Hamas has recently announced a willingness to engage in a cease fire. No telling how this will turn out. No telling to what extent either side is bargaining in good faith either.
I am seeing early indications in the news that Israel is saying this isn’t the same deal they would be willing to agree to.
Yes to both counts. The details have not been released on the deal.
However, Biden just put even more pressure on Netanyahu -
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/05/israel-us-ammunition-shipment-hold
Why it matters: It is the first time since the Oct. 7 attack that the U.S. has stopped a weapons shipment intended for the Israeli military.
The incident raised serious concerns inside the Israeli government and sent officials scrambling to understand why the shipment was held, Israeli officials said.
There were reports of Israelis protesting to get Netanyahu to consider the cease fire agreement after his initial rejection.
This.
To name but one: before this war-on-Hamas resulted from the October 7 attack, Netanyahu was facing continuing protests and other negative fallout from his attempt to subvert Israel’s judicial system. (He’d tried to do so to protect himself from the legal consequences of accusations of corruption against himself).
Now, the consensus is ‘we can’t change governments in the middle of a war.’ So as long as the war continues, Netanyahu is safe.
Hell of an incentive to oppose any possible move toward peace.
I’ll just point out that many of us in the Diaspora are NOT at all happy about what the government of Israel is doing because we’re going to suffer blowback regardless of the fact that we are NOT Israelis and have zero control over what’s going on over there.
In this case, bad actors in Israel are increasing antisemitism world-wide, to the detriments of Jews everywhere. I find it extremely frustrating that there is absolutely nothing I can do about this. The actions of people half a world away are putting me at greater risk.
So much for Israel being a haven for Jews, or protecting Jews everywhere - from my viewpoint the exact opposite is true.
Even IF Netanyahu’s Israel was some sort of fortress for Jews his allies such as Smotrich do not recognize me as being Jewish. I do not meet his racial purity standards and thus I would be denied that haven even as the world outside - which very much does consider me Jewish - becomes ever more hostile. How very sad, tragic, and disgusting that powerful Jews in Israel are engaging in actions that increase global antisemitism.
I can only hope that Israelis of decent and moral character can remove these evil men from power.
More’s the pity - I suspect we’ll never be rid of Hamas until those old men are rendered powerless.
The BBC is also state TV - does that make it inherently bad or biased? So is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and a lot of others.
Yes, Al Jazeera has a bias. So does every other media outlet. Qatar is not a friend, but it is an ally and they’re a key player in bringing together the two sides of this war somewhere other than a battlefield. I take everything Al Jazeera with a grain of salt (which is true of pretty much every media outlet) but for a lot of reporting they’re not that far off a lot of Israeli outlets. More of an Arab/Muslim perspective? Sure. Just like Israeli media comes at things from an Israeli/Jewish perspective.
The incident raised serious concerns inside the Israeli government and sent officials scrambling to understand why the shipment was held, Israeli officials said.
Morons. The shipment was held because this conflict is starting to spill over the borders of the Middle East and is having an impact on US politics. Sufficient numbers of Americans are pissed off enough that it’s moving the needle - lots of Americans do not want to be part of genocide and atrocity, not even one perpetrated by an ally. And that includes no small number of American Jews.
If Israeli officials need to “scramble” to understand this they are criminally out of touch.
Netanyahu says he’ll maintain his course of action even if Israel stands alone. OK, terms accepted. Don’t be surprised if the rest of the world does, in fact, walk away from this mess that, clearly, neither side really wants to end.
Sooner or later it will occur to someone how to remove the obstacle to peace called “Netanyahu”. Not an action I would normally approve of, but if removal of one man could open a way to peace vs. leaving him in place and having tens of thousands of people die I can certainly understand why someone might take such drastic action.
Netanyahu is “safe” in one sense… in another, there is a target painted on his back.
Man, you and Ben Gvir would get along. He said pretty much exactly the same thing about Rabin, and even stole the decal from his car and held it up on TV, saying “we can get to the car, we can get to the man”. Then his buddy Yigal Amir blasted Rabin away.
Getting murdered is probably the one thing that could save Netanyahu’s legacy, at this point. Personally, I’d rather he lose the next election and end up in prison, so he and his ideas can be thoroughly discredited.
It’s a sad reality that in international politics, all lives are not created equal. But let’s not accuse everyone who has a problem with that of wistfully pining for some unobtainable utopia.
One of the tenets of the laws of armed conflict is proportionality. As a non-combatant in the US military we had to learn the LOAC, so I’m assuming this is required knowledge for the IDF as well. If preventing the next 9/11 or 10/7 requires killing more civilians as collateral damage than the number of civilians whose deaths would be prevented by taking action, then the correct moral decision is not to take action. This applies to the United States’ disproportionate response after 9/11 just as much as Israel’s disproportionate response to Oct 7th.
Likewise, if the only way to prevent another Oct 7 is to relegate Palestinians to a 2nd-class non-citizen status and wall them up in open-air prisons, then that’s not a morally tenable solution.
It seems to me that the calculation being made by the pro-Palestine protesters is simple – the life of an Israeli is not worth more than the life of a Palestinian. Right now Israel is behaving in a way that suggests they don’t accept that calculation.
Not every Palestinian is a terrorist, and everything Israel has been doing to the Palestinians is only going to encourage more to become terrorists while treating the innocent Palestinians like crap.
Creating a second state, I would assume that there would be some sort of international oversight and coordination of that project and it might also give the world an opportunity to unfuck the mess made by the West following the two world wars.
And do you honestly believe that the current situation is working?
Not at all - remember, he considers people like me an abomination.
The difference between us is that I would not participate in an assassination, even if I can see where others might. Understanding someone’s motivation is not at all the same as approving of it. The most I would concede on that is “perhaps it is the least bad alternative”. I would certainly prefer to seek all possible better alternatives, but I can’t control other people.
If you make good people desperate enough they may do things that are not at all nice.
In that we are in agreement.
And formally creating the Islamic Republic of Hamasistan would work to do what exactly?
Questions answered with questions? I’ll play?
Where should Palestinians live?
Quite the leap.
People may be politically neutralised without assassinating them. Netanyahu has plenty of political enemies and protesters who would be happy to accept a load of that CIA regime-change money. No need to send in a squad of US Navy special forces to take him out, or for anyone, really, to murder him instead of trying him for his crimes.
Again - I’m not promoting that as a solution, just pointing out that the idea is going to occur to some people and one or several might even take a stab at it.
And why assume it’s going to be the Americans taking such an action? People in the Middle East are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves and acting for themselves.
Says something about you if you think that by pointing out assassination is a possibility you assume that’s condoning it (it’s not) and you assume it will be Seal Team Six rather than a Hamas operative going about it.
The US has no motivation for sending in a squad after Netanyahu. A lot of other people - Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Palestinians, etc. - do have that motivation.
Aside from the Palestinians, I don’t think any of those groups have much motivation to off Netanyahu. The more bombs he drops on Gaza, the easier it is from them to sell their anti-Israeli propaganda to distract the folks at home from how terrible their government is.
Somewhere where they won’t be lobbing missiles at their neighbors. This problem wouldn’t exist if the Arab states had taken in their own people as refugees 80 years ago instead of using them as props to stir up Judenhass.
In what sense are Palestinian’s the Arab states “own people?”
Besides sharing an ethnicity, language, religion, culture, and history as former Ottoman vassals?