Has The Israeli Goverment BecomeThe Monster?

[GoblinCampFollower]

This apparently represents only 10% of the existing British arms export licences to Israel.

Thanks. it bugs me when headlines are written in a way that tells you nothing about how big the number really is.... see that too much.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

US charges Hamas leader, other militants in connection with Oct. 7 massacre in Israel

The Justice Department has announced criminal charges against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other militants in connection with the Oct. 7 rampage in Israel.

apnews.com

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Sadly, I think you're right. Any chance at a two-state solution has been blown right out the window.

Lets not forget, Israel has offered peace many times in years past, only to have it come to naught. The only satisfactory solution as far as Hamas is concerned is the obliteration of Israel.
Why doesn't Egypt open its borders to the poor Palestinians? It won't because they know better than to let Hamas into their country.
No one else has suggested this, and of course I have no proof, but part of me suspects Israel "let" Oct 7 happen, to justify the response they made. If the end result is the complete removal of every last Palestinian from Gaza, it would be justified.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

I don't want to go into the whole history of the Arab Jew conflict because it won't be pretty

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Why doesn't Egypt open its borders to the poor Palestinians? It won't because they know better than to let Hamas into their country.

Some of what you said was a little extreme, but it is very telling that the nearby Muslim countries have no interest in taking in Palestinian refugees but will happily fund Hamas and give lip service to their "cause." Iran is obviously the worst offender.

No one else has suggested this, and of course I have no proof, but part of me suspects Israel "let" Oct 7 happen, to justify the response they made. If the end result is the complete removal of every last Palestinian from Gaza, it would be justified.

A few people have suggested in this thread that Israel "knew" Oct 7th would happen. My response is that it likely was drowning in false warnings so the hindsight bias is powerful here.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Why doesn't Egypt open its borders to the poor Palestinians? It won't because they know better than to let Hamas into their country.

It's a bit more complicated than that, I think. For one thing, the current Israeli government would probably be only too pleased to drive the entire population of Gaza into Egypt, given half the chance, and all the Palestinians on the West Bank into Jordan, thus making them all someone else's problem.

Quite how the receiving nations world cope with having to house and find jobs for all these displaced Palestinians is another question -- you'll correct me if I'm mistaken, but I understand that absorbing refugees and asylum seekers is a somewhat contentious issue in the US at the moment, and the US is considerably larger and wealthier than either Jordan or Egypt.

According to a recent report by the European Council on Foreign Relations,

there are serious doubts on Egypt’s ability to absorb Palestinian refugees even if it chose – or was forced – to do so. The country hosts around 9 million refugees and migrants from more than a hundred nationalities. Somewhere between 70,000 and 135,000 are Palestinian, most of whom arrived as a result of the Nakba in 1948 and the subsequent war between Israel and Arab states in 1967. Palestinian refugees live in legal limbo as they are denied refugee status both from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which does not operate in Egypt, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose mandate does not cover Palestinians. This has turned them into an “invisible” population left to fend for themselves through informal networks and by tapping into existing social structures. This means Egypt has little ability to host Palestinians.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This apparently represents only 10% of the existing British arms export licences to Israel.

It seems our previous government sat on the legal advice. It's important to remember that under British law, the government is obliged to refuse export licences for weapons under certain circumstances, and this appears to be one of them.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Quite how the receiving nations world cope with having to house and find jobs for all these displaced Palestinians is another question...

Iran could take decent care of them with the money they are giving Hamas. I know they wouldn't, but just saying, it would be possible. They are willing to stir the pot in the name of helping those people but actually help those people.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Iran could take decent care of them with the money they are giving Hamas. I know they wouldn't, but just saying, it would be possible. They are willing to stir the pot in the name of helping those people but actually help those people.

Come to that, the US could take decent care of the Palestinians by resettling them all in the US with the money they're giving Israel, and most Palestinians would probably prefer that to moving to Iran.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

For that matter there was talk of resettling the displaced Jews from Europe in the US after WWII but fuck no they couldn't do that.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Quite how the receiving nations world cope with having to house and find jobs for all these displaced Palestinians is another question -- you'll correct me if I'm mistaken, but I understand that absorbing refugees and asylum seekers is a somewhat contentious issue in the US at the moment, and the US is considerably larger and wealthier than either Jordan or Egypt.

The thing is that Kingdom of Jordan mostly consists of Palestines already, 50% of the population there are of Palestinian heritage. So going there could be quite the logical choice for some.

Issue is so the people want to stay in the long term where they are. They will not abandon it.

 

[BilliJo Aldrin]

Come to that, the US could take decent care of the Palestinians by resettling them all in the US with the money they're giving Israel, and most Palestinians would probably prefer that to moving to Iran.

LOL and you think all would be peace and harmony in the middle east if all the Palestinians moved to America? It would be better for Israel if they did, because Israel could annex Gaza and the East Bank once for all. That won't placate Israels other enemies, we will still have to support Israel.
Probably 90% of the Palestinians would never accept the offer, they prefer being martys to the anti-Jewish cause. Hamas is Gaza, and Gaza is Hamas. The Jews need to permanently occupy Gaza and keep it locked down tight. They withdrew from Gaza years ago, gave the people there the chance to live free and prosper, buts its been unrest from there ever since.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

LOL and you think all would be peace and harmony in the middle east if all the Palestinians moved to America? It would be better for Israel if they did, because Israel could annex Gaza and the East Bank once for all. That won't placate Israels other enemies, we will still have to support Israel.
Probably 90% of the Palestinians would never accept the offer, they prefer being martys to the anti-Jewish cause. Hamas is Gaza, and Gaza is Hamas. The Jews need to permanently occupy Gaza and keep it locked down tight. They withdrew from Gaza years ago, gave the people there the chance to live free and prosper, buts its been unrest from there ever since.

I wasn't suggesting it's a good idea, any more than I think it would be any sort of solution for Iran to resettle the Palestinians there.

That's for the same reason I never thought that the solution to the NI Troubles was to relocate all the Catholics to the Republic or all the Protestants to the mainland UK. People live where they live, and when they relocate they want it to be because that's the choice they've made for them and their families, not because they're forced to.

On humanitarian grounds, I wish all countries would offer resettlement to Palestinians (and other displaced people) who want it, but as the second half the C20th amply demonstrated, both in Europe immediately after WW2 and in many parts of the former British Empire during decolonisation, trying to solve problems by forcing large numbers of people to relocate whether they want to or not, like so many pieces on a game board, is a pretty grim business.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Come to that, the US could take decent care of the Palestinians by resettling them all in the US with the money they're giving Israel, and most Palestinians would probably prefer that to moving to Iran.

The point wasn't that we should relocate them, the point was that money isn't the reason near by arabic countries aren't taking in Palestinians. They are willing to spend a lot of money to stir the pot, but not to help.

I wasn't suggesting it's a good idea, any more than I think it would be any sort of solution for Iran to resettle the Palestinians there.

That's for the same reason I never thought that the solution to the NI Troubles was to relocate all the Catholics to the Republic or all the Protestants to the mainland UK. People live where they live, and when they relocate they want it to be because that's the choice they've made for them and their families, not because they're forced to.

On humanitarian grounds, I wish all countries would offer resettlement to Palestinians (and other displaced people) who want it, but as the second half the C20th amply demonstrated, both in Europe immediately after WW2 and in many parts of the former British Empire during decolonisation, trying to solve problems by forcing large numbers of people to relocate whether they want to or not, like so many pieces on a game board, is a pretty grim business.

I agree with all of this. People live where they live and relocation is never really a great solution just something that sometimes happens by necessity. I do believe many desperate Palestinians would move to near by arabic countries if the option was open though.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

The thing is the issues with Israel are a unique problem. Palestines and Israel have got both their own founding myths, which greatly contradict each other and are one of the main reasons for the on-going conflict.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The thing is the issues with Israel are a unique problem. Palestines and Israel have got both their own founding myths, which greatly contradict eath other and are one of the main reasons for the on-going conflict.

I don't think it's so much to do with founding myths as it is to do with the fact that the Palestinians had been living there for centuries as subjects of a province of the Ottoman Empire, alongside smaller communities of Jews and Christians, and later under the British Mandate. From the beginning of the C20th they found themselves sharing the country with an increasingly large number of Jews who were legally relocating from Europe, whether for religious reasons or to escape antisemitic violence, and legally buying land from absentee Ottoman landlords. Post WW2 they found themselves, without being consulted about it, citizens of an explicitly Jewish state, with the Jewish population greatly increased by immigrants from Europe, displaced by the Holocaust and post-war boundaries, and by Jews expelled from various North African and Middle Eastern states by their respective governments.

Many of them were driven off their land by the Israeli Army during the fighting of 1947--49, and found themselves forcibly relocated to neighbouring countries which, unlike the European countries (particularly Germany) which also had to resettle whole populations who had been expelled from their homes after the German defeat, didn't try to resettle and integrate them, but gave them the hereditary status of "Palestinian refugee."

This has continued ever since, with Jews emigrating, perfectly legally, to Israel, whether for religious or cultural reasons or because they wanted to escape persecution in the former Soviet Union.

The result is that you've got two communities, each with perfectly valid, and conflicting, claims to the land in which they both live, same as in India during partition, Northern Ireland or the former Yugoslavia.

The problem isn't "founding myths." It's history ("a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," as a noted fictional Irishman once put it).

 

[Cristiano]

I am not surprised by this one bit:

Netanyahu derailed a potential Gaza hostage deal in July, Israeli newspaper reports

 

[detrius]

I don't want to go into the whole history of the Arab Jew conflict because it won't be pretty

 

[Veritable Quandry]

The problem isn't "founding myths." It's history ("a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," as a noted fictional Irishman once put it).

I would say that the problem isn't "history" which is a theoretically objective set of facts and sequence of events so much as "memory" which is how history is reconstructed (not always consciously) by a community for various purposes including understanding their present circumstances and maintaining identity. Obviously there are multiple communities in the area (Israelis, Palestinian, Christians, Bedouins, etc.) who share a history but have very different memories, which is why talking to any of the people on the ground seldom leads to agreement. Then you have outside groups like Evangelical Christians who have there own memory of the region that is further divorced from history but has a religious and increasingly political significance to them.

Pointing at the history does not help because each group has a vastly divergent view of what that is, even when they can agree on events.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I would say that the problem isn't "history" which is a theoretically objective set of facts and sequence of events so much as "memory" which is how history is reconstructed (not always consciously) by a community for various purposes including understanding their present circumstances and maintaining identity. Obviously there are multiple communities in the area (Israelis, Palestinian, Christians, Bedouins, etc.) who share a history but have very different memories, which is why talking to any of the people on the ground seldom leads to agreement. Then you have outside groups like Evangelical Christians who have there own memory of the region that is further divorced from history but has a religious and increasingly political significance to them.

Pointing at the history does not help because each group has a vastly divergent view of what that is, even when they can agree on events.

Well, members of both communities are, individually, residents of Israel for good historical reasons (they were born there, as were their parents and their parents... or they emigrated there legally for reasons that seem good to them). They also have objective reasons for liking or disliking the current political and social setup, depending on how the government and some members of the other community treat them, depending on their religious and ethnic background.