[Godstud]

@JohnRawls There is no ethnic cleansing going on. This is moronic hyperbole.

Hamas knew what the response would be when they started the war and even said they were willing to martyr every Palestinian.

What level of retaliation was good enough? Do you think Israel wants to continue to be plagued by Hamas for eternity simply because Hamas can't accept being next to Israel?

Israel pulled out all of their settlers in about 2006, for peace with Palestine. They never got it. Hamas started lobbing missiles.

War sucks, but Hamas knew this when they started it. Every death is on Hamas' shoulders. You know it, and I know it.

[JohnRawls]

@JohnRawls There is no ethnic cleansing going on. This is moronic hyperbole.

Hamas knew what the response would be when they started the war and even said they were willing to martyr every Palestinian.

What level of retaliation was good enough? Do you think Israel wants to continue to be plagued by Hamas for eternity simply because Hamas can't accept being next to Israel?

Israel pulled out all of their settlers in about 2006, for peace with Palestine. They never got it. Hamas started lobbing missiles.

War sucks, but Hamas knew this when they started it. Every death is on Hamas' shoulders. You know it, and I know it.

Were Israelis not taking Palestinian land and homes before the war lets say with the settlement program? Are they not displacing Palestinians now closer and closer to the Egyptian border for the same reason? Don't be coy seriously. When Azerbaljan ethnically cleansed Armenians off their land then everyone were like "ethnic cleansing" and now when Israel basically just does the same, yes may be in a way slower version and now in a bit faster than its not ethnic cleansing? Lets be honest here, removing people from their homes and land on mass is ethnic cleansing irrelevant of how slow or fast you are doing it.

[Godstud]

Were Israelis not taking Palestinian land and homes before the war lets say with the settlement program?

You mean the settlements they abandoned in 2006 for lasting peace? Those settlements?

Palestine's border problems with Egypt are not Israel's problems, and the biggest walls are on the Egyptian border. Tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed into Israel daily prior to Oct 7.

Ethnic cleansing? Grow up. You can't prove it because it isn't happening.

[JohnRawls]

You mean the settlements they abandoned in 2006 for lasting peace? Those settlements?

Palestine's border problems with Egypt are not Israel's problems, and the biggest walls are on the Egyptian border. Tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed into Israel daily prior to Oct 7.

Ethnic cleansing? Grow up. You can't prove it because it isn't happening.

I am proving it right now. The Settlement program is an example of slow ethnic cleansing.

[Godstud]

The Settlement program is an example of slow ethnic cleansing.

no. It's not. BUilding more homes for people to move there is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch of the imagination! Illegal immigration is ethnic cleansing by that standard.

FFS, do you even know what ethnic cleansing means?

Ethnic cleansing
- Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous.

No one is being removed. Why lie about it?

[JohnRawls]

no. It's not. BUilding more homes for people to move there is not ethnic cleansing by any stretch of the imagination! Illegal immigration is ethnic cleansing by that standard.

FFS, do you even know what ethnic cleansing means? :?:

Ethnic cleansing
- Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous.

No one is being removed. Why lie about it?

Yeah, removal of Palestinians from their homes and then putting Israelis in to those homes or demolishing them and building new ones FORCEFULLY is exactly that. Straight from your description, no?

[Rich]

Moving the goalposts won't change the facts on the ground, Israel does civilian punishment better than Hitler...

No it doesn't. Israel is fundamentally a Liberal democratic regime and Liberals on the whole are not very good at terror. They tend to use too much terror, to keep the hearts of the population, but too little or too incompetent terror to win over their minds. Plantation slavery, Jim Crow and South African Apartheid need to be seen as the exceptions to the rule not the norm. Liberals (to which from a certain perspective I would include myself) generally do much better when they sub contract out the teror to somebody else. This is business 101, stick to your core competencies.

A classic example of liberal incompetence at terror was Winston Churchill's harebrained scheme to police Iraq's tribes by dropping non lethal gas from aeroplanes. And this is the guy who the Liberals put up as the greatest source of wisdom on the defence of liberal democracy. Terror is most effective when it is applied at a low level, against small interrelated, strongly interconnected communities. Trying to terrorise nations or communities of millions of people from the air is the height of stupidity.

[Godstud]

@JohnRawls No. Your perception of it is not. I guess Palestine shouldn't have chosen a terrorist organization to lead it. Israel seizing land now, when it is at war with Palestine, is hardly surprising.

Israel removed 10,000 Israeli families from Gaza in 2006 for peace that they never got from Hamas. I'd say it's justified given the ongoing hostilities from this terrorist organization pretending to be the leadership of Gaza.

[late]

No it doesn't.

Nazis killed 30 Frenchmen for every German killed.

If Israel stopped shooting yesterday, and did everything they could to send in medicine and emergency supplies, it's too late. They will exceed the 30 to 1 ratio, as I predicted.

Civilian punishment has a specific definition, and what Israel is doing meets that definition; and the definition of other war crimes.

[wat0n]

Hamas are terrorist animals who started this and Israel are ethnic cleansing animals also, Gaza is 66% destroyed this is already reaching levels of Russian devasation in Ukraine. Mariupol is 70% destroyed, Bakhmut is 80% destroyed.

Hamas deserved a response and retaliation but not to this degree.

You forgot to mention that the US-led coalition reached similar levels of destruction to take Mosul, Raqqa, Kobani, etc from ISIS. You talk about Russia in Ukraine but this is something the West and NATO itself also do in similar situations. If you think an attempt to take Crimea from Russia won't leave places like Sebastopol like this, think again.

This doesn't happen just because the attacker wants to. It's the reality of urban warfare in the 21st century, even if some idiots like @late may just try to draw some proportion ratios (worse, counting both civilians and combatants as if killing combatants was somehow criminal).

You may find this article interesting, it seems even current international humanitarian law provisions are part of the problem. Specifically the ban on using tear gas and flamethrowers, which could have been used to force fighters holed up into a building to leave but, since they're not available anymore, militaries will instead opt to just bomb the building since that's their remaining legal option.

https://mwi.westpoint.edu/militaries-mu ... ties-save/

Both sides are just bad faith actors in the sense of peace.

True and yet this is still an oversimplification.

Israeli settlement building is indeed an obstacle to peace. Not an insurmountable one but definitely a big issue, one that makes violence more likely than otherwise since it increases tensions and violence in the West Bank. The 2014 war (Operation Protective Edge) wouldn't have happened if there were no settlements for example, since the war started over the kidnapping and then execution by Hamas of two settlers who were hitchhiking. More generally, it makes it necessary for Israel to have a much larger military presence and more restrictions solely to protect settlers than there would otherwise be. Some people worry about building during negotiations but the real problem with settlements is that make it necessary to Israel to impose harsher restrictions than would otherwise be necessary. Even then, land swaps and evacuations are both options that can deal with this problem and of all the contentious issues settlements are actually the easiest one to solve as shown by the maps presented in the Annapolis talks in 2008. Jerusalem, refugees and security arrangements are all harder to deal with, in increasing order of difficulty.

But you're still missing the full nature of the problem, because it doesn't make sense to speak of "both" sides when the Palestinians are not united to begin with. There are at least 3 aides here, Israel, Palestinian moderates (the Palestinian Authority) and Palestinian irredentists (chiefly among them, Hamas). The situation in the West Bank isn't and hasn't been the same as the situation in Gaza since 2005, and it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise. They haven't even been governed by the same entity since then.

In fact, even if Israel removed all settlers and reached an agreement with the Palestinian Authority, there would still be the problem of Hamas in Gaza and it's clear that one cannot be solved through diplomacy. It's precisely why it's essential to topple Hamas to have any possibility of actual peace. The Israeli public understands this, and many who could otherwise be willing to give concessions to the Palestinian Authority and even get rid of settlements see these actions as pointless as they would not end the conflict.

Of course, toppling Hamas from Gaza means thinking about the day after. Since Israel can't be trusted not to resettle it and the Palestinian Authority can't afford to be returning riding Merkava tanks, it seems like the international community should play the main role here by sending peacekeepers and having them hand Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

Once this actually becomes an issue where there are two sides, real negotiations could begin. And the international community should pressure both to reach an agreement, or else - the type of resulting agreement will have to be an imposition that doesn't look like one. Arguably, the field is ripe for that, the US on one hand wants to focus on China and not deal with Middle East bullshit anymore, the key Sunni Arab states (Egypt and Saudi Arabia) want to focus on Iran, even Israel wants a peace agreement with Saudi Arabia to focus on Iran as well.

[late]

Israel removed 10,000 Israeli families from Gaza in 2006 for peace that they never got from Hamas. I'd say it's justified given the ongoing hostilities from this terrorist organization pretending to be the leadership of Gaza.

Israel turned Gaza into a prison.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"

They weren't ready to do mass murder in 2006, but they're ready now...

[Rich]

@JohnRawls No. Your perception of it is not. I guess Palestine shouldn't have chosen a terrorist organization to lead it. Israel seizing land now, when it is at war with Palestine, is hardly surprising.

Israel removed 10,000 Israeli families from Gaza in 2006 for peace that they never got from Hamas. I'd say it's justified given the ongoing hostilities from this terrorist organization pretending to be the leadership of Gaza.

You Zionists just can't stop lying can you. It was 1700 families not 10000. And when Sharon first raised the plan he specifically stated not that it was part of a peace deal but on the understanding that it would specifically preclude dialogue with the Palestinians for 25 years. The Israelis don't want partners for peace. they want partners for apartheid.

Hamas have never been offered statehood in Gaza. Hamas have never been offered control of their own borders, Hamas have never been offered international recognition and a place at the United Nations as the recognised government of Gaza, despite the fact that they won the elections not just for Gaza but the whole of the Palestine Authority.

[wat0n]

You Zionists just can't stop lying can you. It was 1700 families not 10000. And when Sharon first raised the plan he specifically stated not that it was part of a peace deal but on the understanding that it would specifically preclude dialogue with the Palestinians for 25 years. The Israelis don't want partners for peace. they want partners for apartheid.

Hamas have never been offered statehood in Gaza. Hamas have never been offered control of their own borders, Hamas have never been offered international recognition and a place at the United Nations as the recognised government of Gaza, despite the fact that they won the elections not just for Gaza but the whole of the Palestine Authority.

You should put the full quote:

There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve. This issue above all others will dictate the solution that we must adopt. In the absence of a negotiated agreement – and I do not believe in the realistic prospect of an agreement – we need to implement a unilateral alternative... More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle – and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state... the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem... Twenty-three years ago, Moshe Dayan proposed unilateral autonomy. On the same wavelength, we may have to espouse unilateral separation... [it] would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.[13]

[late]

You should put the full quote

I am of the opinion, and have been for a long time, that a modern state has to be secular.

A sectarian state is going to have sectarian conflict, or do ethnic cleansing.

The final solution..

[wat0n]

I am of the opinion, and have been for a long time, that a modern state has to be secular.

A sectarian state is going to have sectarian conflict, or do ethnic cleansing.

The final solution..

Go tell this to all states that have established religion, including many in Europe.

Israel is no different, well, it at least has established more than one religion.

[late]

Go tell this to all states that have established religion, including many in Europe.

Israel is no different, well, it at least has established more than one religion.

It's hard to describe, but for the lack of a better way to phrase it, Europe has a tongue in cheek approach to religion.

It's not taken seriously.

Which you can't say about Israel.

If you've noticed, when the extreme Right surfaces, all manner of bigotry comes along with them.

I wonder if someone has studied all this in depth, it's something I'd like to learn.

[Pants-of-dog]

If there is footage showing a permanent battalion presence in Nuseirat, then the footage was not shown in this thread.

The only counter argument produced to address the claim that the IDF bombed supposed “safe zones” was the unsubstantiated speculation that the IDF issued subsequent orders after that. An investigation found no such subsequent orders.

So the counter argument not only has no evidence, but the evidence was searched for and was not found.

[wat0n]

Oh, so now you don't believe Amit Soussana, @Pants-of-dog?

Do you want footage of her rape too?

And there is footage of the tunnels found in Nuseirat, so you're wrong about that one too.

It's hard to describe, but for the lack of a better way to phrase it, Europe has a tongue in cheek approach to religion.

It's not taken seriously.

Which you can't say about Israel.

If you've noticed, when the extreme Right surfaces, all manner of bigotry comes along with them.

I wonder if someone has studied all this in depth, it's something I'd like to learn.

Well, Israel still takes religion far less seriously than its neighbors. And well, it doesn't have some openly theocratic elements like e.g. the Lords Celestials of the UK.

I would also say that the extreme Left can be just as bigoted, can't it? Just see what happened in the USSR, which also had its own approach to religion.

[Pants-of-dog]

If there are tunnels near Nuseirat, then this is a brand new argument.

The previous arguments about battalions and operations can be ignored, then.

Where exactly are the tunnels in relation to the area bombed?

What evidence is there that these tunnels were used by Hamas?

Provide links and quotes.

[late]

I would also say that the extreme Left can be just as bigoted, can't it? Just see what happened in the USSR, which also had its own approach to religion.

At some point in the future, I may continue the discussion of the relationship between church and state. But not now.

There is politics, and then there is conflict. Politics is about give and take, conflict is about take and take.

Without that give and take, politics dies. And sometimes that's just the beginning of the dying.

Which is part of the reason I don't see things along a bilateral Left/Right relationship.

The short quiz, which divides things between 2 variables: freedom/authoritarian and individual/group is an improvement, but incomplete.

What evolved here is a dynamic that swings between those impulses. The Founding Fathers didn't want it, but it happened all on it's own, almost immediately.

That needs to get placed in a 3 dimensional matrix, but I'm too lazy to do it.