Was there a decade with no Israeli acts of terrorism against Palestinians?
I doubt there’s been a single year without some sort of violent act by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, as well as by Israelis against Palestinian civilians.
I don’t think so, any more than (as Crane and iiandyiiii pointed out) there’s been any decade with no Israeli terrorism against Palestinians. (And that caveat about no timeframe with absolutely zero violence is why I was talking about “what the majority of Palestinians do or don’t do”, and “mass violence against Israelis”, etc. [emphasis added].)
But you see my point about the fundamental hypocrisy in this kind of framing. Supporters of Palestinian rights are supposed to accept that Palestinians aren’t entitled to any rights or sovereignty in their ancestral homeland unless and until they comply with some arbitrary and unilaterally imposed metric about no Palestinian ever anywhere committing any terrorist violence against Israelis for some arbitrary and unilaterally imposed “probation period”.
And that’s bullshit. (It’s also looking more and more like a deliberate choice of impossible goal specifically for the purpose of superficially justifying Israel’s continued denial of Palestinian rights and encroachment onto Palestinian land.)
Palestinians as a people are entitled to have rights and sovereignty in their ancestral land, even if some subset of Palestinians engage in terrorist violence. Similarly, there have always been some subset of Israelis engaging in terrorist violence, but Israelis don’t allow (and nor should they) their own fundamental claims to rights and sovereignty to be made contingent on entirely eliminating terrorism among themselves.
Palestinians are fundamentally entitled to rights and sovereignty because they are people in the land where their ancestors have been living for generations and centuries, not because they meet some arbitrary standard of good behavior unilaterally imposed by Israel.
Yanno you’re right.
If the Israelis built an even more draconian prison to contain all the Palestinians, even the toddlers, there’d be less overt violence by those Palestinian prisoners.
Until you considered that everything about that prison is violence.
More violence today and tomorrow in the interest of avenging yesterday’s structural and overt violence is not the way forward.
Unfortunately there are 3 players involved:
Israelis
Gazans
Hamas
There’s only room for 2 of them.
Impending famine in Gaza, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification:
Trump working on a plan to cleanse Gaza of up to a million Gazans and send them to Libya:
Article from Haaretz “What would victory look like?”
Netanyahu and his far-right allies may yearn for a World War II style of total victory, but there would be nothing Churchillian about it. Their vision of flattening and depopulating Gaza, while deflecting all of Netanyahu and his ministers’ responsibility for their failed strategy, is a Stalinist and Putinist one.
It’s up to Israelis who oppose this grim vision to insist on their own version of victory. A majority of them already support it – but, with few exceptions, the leaders of Israel’s opposition are still too scared to say clearly that only a cease-fire can now deliver true victory for Israel.
Pretty much sums up my view of the inevitable failure of this war unless Israel’s leadership completely changes. The current path hurts the hostages and hurts Israel’s future. Maybe it helps Hamas and Israeli extremists, since they’ll get to continue fighting for years and more on this path.
Thoughts on this article, @Babale?
It’s exactly the same boring slop we’ve heard since the beginning of the conflict.
Way back in October of 2023, I made the following posts in the thread about whether Israel can destroy Hamas. None of my thinking on this has changed. What we’ve seen in Gaza is pretty much what I’d expected we would see when the war began. We are reaching the conclusion I predicted - an occupation as Hamas is displaced and a new governing authority is established. And as I said at the time, it has taken a lengthy war and now an occupation.
As I said at the time, in other threads - it would have been fantastic if one of those other countries that claims to care so much about the fate of the Palestinians offered to aid with the transition, since an occupation by anyone-but-Israel is more likely to lead to a peaceful solution. But, again as I predicted, none of them actually care enough to touch the situation with a ten foot pole.
So you truly think this Israeli government could preside over a successful end to the war?
IMO what you describe sounds like a total fantasy - just a complete pipe dream at odds with what’s actually been happening.
The slightly greater context of my quote:
A “bunch of casualties” hasn’t quite reached the hundreds of thousands yet, not even adding in the multiple tens of thousands attributed to starvation … but it is in the ballpark. And so far Hamas not destroyed. I think getting in that range is still likely given current policies, mostly by induced malnutrition and disease.
And it is not established yet that reoccupation will eliminate Hamas either, or at least not without creating another resistance that has the same ends and methods, the same need for revenge.
I think this Israeli government hasn’t yet presented a real plan for what it will do once it has occupied Gaza, but regardless of that occupation is the necessary next step for any possible plan.
I think that the plan for Gaza will be determined at the ballot box, and that this election will come much sooner than Netanyahu would like. Only one Israeli prime minister has ever served a full term since the nation’s founding, and I highly doubt that Netanyahu is about to become the second after this disastrous term.
Yes, I know that’s your opinion. I disagree. We established that a while ago; I’m not sure what has occurred that you think would change my mind on that, since the things that have played out since are pretty much exactly what I suggested they might be when this all began.
Well, it has to be better than any Hamas “plan”.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. None of this is about revenge. It is about people who believe that if they continue with their current course of action, they will secure the entire land. That applies to both extremist Kahanists on the Israeli side as well as Hamas and similar groups on the Palestinian side.
Peace doesn’t come through love and harmony. It comes from both sides realizing the brutal truth: that violence cannot accomplish their goals.
You really are going to argue that none of the support for violence against Israel and Israelis has been, is, and will continue to be, motivated by revenge?
You really think that Israeli forces will raze cities, kill tens of thousands directly and many more by induced disease and famine, and create a population contentedly occupied as a result? That such is not creating new generations of people who desire revenge?
I personally doubt Hamas leadership believes or believed that they would achieve any stated goals. They are thugs who want power in their fiefdoms and nothing like a ten minute hate to keep your people together. Give them less to have power over and they hang on to it even more.
I won’t broach hate, revenge, and dehumanization from elements on the Israeli side, as it is not the point I was making. But occupation is going to eliminate the desire for revenge and support to those who pursue it? I uh doubt it.
Lastly this is a very strange claim:
From someone who has been advocating horrific violence as the means to accomplish goals, and supports ramping it up more since the violence so far hasn’t worked. I know we have a bigger hammer here somewhere….
That’s absolutely not the primary motivation, no. The primary motivation, as any Palestinian militant you ask will happily tell you, is to drive the Jews into the sea so that Palestine can be free from the river to the sea.
I think their actions and words have been pretty consistent with each other.
I’ll see if I can find it later, but in 2023 I read an article by a guy who fled Gaza before the war, because Hamas reached out to him and asked him if he’d be open to administrating Haifa after they reconquer it. He realized they were about to do something insanely stupid, and fled.
So I don’t buy the idea that they don’t mean exactly what they say about conquering Israel.
it sure is strange, if you purposefully ignore the entire context:
“The goal” in question is specifically conquering the entire land.
My goal is to make Palestinians understand that they will never successfully drive us out or kill us all, so they need to learn to live with us in peace. My goal is not to see Israel stretch “from the river to the sea”. Which would, indeed, be impossible.
Also, this is silly:
The violence has worked very well; Hamas’ capacity to wage war is pretty much destroyed. Now they need to be occupied until another government can replace them so they don’t come back. That’s not “ramping up the violence”.
This seems like such incredibly short term thinking. Maybe (maybe!) the present day ability of Hamas to wage war has been destroyed. But the future Hamas, or their successor, will have tens or hundreds of thousands or more eager recruits willing to die for the cause of avenging their civilian relatives who were killed by Israeli forces in this war. Present Hamas has been weakened while future Hamas has been hugely strengthened.
So long as you keep insisting that this is what motivates the majority of the fighting, you will continue to deeply misread the conflict as a result.
What would get Hamas, or a subsequent organization, hordes and hordes of recruits is if they’re able to spin this as “one step closer to eventual liberation”, as a success.
Future Hamas isn’t strengthened by “revenge”. It’s strengthened by the appearance of success. For example - if Israel leaves Gaza without occupying it, and Hamas claims victory. That would win them many, many thousands of recruits.
Making Hamas look like utter losers who accomplished nothing but ruin, on the other hand, is more and more effective:
The protests against Hamas have nothing to do with revenge. They are happening because more and more people are figuring out that Hamas’ path does not lead to a free Palestine.
This is how the war ends:
Hamas never had the ability to wage war. They had the ability to be a terror group. Israel has degraded that. For now.
Which returns to that old post of mine you quoted: was there any way to degrade them without massive loss of life?
Because the goal of eliminating Hamas or a future group also trying to exert terror on Israel and Israelis has failed to be achieved. It has involved horrific violence. And it has not achieved the goal.
“Occupying” Gaza is something that you now suggest won’t involve killing more people and continuing to cause starvation and disease?
Of course it would. And the goal of preventing future terror attacks will be no closer as a result.