Israel's plan after the current campaign ends?

No home, no work, no education, no health care makes for a perfect breeding ground for terrorists.

Or is the immediate plan still to expel Palestinians from Gaza?

The plan seems to be to permanently occupy a buffer zone near the border, massively fortified as a sort of DMZ to prevent any further incursions with extreme prejudice. The remaining 90% or so of Gaza will likely be rebuilt by the world at large, with little involvement from Israel, but the effectiveness of that will heavily depend on what Egypt does about their border.

If Gaza turns into a breeding ground for terrorists, Israel has only itself to blame.

This is children’s cartoon bad guy logic

He's clearly right though? Assuming that was "the plan" the war would end with Gaza devastated and  with nobody responsible for rebuilding it. It is extremely reasonable to think that a Hamas-like organisation or even Hamas itself would spring back up with the funding and the dedication to fill the void. Israel cannot take no responsibility for what happens in Gaza post-war if it expects this kind of group to stay out of power.

To be clear, I am not saying I agree with it.  I am only agreeing with Ray that this seems to be Netanyahu’s plan.  I agree with you that it is completely non-viable.  Setting aside whether or not it would cause a terrorist breeding ground, until there is an independent Palestinian state, the Israeli government has a moral responsibility to do all it can for Palestinian civilians.  As I’ve said in the past, Israel has a responsibility to do a sort of Marshall Plan to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure and destroyed homes.  It’ll be expensive, but that’s part of the price of destroying Hamas.  

We should strive to be our brother’s keeper to the extent possible (granted, it is uniquely difficult in a war like this, but you gotta keep trying), not look for technicalities to give us excuses to neglect that responsibility.  If I had my way, Israeli soldiers would be distributing food, basic medical supplies, bottled water, etc to Palestinians in areas they’d expelled Hamas from.  You can’t replace something - even a horrific something - with nothing or a corrupt, incompetent joke of a ruler (the latter is where we went wrong in Afghanistan).  The Israeli sentiment towards how to handle post-war Gaza makes me think of Elie Wiesel’s observation that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

None of this is to say there is any moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, but this is a major problem I have with the Israeli approach.  On the Israeli side, there is no acknowledgment of the “you had no choice to except break it, now you’re also responsible for helping fix it” principle.  And this is both morally indefensible and strategically insane.  

[GoTfan]

What is Israel's plan after the current campaign ends?

No home, no work, no education, no health care makes for a perfect breeding ground for terrorists.

Or is the immediate plan still to expel Palestinians from Gaza?

The plan seems to be to permanently occupy a buffer zone near the border, massively fortified as a sort of DMZ to prevent any further incursions with extreme prejudice. The remaining 90% or so of Gaza will likely be rebuilt by the world at large, with little involvement from Israel, but the effectiveness of that will heavily depend on what Egypt does about their border.

If Gaza turns into a breeding ground for terrorists, Israel has only itself to blame.

This is children’s cartoon bad guy logic

He's clearly right though? Assuming that was "the plan" the war would end with Gaza devastated and  with nobody responsible for rebuilding it. It is extremely reasonable to think that a Hamas-like organisation or even Hamas itself would spring back up with the funding and the dedication to fill the void. Israel cannot take no responsibility for what happens in Gaza post-war if it expects this kind of group to stay out of power.

To be clear, I am not saying I agree with it.  I am only agreeing with Ray that this seems to be Netanyahu’s plan.  I agree with you that it is completely non-viable.  Setting aside whether or not it would cause a terrorist breeding ground, until there is an independent Palestinian state, the Israeli government has a moral responsibility to do all it can for Palestinian civilians.  As I’ve said in the past, Israel has a responsibility to do a sort of Marshall Plan to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure and destroyed homes.  It’ll be expensive, but that’s part of the price of destroying Hamas.  

We should strive to be our brother’s keeper to the extent possible (granted, it is uniquely difficult in a war like this, but you gotta keep trying), not look for technicalities to give us excuses to neglect that responsibility.  If I had my way, Israeli soldiers would be distributing food, basic medical supplies, bottled water, etc to Palestinians in areas they’d expelled Hamas from.  You can’t replace something - even a horrific something - with nothing or a corrupt, incompetent joke of a ruler (the latter is where we went wrong in Afghanistan).  The Israeli sentiment towards how to handle post-war Gaza makes me think of Elie Wiesel’s observation that “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

None of this is to say there is any moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas, but this is a major problem I have with the Israeli approach.  On the Israeli side, there is no acknowledgment of the “you had no choice to except break it, now you’re also responsible for helping fix it” principle.  And this is both morally indefensible and strategically insane.  

To be fair, the Allies made the same mistake at the end of the First World War when they tried to punish Germany, though that might just be my current reading getting the better of me.

I understand Israel's desire for revenge. It's natural. However, it's the job of leaders to tamp down the worst impulses. More than anything else, THAT is what's supposed to separate Israel from Hamas. Honestly, the question we should be asking is if the ball has rolled too far by this point.

[Vosem]

Haj Amin al-Husseini did not persuade Hitler to exterminate the Jews, a position which Hitler had advocated decades before he ever met al-Husseini, but he certainly lobbied for it. This is questionably relevant to the modern day (also, al-Husseini wasn't an elected official), except insofar as it goes to show that local anti-Zionism was rooted in deranged violence and hatred from the very beginning, which is broadly accepted anyway.

Also important to add that when the PLO was formed in 1964, Haj Amin al-Husseini was immediately discredited and disowned. He had lost almost all power in Palestinian circles after 1948. Today, very few Palestinians know who he is. He isn't taught about in Palestinian schools.

Sure -- I think the fact of widespread Axis sympathy in Britain's Arab colonies (including the anti-British revolt in 1936-1939, and including the rise and defeat of an Axis-sympathetic government in Iraq) is relevant in discussions of the 1940s inasmuch as it is one of the fundamental facts explaining why the Zionist militias were permitted to become as strong as they became, and why the organization of native militias was generally prohibited.

(Yes, I know that sympathy for the Axis was much more limited in North Africa, where fascist occupation was a real thing that people lived through, than elsewhere in the Arab world. Anti-colonial sympathy for the Axis typically only persisted in places where the Axis was a faraway abstraction, not an actual presence.)

Axis sympathies were present there for the same reason they also had purchase in South and Southeast Asia: they wanted the colonial power running their country to go away, and supporting the powers that were at war with said colonial power was one way to do that. This sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic also motivated many forms of collaboration in Europe. For example, Ukrainian collaborators were generally not people who owned heavily annotated copies of Mein Kampf; they were people who hated what Stalin had done to their country during the Holodomor and saw the Germans as their potential liberators.

You are not likely to convince me that Ukrainian collaborators were reasonable or justified. You might actually be likelier to convince me that Hamas is reasonable or justified. Many people -- in fact the overwhelming majority -- hated what Stalin had done to their country during the Holodomor and yet did not see the Germans as their potential liberators. (As I've noted in this thread, I personally lived in a household until I was 13 with a pro-Soviet Ukrainian partisan, whose family had lost multiple members in the Holodomor*, and who did not feel there was a strong question here of which side to back. This opinion was not limited to Jews; most of his comrades-in-arms were not Jews.)

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Snowstalker on AAD, where he cited Shooting an Elephant as an example of a good anti-colonial short story, and I pointed out that the anti-colonial Burmese movement Orwell was lionizing in 1936 would go on to collaborate with the Japanese, invite them into the country, and cause the deaths and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Burmese people. Maybe the moral of this story is that the forms taken by resentment of colonial rule were often foolish, and often much more lethal than the colonial rule itself. It is not true that something is good or justifiable purely because it is anti-colonial.

*In general, the people who raised me lost more relatives to a, the Holodomor, and b, race riots during the Russian Civil War, then they did to c, the Holocaust. This is entirely a consequence of the longitude they lived at rather than a comment about the severity of those events, though.

[GALeftist]

Haj Amin al-Husseini did not persuade Hitler to exterminate the Jews, a position which Hitler had advocated decades before he ever met al-Husseini, but he certainly lobbied for it. This is questionably relevant to the modern day (also, al-Husseini wasn't an elected official), except insofar as it goes to show that local anti-Zionism was rooted in deranged violence and hatred from the very beginning, which is broadly accepted anyway.

Also important to add that when the PLO was formed in 1964, Haj Amin al-Husseini was immediately discredited and disowned. He had lost almost all power in Palestinian circles after 1948. Today, very few Palestinians know who he is. He isn't taught about in Palestinian schools.

Sure -- I think the fact of widespread Axis sympathy in Britain's Arab colonies (including the anti-British revolt in 1936-1939, and including the rise and defeat of an Axis-sympathetic government in Iraq) is relevant in discussions of the 1940s inasmuch as it is one of the fundamental facts explaining why the Zionist militias were permitted to become as strong as they became, and why the organization of native militias was generally prohibited.

(Yes, I know that sympathy for the Axis was much more limited in North Africa, where fascist occupation was a real thing that people lived through, than elsewhere in the Arab world. Anti-colonial sympathy for the Axis typically only persisted in places where the Axis was a faraway abstraction, not an actual presence.)

Axis sympathies were present there for the same reason they also had purchase in South and Southeast Asia: they wanted the colonial power running their country to go away, and supporting the powers that were at war with said colonial power was one way to do that. This sort of "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic also motivated many forms of collaboration in Europe. For example, Ukrainian collaborators were generally not people who owned heavily annotated copies of Mein Kampf; they were people who hated what Stalin had done to their country during the Holodomor and saw the Germans as their potential liberators.

This post also paints with way too broad a brush. Fully 12,000 Palestinian Arabs volunteered to fight with the British Armed Forces in World War II, as did thousands of Jordanians. Axis sympathies were probably present to a certain extent, but it seems clear that Arabs in the Middle East were mostly either indifferent or fought alongside the European countries with which they had colonial ties, with Axis collaboration as a practical matter being negligible outside of Iraq and perhaps Syria and Lebanon (and obviously Libya).

[LM Brazilian Citizen]

I'm deeply saddened and shocked by president Lula's bad faith statement about comparing what Israel is doing in Gaza with Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, and although I think that even though Netanyahu's government has comitted numerous human rights violations, equating the two things are like comparing apples to oranges.

I'm making an impact statement here: I'm personally breaking the ties with the current government, and from now on I'm moving toward a third way of democratic center in 2026, beyond the PT and Bolsonarism, which are currently two failed models in Brazil. President Lula's third term is being much worse than the previous two terms and in an extremely polarized country like Brazil he is acting like Bozo, disuniting the population and talking a lot of bullsh**t.

Despite this, I don't regret at all having voted and supported him strongly in 2022, and I would certainly vote for him in almost every presidential election since 1989, as I said in a post from September of the last year, but now I want new blood, from someone conciliatory and with modern ideas who can develop my country into something even more fullfilling.

Lula didn’t lie at all. So much that NOBODY outside Israel is even contesting his statement. Goal scored. If anything he took way too long.

What happens is that different notions and rules are applied based on geography, culture and race.

When you directly compare these events like Lula did, you actively treat onto the public consciousness a non-white and non-European country with the same standards given to white European countries, like it should be as they aren’t superior to anyone.

As someone who isn’t European and doesn’t benefit from those established structures, Lula stands up for better and equal parameters for everyone. Therefore standing up for Brazil itself as we DON’T have the same kind of privilege.

Luciano Huck describing what goes on in GAZA as a TRAGEDY is what is vomit inducing to me. Like an open admission of what is happening but minimizing it and diminishing people’s lives.

Tragedy is what happens in an accident that is inevitable or a natural disaster. When the action is done actively by humans it’s not a tragedy, but a CRIME.

Many Brazilians often forget of the influence their country has internationally as one of the most important Non-Western countries, alongside India for example. There’s the incorrect normalized notion of being mere bystanders to whatever goes on outside.

What Lula does with this is to normalize calling out Israel actions with the appropriate seriousness that it deserves, using the political weight and prestige he know he has to influence other countries.

When even Brazil doesn’t speak up to what’s moral and right because it doesn’t feel free to do so, that sends the message to smaller south countries they don’t stand a chance.

That’s why countries such as Brazil, India, China, South Africa have the natural responsibility and obligation to be a vessel for the voice of other nations in the South that aren’t able to use it individually. Palestine, is one of those.

You really disgust me. 

[GoTfan]

China's an authoritarian communist state, India essentially has islamophobia as state policy, and South Africa is run by one of the most corrupt political organisations on the planet.

I think Lula's heart is in the right place, but this time he shot his mouth off.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://noticias.uol.com.br/internacional/ultimas-noticias/2024/02/21/estou-orgulhosa-das-ruinas-em-gaza-diz-ministra-da-igualdade-de-israel.htm

I am personally proud of the ruins in Gaza. May 80 years from now all babies be able to tell their grandchildren what the Jews did when they murdered their families, raped them and kidnapped their citizens!

May Golan, Israel's Minister of Social Equality (google translate PT->EN)

All is well in the Israeli government.

[Horus]

https://noticias.uol.com.br/internacional/ultimas-noticias/2024/02/21/estou-orgulhosa-das-ruinas-em-gaza-diz-ministra-da-igualdade-de-israel.htm

I am personally proud of the ruins in Gaza. May 80 years from now all babies be able to tell their grandchildren what the Jews did when they murdered their families, raped them and kidnapped their citizens!

May Golan, Israel's Minister of Social Equality (google translate PT->EN)

All is well in the Israeli government.

Sick stuff. Always remember, it is in the interest of the Israeli state to increase antisemitism outside of their borders as much as possible.

[AtorBoltox]

https://noticias.uol.com.br/internacional/ultimas-noticias/2024/02/21/estou-orgulhosa-das-ruinas-em-gaza-diz-ministra-da-igualdade-de-israel.htm

I am personally proud of the ruins in Gaza. May 80 years from now all babies be able to tell their grandchildren what the Jews did when they murdered their families, raped them and kidnapped their citizens!

May Golan, Israel's Minister of Social Equality (google translate PT->EN)

All is well in the Israeli government.

Sick stuff. Always remember, it is in the interest of the Israeli state to increase antisemitism outside of their borders as much as possible.

Agreed. It’s not the fault of anti semites that the good Jews are being targeted, the blame lies with the bad Jews provoking them

[GeneralMacArthur]

Seems like an entirely reasonable sentiment?  Why would the country winning the war not be proud of what they've done?

Israel was viciously attacked by barbaric monsters who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered innocent civilians.  Those same monsters still refuse to let the hostages go even as they shed crocodile tears about the consequences of their actions.  The whole world is arrayed against Israel and demands that the Jews, as they have time and time throughout history, must once again lie down and accept their submissive status, accept their place as a punching bag for the world's most diabolical cretins.  Instead of being weak and obedient, the Jews stood up for themselves and destroyed their enemy.  Of course they are proud of this!

I swear it's like people pretend 10/7 never happened.  Or like Hamas are just some innocent victims.

If you actually care about the Gazans, and aren't just engaged in either anti-semitism or performative anti-Israel activism that you don't realize is rooted in anti-semitic notions, then you should celebrate the destruction of Hamas and demand that any peace deal include the eradication of Hamas.  After all, if you're so concerned for the tired, poor, huddled masses of Palestine, why do you want to sentence them to a life of misery, poverty and endless war under the regime of a wannabe-ISIS?  What a terrible thing to wish upon anyone, much less those you claim to have sympathy for.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

https://noticias.uol.com.br/internacional/ultimas-noticias/2024/02/21/estou-orgulhosa-das-ruinas-em-gaza-diz-ministra-da-igualdade-de-israel.htm

I am personally proud of the ruins in Gaza. May 80 years from now all babies be able to tell their grandchildren what the Jews did when they murdered their families, raped them and kidnapped their citizens!

May Golan, Israel's Minister of Social Equality (google translate PT->EN)

All is well in the Israeli government.

Sick stuff. Always remember, it is in the interest of the Israeli state to increase antisemitism outside of their borders as much as possible.

Agreed. It’s not the fault of anti semites that the good Jews are being targeted, the blame lies with the bad Jews provoking them

I would not go as far as Horus, but I would definitely give Israel partial blame for the current toxic situation.
Rhetoric from Israeli government officials is out of control. Especially as the death toll could top 100,000 thanks to people being trapped under rubble, this flippantness and ugliness towards Jews not favorable towards what's happening in Gaza (the Knesset expelled the only Meretz MK who was Jewish for holding that position). The Israeli government is garbage. And it deserves partial blame for rises in anti-Semitic violence, for sheer negligence at best, and downright maliciousness at worst.
BTW there's also violence against anti-war Jewish Israelis who dare demonstrate against Gaza being made into a demolition site. Done by radical Jews who are being given arms by the Israeli government.
The Israeli government is not a good actor. It's taking risks and enflaming tensions purposefully, when what it needs to do first and foremost is cool down tensions and treat Gaza better to convince the majority who don't like Hamas that Israel is actually a credible partner, at least for the moment.
It's not doing that. Biden is right to be pushing for Bibi to go.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Seems like an entirely reasonable sentiment?  Why would the country winning the war not be proud of what they've done?

Israel was viciously attacked by barbaric monsters who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered innocent civilians.  Those same monsters still refuse to let the hostages go even as they shed crocodile tears about the consequences of their actions.  The whole world is arrayed against Israel and demands that the Jews, as they have time and time throughout history, must once again lie down and accept their submissive status, accept their place as a punching bag for the world's most diabolical cretins.  Instead of being weak and obedient, the Jews stood up for themselves and destroyed their enemy.  Of course they are proud of this!

I swear it's like people pretend 10/7 never happened.  Or like Hamas are just some innocent victims.

If you actually care about the Gazans, and aren't just engaged in either anti-semitism or performative anti-Israel activism that you don't realize is rooted in anti-semitic notions, then you should celebrate the destruction of Hamas and demand that any peace deal include the eradication of Hamas.  After all, if you're so concerned for the tired, poor, huddled masses of Palestine, why do you want to sentence them to a life of misery, poverty and endless war under the regime of a wannabe-ISIS?  What a terrible thing to wish upon anyone, much less those you claim to have sympathy for.

What Israel is presently doing is effectively recruiting for Hamas more than 10/7 ever could. Despite the popular dislike for all sides present in Gaza's popular majority, if people are losing their mom, dad, elder sister, younger sister, and uncle to Israeli bombs, how do you think people are actually going to respond to that? Either you end the problem through hard action (some of which would generate, for certain, still more problems for Israel on a PR front), or you show you can be trusted.
Israel isn't trusted, and deservedly so. Gaza has been put through hell and Israel's policies are creating needless human suffering and boosting recruitment for groups like Hamas and PIJ.
Israel crafted the present status quo by a calculated quasi-withdrawal, shirked its responsibilities as the power with imperium over the Holy Land, and now is rightfully getting criticism from those outside the region who want the cycle of violence to end.

[CumbrianLefty]

What reasonable and measured posts from PP just above.

The contrast with the mindless "Israel can do no wrong" shills here is so stark.

Its not actually a football match, you know.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

What reasonable and measured posts from PP just above.

The contrast with the mindless "Israel can do no wrong" shills here is so stark.

Its not actually a football match, you know.

Thanks for the kind words.

[Vosem]

Seems like an entirely reasonable sentiment?  Why would the country winning the war not be proud of what they've done?

Israel was viciously attacked by barbaric monsters who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered innocent civilians.  Those same monsters still refuse to let the hostages go even as they shed crocodile tears about the consequences of their actions.  The whole world is arrayed against Israel and demands that the Jews, as they have time and time throughout history, must once again lie down and accept their submissive status, accept their place as a punching bag for the world's most diabolical cretins.  Instead of being weak and obedient, the Jews stood up for themselves and destroyed their enemy.  Of course they are proud of this!

I swear it's like people pretend 10/7 never happened.  Or like Hamas are just some innocent victims.

If you actually care about the Gazans, and aren't just engaged in either anti-semitism or performative anti-Israel activism that you don't realize is rooted in anti-semitic notions, then you should celebrate the destruction of Hamas and demand that any peace deal include the eradication of Hamas.  After all, if you're so concerned for the tired, poor, huddled masses of Palestine, why do you want to sentence them to a life of misery, poverty and endless war under the regime of a wannabe-ISIS?  What a terrible thing to wish upon anyone, much less those you claim to have sympathy for.

What Israel is presently doing is effectively recruiting for Hamas more than 10/7 ever could. Despite the popular dislike for all sides present in Gaza's popular majority, if people are losing their mom, dad, elder sister, younger sister, and uncle to Israeli bombs, how do you think people are actually going to respond to that? Either you end the problem through hard action (some of which would generate, for certain, still more problems for Israel on a PR front), or you show you can be trusted.
Israel isn't trusted, and deservedly so. Gaza has been put through hell and Israel's policies are creating needless human suffering and boosting recruitment for groups like Hamas and PIJ.
Israel crafted the present status quo by a calculated quasi-withdrawal, shirked its responsibilities as the power with imperium over the Holy Land, and now is rightfully getting criticism from those outside the region who want the cycle of violence to end.

I don't think the first half of this is necessarily true. People join political parties (particularly militarized ones) when there is some hope of that party actually achieving its goals; the goal of the current campaign is to convince people, both inside and outside of Gaza, that there isn't a realistic possibility of Hamas accomplishing its goals. Groups like this can and have been crushed through sheer violence (the first half of the history of the Soviet Union is replete with such groups), but for such a defeat to truly be effective in the modern Gazan case, Israel would need to also defeat "foreign Palestinian liberationism", in the form of organizations like UNRWA which run the local educational system, and in the form of humanitarian organizations sympathizing with Gaza. It seems like many Western governments are on board with this, but significant portions of Western civil society are not, which is a shame given that Hamas's ideology, in addition to its visible brutalities in the territories it controls, is an implicit giant threat to the international system as a whole. People will not join Hamas if those who might have done so are rendered totally hopeless.

I agree that the 2004 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake, and Israel deserves significant blame for it, but it should be noted throughout this entire saga that there was substantial lobbying for this on the part of international "humanitarian" organizations, which pushes for actions that foreseeably led to a terrorist state arising, and today continues to push for actions which would strengthen it. Peace will come when foreign sympathy for Palestinian liberationism is defeated.

What reasonable and measured posts from PP just above.

The contrast with the mindless "Israel can do no wrong" shills here is so stark.

Its not actually a football match, you know.

Like who? I've criticized the Israeli government plenty of times, even if it wasn't from anything resembling your perspective. "This war is justified and the efforts taken to protect civilians are insanely over-the-top relative to similar wars" is not the same as "Israel can do no wrong". It's done lots of wrong; just not in the context of the military conduct of the war, on which most of the criticism in this thread focuses.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The "Heads of the Hydra" argument again... it was just two weeks ago I wrote this.

I remember 20 years ago when people said it was going to be impossible to defeat al-Qaeda because every time you killed some terrorist jackass, all his friends and family and children would decide to join al-Qaeda.  The old "each bomb kills one bad guy and creates three more" trope.  But guess what?  After the invasion of Afghanistan, we did defeat al-Qaeda's ground forces.  Then they went into hiding and tried to conduct operations against us via proxy terror cells in Iraq, Jordan and Pakistan, and we killed all of those too.  We killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  Then we killed Osama bin Laden.  By the time we killed Ayman al-Zawahiri hardly anyone cared anymore because al-Qaeda had long since ceased to be relevant.

The unfortunate thing is that these movements survive no by virtue of any organic phenomenon but because of committed state support.

The Taliban continues to exist and rule Afghanistan not because "for everyone Taliban fighter America kills, three more take its place" but because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Pakistan backs the Taliban, trains and arms its fighters, and allows them to seek refuge inside its borders.  America is unwilling to declare war on Pakistan, so it is impossible to fully eradicate the Taliban.  The Taliban survives because it's backed by Pakistan.  al-Qaeda wasn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

ISIS was born out of the chaos of the Syrian Civil War.  The United States would dearly love to do exactly what we did in Iraq -- depose the Ba'ath party, kill Assad, and install a new regime that has nominally acceptable relations with the West -- or at least, do what we did in Libya and allow the opposition forces to form a new government.  But we can't do that because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Russia backs the Assad regime.  With that said, we haven't seen any evidence of "kill one ISIS member, create three more."  We drove ISIS out of Mosul, out of Raqqa, out of Eastern Syria, and today ISIS has virtually no territory, no forces, and no real ability to project power in the Middle East.  There hasn't been any indication that any family, friends or descendants of the people we killed in Iraq/Syria are itching to rebuild ISIS.  It's just over.  Assad survives because he's backed by Russia.  ISIS isn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

So what does this mean for Palestine?  It means it's entirely possible for Israel to defeat Hamas on the battlefield, and if that were the sole challenge, Hamas could cease to exist within a couple years and be forgotten within a generation.  I don't buy for a second the notion that for every bomb Israel drops, one Hamas fighter dies and three more are born.  I don't buy the notion that Israel's war against Hamas will breed so much civilian resentment that it makes a new Hamas inevitable.  al-Qaeda was defeated in Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan, ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas can be defeated in Gaza.

The question is, to what extent are major power players willing to stake their own militaries on Hamas.  Is there a Russia-equivalent who's willing to say "if you get close to truly threatening Hamas, we will intervene militarily"?  Is there a Pakistan-equivalent who's willing to say "we will protect, train, and arm Hamas, and you'll have to declare war on us to stop it"?  So far I haven't seen it.  None of Iran, Qatar, or Egypt have shown a willingness to directly intervene to rescue Hamas.  And I think this is because of 10/7 -- the attack was so brutal that it drew the attention of the entire world and it made it impossible for those power players to covertly prop up Hamas without facing massive widespread condemnation and consequences.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Seems like an entirely reasonable sentiment?  Why would the country winning the war not be proud of what they've done?

Israel was viciously attacked by barbaric monsters who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered innocent civilians.  Those same monsters still refuse to let the hostages go even as they shed crocodile tears about the consequences of their actions.  The whole world is arrayed against Israel and demands that the Jews, as they have time and time throughout history, must once again lie down and accept their submissive status, accept their place as a punching bag for the world's most diabolical cretins.  Instead of being weak and obedient, the Jews stood up for themselves and destroyed their enemy.  Of course they are proud of this!

I swear it's like people pretend 10/7 never happened.  Or like Hamas are just some innocent victims.

If you actually care about the Gazans, and aren't just engaged in either anti-semitism or performative anti-Israel activism that you don't realize is rooted in anti-semitic notions, then you should celebrate the destruction of Hamas and demand that any peace deal include the eradication of Hamas.  After all, if you're so concerned for the tired, poor, huddled masses of Palestine, why do you want to sentence them to a life of misery, poverty and endless war under the regime of a wannabe-ISIS?  What a terrible thing to wish upon anyone, much less those you claim to have sympathy for.

What Israel is presently doing is effectively recruiting for Hamas more than 10/7 ever could. Despite the popular dislike for all sides present in Gaza's popular majority, if people are losing their mom, dad, elder sister, younger sister, and uncle to Israeli bombs, how do you think people are actually going to respond to that? Either you end the problem through hard action (some of which would generate, for certain, still more problems for Israel on a PR front), or you show you can be trusted.
Israel isn't trusted, and deservedly so. Gaza has been put through hell and Israel's policies are creating needless human suffering and boosting recruitment for groups like Hamas and PIJ.
Israel crafted the present status quo by a calculated quasi-withdrawal, shirked its responsibilities as the power with imperium over the Holy Land, and now is rightfully getting criticism from those outside the region who want the cycle of violence to end.

I don't think the first half of this is necessarily true. People join political parties (particularly militarized ones) when there is some hope of that party actually achieving its goals; the goal of the current campaign is to convince people, both inside and outside of Gaza, that there isn't a realistic possibility of Hamas accomplishing its goals. Groups like this can and have been crushed through sheer violence (the first half of the history of the Soviet Union is replete with such groups), but for such a defeat to truly be effective in the modern Gazan case, Israel would need to also defeat "foreign Palestinian liberationism", in the form of organizations like UNRWA which run the local educational system, and in the form of humanitarian organizations sympathizing with Gaza. It seems like many Western governments are on board with this, but significant portions of Western civil society are not, which is a shame given that Hamas's ideology, in addition to its visible brutalities in the territories it controls, is an implicit giant threat to the international system as a whole. People will not join Hamas if those who might have done so are rendered totally hopeless.

I agree that the 2004 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake, and Israel deserves significant blame for it, but it should be noted throughout this entire saga that there was substantial lobbying for this on the part of international "humanitarian" organizations, which pushes for actions that foreseeably led to a terrorist state arising, and today continues to push for actions which would strengthen it. Peace will come when foreign sympathy for Palestinian liberationism is defeated.

It's good there's some common ground between us here.
Imo what's needed isn't less Israeli involvement in Gaza, it's better Israeli involvement. Israeli quasi-withdrawal was a step backwards despite it having some positive effects. Israel defeating Hamas now would be good but not at the cost of 80% of it demolished without replacement and/or the settler faction that is actually the biggest existential risk to the State of Israel becoming more powerful. Hamas exists to fill a perceived need and if Hamas was destroyed and nothing else changed then it would be 100% inevitable something else would take its place.
Hence, there's a need to look beyond Hamas and Bibi and look long-term towards fulfilling the needs (security and otherwise) of both Jews and Arabs, because these set pieces being out of place are what actually makes peace impossible.
The current Israeli government doesn't have thr vision to achieve this. I'd happily take Bibi getting pardoned and Ben Gvir etc. being kept away from power. But that's presently impossible.

[GoTfan]

What reasonable and measured posts from PP just above.

The contrast with the mindless "Israel can do no wrong" shills here is so stark.

Its not actually a football match, you know.

Like who? I've criticized the Israeli government plenty of times, even if it wasn't from anything resembling your perspective. "This war is justified and the efforts taken to protect civilians are insanely over-the-top relative to similar wars" is not the same as "Israel can do no wrong". It's done lots of wrong; just not in the context of the military conduct of the war, on which most of the criticism in this thread focuses.
[/quote]

No, you've just criticised them for not killing every Palestinian man, woman or child they can find.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Imo what's needed isn't less Israeli involvement in Gaza, it's better Israeli involvement. Israeli quasi-withdrawal was a step backwards despite it having some positive effects. Israel defeating Hamas now would be good but not at the cost of 80% of it demolished without replacement and/or the settler faction that is actually the biggest existential risk to the State of Israel becoming more powerful.

Ultimately what is needed is a willing partner in the Palestinians.

Israel is not going to allow Gaza to become a modern, advanced, self-sufficient state if they have good reason to believe the Palestinians would immediately turn around and make use of that generosity to try, once again, to exterminate the Jews.

The most likely scenario is that Israel turns Gaza into a heavily-restricted police state just like the West Bank, where violent conspiracies are quickly snuffed out and military groups have no real hope of organizing themselves to the extent necessary to mount even a symbolic attack.

It's nice to think that with a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance, the Gazans might come around to the idea that actually the Jews are alright.  But there's also a very real chance that a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance is actually just Israel giving them the chance to organize, fortify and re-arm.  Especially given that the hatred is as much cultural as it is contextual.  After all, the Jews never even did anything to Uganda, but that didn't stop Idi Amin from assisting with the Air France highjacking (Bibi's origin story is that his older brother was killed leading the rescue operation), and saying "Hitler was right to burn six million Jews."  It just goes to show that even when the Jews are as nice as humanly possible to their neighbors, those neighbors will still decide to hate and kill them.  It has happened over and over again throughout history, which is why "Never Again" is Israel's modern unofficial state motto.

In other words, the police state will continue as long as paramilitary organizations threaten to fester the instant Israel lets up.  It's not Israel's fault the Palestinians are addicted to hatred and violence.  It's incumbent upon the Palestinians to knock it off and find a way to assure Israel that they genuinely intend to peacefully coexist.  This is Palestine's responsibility, not Israel's.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Some Palestinians now appear to be espousing Vosem thought:

https://www.twitter.com/joetruzman/status/1760071819355464182

Protests against Hamas appear to be spreading to the northern Gaza Strip. "O Sinwar O Haniyeh. The people are the victims. Down with Hamas."

Interesting.

or they were forced to chant slogans by the world's most moral army at gunpoint

Palestinians abused, forced to chant anti-Hamas slogans in ‘safe corridor’

According to testimonies from Palestinians who have made the journey, including one of the authors, those passing through the corridor were forced to chant slogans against Hamas; many had their belongings confiscated; and men were separated from their families, stripped, and subjected to hours of physical abuse and deprivation. All the while, thousands remain trapped inside Khan Younis, unable to leave their shelters out of fear of being shot on the streets...

He then told us that in order to be allowed to pass through the checkpoint unharmed, we had to chant slogans against the resistance: “The people want the overthrow of Hamas,” and “God is sufficient for us, and he is the best disposer of affairs against Hamas and the Qassam Brigades” (appropriating a line from the Qur’an). The officer insisted on the repetition of these slogans; only after more than 45 minutes did the soldiers permit women and children to pass, while men were kept behind...

Zaqout describes his mental and physical state as very bad — all the more so for having lost the work that he kept on his electronic devices. “I will never forget what I went through in the past few days,” he said. “We were deliberately humiliated, and forced to repeat slogans against the resistance and Hamas. All of this happened while soldiers filmed us on their mobile phones, so they can boast about it by publishing the footage on social media.”...

Zohdiya Qdeih found herself unable to utter the slogans that the soldiers ordered Palestinians to chant. She questions the notion of a safe passage when it involves humiliating unarmed civilians, and pressuring them to say words that hurt a segment of the Palestinian people.

“The soldier asked me why I didn’t repeat the slogan,” she recounted to +972. “I remained silent and did not respond. He said, ‘I know your heart is with them, and you will not insult them, but they are the ones who brought you into this situation. They did not stand by you, and you will not find any place to shelter after leaving this checkpoint; all of [the population of] Gaza City is in Rafah.’”

Qdeih emphasizes that many of the people repeated the slogans merely to comply with the soldiers and safely cross the checkpoint. “Our hearts are with the resistance in all its actions, and with the steadfastness on the ground, despite being displaced from one place to another,” she added.

The "Heads of the Hydra" argument again... it was just two weeks ago I wrote this.

snip

It's just incredible to me that anyone could look at the GWOT and think that it's a campaign to emulate.

First off, nobody ever said that destroying the original Al Qaeda (which at its peak had a few hundred to a few thousand fighters) or catching Bin Laden was impossible but that the campaign to "destroy terrorism" would fail. Al Qaeda died but Salafist terrorist groups created in its image (some even calling themselves "Al Qaeda") have multiplied like rabbits since then ranging from Al-Shabaab in Somalia or Boko Haram in Nigeria to Al Nusra and ISIS in Syria. By any objective measure there are way more Bin Ladenite terrorist groups today than there were in 2001.

Second,

The United States would dearly love to do exactly what we did in Iraq -- depose the Ba'ath party, kill Assad, and install a new regime that has nominally acceptable relations with the West -- or at least, do what we did in Libya and allow the opposition forces to form a new government.  But we can't do that because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Russia backs the Assad regime.

In Iraq the US installed a puppet of Iran, America's top geopolitical opponent in the region, with the primary opposition of said Iranian puppets being the top anti-American insurgent leader of 2006. Libya is a failed state to this day, a one stop shop for jihadis to get ordinance and slaves, plus the primary source of migrants flowing into Europe that are destabilizing the whole continent. I'm not sure why America would dearly love to hand a country over to its worst enemy or to create a power vacuum that damages its allies but I guess you don't have many examples of American foreign policy success to point to so you have to make do with what you've got. Syria itself is basically a combination of both: it's a failed state and it's largely under the control of America's worst enemies.

Also, the "ISIS disproves basic counterinsurgency theory" is nonsense because ISIS wasn't some deep rooted local insurgency at all, it was a glorified looter gang empowered by the CIA flooding Syria with weapons and the USAF bombing Assad into oblivion. Remove either factor and ISIS ceases to exist outside of a few lone wolf terrorists. The RSF in Sudan is more like ISIS than Hamas is and unlike Hamas you probably could destroy the RSF by just bombing them.

EDIT: Also the "Taliban only won because of Pakistani smuggling" argument is pure cope, the Taliban had connections to and weapons from the ISI in 2001 and they weren't in control of almost half the country. Twenty years later and pretty much everything including former Northern Alliance territory is theirs. That isn't because of smuggling but because America picked the most depraved, corrupt and shortsighted warlords as puppets, thereby creating support for the Taliban in every corner of the country. Talk about disproving your own point.

[Indy Texas]

Imo what's needed isn't less Israeli involvement in Gaza, it's better Israeli involvement. Israeli quasi-withdrawal was a step backwards despite it having some positive effects. Israel defeating Hamas now would be good but not at the cost of 80% of it demolished without replacement and/or the settler faction that is actually the biggest existential risk to the State of Israel becoming more powerful.

Ultimately what is needed is a willing partner in the Palestinians.

Israel is not going to allow Gaza to become a modern, advanced, self-sufficient state if they have good reason to believe the Palestinians would immediately turn around and make use of that generosity to try, once again, to exterminate the Jews.

The most likely scenario is that Israel turns Gaza into a heavily-restricted police state just like the West Bank, where violent conspiracies are quickly snuffed out and military groups have no real hope of organizing themselves to the extent necessary to mount even a symbolic attack.

It's nice to think that with a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance, the Gazans might come around to the idea that actually the Jews are alright.  But there's also a very real chance that a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance is actually just Israel giving them the chance to organize, fortify and re-arm.  Especially given that the hatred is as much cultural as it is contextual.  After all, the Jews never even did anything to Uganda, but that didn't stop Idi Amin from assisting with the Air France highjacking (Bibi's origin story is that his older brother was killed leading the rescue operation), and saying "Hitler was right to burn six million Jews."  It just goes to show that even when the Jews are as nice as humanly possible to their neighbors, those neighbors will still decide to hate and kill them.  It has happened over and over again throughout history, which is why "Never Again" is Israel's modern unofficial state motto.

In other words, the police state will continue as long as paramilitary organizations threaten to fester the instant Israel lets up.  It's not Israel's fault the Palestinians are addicted to hatred and violence.  It's incumbent upon the Palestinians to knock it off and find a way to assure Israel that they genuinely intend to peacefully coexist.  This is Palestine's responsibility, not Israel's.

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Regardless of what Israel's demographic makeup now is or where more recent immigrants came from, the country was indisputably conceived by and established by people from Europe. Theodore Herzl was born in Hungary; Chaim Weizmann was born in Belarus and spent much of his early life in Germany and the UK; David Ben Gurion was born in Poland. The country's early alliance with the West cemented that image. Consider that even if the Egyptian people had chosen to simply ignore the events of 1947-1949, Israel joined forces with Britain and France to invade their country in 1956. You don't think that wouldn't be incentive enough for them to dislike Israel? The framing of Israel as a symbol of imperialism alongside actual imperial powers couldn't have been clearer.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Quite the opposite, that's exactly my point.  Israel and the Jews didn't do anything to the Ugandans, but Uganda, a landlocked central African country the size of Nevada, which has absolutely nothing to do with Israel and lies 5000km away, for some reason looked at Britain taking 12% of Mandatory Palestine/Transjordan and denoting it for a Jewish state, and said "this is a horrible thing that affects us, and we're going to get really really mad about it.  So mad that we're going to aid a terrorist group that hijacks an airplane and takes 100+ hostages."

Why do we just accept this as some inevitable thing?  Why should we have to pretend this is a reasonable opinion for a state to hold?  Is it not utterly bizarre and horrible?  Why should Uganda care at all about which Levantine ethnic groups get land claims in the British section of the former Ottoman Empire?

Regardless of what Israel's demographic makeup now is or where more recent immigrants came from, the country was indisputably conceived by and established by people from Europe. Theodore Herzl was born in Hungary; Chaim Weizmann was born in Belarus and spent much of his early life in Germany and the UK; David Ben Gurion was born in Poland. The country's early alliance with the West cemented that image.

Well, Israel was originally mostly European Jews, but after the establishment of Israel most of the immigration came from the Middle East and North Africa.  But aside from that, we're talking about a Jewish diaspora that was pushed out of Israel over the millennia and ended up in Eastern Europe or Russia or Poland or wherever.

I get what you're saying though, to the Arabs of the region it has the appearance of a bunch of Europeans coming in and saying, this is our land now.  But that's not even what happened.  The Jews legally purchased land under the laws of the Ottoman Empire.  They're no different than any other immigrant group.  When Irish-Americans came to America, legally under our immigration laws, and purchased land here (also legally), was that imperialism?  Was that colonialism?  No, it was just some people who wanted to live in America finding a legal way to do it, en masse.  The Ashkenazi Jews of the early 20th century, legally immigrating to a barren desert in the outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, were no different.

This is putting aside the fact that, again, these were not just a bunch of random European dudes, they were the diaspora of a people who were native to the land thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled.  That doesn't directly give them the right to be there, but even if they had not come there legally, it would not be colonialism.

Consider that even if the Egyptian people had chosen to simply ignore the events of 1947-1949, Israel joined forces with Britain and France to invade their country in 1956. You don't think that wouldn't be incentive enough for them to dislike Israel? The framing of Israel as a symbol of imperialism alongside actual imperial powers couldn't have been clearer.

Israel's attacks on Egypt were because Egypt threatened Israel with annihilation.  Israel saw these attacks as a proactive form of self-defense.  Both the Suez Crisis and the Six-Days War were preceded by large arms build-ups and mobilizations on the Egyptian side, rhetoric promising the conquest and annihilation of Israel, and Egyptian actions to restrict Israeli trade.  If Egypt hadn't done these things I doubt Israel would have attacked Egypt.  Yet you blame Israel for the conflicts.  This is what always happens with Israel!  The Arabs are held to absolutely no standard whatsoever, while all the consequences of violence that Israel is forced into get blamed on Israel.

[Birdish]

There appears to have been actual progress towards a ceasefire deal in Paris.

From the multiple sources I've read, Hamas has softened some of there demands. Most importantly: the amount of prisoners they want released and a full IDF withdrawal.

Let's hope for a peaceful Ramadan and beyond that, a peaceful Passover in April.