this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
63 points (100.0% liked)
World News
22057 readers
93 users here now
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So I just heard about this whole thing last night. What is the preferred Israeli response to this?
To me it looks like Hamas using occupied buildings as places to attack from, the Israel being told they aren’t allowed to hit back at people using human shields.
Stop the occupation of Palestine, stop the settlement of the West Bank, and stop the apartheid status of Palestinians in Israel. Then either allow Palestine to be an independent country in the UN, responsible for their own security and economy. Or give all Palestinians voting rights in Israel as a one state solution. After that is set and done set up an independent criminal court to judge on all war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in this region, this will of course also include Hamas.
Israel used to occupy Gaza the same way it currently does the West Bank; there were even Jewish settlers living there. The IDF withdrew in 2005 as a token of goodwill towards peace and a future Palestinian state, evicting all Jewish residents as well. Gaza then elected Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the extermination of all Jews, and started lobbing rockets. Israelis aren't exactly keen to see a repetition of that.
I really get wanting to believe that this would be a solution, but the fact of the matter is that there are very real security concerns; a not-small number of Palestinians believe that the state of Israel should be destroyed by violently removing all Jews from the land, as we saw last weekend. You can say that that anger and resentment is somewhat justified - hell, I'd largely agree - but Israel is under no circumstances going to allow its existence to be threatened. The fundamental purpose of Israel existing is to provide a safe homeland for Jews, and Israel will stop at nothing to ensure that.
Giving all Palestinians full voting rights is not going to happen so long as there's such a complete lack of trust between the two groups. Israelis, probably correctly, fear that they'd quickly become a minority within their own state and ultimately be subjected to government persecution or expulsion. You have to keep in mind that a huge chunk of Israelis come from Arab countries that forcibly seized their assets and expelled them. Israelis will not accept the possibility of their own government doing the same.
Idealism simply is not applicable in this situation. If Israel fully withdrew from the West Bank, they have no reason to believe that it wouldn't simply be a repeat of the Gaza fiasco from 2005, with the situation being even worse since attacks out of the West Bank could threaten Jerusalem. Any analysis of the situation must begin and end with the immutable fact that Israel will prioritize its own security above anything else, including Western condemnation.
None of this is to excuse the many unjustifiable travesties that Israel does commit against the Palestinians, which are numerous, nor does it excuse settlements in the West Bank at all, which are disgusting abominations that actively serve to make peace even more impossible than it already is. But fundamentally, Israel is never going to make any kind of withdrawals or concessions unless it feels its security remains guaranteed, and any proposal that doesn't accept this is doomed.
I'm gonna nitpick here, but:
Statements like this really need to be more clear, because they can otherwise severely muddy the waters of an already extremely messy situation. What exactly are you referring to here by "Israel"? Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinian or otherwise, have full rights. Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza are severely restricted and oppressed a lot, and sure, you can make an apartheid analogy if you want. But is it not our entire fundamental premise that the West Bank is not Israel, but rather is Palestine? Palestinians do not live under any kind of apartheid within Israel, unless you are including the West Bank as part of Israel, which no one but the most extreme Israeli nationalists would ever do. So either Palestinians live under apartheid and the West Bank is a legitimate part of the state of Israel, or Palestinians live in Palestine under a strict foreign military occupation and not under an apartheid in Israel.
Not going to get into an argument about Hamas vs Isreali tactics, but you should be aware that it is far, far from the case that Palestinians inside of Israel let alone in OPT have the rights you think they do:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/