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Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

reuters.com

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Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#731

Post by sgt »

GordonS wrote: post #642
wqaatwt wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Zionists are capable of establishing and running a democratic state (however flawed according to some it might be). It would be silly to pretend that’s even remotely close to being an option for Hamas. For starters modern Islamic fundamentalism is inherently incompatible with democracy (amongst other reasons). Expecting that organizations like Hamas could somehow magically change for the better is pure madness…

Hamas is not an Islamic fundamentalist organisation. They are Muslims, but they have not twisted the religion for extremism; they are not ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

That may not be - but they are not just muslims (some would argue not even proper muslims due to the atrocities). They are definitely a terrorist organization. Whether that is done with religion in mind or something else, doesn't change that fact. I mean looking back at the Oct 7 terrorist attack, it's truly despicable.

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#732

Post by pachico »

Don't think I'm taking sides. I'm trying to simply look at it from a neutral bird point of view.

I think this cease fire somehow legitimises, to the public eye, Netanyahu's strategy of intense attack.

It gives the message of "we won't stop until we get the hostages back" and gives the world a reminder of what this is all about, at least according to what he claims.

Again, just trying to observe the message

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#733

Post by pjc50 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #601
xg15 wrote: post #21

Everything else aside, this is an absolutely fantastic development and I really hope the ceasefire holds and all hostages are released. I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruin…

> His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire Only Nixon could go to China [1]. To the degree the Israel-Palestine war could have helped America, it already has. Hezbollah has given way to a power-sharing government in Lebanon. Syria, miraculously, is a wild card-…

> To the degree the Israel-Palestine war could have helped America, it already has.

Fifty thousand people are dead, many of whom were underage, and most of the universities and hospitals in Gaza are destroyed. Like the Iraq war or Tianamen Square, this is something people are going to keep bringing up for decades.

Syria is arguably the only good outcome, and it's not clear whether that was anything to do with Israel/US action at all?

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#735

Post by taleodor »

panick21_ wrote: post #684
reissbaker wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (aka, Jews who never left the Middle East), at 45% of the population [1]. This isn't about Europeans, or even "race": Mizrahi Jews and their Palestinian neighbors are racially indistinguishable. Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews. [2] Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-an…

Yes and the reason many of the Mizrahi are in Israel and not in all the other places is the Zionists.

[flagged]

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#736

Post by presentation »

istjohn wrote: post #399
DiscourseFan wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but Hezbollah and Hamas caused enough grievances on their own. They were violent, far-right, Iran-backed terrorists that suppressed any sort of grassroots self-organization. Isreal wanted them there, they were easy to control, easy to use as an excuse to do whatever they pleased. I doubt the youth of Gaza or Lebanon are stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice.

I doubt the Palestinian people are going to just sit and watch Israel slowly usurp what remains of their homeland. It's never a good idea to underestimate the price a people are willing to pay for their freedom. The French learned that in Algeria, the British in Ireland, and the US in Veitnam.

The difference is that Israelis don’t have another country to leave to.

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#737

Post by crabbone »

xg15 wrote: post #21

Everything else aside, this is an absolutely fantastic development and I really hope the ceasefire holds and all hostages are released. I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruin…

> Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".

Israel doesn't want to annex Yehuda and Shomron (the place you call West Bank). This is a complete misunderstanding of the people in the West about Israeli politics. Israel wants to have nothing to do with Arab population. Never wanted it, and doesn't see it wanting it in the future. It's completely antithetical to what the absolute majority of Israeli population (and the politicians who represent it) want.

The reason why Israel holds that territory is that after one of the wars, Israel tried to use it as a bargaining chip to convince its Arab neighbors to recognize Israel as a country and to sign a peace treaty, once the territory is returned (so-called "land for peace" series of UN treaties). But, the Arab neighbors outsmarted Israel by abandoning their people in occupied territories, and, essentially, handing Israel an armed grenade that it now has no idea what to do with.

With respect to this problem, Israel has different approaches to its solution, that range from the "transfer" (the idea that Israel will force / subsidize the Arab population to migrate out of the occupied territories, this is the extreme right-wing position, assassinated "Gandhi" was one of the major proponents of it.) to the two-state solution on the far left, where Israel makes territorial concessions, esp. in Jerusalem and around.

But there's no political force that wants annexation (including the population), and nobody would realistically dare to vanquish / force to move the whole population of Gaza / Yehuda and Shomron. Of course, you could probably find some oddball idiot declaring "death to all Arabs" or similar, but they don't hold any real political power. But even these people wouldn't want annexation if it meant they have to put up with the people from annexed territories.

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#738

Post by presentation »

gravisultra wrote: post #296
boringg wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a good development. Everything in this part of the world is on a rinse snd repeat cycle ever since the Assyrians and the Babylonians - it hasn't changed much except maybe its actually a little more humane then it was in the past (which says something). Sorry for the cynical take but this just does a temporary stop.

That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of European settlers via Zionism. It's easy to wave our hands and say "it's so complicated!" or "they've been doing this for thousands of years!" but it's not complicated, much like apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not complicated. Colonialis…

That’s cool and all but the Israelis are in Israel already, there’s no turning back the clock on Zionism without the mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to.

Palestinians have a legitimate historical claim and so do Israelis. They’re exactly that, historical. If both sides can’t let those be history, it’s either eternal conflict or the elimination of one of them.

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#739

Post by pron »

gravisultra wrote: post #296
boringg wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is a good development. Everything in this part of the world is on a rinse snd repeat cycle ever since the Assyrians and the Babylonians - it hasn't changed much except maybe its actually a little more humane then it was in the past (which says something). Sorry for the cynical take but this just does a temporary stop.

That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of European settlers via Zionism. It's easy to wave our hands and say "it's so complicated!" or "they've been doing this for thousands of years!" but it's not complicated, much like apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not complicated. Colonialis…

Ethnocentric racism is never good and it is, indeed, rampant in Israel, but it's hard to compare European colonialism to Zionism for a few reasons. The cultural and historical affinity of Jews, including Jews residing in Europe, was nothing like that of Europeans to the Americas, Africa, or East Asia. For well over a millennium Jews were praying for a return to Zion three times a day, even after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its later conquest (from the Byzantine Empire) by the Arab Islamic Empire, there have been many (small) migrations of Jews to the area [1], there has been an uninterrupted (small) presence of Jews there, and Jews in Europe were considered "racially" oriental "semites". Unlike European-style settler- or exploitation colonialism, there wasn't any metropole to Zionism, in the name of which colonisation was taking place. Finally, the bigger migration by modern Zionism in the time of the Ottoman Empire (that is when this conflict started, not under the Brits, who came into the picture -- after Tel Aviv was a city), came as a result of difficulties the Jews experienced in Europe and the Russian Empire, and certainly not on behalf of those powers.

That's not to say that Israel (like all countries in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand) isn't a form of settler colonialism [1], sometimes openly and consciously so, but it is different from European colonialism (and in some respects it can be different for the worse, at least compared to some specific European colonies).

So yes, some things are simple, but your comparisons to things that were quite different actually shows how other things are not so simple. But it is precisely because history is often complex and almost never easily generalisable that I hate using it either as moral justification or condemnation of present events. I don't think that the fact both Arabs and Jews came to the Levant through migration and conquest (even according to both culture's own national mythology) has any bearing on present moral responsibility. In the end, as you say, ethnocentric nationalism is just wrong.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism

Re: Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza

#740

Post by presentation »

SurgicalDoc_UK wrote: post #699
xg15 wrote: post #21

Everything else aside, this is an absolutely fantastic development and I really hope the ceasefire holds and all hostages are released. I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruin…

Exactly. This war has really messed up the world and Israel for generations to come. Never mind the devastation in Gaza. But the Palestinians cant keep living under occupation. Everyone should continue to exert pressure for a free Palestine or the cycle will continue. The fundamental goal of the current Israeli government is to never have a Palestinian state, which will always be a major barrier unless sanctions are…

My understanding is that decades past when Israeli liberals tried being nice to Palestine and letting them self govern they were rewarded with more bombings and conflict. It isn’t a politically tenable position in Israel anymore to let Palestine (and Lebanon) “just be,” and that’s equally the fault of Palestinian behavior as it is Israel’s.

I am sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, but the truth of the matter is that Israel has a valid claim too and military superiority to back it. If Palestine is to self govern, it and the rest of the nations around it need to convince Israel that they won’t try to wipe Israel off the map (or, alternatively, to succeed at it, which I’m sure many Western protesters would celebrate). Until then Israel will just dominate them instead.

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