Okay, lots going on here but this incident today prompted this thread:
I’m pretty sure that last sentence is the key, eh.
Here’s the AP’s actual news story about the bombing:
So here’s a thread to discuss what’s going on, because with this event I’m really, really feeling like Israel is about to kill and/or displace tens or hundreds of thousands of people based on their religion/ethnicity, and I don’t think that’s cool.
I admit that I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to have hard, set-in-stone opinions tho: there is a LOT of background that brought us to the current situation. But deliberately bombing news organizations seems beyond the pale. If that line is being crossed what other lines will be crossed?
I’m an American Jew and I’ve grown up with some positive feelings for the only nation that promises to take me in if things really get bad for Jews. But I was really disturbed by this. They’ve been bombing apartment buildings, and now they are bombing the reporters. (They did give the residents notice that they planned to destroy the building, so I think the reporters got out.) It wasn’t just AP, Al Jazeera had offices there, too, and I suspect others.
Yeah, when you start bombing the journalists, you are in the wrong. And you know it.
How much of this is Netanyahu and politics and his trial?
“Witness testimony began on 5 April 2021.” says Wikipedia
So is it a distraction and/or an attempt to appeal to his base and build political strength?
The other question is, how bad will this have to get before the US takes some action, even if only symbolic (e.g. move the embassy back to Tel Aviv). If past history is any guide, pretty much no country is going to do much about it, and it will make just one more ugly chapter in the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
Does anyone have a link to a purely factual and neutral summary of developments in the past few weeks/months that have led up to this? I was off the grid hiking for several weeks so I’m really behind the curve on this, and I just can’t find a good source that’s not dominated by the horrific headline violence.
It is not too surprising that this kind of stuff coincidentally happens when there are elections in Israel. Not that Netanyahu orchestrated it, but he is an expert in taking advantage of these kinds of situations and neutralizing political opposition in general. I think Lapid still has a couple of weeks to form a government, though.
Right now, Netanyahu’s opposition is trying to form a unity coalition, and it’s very likely that the only possible coalition will have to include Zionists from a wide range of the political spectrum as well as Arab parties including the Islamists, and will possibly even Orthodox parties. It was already a tall order to ask all of those groups to put aside their differences for long enough for the Netanyahu trial, and I think it’s going to be much harder now unfortunately.
The main events that kicked this off were the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and the clashes at the Al-Aqsa mosque. The evictions I believe were already planned to occur around now for a long time back and the mosque clashes are related to a holiday, so I don’t think Netanyahu could have possibly messed with the timing. I do think it’s pretty reasonable to believe that he’s letting the situation escalate as much as possible because it’s going to make it tougher for his political opponents to compromise on big ideological questions and unite around corruption.
EDIT: “related to a holiday” was a poor choice of words. People were going to the mosque for the Jumu’atul-Wida holiday. The clashes resulted from protests and violence around those gatherings.
I tend to think that it was right wing activism that started organically and Netanyahu took advantage of it. Perhaps some in his circles knew what was going to happen in advance and telegraphed that information back to Bibi.
Whatever its origins, just more of the same. And predictably it puts the US, particularly moderate Dems like Joe Biden, in the awkward spot of having to stand with Israel, whatever they decide to do, while cautioning against an overreaction, which is almost inevitable.
There’s not going to be a lull in the fighting for months now. Many, many people will be caught in it and killed.
In the end, waves of bloody violence like this will happen because of the abundence of enciting incendents by hard-line Israeli leaders/population, which triggers both reactionary resistance by Palestinians and terrorism by organized groups like Hamas.
I’ll restate my position. The only way out is if all parties buy into a future of peace. This won’t happen unless Palestinians are given 1. a viable state of their own or 2. a vote in the exsisting state of Israel (and thus political power to peacefully exert their wishes). I don’t see a third way.
the only answer I can give to this would be in the Pit.
But I hope other people reading this thread will realize that there just might be something immoral about an Islamic terrorist government that aims its bomb exclusively at civilian targets.
In the video linked above by Trevor Noah , he attempts to dismiss the attacks as totally nothing to get worried about, because Israel has a missile defense system that works very well, so most of the attacker’s bombs don’t do much damage, so gee whiz, there’s nothing wrong with indiscriminate bombing of several million civilians.
I do not believe that this remotely about to happen. Violence in Gaza likely is not a prelude to any large scale displacement. The occupied Palestinian territories are divided in basically three conceptual areas: Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank (East Jerusalem and the West Bank are physically adjacent and are on the Eastern side of Israel with Jordan further east, the Gaza strip is on the Western side of Israel and borders Egypt.) Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip a number of years ago, and this included removing all Israeli settlements from the strip. So Israel does not really have territorial ambitions in Gaza, in fact it would probably love it if Egypt agreed to annex it, which they will never do (and which the Palestinians would probably oppose.) If Israel was looking like it was gearing up to roll into the West Bank a fear of mass displacement could be valid (although still unlikely), but Israel just doesn’t have territorial ambitions in Gaza. There are no Jews living there and they have taken the approach of just walling it off for awhile now.
I admit that I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to have hard, set-in-stone opinions tho: there is a LOT of background that brought us to the current situation. But deliberately bombing news organizations seems beyond the pale. If that line is being crossed what other lines will be crossed?
I would say no lines are really being crossed here that are new. To people that don’t watch this conflict, which hasn’t been “hot” since 2015, nothing that Israel is doing here is very divergent from the sort of back and forth violence we’ve seen between Israel and the Palestinians for ages. It’s just been quiet for awhile so it’s shocking to see it again if you hadn’t paid a ton of attention to previous flare ups.
So: where is this going? Where should it go? How will we get there? And will everyone be happy when we do?
This probably is going to another period of violence that will last months, and then it will end. Where should it go is incredibly complicated–I personally no longer believe a two state solution is a realistic option, and advocate for a one state solution in which all citizens of the one state have political equality and civil rights (however most Palestinians and Israelis oppose a one state solution AFAIK), I frankly don’t expect it to get there ever or at least in my life time so I have no idea on the “how”, and it’s unlikely everyone will be happy anytime soon.
You have Al Jazeera in that building whipping up terrorists to do exactly that. They just happened to be in the same building with AP reporters and Israel called them up first so they could get out of the building.
