Gaza isn’t a country with an army, it’s a terribly poor, largely ungoverned mess with millions of people with little chance at a decent life. Inevitably some choose violence, and that’s a terrible thing. Some others undoubtedly sympathize with the violent ones without actually taking part. In a desperate place, some will make desperate decisions. The way out of it is not to kill or remove all Gazans (for many reasons), but to ensure Gaza is not such a desperate place that so many will have no choices but desperate choices. That certainly won’t be easy, but Israeli policy hasn’t been on the right path for this for a long time, so it’s become harder and harder. That doesn’t justify this violence, if course.
Elephant in the room: clears them out to where? Okay, fine, lets forcibly remove 2.5 million people from their homes (note that word, their homes). Where, exactly, do you intend to relocate them to?
Deciding 2.5 million people don’t qualify as an ethnic group and therefore cleansing the area where they live of them isn’t ethnic cleansing is the worst kind of semantic game playing.
It would be if the goal was just to take their land.
When that group has actively engaged in trying to kill you and yours for over 50 years I think it is a very normal reaction to push them further away so they can’t kill you or your family. Then the specter of “ethnic cleansing” is invoked to make you stopping them from killing you somehow bad.
That’s semantic game playing.
“That group” (Gazans) has not been doing anything aside from trying to exist. Some people and some groups have been trying to kill Israelis. But Gaza is not Hamas - Hamas is a subset of Gazans. Trying to get rid of Hamas is a reasonable response - Hamas is indeed trying to kill Israelis and wipe them off the map. Gaza and Gazans are not.
Is this really not clear to you?
Ignoring your continuing to play semantic word games with evicting 2.5 million people from their homes, do you have an actual answer to the question that was posed to you? I’ll even repeat it for you:
Elephant in the room: clears them out to where? Okay, fine, lets forcibly remove 2.5 million people from their homes (note that word, their homes). Where, exactly, do you intend to relocate them to?
I think I responded to what seems the same question in post 18 above.
You keep stating factually incorrect things to justify hypothetical atrocities. It’s factually incorrect that Gazans, as a group, are trying to kill Israelis. Maybe some Gazans are helping Hamas. But that’s not even close to equal to 2.5 million people are guilty of trying to kill Israelis.
Yes.
This thread is attempting to make an awful thing less awful, but that’s not my objection to it.
Israel does not engage in ethnic cleansing, because that would be exceedingly wrong, a fact of which Israel is well aware because it was founded to protect the Jewish people from ethnic cleansing. And yet, the world is full of morons who accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and worse.
The last thing Israel needs when engaging in a proportional response is a bunch of self-appointed cheerleaders to stand around shouting “Wipe them out! Kill them all! Erase them from the map!”.
I’m using the phrase because it is an accurate description of what you are proposing.
Yes, indeed. That’s one of the things that makes us better.
I’ll quibble with one thing here - most of the governments (or past governments) of Israel’s neighbors have had a policy to wipe Israel off the map, but that’s different than saying everyone around them wants to (the latter is false - governments do not always represent the wishes of the people, and even when they represent a majority that still doesn’t cover everyone). I think these seemingly little things are important to be careful about because so many try to use tricks of language like that to justify atrocities.
A question for Hamas to answer.
The idea that Gaza is filled with a bunch of neighborly peace-loving Muslims doesn’t align with the reality that they are run by Hamas which is a militant group intent on destroying Israel. This is not a handful of terrorists, it’s the people running Gaza and they’re attacking with thousands and thousands of rockets along with ground assaults. This is an all out war on their part.
Us in that context is the state of Israel which does not have a policy of wanting to erase its neighbors compared to its neighboring states who do, not the Israeli people compared to the people of foreign states.
Eta: for me, I won’t speak for whack-a-mole
I do think a lot of individual people in the states surrounding Israel do have personal animosity towards it, but that’s because of the environment in which they were raised. It’s why normalizing relations is so important. If your textbooks keep hammering how evil Israel is, kids will grow up with a negative view of Israel.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/19/middleeast/saudi-textbooks-israel-mime-intl/index.html
It seems I am wrong. There is no legal definition of “ethnic cleansing.” It has been used before in UN reports and such but, so far at least, it seems a term without an actual definition in a legal sense. Yet, it seems what they have used it for is pretty much what most would think.
I am not making a point with this. Just adding it in to the discussion since it may be relevant.
As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing. A United Nations Commission of Experts mandated to look into violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing in its interim report S/25274 as “… rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” In its final report S/1994/674, the same Commission described ethnic cleansing as “… a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” - SOURCE
I don’t know that anyone said this. There’s clearly a lot of people who support Hamas in Gaza.
This is all true, but none of this justifies ethnic cleansing.
Nazis in WW2 weren’t a handful of terrorists, they ran the whole German nation. That doesn’t mean that evicting everyone who lived in Berlin would have been justified.
What queer logic you have there. Israel is to forcibly evict 2.5 million people, but since you have no actual answer to where exactly Israel is going to displace them to, you try to hand wave it away by making it Hamas’ question to answer? I hate to inform you, but if you want Israel to drive 2.5 million people from their homes, you aren’t going to like the answer that Hamas will give to the question of where they should be evicted to. Are you sure you want them to come up with the answer?
I agree. I also think the precedent set by WW2, difficult though it might be to implement, is the way for Israel to approach this. Invade Gaza, occupy it, and force Hamas to surrender, at the barrel of a gun if need be. Once that’s done then put a new government in place, and prop it up with occupying soldiers as long as necessary. Not in the way the US tried to do things in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror, but the way the Allies did things with Japan and West Germany after WWII.
Except for post-WWII reconstruction has this ever worked since?
ETA: I would suggest there is another problem in the Middle East. There are many countries that have no interest in seeing peace happen. It is in their political interest to focus the unhappiness of their population on outsiders rather than their own shitty government. So, they work to destabilize various regions and they are pretty good at it (Iran is certainly one such country but I doubt the only one).
It hasn’t been tried. For the US, the Korean War was a draw and Vietnam a loss, so there was no opportunity to even try. We didn’t invade Iraq in Gulf War I. Eastern Europe didn’t need to be invaded, they (mostly) became westernized peacefully of their own volition after the Cold War ended. That leaves Afghanistan and Iraq II as the only other opportunities to even try to implement that strategy, and Bush Jr. had no interest in doing nation building the way it was done at the end of WWII.
I have no idea if the general Israeli public would have an interest in such a project, doing things like the Marshall plan, writing a brand new constitution for Gaza and enforcing it militarily, and such, but it seems like the best long term approach to solve the problem.
If they continued to fight it would have ended in total destruction of the country.
This has been an ongoing war with no apparent solution beyond ceasefires. Hamas needs to be removed from Gaza and that’s probably gong to mean governance by Israel.
You know what, once upon a time, the Palestinian people didn’t exist, at least, not as they are today. Neither did Israelis. But today, both ethnic groups unquestionably exist.
And sure, lots of Palestinians support Hamas. And lots just want to get on with their lives. My husband has a Palestinian colleague (in a big volunteer open source software project. ) The guy managed to get a visa to visit the US (which is flipping hard for Palestinians) but couldn’t spend the stipend he’d been given because he’s a Palestinian, and they don’t have access to good infrastructure. My husband fronted him the money. Because that guy isn’t a terrorist. He’s a man who’s had the short end of the stick in all sorts of ways and is still trying to give back to the internet community and make the world a better place.
I hope he’s okay.
War sucks. Lots of innocent people get killed and injured.
What defines an “ethnic group?” (really asking)
I live in Chicago. Am I part of the ethnic group “Chicagoan?” Chicago is older than Palestine (or Gaza Strip).
I too hope your friend is ok.