Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East
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As long as Palestinians are used as a vehicle for Arab nations to kick Israel, as long as Israel's existence is threatened, and as long as Palestinians vote for Hamas etc., then this is the end result.
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@paekakboyz said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@Frank if Israel has effectively destroyed Palestine, or any hope of it being a functional country/entity, then some of those anti-Israel countries might consider it moot as there isn't anything to lose. Not sure if that means open season on Israel, or if they'd give up as there was no internal element to support. So does Palestine existing in some form actually keep Israel safer in a perverse way? the country I mean, I suspect however things pan out life will always be riskier in that part of the world
The list of anti-Israel countries is shrinking all the time and the silence from some recently-friendly Arab states is deafening, especially silence about attacks on worshippers in the 3rd holiest site in Islam during the holiest month in the Islamic calendar
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@antipodean said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
As long as Palestinians are used as a vehicle for Arab nations to kick Israel, as long as Israel's existence is threatened, and as long as Palestinians vote for Hamas etc., then this is the end result.
This current situation has little to do with Arab nations trying to kick Israel - there are only a small handful of Arab nations who aren't now on good terms with Israel.
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Given TSF is the font of all knowledge can anyone give a one paragraph explanation of the origins of current trouble?
I appreciate the complications around the formation of the Jewish state post WWII, and religious conflict dating back 2,000 years complicate matters somewhat, but any comments I've seen tend to sit heavily on one side or the other, each accusing the other.
I have a suspicion, like most things, fault may lie on both sides.
Depending on which commentator I've read the removal of protestors from the mosque was either a heinous attack by an oppressive state, or the justified and inevitable result of deliberate provocation.
What were they protesting?
Did they have a right to?
Is their cause justified?
Was it a deliberate attempt to provoke conflict?Appreciate the thoughts of those more informed than me.
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@frank said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@kirwan said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@booboo religion.
You’re welcome.
Religion itself or deliberate distortion of religion to justify actions?
Religion itself seems to generally lend itself to extremes.
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@frank said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@kirwan said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@booboo religion.
You’re welcome.
Religion itself or deliberate distortion of religion to justify actions?
Religion is a useful recruiting tool as well
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The Hill kind of touched on it today in their video, explaining that the Israeli right wing aligned itself with the GOP and therefore now Israeli politics is aligned with US politics, meaning that the 100% support for Israel is not starting to get diluted across party lines, and which means that as the US gets more liberal over time the support for Israeli policies will likely change to a more negative stance:
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Quite a reasonable explanation of what's happening in Gaza and the politics behind it.
In 2018 Yehiya Sinwar, the Hamas veteran who effectively rules Gaza, made an unusual announcement. Speaking two days after Israeli soldiers killed 60 Palestinian protesters and militants at the Gaza border fence, he said that his group would pursue “peaceful, popular resistance”. It was a remarkable thing for a leader of the proscribed terrorist group to say in the face of hardliners calling for vengeance. Sinwar is widely considered a ruthless and brilliant political mind whose two decades in Israeli prisons gave him fluent Hebrew and an intimate understanding of his enemy’s politics and society. And his strategy of “negotiation by rocket” had previously brought tangible successes. But his reluctance in 2018 to seek blood for blood signalled a softening. The next three years saw an easing of the blockade around Gaza, and economic and humanitarian relief. It appeared as though Hamas were seeking legitimisation. “Basically Hamas in recent years was pursuing a more pragmatic strategy with regard to Israel,” said Neri Zilber, an Israeli-American journalist who closely follows events in Gaza. This week, the group seemed to throw that entire strategy of calibration to the winds. And no one is quite sure why. Instead of firing a few dozen rockets in response to Israeli police heavy-handedness in Jerusalem, it launched over a thousand in a ferocious and unprecedented barrage over a single night this week. Instead of confining the bombardment to southern Israel, it fired at targets deeper inside Israel than ever before including, for the first time since 2014, Jerusalem itself. And instead of rapidly de-escalating, it seems encouraged by the unrest in mixed Arab-Jewish towns inside Israel to keep up the pressure. All of this came at the price of a massive Israeli response that has devastated Gaza, killed dozens of Palestinian civilians, and likely dealt grave blows to Hamas’ own manpower and infrastructure. “I cannot believe that they did not think this through,” said Michael Stephens, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “I just can’t work it out.” A clue may lie in recent political developments inside Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel may have upset that delicate balance. In March, Sinwar’s authority was badly shaken during the terror group’s rather opaque internal elections. In the end, he scraped a victory - but the strength of the challenge from more traditional and militant rivals revealed growing dissatisfaction with his rule and an apparent resurgence of the wing of the group with more traditional ideas about destruction of the Jewish state. Then, on April 29 Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, postponed the first elections in 15 years on the grounds that Israel was refusing to guarantee that Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem would be allowed to take part. Most observers believe the real reason is because his fractured Fatah party, widely perceived by ordinary Palestinians as corrupt, authoritarian, and ineffective, was expected to take a mauling at the hands of Hamas. With the electoral avenue to defeating Fatah and claiming leadership shut, the hardliners inside Hamas may have argued that there was less to lose from military escalation. The third electoral vector was in Israel itself. Until the beginning of last week, Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 years as Israeli’s prime minister appeared to be over. An unlikely coalition of right-wing, centrist, left-wing and Arab Islamist parties was poised to take power with a “government for change” focused on reconciliation and civilian affairs. It would have been the first time one of Israel’s minority Arab parties was in government, and represented a tantalising opportunity to up-end a status quo from which Hamas has benefitted, and resurrect long-neglected ideals of co-existence and integration it opposes. It is not clear that Hamas’ objective was to sabotage that coalition and save Benjamin Netanyahu’s government - but that it was certainly one of the consequences of the past week’s escalation. With the political scene completely destabilised, and tensions building during Ramadan over Israeli police heavy-handedness around the Al-Aqsa mosque and the looming legal battle over the eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, someone inside the Hamas apparently decided the time was right to attempt to reignite to general conflict. “It was a golden opportunity to make the connection between defending Jerusalem and Gaza,” said Yossi Mekelberg, an expert at Chatham House. “They also distinguished themselves from Abbas, who appears to be doing nothing or helping Israel." Hamas is not directing the rioting in mixed Jewish Arab cities inside Israel, but its leaders may well think that they inspired it, and see it as vindication of their strategy. Have they miscalculated? It is difficult in the fog of war to work out whether the bloody costs Hamas and ordinary Gazans have paid will justify the fruits of this gamble, even on the terror group’s own terms. But if their goal was to sow chaos, and throw Israel and Palestine into the jaws of conflict, they can certainly congratulate themselves.
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@booboo said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
Given TSF is the font of all knowledge can anyone give a one paragraph explanation of the origins of current trouble?
I appreciate the complications around the formation of the Jewish state post WWII, and religious conflict dating back 2,000 years complicate matters somewhat, but any comments I've seen tend to sit heavily on one side or the other, each accusing the other.
I have a suspicion, like most things, fault may lie on both sides.
Depending on which commentator I've read the removal of protestors from the mosque was either a heinous attack by an oppressive state, or the justified and inevitable result of deliberate provocation.
What were they protesting?
Did they have a right to?
Is their cause justified?
Was it a deliberate attempt to provoke conflict?Appreciate the thoughts of those more informed than me.
I'd say it is more of a battle for territory / land grab/ asset steal under the guise of religion.
I would also say that historically that has been the case, worldwide for conflict.
As for the other questions, I can only answer them with questions.
Was taking land from Palestinians to give to what is now Israel correct? Holy land, etc, and simplified I know, or should Jewish people just have been allowed back into Europe in some way once the Nazis were gone?The whole thing is a fuck up and blowing up innocent people is a war crime:
Article 6(b) of the Charter thus condemned the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity" and classified it as a violation of the laws or customs of war, therefore, making it a war crime.Both parties should be held to account by the UN, but it won't make any difference.
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@snowy said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
@booboo said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
Given TSF is the font of all knowledge can anyone give a one paragraph explanation of the origins of current trouble?
I appreciate the complications around the formation of the Jewish state post WWII, and religious conflict dating back 2,000 years complicate matters somewhat, but any comments I've seen tend to sit heavily on one side or the other, each accusing the other.
I have a suspicion, like most things, fault may lie on both sides.
Depending on which commentator I've read the removal of protestors from the mosque was either a heinous attack by an oppressive state, or the justified and inevitable result of deliberate provocation.
What were they protesting?
Did they have a right to?
Is their cause justified?
Was it a deliberate attempt to provoke conflict?Appreciate the thoughts of those more informed than me.
I'd say it is more of a battle for territory / land grab/ asset steal under the guise of religion.
I would also say that historically that has been the case, worldwide for conflict.
As for the other questions, I can only answer them with questions.
Was taking land from Palestinians to give to what is now Israel correct? Holy land, etc, and simplified I know, or should Jewish people just have been allowed back into Europe in some way once the Nazis were gone?The whole thing is a fuck up and blowing up innocent people is a war crime:
Article 6(b) of the Charter thus condemned the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity" and classified it as a violation of the laws or customs of war, therefore, making it a war crime.Both parties should be held to account by the UN, but it won't make any difference.
Religion is a convenient excuse. It's always about power, money and resources.
The way I understand it the Brits promised the land to both parties to get them onside during WW2. After the war the Jews made so much trouble for them that they left and in the ensuing vacuum the Jews on out and proclaimed a new nation. I'm sure the yanks were there in support somehow but I'm not sure it was any more than diplomatic, morale and monetary support
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Excellent article in The Australian
The latest attacks on Israel are part of a decades-long plan to destroy the Jewish state and establish Islamist rule in its place. While the trigger and justification for violence against Israel changes with each conflict, the collective goal of transnational jihad remains the same. It is to wipe Israel off the map. The most recent outbreak of violence was triggered by a long-running property dispute in East Jerusalem against the background of violent conflict between rival ethnic chauvinist groups of Palestinians and Israelis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu roundly condemned Israeli Jews involved in the brutalisation of Arabs in recent weeks and called for an end to the violence. Sheikh Jarrah is a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood. Some Israelis have asserted legal ownership to properties in the area and sought court orders to evict tenants whose leases have expired, as well as some they say are squatters with no lease rights. Palestinian tenants are claiming they are the rightful owners of the land under a historical agreement with Jordan before Israel assumed control of the territory. While the law might be on the Israeli settlers’ side, they have all but lost the public relations battle. The media is less interested in the opinion of Israeli courts than the plight of Palestinian evictees. It makes colourful copy and is easy to digest. The best option for settlers would be to accommodate the Palestinians, quell domestic unrest, and set their sights on Gaza. For supporters of the Palestinian cause, the Sheikh Jarrah dispute is a microcosm of Israeli-Palestinian relations. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement criticises the unequal citizenship status of Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Yet on its website, BDS members also describe Israel as a racist, colonising power. It is unclear why a group that denies the legitimacy of the Jewish state would seek to further enfranchise Palestinians within it. The majority of United Nations members recognise Israel’s legitimacy, but its boundaries are contested. Writing for The Atlantic, Uri Friedman explained that after the Six Day War in 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt and took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. He writes that under its military occupation, Israel allowed Jews to build settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. Former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon withdrew settlers and troops from Gaza in 2005. Islamist group Hamas subsequently gained control there. For many, Gaza is a cautionary tale of what could happen if Israel bowed to international pressure and yielded more territory to Palestinians. Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election of 2006. After armed conflict with the rival Palestinian political party, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority was split in 2007. Ynet news reported at the time that more than 600 Palestinians had been killed in the factional fighting in 2006-07. In April, President Mahmoud Abbas postponed the first Palestinian elections to be held in 15 years. Hamas claimed it was a coup. Since it came into being, the modern state of Israel has been subjected to unending threats of annihilation from Islamist states and their terrorist proxies, countless terrorist attacks, streams of vitriol from the UN, unbridled anti-Semitism on social media and a barrage of anti-Semitism often wrapped up in Palestinian rights rhetoric. Yet the ever-aspiring superpower of China chose to condemn Israel for defending itself in recent days. It called the US racist for rescheduling a UN meeting on the matter. One might see irony in China condemning other states for prejudice given its ethnically chauvinistic citizenship rules, but perhaps it is only natural the CCP should feel an affinity for terrorist groups like Hamas. They are both ideologically purist and violently intolerant. They employ extrajudicial means to silence dissent and want to fell the free world. They are barbaric brothers in arms. Somewhere between Palestinians flying the terrorist flag of Hamas on the Temple Mount and the 2000th rocket fired on Israel in a week, I lost sympathy for folk crying racism in Jerusalem. And there is nothing quite like the CCP pleading the case of Hamas to firm one’s resolve to defend Israel. In recent weeks, the international community called for moderation on both sides, as though Israelis and Palestinians had never thought of it. At the root of such casual condescension is an inability to grasp the difference between pacifism and peacemaking. It is the latter that creates sustainable peace, and it requires eternal vigilance. In the coming days, the West must resist being so easily persuaded by populist narratives that depict Palestinians as the victims of evil Israelis. Remember the broad support in the Palestinian territories for Islamist terrorist groups. Remember that Palestinian voters gave Hamas victory in the last election. Recall that Hamas is allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all of which seek the destruction of Jews. Do not forget that Hamas has executed innocents for being homosexual, politically moderate, or fraternising with the enemy – Israel. Remember that Hamas killed hundreds of Palestinians to secure its power, enforce sharia morality and permanently silence dissenters. It is a brutal terrorist organisation that kills Jews whenever it is given the chance and seeks the destruction of freedom-loving people. Its founding charter is a testament to genocidal anti-Semitic intent. If you must defend Hamas and its comrades against Israel, first know what it is you are defending.
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Another take by Gwynne Dyer.
“Objective allies” generally don’t even talk to each other. They don’t have common values, their ultimate goals may be completely incompatible, they often hate each other. But they share some intermediate goal, and are clever enough to realise they can both get what they want by acting together in certain ways. Sometimes those ways may even involve shooting at each other, but if acting that way brings a result that serves their various purposes, they are still objective allies. So Benjamin Netanyahu, still prime minister of Israel despite his parlous political position, and Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian organisation that controls the Gaza Strip, are objective allies. Right now the missiles are flying and people are dying in both the Gaza Strip and Israel, and as usual it’s hard to say who or what started it. Was it the Israeli air strikes that hit 150 targets in Gaza and killed around 30 people including nine children on Tuesday? Or the Hamas fighters who launched 130 of their homemade missiles at Israeli towns earlier in the day and killed three Israelis? Or the Israeli police who fired stun grenades Monday night at Palestinian demonstrators taking shelter in the al-Aqsa mosque on what Israelis call Temple Mount? Or the Palestinian protesters who threw rocks and other missiles at the police every night during the last week of Ramadan? Or the founders of Hamas in 1987, or the authors of the Balfour Declaration in 1917? Never mind who started it. The right question is: who benefits from what is happening right now? It’s the same old “objective allies” who have been playing this game for a quarter-century already: Hamas and Netanyahu. And yes, they do hate each other, but nevertheless ... Consider Netanyahu’s position. For the fourth time in a row, he has just failed to get an election outcome that will let him create and lead a coalition government. He is on trial on serious corruption charges, and may go to jail if he does not remain prime minister. The opposition parties that want to see Netanyahu gone now have a month to try to make a different coalition that excludes him, but they have a problem. The electoral arithmetic means that their coalition must contain the United Arab List, or UAL, one of the parties that represent Israel’s 20 per cent minority of Arab citizens. No Arab party has ever been part of an Israeli government before, so putting this coalition together was already quite tricky. Doing it while Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other is impossible. UAL chairman Mansour Abbas has already suspended the talks with his potential Jewish coalition partners. If these Coalition talks fail, Israel will have to have another election (the fifth in 30 months) next autumn. Netanyahu will remain prime minister in the meantime, and will then have another, fifth chance to get a durable right-wing majority coalition that will pass legislation safeguarding him from further prosecution. I can’t read Netanyahu’s mind, but if he were a ruthlessly self-serving politician he would certainly find this little war politically useful. How about his alleged “objective ally”, Hamas? Hamas needs a war right now less than Netanyahu does, but it’s always up for one. Its business model is perpetual rejection of peace with Israel, in the expectation that divine intervention will one day deliver total victory and eliminate the Jewish state. Hamas is therefore in permanent competition with Fatah, the rival Palestinian political movement that accepted the (now moribund) “two-state solution” which envisaged Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side. A little war with Israel now and then is good for Hamas’s image. The Hamas-Netanyahu “objective alliance” is based on the fact that Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution just as much as Hamas does. Indeed, they began by strangling that deal together in 1995-96, and most of the shooting since has been about keeping it dead. The deal came out of the Oslo Accord of 1992, in which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed to move towards two parallel states living in peace. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist, but everybody expected his successor, Shimon Peres, to win the 1996 election on a sympathy vote and go through with the Oslo deal. Instead, Hamas went on a terrorist spree, bombing buses in Israel to cause maximum casualties, in order to drive Israeli voters into the arms of the anti-Oslo Accords nationalist right instead. It succeeded, and the right-wing candidate, ex-commando Binyamin Netanyahu, became prime minister instead and sabotaged the “peace process”. It was never very likely to succeed, but Hamas and Netanyahu both act as objective allies whenever the corpse of the two-state solution threatens to rise from its shallow grave.
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Interesting stuff.
Yet, I still don't get it. At all.
Mainly because despite everything I read, the left wingers in this country are still 100% behind, and support, Palestine. Which is obviously quite difficult to do given the Corbyn's recent run-in with opposing Jews.
Still can't get my head around it.
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A key driver may well be Hamas's attitude to Jews. Here are a few extracts from its charter. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the situation (and I think it's reasonable to blame Israel for much of it), Hamas seems to have a pretty vile racist ideology (Godwin alert..) not dissimilar to Nazi Germany.
'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' (Article 7) 'The enemies have been scheming for a long time and have accumulated huge and influential material wealth. With their money, they took control of the world media. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the globe. They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about. With their money they formed secret organizations - such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs and the Lions - which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. They stood behind World War I and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains.There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it.' (Article 22) 'Zionism scheming has no end, and after Palestine, they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates River. When they have finished digesting the area on which they have laid their hand, they will look forward to more expansion. Their scheme has been laid out in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'.' (Article 32) 'The HAMAS regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism. Islamic groups all over the Arab world should also do the same, since they are best equipped for their future role in the fight against the warmongering Jews.'
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@majorrage said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
Interesting stuff.
Yet, I still don't get it. At all.
Mainly because despite everything I read, the left wingers in this country are still 100% behind, and support, Palestine. Which is obviously quite difficult to do given the Corbyn's recent run-in with opposing Jews.
Still can't get my head around it.
From what I can tell there are plenty of Palestinians that would love Israel to topple Hamas so they don't have to live under their rule anymore, and plenty of others that are right behind what Hamas are doing. And there are lots of Jews that oppose what the Israel government is doing, and plenty more that are right behind them. Like anything that involves human's it's a complex mess, which political activists in the west reduce down to a single issue (Israel bad, Palestine good, and vice versa) and then spout all sorts of bullshit on social media to make themselves look and feel virtuous.
One thing that seems apparent is that Israel takes measures to protect their own citizens, whereas Hamas is more than happy to use theirs as human shields.
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@no-quarter Probably not a bad explanation there fella.
The only thing I know is that when the left wingers / far left fully support one side, then they are probably completely wrong. But in this case, the other side is Israel. And I've worked with a few Israeli's in my time, and did not like a single one of them. Worked with plenty of Jew's who I had a lot of time for, but Israeli's .... Nup.
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@no-quarter said in Israel, Iran, Syria, and the rest of the ... Middle East:
Hamas is more than happy to use theirs as human shields.
You are probably correct but that doesn't appear to work. Israel are O.K. with collateral damage it seems, in order to get at Hamas leaders.
All a complete clusterfuck.