Gaza

No religion is used as an excuse.

Then remove the excuse.

That’s a really mealy mouthed cop-out.

Personaly I belive in freedom of religion, if stupid people want something to belive in, fine,  but if it affects other people then it’s very wrong.

We could make the same argument about russia trying to taking over Ukraine… it’s the same thing but in reverse ideology.

We don’t as a ‘species’ need to make war, we already posess the intelect and tehcnology to fix all of our problems right flipping now.

Sorry you have lost me, Russia trying to take over Ukraine is also about religion but in reverse ideology?

Anyway if all the Palestinians converted to Judaism it wouldn’t solve the problem, because the issue isn’t religion.

Well yes, it’s a land grab. Plain and simple.

An attempt to paint it otherwise is a bit silly.

I’m just so frustrated as there doesn’t seem to be any end game, it’s just all fighting. On and on it goes, and for what?

How can there be end game when the West supports the oppressor?

Religion is the problem…and I say that to Hindus, and Christians too.

I have never heard of any religion (teachings) initiating wars, but I have heard of people using religion to start wars.

“Othering” a group and getting people to hate them is closer to the root of the problem than religion. Religion just seems to be used as a tool to achieve that.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/27/israel-hezbollah-ceasefire-begins-biden-lebanon-iran

Lebanon ceasefire, nothing much on progress for Gaza.

The deal will not have any direct effect on the fighting in Gaza, where US efforts to broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas have not led to a deal. The negotiations over Tuesday’s ceasefire were reportedly facilitated by a decision to decouple them from the Gaza talks, where the conflict remains intractable.

On and on it goes, and for what?

So the Israelis have more land. What did you think?

where the conflict remains intractable.

Where Israel refuses to stop murdering people.

Despite international arrest warrants being issued for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity it would appear that there is no let up with Israel killing aid workers.

https://news.sky.com/story/israel-claims-it-has-killed-palestinian-allegedly-involved-in-7-october-attack-13263514

Still, I guess there is no reason why Israel should suddenly stop committing war crimes, they know that the United States government will protect them whatever they do.

I’ve been watching Dark Winds, a TV series about a Navajo policeman, and hence about life on a reservation. One of the themes is the policy (?) of sterilising Native American women for various reasons, with the inevitable impact on population. In fact it’s exactly what you’d do if you wanted to quietly bring about a genocide. So it should be no surprise that UNRWA report that 70% of casualties in Gaza are women and children – exactly the people you’d target if you were intent on wiping out a group of people. So no surprises there, and no surprise that the US does nothing to stop it.

Blimey even Ynet,  the staunch supporter of the zionist regime, is reporting allegations of Israeli ceasefire violations.

France warns alleged Israeli violations risk collapse of Lebanon cease-fire

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rk6deikmyx

Paris reports 52 alleged IDF violations of cease-fire agreement, accusing Israel of bypassing international committee tasked with overseeing compliance.

Regime accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity not complying with ceasefire commitments……who would have thought it?

How long before Netanyahu accuses the French government of anti-Semitism?

This is possibly the most damming appraisal of the Israeli genocidal assault on Gaza I have heard/watched.

Susan Abulhawa speaks in proposition of the motion that “This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide”

This is # 7 of 8, There are 4 debates for the motion and 4 debates against the motion, further debates can be watched if you check out the Oxford Union YouTube

https://youtu.be/nW5U_ZqGmZU?si=3c7Meg3X8vjM1Jnl

Former Israeli president claims Queen Elizabeth ‘saw Israelis as terrorists’

https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/former-israeli-president-claims-queen-elizabeth-saw-israelis-as-terrorists/

The former President of Israel said: “The relationship between us and Queen Elizabeth was a little bit difficult, because she believed that every one of us was either a terrorist or a son of a terrorist.”

He added: “She refused to accept any Israeli official into (Buckingham) Palace, apart from international occasions.”

As the chant in the streets goes….

“1,2,3,4, occupation no more”

“5,6,7,8, Israel is a terrorist state!”

Even Queen Elizabeth knew it!

because the issue isn’t religion.

It isn’t only religion. It’s also ethnicity, history, and nationality.  But you can’t deny that extreme religious Zionists in Israel increasingly see themselves as guardians and definers of the how the Jewish state should be, and are very reactionary when it comes to any concessions to Palestinians, and Islamist groups in Palestine and elsewhere in the Islamic world advocate the necessity of liberating the “holy” territories and sites for religious reasons, and preach violence and hatred against Israel and Jews.

You can’t ignore the influence of social media propagating “Jewish Plans” to destroy mosques and build synagogues in their place, any more than you can’t ignore the hopeless socio-economic outlook of most of Gaza and be surprised that young unemployed uneducated disaffected men turn to violence as a result. Both extremist Sunni and Shia organisations call for the destruction of Israel, and Iran in particular does so from a strictly theological standpoint, just as the Muslim brotherhood still calls Israel a ‘Foreign Object’ in the middle of what they regard as a potential Islamic Caliphate, just as Makerhet (Gush Emunim) went from Messianic propaganda to violent terrorism in the 80’s.

It’s not the entire solution obviously, but without religious tolerance/understanding, there isn’t gong to be any peace anytime soon, and neither the settler right or Islamist groups have any interest in seeking it.

I see Jewish religious extremists on every pro-palestine demo in London, in solidarity with Palestinians. And I see Netanyahu, an obvious atheist, overseeing a genocide in Gaza.

Israel could not function or exist without secular Jews.

As I said previously if Palestinians all converted to Judaism it would solve nothing. Because it isn’t about religion.

What about if all Israelis converted to Islam? Presumably the Jewish diaspora in the US would stop pretending it is their “homeland”, and the cash flow would dry up ?

Well, it’s nice to dream ….

I see Jewish religious extremists on every pro-palestine demo in London, in solidarity with Palestinians. And I see Netanyahu, an obvious atheist, overseeing a genocide in Gaza.

Israel could not function or exist without secular Jews.

As I said previously if Palestinians all converted to Judaism it would solve nothing. Because it isn’t about religion.

Nothing here contradicts anything nickc said…

Can’t you both be right?

It isn’t only religion.

I consider blaming religion as an easy cop out/excuse. Yeah sure plenty of things come into it, one side speaks Arabic and the other side speaks Hebrew, are we therefore going to blame language for the Palestinian-zionist conflict?

The problem with focusing on detailed differences is that it ignores the actual cause of the conflict…. settler-colonialism and its need for land.

No one pretends that the American Indian Wars had anything to do with religion, although the religious differences between the two sides could not have been any starker, so why pretend that religion is the issue with zionist settler-colonialists?

The reason that Netanyahu hates Palestinians is because they won’t get off the land that he wants, it has nothing to do with religion, the language they speak, or anything else. They are Palestinians and he is not, it is exactly the same mentality as white settlers 200 years ago in the “New World”

But Netanyahu is not the only one fighting here. Nor is this in any way a recent thing. Religion may not be the driving force behind the more recent conflicts but it is a large part of the whole background and bad feeling between the two sides. No one’s saying it’s the only cause.

Religion is not a large part of the whole background to the Palestinian-zionist conflict. It was the Nakba that caused the “bad feeling”, as you call it, between the two sides.

The Nakba was a simple but devastating act of ethnic cleansing, but it was not carried out in the name religion.

Can you imagine if it had been???

LOL out of curiosity I decided to click on the Wikipedia definition of the Nakba, I could not have put it better myself!

The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة, romanized: an-Nakba, lit. ’the catastrophe’) is the ethnic cleansing[2] of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.

And not once is religion mentioned.

No one pretends that the American Indian Wars had anything to do with religion

Your history is wrong. The Indian wars were very much defined by the religiosity of 19thC Federal Govt, from policies that sought to encourage Indians to put aside their “savage ways” they thought so that it would help them to assimilate if they accepted Christianity, to boarding schools filled with children forcibly removed from their parents run by Federally appointed Christian orders in order to “Kill the Indian and save the Man” That doesn’t mean that the US Govt didn’t want the land, it most certainly did, but to ignore how much evangelical Christianity was a part of that, is to fail to understand what motivated them.

Eh yes, that is exactly my point…… religion was/is used as an excuse for settler-colonialism. It always has been, I would never dispute that, on the contrary.

But it was a need for the indigenous people’s land that drove the settler-colonialists, not a need to save their souls from eternal damnation.

Obviously it makes sense to send a few missionaries to pretend to be on a moral crusade, but they put a lot more effort in killing them than in trying to save their souls.

Religion is not a large part of the whole background to the Palestinian-zionist conflict. It was the Nakba that caused the “bad feeling”, as you call it, between the two sides.

I’ll admit I’m not hugely well informed on all of this, but don’t you then get into the “Who kicked who off the land first” argument?  Do you focus on the actions of the 20th Century or the last few thousand years.

Do you focus on the actions of the 20th Century or the last few thousand years.

I would suggest not focusing on the actions which occured a few thousand years ago. Although Netanyahu would obviously love to. According to Netanyahu Israel was promised to him a few thousand years ago by a God which he doesn’t believe in.

The term Nakba was coined by Constantin Zureiq in his 1948 book Ma’na al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Catastrophe), and he was referring to the failure of the Arab armies in the 1948 war to destroy Israel, i.e. their failure to carry out an ethnic cleansing.

The revised meaning came much later, and ignores the fact that the 1948 Nakba was the result of a war that 7 Arab armies started and lost.

Then, of course, the Arab world expelled or drove out almost a million Jews, which doubled Israel’s population with Middle Eastern and North African Jews who had nowhere else to go and nothing left to lose, which makes any settler colonialism argument moot anyway.

Goodness me has nothing happened in the last year to convince you that the creation of a brutal apartheid regime was a huge mistake and that the Palestinians were right to resist from the very start?

Today are witnessing a far-right  Israeli state committing war crimes and crimes against humanity whilst it slaughters tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. How could a zionist doctrine steeped in racism have resulted in anything else?

“The national pride and euphoria that followed the Six-Day War are temporary and will bring us from proud, rising nationalism to extreme, messianic, ultranationalism. The third stage will be brutality and the final stage will be the end of Zionism.” 

The prophesy of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a Jewish Israeli philosopher.

We appear to be currently witnessing the third stage.

We appear to be currently witnessing the third stage.

Middle east is changing fast. The more brutal they are in the 3rd stage the more severe is the ending for the Zionist state.

This will be the 3rd and final expulsion from the land with no return.

I love this video clip in the Sun……. Boxing legend and his entire team of bodyguards get chased down the road because a jeweler in Hatton Garden recognises him and informs all the others that Mayweather is genocide supporter !

https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/32232491/moment-floyd-mayweather-held-back-entourage-london/

Apparently 70% of Hatton Garden traders are Jewish, which must have added to Mayweather’s humiliation. He probably believed zionist nonsense and presumably thought it was one place in London where he would be safe!

Death feels imminent for 96% of children in Gaza, study finds

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/dec/11/death-feels-imminent-for-96-of-children-in-gaza-study-finds

A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.

A needs assessment, carried out by a Gaza-based NGO sponsored by the War Child Alliance charity, also found that 92% of the children in the survey were “not accepting of reality”, 79% suffer from nightmares and 73% exhibit symptoms of aggression.

An estimated 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied, separated from their parents, although the study notes the real number may be much higher.

The estimated death toll in Gaza is more than 44,000 and a recent assessment by the UN Human Rights Office found that 44% of the fatalities it was able to verify were children.

So according to the United Nations almost half of all the people that the IDF are currently slaughtering in Gaza are children.

If the IDF spoke Arabic instead of Hebrew is there any doubt that they would be classified as a terrorist organisation by Western governments? But instead of that they are generously supplied with all the weapons that they could possibly need to carry out the killings.

Racism is at the very core of this conflict, as is the 19th century colonial attitude which attaches so little value to non-european lives.

We are horrified and intolerant of racism on our shores and yet when it happens in far distant lands it is somehow so much more acceptable.

Who would have thought that this mentality would still persist in 2024?

https://www.israelhayom.com/2024/12/12/asked-about-war-crimes-idf-soldiers-denied-australia-visa/

While four applications were swiftly approved, Omer, serving in the academic reserve program, and Ella, an Intelligence Corps service member, were required to complete extensive 13-page declarations typically reserved for foreign fighters and government officials. The questionnaire included pointed inquiries about participation in prisoner abuse, detention center operations, and potential involvement in war crimes or genocide.

Wow, Israel’s pariah status continues to grow as does the overwhelming evidence that it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And yet they appear to be incredulous that anyone should disapprove of their genocidal slaughtering of men, women, and children.

“Why are we subjecting friendly allies to war crimes investigations?” he asked.

How about because murdering people isn’t cool?