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

I went to school with some first generation Palestinians just 5-ish years ago.

One of them had to miss an entire quarter because Israel just wouldn't allow him to leave. He has never been back to Palestine since then because another detainment or missed visa problem, etc. would derail his career.

>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea; "it's strategically important for us" isn't really sufficient justification for mass murder, and - on a purely geographic point - talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate.

Russia is the largest country on earth, whereas the distance from the West Bank to Tel-Aviv is like 5 miles.

This roughly like arguing that owning a personal nuke is no different from owning a firecracker. The scale of the threats are separated by several orders of magnitude.

>And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?

Because the Palestinians rejected the 1948 borders, started a war, and then lost. Incidentally they also rejected the 1967 borders by starting a war in 1973 and losing that one too, but the consensus around those borders is at least a bit more solidified so people still pretend they're meaningful rather than null-and-void.

The work that has been going on for the past month is systematically destroying every known air defense asset of the Syrian government (and securing a key mountain peak with newly entrenched ground troops) in order to have a permanent air corridor with which to strike Iran.

The Israeli F-35s can get through right now, but they have limited payload and have to rely on slightly dicey refueling arrangements. With Syria under Israeli air cover, they can run tankers right up to western Iran and strike anywhere in the country.

Repeated, unilateral Israeli aggression is the status quo in the region.

>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea;

How many times have Ukranian terrorists murdered a bunch of Russian athletes at the Olympics? Or hijacked a 3rd nation plane carrying Russian tourists and then murdered them? How many bombings have Ukranian extremists carried out in Europe, targeting Russian tourists?

They are not the same arguments.

At all.

Wait, does Ukraine have a long established history of military attacks against Russia?

>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea

The rhetoric may be superficially similar, but facts on the ground aren't. The Russian state is not under an existential threat in the same way that Israel would be with Hezbollah in the north, and a similar entity in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is a tiny nation with a tiny population. Russian and Israel's security issues are simply not comparable.

>talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate

They are linked, and highlight the core problem to Israel - namely - disengagement does not work with a hostile entity.

Israel in 2005 disengaged from Gaza. It wasn't a full disengagement as Israel still exerted control over the airspace and territorial water, but it also wasn't nothing and it was an olive-branch and a big opportunity. Instead it resulted in a Hamas electoral victory, and rocket attacks, and a circle of retaliatory actions from Israel and Hamas. Imagine a world, where post-disengagement there were no attacks from Gaza, no preparation for war and smuggling of weapons into Gaza by Hamas - by this point, where would we be? Would Israel still maintain the same kind of blockade? I just don't think so. I truly believe it would be a model for permanent peace and Palestinian statehood.

>And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?

I mentioned 1967 borders, because as best as I can gather, that is the current Palestinian position. Although it isn't clear exactly what the Palestinian position is as Palestinians do tend to maintain some level of ambiguity on this point.

> If Israel's war is with Iran, why is that war not being carried out in Iran?

It goes the other way actually - Iran is at war with Israel. Iran is using proxies, Hamas, and Hezbollah to strike at Israel.

Egypt implementing a blockade triggered the 1967 conflict. It didn't come from nowhere. Then that was followed up by yet another war against Israel in 1973.

That's part of the problem as well - it's not exactly clear what the Palestinian position is - partly because I think they see things like 'right of return' (which is completely unacceptable to Israel) as bargaining chips to trade for something during negotiations.

Forced displacement is a recognized crime against humanity. Israel forcibly displaced these people, refusing their right of return is a crime.

The fact that we use the term "Settling" and "Settlers" is kind of grotesque. These places are occupied, by Palestinians, who have to be ethnically cleansed (with varying degrees of violence) in order to establish new Israeli Jewish settlements. This is done with Israeli Jewish soldiers, a hundred thousand of whom now patrol hundreds of enclaves and all major routes through the West Bank.

Isreali and US right-wing leaders find a hostile Iran to be extremely politically convenient, and the military-industrial complex that they share with each other and with centrist parties just wants a reason to keep existing. People talk about a potential "War with Iran", but in reality we've given them maybe a dozen different diplomatic casus belli in the past decade, in part to deter them from political moderation.

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-and-soil nationalism, Ashkenazi Jews are firmly within the Middle Eastern/Levantine clade and are more closely related to Palestinians than they are any European group. [3]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews

It is easy to say it's complicated, but you've inadvertently illustrated just how easy it is to say that it's simple too.

Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?

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.

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

That is wrong. There were conflicts before, the Hebron massacre (1929) for example. There was an Arab nationalism and the Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler and planned a middle-eastern Holocaust.

Also, Jews were expelled from surrounding nations when Israel was founded, even more than Palestinians were driven from what now is Israel. There never was any compensation or talk about their right to return and these are not Jews with European ancestry.

Frankly, I think not a single statement of yours is true.

What a pile of nonsense...

Whose colony is Israel? Do you even understand what this word means?

You are just parroting some propaganda lines that you don't understand. The propaganda lines that were specifically constructed to appeal to emotions (by referencing European colonialism that started with exploring Africa and India with subsequent conquest, which did result in many bad things, but has nothing to do with what happened in Israel beyond some superficial similarity).

Colonialism was bad because the colonial powers took freedoms away from the local population, siphoned their wealth to the country-colonizer while devastating the colony's inhabitants. Israel did nothing of sorts. It never wanted to have anything to do with the local population. In fact, one of the major sources of conflict was that Jewish population that came to replace the Turks who owned the land worked by the locals didn't want the locals to work that land anymore. And the landless peasants thus became unemployed / unemployable.

So, Arabs living in Israel used to be servants to the Turks, but once Jews replaced the Turks, and "freed" the Arabs, the later discovered themselves to be useless and without means of sustaining themselves. Not a good spot to be in, but hey, at least now they were "free" (I do use this ironically, I don't think they wanted that kind of freedom). Arabs, of course, thought about former Turkish land as their own (because they used to work it), but it's no more theirs than it is Jewish or whoever else inhabited that area historically.

Bottom line, claiming land based on some historical past that was cancelled by more recent historical events is a road to nowhere. And if you try to follow it, Jews probably have a better claim to that territory than Arabs, who invaded and occupied that territory later.

But, more importantly, today, the conflict isn't even about the land at all. All major players would be willing to make territorial concessions, if the core of the problem was addressed. And people are at the core of the problem, not the land. Something needs to be done with the Arabs inhabiting the occupied territories: they need to get some kind of a political status with an eye to permanency. Either completely abandon the program of building an independent state and join some other country, or the opposite. But neither seems likely. And so the conflict will go on for as long as this issue isn't solved.

True, but Israel could be seen as just the latest Crusade.

Western Europe went through ~200 years of brutal religious wars from the advent of Protestantism. The same is going on in the Mideast, it just started only 100 years ago with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Thank you for providing an educated response to the exhausting "ancient conflict" discourse

> the Levant separated the empires of Mesopotamia and Anatolia from Egypt. The numerous battles that happened at Meggido

The Egyptians were a major force in fomenting regional frictions with Israel. And the Levant remains a crossroad—it borders by land or sea the spheres of influence of the EU, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf monarchies, Egypt and America.

> convincing rulers in the Levant to ally themselves more closely with them at the expense of the Assyrians

Iran versus the West (and Gulf monarchies) in literally Syria.

The region isn’t pre-destined for chaos. But the geography and history make peace difficult. (There is always another person who can “legitimately” claim some land when you’re sited next to the cradle of civilisation.)

The Sunni-Shia conflict falls pretty close to the same line between the Babylonians (south) and Assyrians (north).

The Assyrians were constantly attacked by proxies helped out by Egypt (Elamites, Medes, Babylon).

They literally razed Bablyon to the ground including the entire population after over 15 months being under siege and afterwards trying to change the lands hydrology so that people couldn't resettle - probably one of the harshest destruction but not the only one.

I guess its an improvement - not one thats remotely impressive.

Hmm, what do you mean? Like, compared to ancient times, or compared to a previous point post-WWII?

Certainly the organization of one side of this conflict into a state rather than militias naturally has tempered things since the early days where entire villages were being wiped out at random, but both sides are pretty openly engaged in terrorism to this day (targeting civilians for political reasons).

> It would be nice to see people let go of past injustices on both sides long enough to have a lasting peace

It's not past injustices. Israel is occupying, annexing and settling more land now. It's not some tit-for-tat between neighbours over past wrongs, it's one neighbour that is chasing away the other to take their house.

Not to sound terse, but I think the retort here is clear: morality exists, and it's important that we do our best to follow its guidance. It matters who's right and who's wrong! I absolutely agree that deciding on absolute historical blame for one "side" or another over many generations isn't helpful, but we absolutely need to litigate who's violating whose rights if we want to set things straight.

"It's all complicated and people in this part of the world are unusually tribal/violent" has been used to explain away this conflict since its inception in the US, which we have no right to do as a primary stakeholder. We (US citizens) have a stake in Gaza because the situation would be completely different without our aid, both direct (i.e. massive shipments of weapons and offering the services of our military) & indirect (i.e. using our UNSC vote to block otherwise unanimous resolutions against Israel).

To bring it all back to the one absolutely-litigated conflict in the western canon for clarity, as we so often do: was WWII about "tribalism" and both sides being prone to violence, or was it about unjustified aggressors and justified responses? Despite the nuances of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think we would all immediately endorse the latter position. Why not in this case, too?

Letting go of past injustices might work, if they weren't ongoing.

> almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight

This is a common Zionist take saying that just because someone is not from the region, they cannot criticise Israel's mass slaughter of children. Also, this has very much to do with American politics, as the US is the main backer of the apartheid state.

I count myself fortunate for missing the references to US politics, but seeing oppression and war discussed with a framing of "who should win" as a dispute of claims, history and ethnicity rather than as a tragedy of money, military power and cruelty (what is the problem that is solved by bombing children?) is very disheartening.

> I like how even in this thread, you have many people - almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity

> I like how even in this thread, you have many people - almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight

A popular chant is "The children of Gaza is our children too." Israel has killed up to 5% of Gaza's population and injured ~15%, about half of whom are children. It's not tribalism to be disgusted by such carnage. I don't agree with the claim that we don't have a stake in this fight.

My friend, its tribalism all the way down. Thats what we do.

What the hell does your statement have to do with the very real, practical natures of the governments and political organizations of neighboring countries and lined up against Israel through a number of ideological arguments?

I'm not talking about monoliths on either side. I'm specifically referring to states in the region with authoritarian and even despotic governments with exactly the traits that the comment I originally responded to claims about Israel.

I could name a dozen Arab leaders who were assassinated by Arabs for expressing interests in making peace with Israel. If we start looking them up I wager we'll get to two dozen.

Because all Israelis are the same? A right extremist assassin murdered Rabin. Even among the right he was almost universally condemned. Keep in mind Rabin was democratically elected on the promise of Peace.

it proves nothing. the vast majority of Israelis condemn the murder.

Who were Anwar Sadat and King Abdullah I, and how did they die?

Because it's a cultural arms race. What kind of nation do you think is capable of manifesting in those local conditions, a progressive social democracy like Sweden?

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 regardless of everything else.

> the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is temporal

No, it isn’t. Very few revolutions (i.e power inversions) have succeeded by indiscriminately killing the dominant side’s civilians. That frequency, moreover, goes down over time.

Oh it's a temporary 42 day one :c. I assumed it was permanent and that Hamas would not give away all their leverage (the hostages) in exchange for only a pause in the fighting.

No, you're right - they just wore them down.

To: "But you can't "take" a deal your counterparty refuses.", I meant that, several times there were articles saying a ceasefire was near, negotiated by a third party, and in those it has been Israel rejecting it for being permanent and not temporary.

> Why are you using scare quotes for "terrorists"?

The scare quotes are for Likud+ and/or the IDF.

Yes, repeatedly. For example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2023_Gaza%E2%80%93Israel...

Here is a longer list where I found this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Israeli_attacks_aga...

That’s great but all you have done is basically kick the can down the line and killed many innocent people in the process.

It’s not like you haven wiped out Iran permanently (not advocating for this obviously, I’m Iranian!) or achieved anything of significance really, perhaps Iran has been slightly weakened, though even that remains to be seen depending on what happens with Syria, or have lost any major allies permanently.

You are naive if you think the infrastructure wont be rebuild with their allies and networks won’t be established, all it takes is time, funding and support which now they have plenty of thanks to Israelis actions.

This isn’t the same celebration you should be having like Russians have just marched in Berlin in WWII.

I suppose the good news is that bloodshed will stop (hopefully) for a few years and a stable long term solution can be figured out meanwhile.

I am fine with calling killing Hezbollah operatives bad-ass and am comfortable with the implications. Hezbollah is (was?) very bad, most especially if you were a Sunni in Syria. Fuck those guys. People should stop developing parasocial relationships with monsters.

All of my Lebanese friends, quite young, have stories about the wars with Israel. The helicopters and bombs over Beirut. Waking up in fear in the night. They have been grieved in regards to Israel their whole life. In this respect not much has changed.

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.

Also hundreds of millions of people outside of the Middle East who now very much do not support Israel. They've lost any goodwill they may have had and that's an understatement.

For context:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...

> None of this was a secret. In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1226691760/the-long-and-bitte...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Use_...

There's even a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to documenting Israel's decades long support for Hamas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas

Damn if you do damned if you don’t.

Israel approved money from Qatar to flow into Gaza as a goodwill, trust establishing gesture, and as part of previous ceasefire agreements. It was supposedly used to pay salaries for the Gaza government. Was it wrong in hindsight? Of course. Was it used to create division? No.

The “briefcases full of cash” began flowing into Gaza in the mid-2010s, IIRC. Hamas had been in power in Gaza for around a decade at that point.

> As the Hamas leadership pointed out, this objective failed.

Israel's objective from day one has not been to expel Hamas from Gaza (that's virtually impossible), but to remove it from power. And if the rumors about the ceasefire are true (and if the ceasefire is going to be respected), that's what's going to happen.

Gazans will probably attack again, but Israel will not be caught by surprise for at least a generation.

Disagree. Israel historically was in a worse state. The U.S. didn’t always support Israel. Additionally Israel, a nation of Jews, has seen its people in much, much, much, worse. Including pre 49.

This is just even remotely close to being true. 1948 was as weak as they have ever been. They're stronger now then they've been in a long time. I wouldn't be surprised to see diplomatic recognition with Saudi Arabia and Lebanon in the next few years.

Very well said, it's amazing how many people don't see this.

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Yes reading about the insecurity of the military outposts near the border, one only filled with all-female 20yr old comms people and only a couple guards with rifles, another base full of unarmed students in training, and the general slow response of some of the QRF was pretty shocking. Proper military response took hours to show up in some cases. It's not like the giant Ukraine border, it should be easier to manage. But I'm no expert...

A good first step for border security would be to declare where those borders are.

Did you know that Gaza has shopping malls and waterfront resorts? Did you know that Israel had been opening up more and more jobs for Palestinians within Israel? Until they decided to throw all that progress away on October 7th.

Yet, over a million israelis left, and their media complains about it. And yet, we see the pride of the Palestinian people in them facing one of the most brutal regimes in history, they stand tall and strong.

Aid to Germany after World War II under the Marshall Plan totaled $14 billion ($60 billion in today’s value), averaging $272 per capita across participating nations over four years. In contrast, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have received $1,330 per capita since 1993, or $161 annually, more than twice the per-capita annual aid under the Marshall Plan

... after they unconditionally surrender.

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It was always about ethnic cleansing. Either they get away with it or somebody stops them.

Haven't you seen and heard from the zionist figures about how they are now claiming that Lebanon and parts of Saudi Arabia are theirs?

If Israeli goals really were to displace Palestinians, maybe they'd start within Israel proper first?

That is not likely to happen. Arabs with Israeli citizenship (who may or may not identify as “Palestinian”) are only like 20% of the population. Palestinians without Israeli citizenship are not allowed to live in Israel except in some edge cases like people in East Jerusalem which was annexed.

Israel is never going to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and give the people there full citizenship rights, instead they will continue carving up the WB with Jewish-only settlements that are in practice part of Israel but not officially annexed and which Palestinians are not allowed to live in.

They neighboring countries are allowed sovereignty by the west with the condition that they do what Israel tells them to do

The former solves the problem but isn't really on the table. The later doesn't settle the question. Both sides would have to come up with a mutually agreeable solution and that isn't on the table.

> false. Hannibal directive has nothing to do with hostages

Weird, The IDF says it's indeed about kidnapped hostages: [1]

> the General Staff Directive for Contending with Kidnapping Attempts (also known as the "Hannibal" Directive) was initiated, meaning a number of actions necessary to locate and rescue kidnapped soldiers were put into effect.

Why would you even try to lie about its purpose when it's well known and documented?

[1] https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/military-advocate-general-s...

[2] Origin of Hannibal directive by Haaretz: http://archive.today/romMZ

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Especially since Netanyahu was trying to revive Hamas prior to Hamas's attack, in order to starve off Fatah's Palestinian recognition efforts at the UN, according to the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... )

Turn on Israeli TV and they're showing the IDF raping prisoners in Sde Teiman. Degenerate behavior from the self-described Jewish state. The US taxpayer is paying the bills for all this bloodshed.

>IDF or Likud

The IDF and Likud does not have a policy of attacking civilians to achieve political or war goals.

They likely have some deranged and radicalized commanders who do this anyway, but it's not the organizational policy.

I know you are being downvoted (not by me). This is a good question, if all the context and history is removed, and we are only looking at who killed more.

I am trying to respond in good faith, but it looks like Hamas is accepted across the world as a terrorist organization for specifically targeting civilians. And as much as I loathe the loss of civilian life at the hands of IDF, this is not a conventional war, and Hamas hiding within civilian populations and tunneling under hospitals is on Hamas and not on IDF. Like it happened in history a million times, Hamas could've surrendered against a superior enemy and and returned hostages, to protect its own citizens.

So, that's why Hamas must cease to exist. Not Palestine itself, nor another government in Palestine - just Hamas. They could've stopped it, they didn't.

Let me know when IDF/Likud behave like this unprovoked (Yes, I know what's going on in West bank and its not remotely close to what Hamas did)

Hamas is a designated terrorist organization by the US, EU, and others. Their stated purpose is to destroy Israel, and their founding charter including language about killing all Jews. They started this war by massacring over a thousand civilians, injuring thousands more, and kidnapping hundreds. They killed people brutally - beheadings with dull tools, rapes, burning people alive. They also continued launching tens of thousands rockets at Israeli civilians for the duration of the war, though it was basically not reported. If Israel did not have the world's best rocket defense, there would be tens of thousands more dead Israeli civilians.

IDF is the military branch of an actual state. Likud is a political party. Neither advocate for indiscriminate killing of civilians (though some Likud politicians might, just like the US or any other nation has crazy politicians).

"Right to exist" is granted either through law or force. Hamas doesn't have law, doesn't exist within a functioning state, and is illegal by the laws of most nations. IDF isn't.

If you actually think there's a moral equivalence between the IDF and Hamas, or that Hamas is somehow the moral group here, you really need to learn more. Stop consuming social media, stop reading things on the internet, go buy some books from a diverse array of sources, both pro-Israel and anti-Israel, and maybe you can gleam the truth out of there. It's not a guarantee, but it's your best shot.

I really think the TikTok age has amplified insanity where we actually have people asking, "Why does a military get to exist but not terrorists?".

For anyone who needs a reminder of how this war started (warning, extremely graphic / not suitable for life): https://www.hamas-massacre.net/

Hamas is a terrorist, Islamist organization with the explicit goal of genocide against Israelis: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/10/ha...

The blood of the Palestinian civilians that Hamas waged war from behind is absolutely on Hamas's hands.

I mean, realistically speaking, the IDF is a powerful force, while Hamas is not. Israel has the ability to completely take over Gaza, but Gaza does not have the ability to take over Israel. So, as macabre as it may be, Hamas' right to exist, technically speaking, is controlled by Israel.

(All of this assuming no outside intervention for 3rd-party nations or groups of nations, of course.)

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>This was genocide

Please don't abuse this word. If Israel was conducing genocide there wouldn't be Arab Israelis, and the population of Gaza would not grow over time.

Ethnic cleansing and insufficient proportionality consideration, likely. Not genocide. The Israelis don't want to remove Palestinians from the face of the earth, they want political and physical safety for the Jews, and history has worked out such that they feel they need an Jewish-majority ethnostate.

Which countries are in is this non-aligned world?

Please be careful when using the word genocide

Gaza population: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1422981/gaza-total-popul...

Jews in before/after WW2 in Germany: 500k before, 200k after, 100k now. 6M European jews killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany

What Palestinians went through in the last 15 months is grotesque and unforgivable, but their "elected government" could have completely avoided this.

China gained even more from this genocidal spree & exercise in ignoring international law. BRICS got a new lease on life. And NDB is shaping up to be a legitimate competitor to the IMF.

Israel's actions in the last 75 years simply cannot be compared to genocide in any rational sense of the word. The number of Palestinians has been rising steadily for decades and life expectancy for Palestinians has been increasing as well. Israel has not killed two million or three million or five million Palestinians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_P...

Everything that happened since October 7th was avoidable. You can't expect to murder 1200 Israelis in this fashion and think nothing will happen. It would only invite more murders and more murders.

In in the modern age ethnostates are distasteful, why can't we all just get along etc, but the Jewish Israelis argue that history has shown they are not safe in other countries and need a state they have political control over.

So basically all Islamic states in the world as well?

You're welcome to try, but I do not believe you will get far.

That's the thing with militaries. You kind of have to overpower them in order to get rid of them.

It helps to have the backing of the US.

> officially be labelled as genocidal

By whom, legions of anti-American people on the internet?

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Thank you very much! This is helpful!

Wow. Bibi claiming Hamas is not accepting the agreement. Typical

You are aware, I hope, that Gaza is not in the West Bank?

The west bank has borders with Jordan and Israel.

Gaza has borders with Egypt and Israel.

Israel indeed never pulled from the West Bank, and sadly, it does let settlers live there. But it did not grow the taken area. And when Israel pulled from Gaza, it removed the settlers.

Yes, that is true that Israel pulled back from Gaza completely in 2005, removing its settlers in the process.

Gaza and the West Bank are distinct.

Israel never pulled back from the West Bank, but that part of the occupation is the same size as it was in 1967. The West Bank occupation did not grow smaller (nor did it grow larger - it's the same size). Sadly, Israel does let settlers settle there, but if an agreement is ever reached, they will likely be removed like those in Gaza.

Can you find, on the map, an area which was not occupied by Israel in 1968, but was occupied on Oct 6 2023 (before the Hamas attack on Israel which prompted Israel's re-occupation of Gaza in 2023-2024?)

Some are being relocated inside the West Bank, which is horrible, heinous and possibly a war crime, but they remain within the (occupied since 1967) west bank.

And settler = occupant

Israel is occupying the West Bank in the same way that it did since 1967. That occupation did not grow larger (or smaller).

The policies are heinous, possibly war crimes.

But Israel did also occupy Sinai and Gaza, and no longer does (well, it didn't until 7-oct-2023, at which point, Gaza opened a full fledged war which prompted Israel to re-occupy Gaza)

It still occupies the West Bank, and may or may not continue to do so, may or may not annex it. Prediction is very hard, especially about the future.

Can you show me, on the map, an area which was not occupied by Israel in 1968, but was occupied 6-oct-2023? Because I can show you the opposite.

Probably the most efficient way of creating multiple generations of anger and hate is letting a radical terrorist movement control 2 million people, which can completely mold the education curriculum and free to draft anyone to their quasi-army

So whatever it has done, it cannot possibly be worse than pre-war

This is the narrative that the extremists want to push, but it’s hardly the truth. Hamas was not some grassroots movement of frustrated Palestinians. It was an Iranian proxy force masterminded, funded, supplied, trained, and instructed by Iran.

There are certainly many angry Palestinians before and after but this is foreign meddling through and through. Hamas would not exist in this form and have done the things that it did otherwise.

They already hated Israel. So much that they attacked them and started this war in the first place. I doubt Israel is any worse off in terms of being hated than they were before the war.

Hamas is not a rational actor. Their stated goal is to destroy Israel and kill every Jew. That's it. There is no scenario in which they are going to stop hating Israel. They don't care if every Palestinian also gets killed, if they get to destroy Israel it's worth it to them.

There are multiple generations of hate in the West Bank as well. Israel isn't threaten by them as much as they have much more difficulty accumulating weapons.

> Israel has likely also created multiple generations of anger and hate against themselves

Israel would have created multiple generations of emboldened anger and hate against themselves if they failed to respond to the massacre and mass kidnapping.

In 50 years there will be no Palestine :c

I don't understand how is this different to all wars? back then when the Nazis started the war and we had to declare war against them. Or when we nuked 2 cities of Japan, were we also afraid that we will create multiple generations of anger and hate? how is this different?

I'm not comparing Israel or Palestine to Nazi, it's just a bitter fact that war always create anger and hate. Something had to be done though?

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The difference being that the new manpower has zero experience, is mostly kids and has no leadership. They reverted from a terrorist army, to an unorganized guerilla

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It was 100% driven by the weakness in Hezbollah and Russia and Iran. There’s no doubt.

That's not actually true. First Israel didn't fund them, they allowed others to fund them, second the Hamas back then was not the terrorists of today, they changed.

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What was Oct 7th retaliation to, exactly?

It really depends what people have to lose. If they're left without families, place to live, purpose in life other than revenge... what exactly could be "even worse" at that point?

The framing here is pretty ridiculous. Israel definitely punches back much harder than Hamas, but comparing October 7th to a punch and Israel's response to running over babies with a bulldozer is absurd.

Hamas blatantly escalated the conflict by a large margin, there's no denying that. You can't cry over your adversary's response when you do something like that, I'm sorry. Next time keep your hands to yourself, or perhaps just continue throwing rockets at civilians: Israel seems to be willing to tolerate that.

> If genocide was a goal of any of the Israeli leadership, they abjectly failed

This take is incredibly callous. Suppose 8% of everyone you gets killed. This is a shockingly brutal thing to happen to a population. Aside from that you're wrong on a factual level. The "in part" part of the '51 convention is there precisely so people don't say "there's still Jews left so technically the Holocaust wasn't a genocide". The holocaust was a genocide, and this is a genocide (yes, "is", they're still dropping bombs on a population half of which is under 18). There's a reason the relevant cases haven't been thrown out of the ICJ and ICC.

> Christians are already being persecuted.

Do you have a source for that?

Hamas was built over a long period by Iran, through Syria. Iran is much weaker than before, Syria is no longer a route to send supplies, and Hezbollah has been gutted.

Concretely, Israel will not be caught offguard for an Oct 7-style attack for quite a while. So the macguffin (hundreds of hostages) will probably not come up again.

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