Tim of the Oak
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Israeli Forcee are reporting that they have freed 50 hostages that were held captive at a kibbutz.
Middle East Conflict | Netanyahu orders strikes on Gaza (p1161)
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jim tolmies perm
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Like the premise but you make it sound easy which it's not...if you could persuade the Republican guard to join hands with the protesters the world would become an infinitely better place
samuelyeboah
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hello from israel fellow blues. been an absolutely exhausting 24 hours. barely slept. praying for the families still stuck, for the hostages, and for the poor gazans who will die by israeli counter aggression.. i just want all this to end
Bazzmand Show
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Think it was a rave, there is footage of them flying in on paragliders which is just bonkers. Can't imagine tripping my nut off and a load of terrorist paramilitary flying in.
Churchlawtonblue
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Well what we have been doing so far hasn't exactly worked has it.
Those in charge arnt as brave when it's their existence threatened.
Prestwich_Blue
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They've been offered this a number of times and (to use Garry Cook's phrase) "bottled it".
They were offered a jointly-ruled state with the Jews in the 1920's but refused that (although it's not clear whether the Jews were particularly keen on it either).
There were various attempts in the 1930's to achieve a compromise but the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 saw significant violence between both Jews and Arabs, repression by the British forces (which pre-war were led by people like Montgomery, Wavell and 'Bomber' Harris) and also internecine conflict between Arab groups. As a result, the British restricted immigration of Jews, at a time when they most needed to flee Europe.
Post-war the Anglo-American Commission of 1946 failed to find a solution so the British handed the Mandate back to the UN, who proposed the Partition Plan. Yet again, the Arabs rejected this, which would have given them far more than they'll ever get now.
United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine - Wikipedia
Following the UN vote to accept the plan, the Arab armies attacked the newly-declared Israeli state but lost the areas marked in pink/coral on the map in the above link. That led to the internationally accepted 1948 borders. It should be noted that had the Arabs succeeded in overrunning Israel, then there still wouldn't have been an independent Palestinian state. The Syrians saw it as part of a Greater Syria and the Egyptians as part of Egypt. That of course led to what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the creation of the refugee issue.
At that point, Jordan occupied the West Bank and could have set up an independent state, but annexed it in 1950 (with the support of the Palestinian leadership) and it became Jordanian territory although the annexation was regarded as illegal by the international community.
The Egyptians occupied Gaza but that was governed under military rule, rather than civilian. But neither allowed the occupants of those areas any form of self-governance so it's clear that, despite their rhetoric, there's never been any notion among Arab leaders of a Palestinian state.
Things changed again in 1967, when the Six Day War saw Israel now in control of the West Bank and 'Palestine' suddenly became a problem, as did Israeli settlements in the West Bank & (to a lesser extent) Gaza. The Oslo Accords in the 1990's offered them full or partial control over some of the West Bank (but ultimately got nowhere) and Yitzhak Rabin, the author of those, was assassinated by extreme right-wing elements in Israel because of it. Netanyahu was opposed to them and his current Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was one of those actively calling for Rabin's head. He's a far-right, convicted racist, which shows the moral vacuum at the heart of Israeli politics currently.
But the point is that they've had opportunities, primarily in 1947/1948, to have an independent state but have firmly rejected those.
SWP's back
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Probably why many people dislike the leadership of the state of Israel.
Side note but what the fuck is it with the whataboutist twunts on this thread?
Honestly, go get yourself on Reddit and see some of Hamas’s videos and see how much you want to “whatabout” after watching them. Especially the poor young woman being passed from one truck to another with blood pouring between her legs and all over her behind. If seeing that video and the many like it doesn’t put you off ‘both side-ing’ this thread for a few hours then I’d probably say you’re a sociopath.
The blue phantom
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[/QUOTE]
Nothing will work until the illegal occupation by Israel is dealt with. It's as simple as that.
Nothing will work until the illegal occupation by Israel is dealt with. It's as simple as that.
ZenHalfTimeCrock
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I wouldn't disagree with your diagnosis.
But I doubt that taking out the Iranian dictatorship could be achieved without a lot of civilian casualties and mayhem. From what I can tell, a majority of ordinary Iranians would like to be rid of their own leadership. Whether they would support your strategy is another matter.
Reading the 2008 edition of the late Michael Axworthy's Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran, one detail (actually from the blurb on the back) jumped out at me: in this 'Islamic Republic', only 1.4% of Iranians attend Friday prayers at the mosque. That's probably below Sunday church attendance figures in the UK. So what does that suggest about the state of the revolution even back then?
An here's a little extract from the book itself:
'....there is good evidence that Iranians are today more sceptical of religious leadership and more inclined to secularism than most other nationalities in the Middle East. The failure of the West to take advantage of the opportunity offered by a reformist president in Iran already looks like a bad mistake. One such opportunity came after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States when members of the Iranian leadership (not just Khatami, but also Khamanei), condemned the terrorist action in forthright terms, and ordinary Iranians showed their sympathies with candlelit vigils in the streets of Tehran - more evidence of the marked difference of attitude between Iranians and other Middle Eastern peoples.'
In recent years I haven't kept up with events in Iran, so I am not best placed to make any kind of judgement call about the state of the country. The expat Iranians I taught (mainly the sons and daughters of those who fled Iran after the fall of the Shah) and their parents, some of whom I got to know quite well, were highly intellectual, very pleasant people, but also quite patriotic. I got the sense - though I could be wrong - that they resented the foreign interference that has dogged Iranian history.
Perhaps the most egregious recent example was Operation Ajax, the US/UK instigated coup d'état that got rid of Mossadeq. Who knows what might have happened if we hadn't interfered? Instead, we got the return of the Shah, and then the Iranian revolution as a reaction to his rule.
With the passing of Axworthy, the UK's leading commentator on Iran is probably Ali Ansari at St Andrews. So it might be worth watching out for any articles by him in the days ahead.
But like I said, bearing in mind what happened in Iraq back in 2003 and past Iranian history, I would be wary.
Kinkladze 1
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Nothing will work until the illegal occupation by Israel is dealt with. It's as simple as that.
[/QUOTE]
Do you propose to move Israel somewhere else then?
MCFC ISRAEL
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Is Israel murdering their women and children? You are so blind and full of hate, fed by lies that are told to you from your warm and cozy home thousands of miles away and you have no idea what is happening in the Middle East. There are 2 million Arab citizens of Israel, not even one of them is willing to give up their Israeli passport to get a Palestinian instead, or Syria and Lebanon where thousands of people are being murdered under a dictatorial regime every year. I'm trying to explain to people like you that Hamas can't be trusted. We removed the "occupation" from Gaza, and what did we get? Tens of thousands of missiles, thousands murdered. Why do you criticise Israel, why don't you say anything about Egypt? They can open the border of Gaza and give passport to the people of Gaza, make them citizens. The same goes for Jordan, they can easily annex Judea and Samaria and be responsible for the Palestinians. Nobody wants them! Their Muslim brothers do not want them! Why?
Because they know exactly what they will get. The goal of the Palestinians and their leaders is to destroy Israel, including the head of the Palestinian Authority, supposedly a diplomatic figure and the leader of the Palestinians who is supposed to be a state, he is a declared holocaust denier and himself was involved in terrorism attacks against Israelis in the past.
You don't know shit and if you care so much about the Palestinians, come visit them, live with them, I bet you never donate a cent to them. You do nothing, you not even really care about the Palestinians , you just a stupid and hypocritical anti-Semite.
uwerosler28
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Your lose creadance on your arguments everytime you name call or throw out assumptions about the posters you are replying too.
The blue phantom
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Wow. Just fuckin Wow.
samuelyeboah
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relax man, you are not making sense and are just saying racist shitty talking points..
DenisLawBackHeel74
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Well said mate.
I have friends and co workers in Israel and they’re terrified with what’s going on. My thoughts are with them.
samuelyeboah
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while this is true, with regards to both sideing, i think you have to take into consideration all the videos of the atrocities you are *not* seeing out of gaza because they happen from hellfire missiles from a jet fighter killing entire families.. no one to take videos. the end result is the same - needless death of the uninvolved.
halfcenturyup
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And make no long-lasting difference.
Anyway, this isn't a war, is it? It's an insurgency and they are always dirty. It took an awful event to stop Americans funding the IRA and start pushing seriously for a peace settlement. I can't imagine what sort of awful event will finally get the knuckle-draggers in Israel and Palestine to come to some resolution there.
ZenHalfTimeCrock
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This pretty much expresses my own view of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict.
I used to favour Israel until I read the following account of the Sabra and Chatila massacres in Robert Fisk''s book Pity The Nation: Lebanon at War. Since then I have been struggling to see where the moral high ground is for those who think that one side or the other are in possession of it.
It's pretty grim stuff so either brace yourselves or scroll down to the next post.
'What we found inside the Palestinian camp at ten o'clock on the morning of September 1982 did not quite beggar description, although it would have been easier to re-tell in the cold prose of a medical examination. There had been medical examinations before in Lebanon, but rarely on this scale and never overlooked by a regular, supposedly disciplined army. In the panic and hatred of battle, tens of thousands had been killed in this country. But these people, hundreds of them had been shot down unarmed. This was a mass killing, an incident - how easily we used the word "incident" in Lebanon - that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist activity. It was a war crime.
Jenkins and Tveit were so overwhelmed by what we found in Chatila that at first we were unable to register our own shock. Bill Foley of AP had come with us. All he could say as he walked round was "Jesus Christ" over and over again. We might have accepted evidence of a few murders; even dozens of bodies, killed in the heat of combat. Bur there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition - tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.
Where were the murderers? Or to use the Israelis' vocabulary, where were the "terrorists"? When we drove down to Chatila, we had seen the Israelis on the top of the apartments in the Avenue Camille Chamoun but they made no attempt to stop us. In fact, we had first been driven to the Bourj al-Barajneh camp because someone told us that there was a massacre there. All we saw was a Lebanese soldier chasing a car theif down a street. It was only when we were driving back past the entrance to Chatila that Jenkins decided to stop the car. "I don't like this", he said. "Where is everyone? What the fuck is that smell?"
Just inside the the southern entrance to the camp, there used to be a number of single-story, concrete walled houses. I had conducted many interviews in these hovels in the late 1970's. When we walked across the muddy entrance to Chatila, we found that these buildings had been dynamited to the ground. There were cartridge cases across the main road. I saw several Israeli flare canisters, still attached to their tiny parachutes. Clouds of flies moved across the rubble, raiding parties with a nose for victory.
Down a laneway to our right, no more than 50 yards from the entrance, there lay a pile of corpses. There were more than a dozen of them, young men whose arms and legs had been wrapped around each other in the agony of death. All had been shot point-blank range through the cheek, the bullet tearing away a line of flesh up to the ear and entering the brain. Some had vivid crimson or black scars down the left side of their throats. One had been castrated, his trousers torn open and a settlement of flies throbbing over his torn intestines.
The eyes of these young men were all open. The youngest was only 12 or 13 years old. They were dressed in jeans and coloured shirts, the material absurdly tight over their flesh now that their bodies had begun to bloat in the heat. They had not been robbed. On one blackened wrist a Swiss watch recorded the correct time, the second hand still ticking round uselessly, expending the last energies of its dead owner.
On the other side of the main road, up a track through the debris, we found the bodies of five women and several children. The women were middle-aged and their corpses lay draped over a pile of rubble. One lay on her back, her dress torn open and the head of a little girl emerging from behind her. The girl had short dark curly hair, her eyes were staring at us and there was a frown on her face. She was dead.
Another child lay on the roadway like a discarded doll, her white dress stained with mud and dust. She could have been no more than three years old. The back of her head had been blown away by a bullet fired into her brain. One of the women also held a tiny baby to her body. The bullet that had passed into her breast had killed the baby too. Someone had slit open the woman's stomach, cutting sideways and then upwards, perhaps trying to kill her unborn child. Her eyes were wide open, her dark face frozen in horror.
"...As we stood there, we heard a shout in Arabic from across the ruins. "They are coming back," a man was screaming, So we ran in fear towards the road. I think, in retrospect, that it was probably anger that stopped us from leaving, for we now waited near the entrance to the camp to glimpse the faces of the men who were responsible for all of this. They must have been sent in here with Israeli permission. They must have been armed by the Israelis. Their handiwork had clearly been watched - closely observed - by the Israelis who were still watching us through their field-glasses.
When does a killing become an outrage? When does an atrocity become a massacre? Or, put another way, how many killings make a massacre? Thirty? A hundred? Three hundred? When is a massacre not a massacre? When the figures are too low? Or when the massacre is carried out by Israel’s friends rather than Israel's enemies?
That, I suspected, was what this argument was about. If Syrian troops had crossed into Israel, surrounded a Kibbutz and allowed their Palestinian allies to slaughter the Jewish inhabitants, no Western news agency would waste its time afterwards arguing about whether or not it should be called a massacre.
But in Beirut, the victims were Palestinians. The guilty were certainly Christian militiamen - from which particular unit we were still unsure - but the Israelis were also guilty. If the Israelis had not taken part in the killings, they had certainly sent militia into the camp. They had trained them, given them uniforms, handed them US army rations and Israeli medical equipment. Then they had watched the murderers in the camps, they had given them military assistance - the Israeli airforce had dropped all those flares to help the men who were murdering the inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila - and they had established military liason with the murderers in the camps.'
Metal Biker
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Nothing will work until the illegal occupation by Israel is dealt with. It's as simple as that.
[/QUOTE]
There you go again. It's not an illegal occupation, it is called the State of Israel and the Jewish Israelis who have lived in that region for decades and were born there have every right to live there as any Palestinian. Hamas, however disagrees and calls for the extermination of every Jewish person. Note, 'Jewish', not 'Israeli'.
Tim of the Oak
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Pretty sad all these commentators they get on the radio. This Richard Kemp who was in charge of U.K. forces in Afghanistan described civilians being bombed in Gaza as collateral damage. A bloke for the “Palestinian Alliance” refused to condemn the terrorism atrocities against Jewish villagers. People leaving North London feel it’s OK to steal Palestinian land (and that’s not just Kier Starmer). If they tried it here they would get banged up.
I see some posters propose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as the neatest solution. No doubt these posters will be popping out for their morning walks and be handing over the keys to their houses and cars to strangers.
I see some posters propose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as the neatest solution. No doubt these posters will be popping out for their morning walks and be handing over the keys to their houses and cars to strangers.