Risk of flare-up between Palestinian militants and Israel has been deepening for months, writes Jeremy Bowen.
Israel was taken by surprise by the most ambitious operation Hamas has ever launched from Gaza.
The scale of what's been happening is unprecedented. Hamas breached the wire that separates Gaza from Israel in multiple places in the most serious cross-border attack Israel has faced in more than a generation.
It came a day after the 50th anniversary of the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria in 1973 that started a major Middle East war. The significance of the date will not have been lost on the Hamas leadership.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country is at war and will exact a heavy price from its enemies.
Videos and photos of dead Israelis, civilians as well as soldiers, are all over social media.
Their settlers have been entering the Al Aqsa Mosque en masse for the past couple weeks, trying to pray, which even the Israeli government says they're not supposed to do.
The Israeli settlers did this first in the forties when they invaded and colonized Palestine, indiscriminate violence was their M.O., so yes the first stone was thrown two generations ago. Not excusing the violence today, but it is not unexpected nor unprecedented by either side of this conflict.
It belonged to the British before WW2. After the war, where Israel was created after 6,000,000 Jewish people (among other "undesirable" groups, such as gay people) were summarily executed by the nazis, it fell under immediately attack from all of its neighbors in 1947. Two years after six million were executed.
The Arab League members Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq refused to accept the UN partition plan and proclaimed the right of self-determination for the Arabs across the whole of Palestine. The Arab states marched their forces into what had, until the previous day, been the British Mandate for Palestine, starting the first Arab–Israeli War. After an initial loss of territory by the Jewish state, the tide turned in the Israelis' favour and they pushed the Arab armies back beyond the borders of the proposed Arab state
While it doesn't excuse brutal repression, I don't think they are ever going to back down. Any time they do, everyone seems to execute all of them in pogroms.
Everyone choosing a side between Palestine and Israel, but I'm going to take the mega unpopular stance of fuck both these people. Fuck the fundamentalist followers of Abraham, no matter what branch.
They would visit great violence on you in the name of their god if they had the chance. They are murderously self-righteous.
Seems so strange that two sects of the same religion would commit horrid acts of violence against each other, against children, all because at some point some dude may have said some different shit than some other dude at a place like 60 miles away.
I also don't get the side picking. This attack was violent and horrible, but does that wipe away the decades of horrible shit Isreal has done? Seems like two toxic groups are doing toxic shit at each other.
I only feel sorry for the innocent people caught in the cross fire.
They are too similar, so they must go out of the way to villainize and demonize the "other" lest people not feel like they are 100% in the right. Something similar to you but not you might make the regulars of society realize the invisible lines and honestly they don't really want to think about it anyways. Us vs them and the more alike the mora adamant the existence of differences.
Which side should you support? Maybe the only side actually facing genocide.
Israel is kettling Palestine. Palestine has no option but to fight back against israels apartheid.
Both sides say they want to eradicate the other but only Israel is actually doing genocide.
I get it. if I was born in Palestine I'd fight too.
But if I went to Palestine in the body I currently inhabit, I'd be raped and stoned in the streets for the way I dress.
I've seen videos of children of both cultures calmly telling tourists they should die, that god will kill them, that the children themselves would kill them if they could. The Israeli children are dressed nicer, but the raw hatred is the same. Both cultures suckle their children on self-righteousness. On stories of being 'gods chosen'. If their cultures grow and succeed they wont care that you helped, they'll use their power to subjugate you to their god all the same. Because they're 'special'
For better or worse (probably worse though) the British gave Israel to the jews because they were also facing genocide. So it's not quite as clear cut as you'd like it to be.
Calling this a religious war completely misses the socioeconomic context. Palestine is extremely poor, but they've also been systematically oppressed, had their homes stolen from them, had their rights ripped away, and are treated as basically subhuman.
Religion is the power that's organizing revolutionaries, but it's not the power that's creating revolutionaries.
I think calling it a socioeconomic war strips away all the context of the last 100ish years. These groups are fighting over who gets Jerusalem, because they believe it's holy. The socioeconomic conditions in Palestine are the result of a long holy war that they are losing. Tell me I'm wrong.
GB and the allies said, hey we'll put you here in Israel since 2000 years ago the Pharaohs made you slaves. Don't mind the people living here, they'll just move. They did the same thing with India and Pakistan. I wonder how the animosity between these groups started?
While Britain did make the matters worse but we must not forget that Hindus and Muslims have been at war with each other for a millennium now.
Same for Jews and Muslims.
People also want to indulge in political correctness and give free pass to Islamic scriptures which promotes hatred against Jews and Polytheists (Hindus).
That's why you'll find Muslims in Israel and India living largely peacefully but Hindus in Pakistan and Jews in Palestine continue to face atrocities.
In fact Hindus don't even have freedom of religion in India as many of our sacred Hindu sites were destroyed by Islamic invaders and mosques were built upon them.
Today's conflict between India and Pakistan is basically Hindus in conflict with ex-Hindus who converted to Islam to escape from Jizya (Islamic tax) and other forms of atrocities.
Another thing that makes India unique is that it has somehow retained some bits of it's culture even after the repeated Islamic invasions, that's not the case with other 50 odd Islamic countries. Spain might be the only other exception.
So, these are centuries old conflicts which Britishers exploited well.
Lol no. They keep close relations with the army for protection because they're such a small minority. Meanwhile muslims in India face the stupidity of the BJP and muslims in Israel face the wrath of whosoever turn it is to go raid Al Aqsa again.
Also it wasn't Britain's idea to split the country. That was a stance of the Muslims. Britain did exploit the tensions between them to prevent them from rebelling against the British Raj. Then they did a 180 when they no longer had a need to keep India under brutal occupation.
All in all Pakistan and India came out far far better than Israel and Palestine.
Hindus in conflict with ex-Hindus
Straight outta r/Chodi lmaooooo
You're aware that terrorism is how Israel became Israel. Look into proto Israeli bombings of civilian targets.
On 22 July 1946, Irgun bombed the British administrative headquarters for Palestine, which was housed in the southern wing[142] of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.[143][144][145] A total of 91 people of various nationalities were killed and 46 were injured.[146] The hotel was the site of the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan.
So what is the solution? Rolling over and dying as Israel genocides them in slow-motion while the rest of the world looks on and shrugs? Hamas is a putrid, evil organization, but the Palestinians have no other options. No one gives a shit what's happening to them.
There is zero historical evidence outside the Bible for the enslavement of Jewish people. The Egyptian wrote down everything and there are no mentions of Jewish slaves and certainly no mention of locust, frogs, the Nile turning to blood, or the mass slaughter of children in the middle of the night.
You can't say that, it's "impolite", but it's true.
Bibi's an authoritarian with a strong desire to create a sort of ethnostate. He also needs the media to cover something other than his corruption and his removal of the judiciary's independence from his regime.
So, I expect this to be extremely ugly and to leave Palestine and her people worse off than ever before.
A major issue is that there isn't even a Palestinian Authority with which to negotiate anymore. And, Hamas is happy to let Palestine and Palestinians suffer to the last person so long as it means they get to shoot at just one more Israeli. It will go on until Israel wants to stop, which under the current government may be never.
And you think Hamas will disband immediately? No, they will launch an all out attack again, because one of their stated holy goals is to murder as many Israelis as possible. The blockade keeps Israelis alive, and your armchair suggestions are stupid.
No, Israel has declared war. This is a BFD. A couple hundred dead, 1500 injured, Hamas is going door to door executing people. 2000 rockets fired into Israel. They've captured territory. They've captured the general of the Israeli defence force. This isn't some border skirmish like we have heard about for a couple of decades, this was a very competent full scale attack.
Israel doesn't fuck around. Even if you don't agree with them, they're very militarily capable. Israel is about to turn Gaza into rubble in under a week. In the 6 day war, several Arab countries formed a coalition and attacked Israel, and got so thoroughly buttspanked they haven't done it since. Within 6 days they conquered all the way to the current Jordanian border, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the entirety of Sinai, which they returned as a gesture. Gaza is about to get glassed.
I mean Israel already declared a state of war. Yeah this is not a small scale attack, and is actually the first time Hamas actually attacked Israel with foot soldiers.
If I were Mossad I'd be ashamed right now. How the fuck did they miss this? The FBI missed 12(?) 9/11 hijackers and it was the fuck up of a lifetime. Mossad missed an ENTIRE MILITARY OPERATION. Wtf?
Other videos of armed men from Hamas hauling soldiers and civilians into captivity in Gaza have enraged and alarmed Israelis.
Israelis and Palestinians have been focusing on the West Bank, the territory between Jerusalem and the Jordanian border that Israel has occupied since 1967, where there has been almost continuous confrontation and violence throughout the year.
Armed Palestinians, especially those operating out of the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus, have attacked Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers.
Extreme religious nationalists inside Israel's right-wing government have repeated their claim that the occupied territories, in their entirety, are Jewish land.
During the last week, some Jews have prayed inside the Aqsa Mosque compound, the third holiest place for Muslims after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.
At the heart of the trouble is the intractable and unresolved century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan.
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"Blindsides" give me a break. You are telling me one of the most intelligence heavy militaries in the world couldn't possibly have seen this coming? Israel let this happen to justify wiping out hamas for good.
I keep popping into these threads just to check, and not one of those "private property is theft you can't own land" people that are so prevalent in the rest of lemmy's threads has brought this up yet. Seemingly, they do in fact think that either israel or palestine can claim "true" ownership of said land, due to this or that reason.
Tangentially related at best I know, I just find that pretty interesting.
Israel and Palestine are both countries. Private ownership does not factor into the equation. If you get into the weeds, part of the dispute is a claim of private property rights that predate Israel. But even that duspute could be viewed through the lense of collective rights.
Interesting, so those people think that "states" can own the land? This distinction seems odd to me, one would think that if "land cannot be owned" as is the typical assertion, it wouldn't matter if a state or an individual is doing the "owning," it "can't be done."
"The state" is distinct from "the people," as well, unless either of these states (Israel or Palestine) are actually marxist and have abolished "the state," then one could make the argument that "the people" have become "the state," however then the argument could also be made that there is no "state" to speak of that could do the land owning. And as far as I'm aware, neither "state" is that.