I can wholeheartedly recommend watching the documentary “The Gatekeepers” from the always excellent Storyville series on iPlayer. It interviews the 6 former heads of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic secret service.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04lxjbf

Very enlightening.

It’s the extremists on both sides who are the problem. Netanyahu has a lot to answer for with his lust for power.

I mention it not to justify the actions of Hamas, but to understand them and illuminate what IMO is the way forward – if you don’t understand what drives people to the horrific depths of 7/10, the only solution is to wipe them out, and I don’t believe Israel can ever war its way to peace. The only solution is compromise, and that takes both sides.

Fair, and in the context of this discussion it adds context and value for sure. I was refering to the wider discourse at the level where solutions can be made. The line is fine when talking about historical context and doesn’t take much to cross before it becomes a slanging match and communication breaks down. In fact, like this place in a lot of ways. 😶

Often it’s simply right-fighting and in this context compounded by some rather visceral motivators and having political headbangers on both sides so you end up with the perfect recipe for conflict.

Interestingly (or otherwise…), I finished Jeremy Bowen’s 6 Days this week – much to mull over from that but two particular quotes stuck with me. Deputy Chief of Staff General Ezer Weizman said to a British journalist – “don’t allow yourself to be fed bullshit about Israel not being built at the expense of the Arabs, if I was Palestinian Tel Aviv would be blowing up every ten minutes.” And general war hero Moshe Dayan predicted that Palestine would use terrorism to fight Israeli rule – when asked how he knew, he said “because that’s exactly what I’d do if I were in their place.”

That’s what the slogan, “From the river to the sea” is referring to, a single Islamist state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea

Not really. See wikipedia “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” came to mean “one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel”

Whilst HAMAS have used the phrase leading critics to argue that it implicitly advocates for the dismantling of Israel, and a call for the removal or extermination of the Jewish population of the region, right wing Israeli politicians have also used it “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

“one democratic secular state that would supersede the ethno-religious state of Israel”

If Hamas has anything to do with it, you can scratch-out the bits of that sentence that say “democratic” and “secular” as they have zero interest in either of those.  The phrase has become a bit like the St Georges flag. You can try to reclaim it, and after all its just a flag, but even ironically; you’re still using a symbol that’s been hijacked by extremists. It’s stopped signalling anything, other than a lack of tolerance.

f Hamas has anything to do with it, you can scratch-out the bits of that sentence that say “democratic” and “secular” as they have zero interest in either of those

if Israel would offer anything other than misery, Hamas wouldn’t get volunteers to stuff envelopes, never mind sign up for martyrdom.

Bojo’s (Daily Mail) piece on not selling arms to Israel. I’d despair, but what would that achieve?

I’m not going to link it, basically we should sell them arms because they are the only democracy in the middle east.

Non Wail articles on B Jonhson today.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68748251.amp

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/06/banning-arms-sales-to-israel-would-be-insane-says-boris-johnson

He added: “Is that really what you want, all you legal experts who say that Israel’s actions now necessitate an arms embargo? Do you want to hand victory to a bunch of murderers and rapists? We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel – when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since world war two.”

Just checking in.

So far this is an exemplary thread.

Of interest.. It’s easy to think you are only talking to a few people who post replies but…

Yesterday: Topic page views: 2487

Viewers: 799

Again, anyone new to the topic should make sure you read my OP before you consider contributing

“if Israel would offer anything other than misery, Hamas wouldn’t get volunteers to stuff envelopes”

This is reductionist and oversimplified, and you can tell that by looking elsewhere:

1) to Lebanon, which is a chaotic, vibrant, pluralist semi-democracy, and where Hamas’s sister organisation Hezbollah is an important political force. Its ascendancy after the Israeli withdrawal cannot be explained by “Israel offering only misery” to Lebanese voters; and

2) to the West Bank, where Hamas didn’t traditionally enjoy much support, despite Palestinians there living under the same conditions – and in fact subject to more interference by the Israeli occupying forces after Israel withdrew from Gaza.

The rise of Hamas as a political force in Palestinian politics was a reaction against Fatah’s failure n government to either secure a final resolution OR to be competent in the provision of services in the interim. Obciously if you as an ordinary Palestinian have lost faith in any peace process then you might as well support the guys who are at least doing something to hit back (but of course Hamas aren’t asking for support – it’s not a democracy) instead of the inept old men who got fat in the 1990s and 2000s.

That’s why there was a Hamas-Fatah war, why Gaza and the West Bank were governed separately, and why there haven’t been elections in years. Fatah and Hamas have failed at the number one requirement in a liberation movement, which is to maintain unity and work out the differences after your enemy has departed…

…and Israel was too happy to let Fatah keep **** everything up “in the interim” that they didn’t realise it undermined their long term interest in having a minimally competent and sane Palestinian administration next door. Building a big wall and thinking you can just wall the problem out hasn’t worked.

Israeli actions over the past few months seem nothing but counter-productive and against their long-term strategic interests. Launching strikes on international embassies, massacring international aid workers, and starving a civilian population is reckless, cruel, unnecessary, but most of all, ineffective. I can only surmise that this strategy is for the long-term political survival of Netanyahu rather than securing long-term security for the Israeli state. 

Netanyahu’s aim appears to be total war, bringing Hezbollah and direct confrontation with Iran into the crisis, even before they have eliminated Hamas, which although weakened, still has the majority of its leadership intact, enjoys widespread support in Gaza, and now has undoubtedly many thousands of young, angry men as potential conscripts. These are men who will not easily forget bearing witness to nieces and nephews and brothers and sisters being blown into bloody bits while IDF troops dance, laugh and joke as they loot homes and humiliate a broken people on social media. 

Israel bleeds support now, and this is clear through high-profile judges, Tories, and even the US Democratic establishment turning against her. Netanyahu and his political supporters are reckless, incompetent, fanatical and criminal. What is staggering is his historical support and funding for Hamas. In this way, Netanyahu is Hamas’s best asset, providing them with funding, widespread support domestically while isolating Israel abroad.

The phrase has become a bit like the St Georges flag. You can try to reclaim it, and after all its just a flag, but even ironically; you’re still using a symbol that’s been hijacked by extremists. It’s stopped signalling anything, other than a lack of tolerance

Is the issue that flags/slogans get hijacked by extremists, or is it because we then choose to only consider it as being used by extremists?

May not translate well to the Palestinian context.  St Georges flag means different things to different people – if we abandon it to nationalist headbangers then that is all it will be going to be going forward and we’ve let the headbangers win.

Tldr: why the support for the regime?

In simple terms an awful lot of UK politicians have Israeli donors, be they industrialists, companies or wealthy individuals who are courting those in power to help influence UK policy towards the Middle East

having political headbangers on both sides so you end up with the perfect recipe for conflict.

And not as the result of one country being invaded by a people who then took over the entire area. This being the case, no person of a country that is being oppressed has any requirement to play fair.

.

Of course theres going to be people who will not agree with sharing their land with an invader.Probably everybody, but only some will be able or willing to do anything about it, even at great cost. Britain was invaded a number of times – Normans, Vikings,Romans. Did the British people think they should submit to these invaders, or did they rise up and try to fight them, and thus expel them from their land.

.

Perhaps thats why in Britain, its traditional to favour the underdog.

In much the same way that Al-Qaeda and ISIS owe their origins to western intelligence services (and helped fuel profitable wars), Hamas wouldn’t exist without the influence and funding of Israel’s own covert programmes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

It also obscures Hamas’s curious history. To a certain degree, the Islamist organization whose militant wing has rained rockets on Israel the past few weeks has the Jewish state to thank for its existence. Hamas launched in 1988 in Gaza at the time of the first intifada, or uprising, with a charter now infamous for its anti-Semitism and its refusal to accept the existence of the Israeli state. But for more than a decade prior, Israeli authorities actively enabled its rise.

This isn’t just distant history though, the relationship continues to the present day:

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/why-netanyahu-bolstered-hamas/

The same is true of Netanyahu’s longstanding policy of bolstering Hamas rule in Gaza, including encouraging Israel’s de facto ally Qatar to finance the terrorist organization. While the much-respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz has covered this issue, it has been largely ignored by the international press.

On Sunday, The New York Times gave new prominence to the long-standing Netanyahu-Hamas connection in a detailed and lengthy report. According to the newspaper:

Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.

For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip—money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.

According to the Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled into Gaza with a Qatari official carrying suitcases filled with cash to disperse money. Retired Israeli general Shlomo Brom described the logic of Netanyahu’s position: “One effective way to prevent a two-state solution is to divide between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.” If the extremist Hamas ruled Gaza, then the Palestinian Authority—a compromised comprador government with a tenuous hold on the West Bank—would be further weakened. This, according to Brom, would allow Netanyahu to say, “I have no partner.”

Hamas were the effective government in Gaza, money went through them to help the people that lived there. Is the complaint is that Israel “allowed” other states to put money into Gaza, via Hamas who were running it in the main? That money didn’t all go to help the people of course…

Normans, Vikings,Romans. Did the British people think they should submit to these invaders, or did they rise up and try to fight them, and thus expel them from their land.

In the examples provided, it depends at what point in the timeline you’re looking at, and which tribe you was in for the Roman one. But that’s way OT.

For a degree of balance in the thread, from a Palestinian perspective Hamas are an authoritarian entity with no regard for democracy amongst the Palestinians and are brutal in shutting opposing views/voices in Gaza, There are a few links below to offer an insight into their brutality.

Link to AP report on Hamas and their actions on October 7th

Amnesty : state of Palestine as of 2022

Amnesty : Link to 270+ articles on The state of Palestine

And if you want independent journalism on a range of topics free from influence then the French “The Conversation” is worth watching/reading.

How Hamas weaponised Palestinians despair

If Biden continues to shield Israeli atrocity from global opinion, the American public, and even the highest machinery of his own party, and Netanyahu unleashes the IDF into the south, kills another 10,000 civilians, and raises the last of Gazan infrastructure, leaving it a smouldering, starving and hopeless ruin, where and to what do these two million destitute peoples go back to?

So essentially, the Israeli intelligence services helped form a militant ruling faction that not only supresses the occupied population of Gaza, but gives Israel’s leaders the perfect excuse to bolster support for continued genocidal bombardment and collective punishment, allowing Israel to expand it’s territory in pursuit of it’s ongoing colonial settlement policy…

Given the vast amount of military aid Israel receives:

are Palestinian authorities allowed any access to military hardware to resist the occupation?

This is just the “Israel are behind the attack on themselves, they made it (or allowed it to) happen to justify more military operations” conspiracy theory.

My bad, as usual, I’m just seeking out the facts and seeing where they lead…

On which note:

are Palestinian authorities allowed any access to military hardware to resist the occupation?

Well, they’re armed, so yes. I dont think anyone that’s tried has successfully stopped them. (Increasingly Israeli stuff apparently)

That’s odd…

The State of Palestine has no land army, nor an air force or a navy. The Palestinian Security Services (PSS, not to confuse with Preventive Security Service) do not dispose over heavy weapons and advanced military equipment like tanks.

In the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, Israel has consistently demanded that the Palestinian state would always be demilitarized. Israeli negotiators demanded to keep Israeli troops in the West Bank, to maintain control of Palestinian airspace, and to dictate exactly what weapons could and could not be purchased by the Palestinian security forces.<sup id=”cite_ref-carlstrom_2011_4-0″ class=”reference”>[4]</sup> In June 2009 at Bar-Ilan University, Benjamin Netanyahu said: ″We cannot be expected to agree to a Palestinian state without ensuring that it is demilitarised,″<sup id=”cite_ref-carlstrom_2011_4-1″ class=”reference”>[4]</sup>

Meanwhile…

We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel – when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since world war two.”

If that’s the criteria, massacre, when do the Palestinians get armed? 30,000, 40,000, 80,000?

basically we should sell them arms because they are the only democracy in the middle east.

So everyone living, involuntarily, under an autocratic regime deserves to die at the hands of Isreal/A.N.Other?

And Isrealis have the power to change the direction of its policies and stop killing thousands of Palestinians, yet choose not to.

That’s odd…

Nobody is denying the heavily lopsided state of “armed”

But Hamas ARE armed. If they weren’t this would be over already.

Ah yes, silly me, and there was I thinking it had all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated purge of territory for colonial purposes, but let’s not forget, this is a war and even children may have dangerous thoughts of seeking freedom from occupation…

are Palestinian authorities allowed any access to military hardware to resist the occupation?

They have a very generous benefactor in that regard, Iran.

Ah yes, silly me, and there was I thinking it had all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated purge of territory for colonial purposes, but let’s not forget, this is a war and even children may have dangerous thoughts of seeking freedom from occupation…

Eh? That’s very similar to what I think it looks like.

Doesnt mean Hamas are unarmed. Which was what you questioned.

Tbh, I’ve literally no idea what you’re doing  now so will move on.

Bloody hell, so Gazans and Palestinians are armed to the teeth then?

Maybe we should join our special relationship buddies in the US and forego our healthcare system to free up enough taxpayer money to ensure Israel has enough weapons to stop the Palestinians escaping in dinghies and coming over here and killing us all with their advanced automated drones integrating into society with their strong work ethic.

“We are being asked to shun the Israelis, to mount a total moral repudiation of Israel – when that country has only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since world war two.”

What is being asked is that a country and nation state which is a regional superpower act within international law and not prosecute a genocide on a people who are stateless and defenceless. This is what is being asked of Israel and this is what is being ignored.

And with all due respect, what apologists for Israel demand is selective outrage and condemnation. Condemn the Hamas attacks and be outraged by them, but not by Israeli murdering many thousands of innocent children, as though the current theatre of atrocity is somehow justified by the atrocity the other.

With regards to accusing people of conspiracy theory by stating well-reported facts that Hamas were funded for political reasons is false equivocation. I don’t think anyone is saying that. Here, the facts speak for themselves. 

Bloody hell, so Gazans and Palestinians are armed to the teeth then?

Not compared to Israel, nobody said they were. You asked “are Palestinian authorities allowed any access to military hardware” and I answered.  I’m not casting judgement or expressing an opinion, just stating a fact in an attempt to answer your question.

Bloody hell, so Gazans and Palestinians are armed to the teeth then?

One of the reason the quality of discussion on this thread has been so high is that theres been very limited occurrences of people “making shit up about what other people think” either directly or indirectly.

Please for the sake of the thread dont go down that road.

Edited

Please for the sake of the thread dont go down that road.

But it doesn’t take long for a few people to push that line though. Selective quoting, dishonest inference and flat out shitposting.

Not surprising, but when you’ve supplanted a personality for politics, this is the way.

How are we all doing?
still good?

Banging. Bloody lovely ride today.

How are we all doing?

still good?

Entering a critical phase, I’d say.

Jivehoneyjive, it would be helpful if you were more precise in who you mean by “Palestinian authorities”. Do you mean Hamas? If so please say so. Palestine is not a state in the way that most countries are (hence why “2 state solution” is a hope rather than reality). So it is hard to know how to respond to your points above.

Hamas are clearly not ‘allowed’ weapons… after all, they are terrorists, resisting occupation, who just happen to have a history of covert support from the Israeli intellgence services.

Meanwhile, as mentioned above, weapons supplied to the Palestinian Security Services are heavily vetted by Israel and are not to be used for the purposes of resisting occupation

It’s not really a case of being ‘allowed’ weapons and isn’t a helpful way of looking at things. It’s more a case of who will supply you with weapons and technologies and the line they draw with how you use them. Someone is clearly supplying Hammas with weapons and not just small arms. They have or had a significant supply of artillery type munitions. Israel clearly has more open suppliers, the critical question is whether Israel has stepped over the line that will halt that supply. I think most of us think that line was unambiguously crossed sometime ago, unfortunately weapons supply and politics are closely linked and often murky at best.