Israel slams UN chief for saying Hamas attack ‘did not happen in a vacuum,’ calls for his resignation
Israel slams UN chief for saying Hamas attack ‘did not happen in a vacuum,’ calls for his resignation
Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the UN secretary-general addressed the 15-member UN Security Council Tuesday.
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There's not an Arab lockdown per se. Israeli Arabs are about as free as anyone in Israel. They're members of parliament, serve on the Israeli Supreme Court, all that.
What is true, of course, is that Palestinian Arabs are basically stateless people who live in inhumane conditions with few freedoms and fewer opportunities for dignity. That's a real problem. I don't necessarily have a solution that they would accept though. To live in dignity and liberty, you need to live in peace. To live in peace, you need to accept that your neighbors have a right to exist.
Hamas didn’t always exist, Hamas is a result of the conditions of the people.
Race-hate has existed for a very long time. It isn't a result of the conditions of anyone.
If Hamas were an insurgency against oppression, it would surely be active in the region's other far more oppressive landscapes.
The narrative that oppressed people turn violent and that's what this violence is probably partially true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Much of what fuels Hamas and the main reason the peace process is so challenging in the Middle East isn't the plight of oppressed people; it's plain old bigotry.
If tomorrow, Israel announced that it is now a pacifist state, and it melted down all its weapons, disbanded the IDF, and issued Israeli passports to Palestinians, the result would be a thousand pogroms and millions dead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Palestinian_militant_groups
By my count there are 38 known Palestinian militant organizations. Hamas is just one of them. Hamas is like a flavor of ice cream. It's not special itself, it's just popular in a specific area at a specific time. There are non-religious resistance groups, they are also religious resistance groups.
I agree, if Israel changed its ways tomorrow and abandon all weapons, the state would collapse. A structured piece, like South African transition from apartheid, should be a slow methodical process, involving the integration of incentives for the entire population.
South Africa was not slow or methodical; it was pretty fast, at least legally. And for a whole host of reasons, it's just not an apples to apples comparison. You could go into the fact that Israel was invaded by its Arab neighbors, who were committed to obliterating it, or you could point out that it's a thousand-year feud, etc. It's just not a comparison that's useful because the differences are too great.
But probably the biggest difference is that there is no Palestinian counterpart to Nelson Mandela.
The concession Israel seeks is, basically, for terrorists to stop slaughtering them in the streets. That's it. What they want is peace. To go to the cinema without fear of being kidnapped or murdered. South Africa's government wanted free labor. Israel just wants to not have bombs go off in the street. Nelson Mandela's whole message was of peace, non-violence, and reconciliation, so if a single Palestinian leader were to offer such a message, they would be a hero to Israelis everywhere.
It's not like Israelis are getting rich off the toil of Palestinians. Quite the opposite. The comparison to South Africa really doesn't work.
And land, the settlers want the land... they would prefer the land not be occupied, but thats just a nice to have.
Nelson Mandela is a terrorist. wiki He was on the USA terrorist watch list until 2008 - time.com
Mandela was not a terrorist. That's an indictment of the US government's stupid "watch list," not Mandela.
In terms of land, do you really think they're coming out ahead in that? Before 2012, they had almost no settlements and they regular demolished them. How were they coming out ahead? Do you think the average Israeli is eager to keep the status quo for a few acres of land? Have you ever talked to an Israeli? They don't care about the land. Most Israelis I know are pretty angry about the squatters and just don't want their tax dollars going to bribe them into leaving like last time Israeli settlers were evicted from Gaza.
Do you think that in 1967, facing invasion from every side, the Israeli thinking was "muaahahaha, finally a full-scale invasion we can use as a subterfuge to add a new subdivision in 50 years!"
The military cost of occupying the West Bank is costing Israel many, many times what the land was ever worth many times over.
And keep in mind, the settlements are mostly in the West Bank, not Gaza.
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Mandela used violence to achieve the end of Apartheid
I don't think its productive for us to speak anymore, we can't agree on basic interpretation of facts.