War in Gaza

greywolf00 said:

I'd love to see updated data supporting the idea that Palestinians are no longer the majority ethnic group of Gaza as that would mark a remarkable shift from 2004 where they accounted for 49% of the population. I'm not saying it's false, it's just not data I've seen.

As for the "Insurgent" recruiting, that's a longstanding and common theme in Islamic extremist organizations due to the religion. It's impossible to determine how many members of Hamas in Gaza are from other countries so they will continue to be classified as a Palestinian Terrorist Organization.

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Corwin said:

This may shock you, but I've checked it out, less than 100 years ago (actually I think not much more than 50 years ago) the majority of Israelis were called Palestinians. Historically, there is NO such nation or people as Palestinians, EXCEPT for the Jews!!

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Things change, of course—the only constant in the Middle East is sudden and dramatic change—but as I write it seems as if Israel is losing the war in Gaza, even as it wins the battle against Hamas’s rocket arsenal, and even as it destroys the tunnels meant to convey terrorists underground to Israel (and to carry Israeli hostages back to Gaza).

This is not the first time Israel has found itself losing on the battlefield of perception. Why is it happening again? Here are six possible reasons:

1. In a fight between a state actor and a non-state actor, the non-state actor can win merely by surviving. The party with tanks and planes is expected to win; the non-state group merely has to stay alive in order to declare victory. In a completely decontextualized, emotion-driven environment, Hamas can portray itself as the besieged upstart, even when it is the party that rejects ceasefires, and in particular because it is skilled at preventing journalists from documenting the activities of its armed wing. (I am differentiating here between Hamas's leadership and Gaza's civilians, who are genuinely besieged, from all directions.)

2. Hamas’s strategy is to bait Israel into killing Palestinian civilians, and Israel usually takes the bait. This time, because of the cautious nature of its prime minister, Israel waited longer than usual before succumbing to the temptation of bait-taking, but it took it all the same. (As I’ve written, the seemingly miraculous Iron Dome anti-rocket system could have provided Israel with the space to be more patient than it was.) Hamas’s principal goal is killing Jews, and it is very good at this (for those who have forgotten about Hamas's achievements in this area, here is a reminder, and also here and here), but it knows that it advances its own (perverse) narrative even more when it induces Israel to kill Palestinian civilians. This tactic would not work if the world understood this, and rejected it. But in the main, it doesn’t. Why people don’t see the cynicism at the heart of terrorist groups like Hamas is a bit of a mystery. Here is The Washington Post on the subject:

The depravity of Hamas’s strategy seems lost on much of the outside world, which — following the terrorists’ script — blames Israel for the civilian casualties it inflicts while attempting to destroy the tunnels. While children die in strikes against the military infrastructure that Hamas’s leaders deliberately placed in and among homes, those leaders remain safe in their own tunnels. There they continue to reject cease-fire proposals, instead outlining a long list of unacceptable demands.

3. People talk a lot about the Jewish lobby. But the worldwide Muslim lobby is bigger, comprising, among other components, 54 Muslim-majority states in the United Nations. Many Muslims naturally sympathize with the Palestinian cause. They make their voices heard, and they help shape a global anti-Israel narrative, in particular by focusing relentlessly on Gaza to the exclusion of conflicts in which Muslims are being killed in even greater numbers, but by Muslims (I wrote about this phenomenon here).

4. If you've spent any time these past few weeks on Twitter, or in Paris, you know that anti-Semitism is another source of Israel’s international isolation. One of the notable features of this war, brought to light by the ubiquity and accessibility of social media, is the open, unabashed expression of vitriolic Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism has been with us for more than 2,000 years; it is an ineradicable and shape-shifting virus. The reaction to the Gaza war—from the Turkish prime minister, who compared Israel's behavior unfavorably to that of Hitler's, to the Lebanese journalist who demanded the nuclear eradication of Israel, to, of course, the anti-Jewish riots in France—is a reminder that much of the world is not opposed to Israel because of its settlement policy, but because it is a Jewish country.

5. Israel’s political leadership has done little in recent years to make their cause seem appealing. It is impossible to convince a Judeophobe that Israel can do anything good or useful, short of collective suicide. But there are millions of people of good will across the world who look at the decision-making of Israel’s government and ask themselves if this is a country doing all it can do to bring about peace and tranquility in its region. Hamas is a theocratic fascist cult committed to the obliteration of Israel. But it doesn’t represent all Palestinians. Polls suggest that it may very well not represent all of the Palestinians in Gaza. There is a spectrum of Palestinian opinion, just as there is a spectrum of Jewish opinion.

I don’t know if the majority of Palestinians would ultimately agree to a two-state solution. But I do know that Israel, while combating the extremists, could do a great deal more to buttress the moderates. This would mean, in practical terms, working as hard as possible to build wealth and hope on the West Bank. A moderate-minded Palestinian who watches Israel expand its settlements on lands that most of the world believes should fall within the borders of a future Palestinian state might legitimately come to doubt Israel’s intentions. Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel’s sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates. And yes, I know that in the chaos of the Middle East, which is currently a vast swamp of extremism, the thought of a West Bank susceptible to the predations of Islamist extremists is a frightening one. But independence—in particular security independence—can be negotiated in stages. The Palestinians must go free, because there is no other way. A few months ago, President Obama told me how he views Israel's future absent some sort of arrangement with moderate Palestinians:

[M]y assessment, which is shared by a number of Israeli observers … is there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?

Obama raised a series of prescient questions. Of course, the Israeli government's primary job at the moment is to keep its citizens from being killed or kidnapped by Hamas. But it should work to find an enduring solution to the problem posed by Muslim extremism. Part of that fix is military, but another part isn't.

6. Speaking of the Obama administration, the cause of a two-state solution would be helped, and Israel's standing would be raised, if the secretary of state, John Kerry, realized that such a solution will be impossible to achieve so long as an aggressive and armed Hamas remains in place in Gaza. Kerry's recent efforts to negotiate a ceasefire have come to nothing in part because his proposals treat Hamas as a legitimate organization with legitimate security needs, as opposed to a group listed by Kerry's State Department as a terror organization devoted to the physical elimination of one of America's closest allies. Here is David Horovitz's understanding of Kerry's proposals:

It seemed inconceivable that the secretary’s initiative would specify the need to address Hamas’s demands for a lifting of the siege of Gaza, as though Hamas were a legitimate injured party acting in the interests of the people of Gaza — rather than the terror group that violently seized control of the Strip in 2007, diverted Gaza’s resources to its war effort against Israel, and could be relied upon to exploit any lifting of the “siege” in order to import yet more devastating weaponry with which to kill Israelis.

I'm not sure why Kerry's proposals for a ceasefire seem to indulge the organization that initiated this current war. Perhaps because Kerry may be listening more to Qatar, which is Hamas's primary funder, than he is listening to the Jordanians, Emiratis, Saudis, and Egyptians, all of whom oppose Hamas to an equivalent or greater degree than does their ostensible Israeli adversary. In any case, more on this later, as more details emerge about Kerry's efforts. For purposes of this discussion, I'll just say that Israel won't have a chance of winning the current struggle against Hamas's tunnel-diggers and rocket squads if its principal ally doesn't appear to fully and publicly understand Hamas's nihilistic war aims, even as it works to shape more constructive Israeli policies in other, related areas.

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GothicGothicness said:

It is a never ending story, a city should not be "holy" for two different religions. In a normal situation you can give each a piece of land and they can be happy with it in the long term, but if both needs to "share" the same place and with different cultures and religions it has almost never worked out.

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ManWhoJaped said:

It's nothing to do with the holy city except to a few ultra-orthodox jews, though many of the crusades were largely about guaranteeing ACCESS to the holy city which was not always possible.

It's more like jewish nationalism. Jews are one of the bigger ethnicities in europe and yet have no homeland of their own. They are the first 'multiculturalism' that europe really dealt with and still the biggest (though not for long probably). Mainly jews have not assimilated into europe until recent times, if then. So the question becomes should they 1) integrate locally 2) take over their current residence as has started to happen when they migrated in mass numbers or 3) find some kind of homeland. A lot have christianized especially in spain, but after WW II a great number leaned strongly towards option 3, because otherwise you are always at the whim of the majority. And it's not just jews who are vulnerable, they are just the most documented case of genocide.

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Corwin said:

Historically, there is NO such nation or people as Palestinians, EXCEPT for the Jews!!

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ManWhoJaped said:

USA won't be muslim except maybe in a thousand years…

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ManWhoJaped said:

There's simply no option but to fight. There's no way that gaza region can ever be secure unless Israel patrols its borders to keep out foreign influece or else takes it over.

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zahratustra said:

Yup, that's why I believe that the future belongs to the bunnies.

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Gaza is a tough place; it's tiny, overcrowded and besieged. But the people are kind. The food is delicious, and the beach, though filthy, allows us to pretend that we're free. The sunset at sea is a spectacular scene, despite the Israeli warships dotting the landscape. Take a stroll down the street, and you'll meet vendors, mostly young children hawking their wares. Take a taxi, and by the time you get off, you'll be exchanging phone numbers with your newest friend, the taxi driver.

Our markets are complete chaos, an experience for all five senses. Rush hour is when school children, dressed in UNRWA uniforms or Barcelona and Real Madrid t-shirts, finish classes and flood the streets on their way back home. It is when I realize how young Gaza's population is. Night is as lively a time as daytime. Smoke shisha at a beach or downtown café or chill with the family. The people in Gaza, too, are humans.

But this isn't the scene in Gaza anymore. The streets are deserted, and so is the beach. Schools have become makeshift shelters crammed with displaced people fleeing death to a supposedly safer place. The beautiful noise of life has been replaced by a horrid one of death. Drones are humming overhead, and jet fighters are roaring.

There is always shelling at a distance. Distance, however, is relative. It could be so close that your windows will be blown out as you scream your heart out. Only then will you realize you have just escaped a narrow death. But someone else must have inevitably died. This could happen numerous times a day before you force yourself to sleep in the dark in a safe corner of your house to the sound of falling bombs and missiles, in the hope that none of these missiles will know its way to you.

The people in Gaza are living through yet another Israeli assault, the third such assault in six years, with nowhere to flee. As missiles hit civilian houses, entire families are obliterated. How else could one possibly characterize the killing of twenty-five members from one family in one strike, or the killing of another eighteen members from another family in just another strike? How can one describe the arbitrary and indiscriminate shelling of one of the most crowded and impoverished areas in Gaza City with endless barrages of missiles and mortar shells all night long while preventing ambulances and civil defense forces from entering the area to rescue and evacuate the victims?

"We don't target civilians," Israel tells us. "You're simply lying" should be a sane person's response to these, at best, baseless claims. Israel does target civilians with its sophisticated high-precision weapons, hence the over 1,000 deaths in Gaza so far, 80 percent of whom are civilians, according to human rights groups. Over 200 children have been killed, some charred, others decapitated and many disemboweled. Israeli warships have killed four young children from Bakr family playing on the beach in broad daylight, an incident witnessed by NBC's reporter in Gaza Ayman Mohyedin. A sniper killed a distressed young man looking for his lost cousin amongst the debris in the wake of its unspeakable massacre in Al Shujayeh.

Its unmanned drones killed two young brothers from Areef family with a missile while they were on their way to buy yogurt for their breakfast. In another incident, it fired missiles at and killed three children feeding their pigeons and chickens on the roof of their building. Israel has dropped thousands of tons of explosives on one of the world's most densely populated areas, killing 26 members from Abu Jame' family in one airstrike, 20 members from Al Najjar family, 18 from Al Batsh family, nine from Al Qassas family, 7 from Al Keilani family, 8 from Kaware' family, five from Hamad family and on and on. These are the stories we hear as we wait death in the comfort of our home.

A ceasefire might be negotiated and agreed upon. Hamas might soon stop firing rockets, but then will Israel cease to exercise its violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on a daily basis? The reality is that if Palestinians stop resisting, Israel won't stop occupying, as its leaders repeatedly affirm. The besieged Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had a motto "to live and die in dignity." As I sit in my own besieged ghetto, I think how Palestinians have honored this universal value. We live in dignity and we die in dignity, refusing to accept subjugation.

We're tired of war. I, for one, have had enough of bloodshed, death and destruction. But I also can no longer tolerate the return to a deeply unjust status quo. I can no longer agree to live in this open-air prison. We can no longer tolerate to be treated as sub-humans, deprived of our most basic human rights. We are trapped here, trapped between two deaths: death by Israeli bombs and missiles, and death by Israel's blockade of Gaza.

We want to be able to get in and out of Gaza freely, whenever we choose. Why should our students not be granted their right to study at universities of their own choice? Why should our patients be left for their own death as Israel deprives them of receiving medical treatment in hospitals outside of Gaza? Our fishermen want to fish in our sea waters without the prospect of being shot at and killed. We deserve the right to access clean water, electricity and our most basic needs. And yet we can't because Israel occupies. It occupies not only our land but our bodies and our destinies. No people can tolerate this injustice. We, too, are humans.

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Corwin said:

This may shock you, but I've checked it out, less than 100 years ago (actually I think not much more than 50 years ago) the majority of Israelis were called Palestinians. Historically, there is NO such nation or people as Palestinians, EXCEPT for the Jews!!

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HiddenX said:

Reading all the different opinions and views so far, this is not a black/white scenario.
There are justifications and crimes on both sides. And currently unfortunately no willingness to accept the other faction. Not to speak of peace or a two state solution.

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DArtagnan said:

Oh, look, it's Mr. Controversy

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DArtagnan said:

I can speak troll, but I usually have to care

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