It’s punishing an entire community for the actions of a few. Should LAPD burn Watts or Compton to the ground if they find out that a resident’s harboring a cop killer in their home?
I’m sorry for your plight, and i hope you do okay. And i agree that launching rockets at civilians in Tel Aviv is wrong. But so is launching rockets at civilians in Gaza.
Naw, Al Jazeera was not whipping up terrorists. They were in the same building as some Hamas offices, however. My understanding is that Israel warned both AP and Al Jazeera. I read a report from one Al Jazeera journalist saying he only had half an hour to grab his stuff and flee. My pro-Israel friend that I’m close enough to to take about this without getting into a fight thinks both sets of journalists are collateral damage, but that maybe Al Jazeera was intentionally providing cover for Hamas.
He also thinks that the reason violence broke out is that “it’s been seven years, and Hamas has had time to amass a lot of weapons”.
Should they burn that home to the ground?
I think the only possible solution is a two state solution. And I don’t think that can happen unless someone in Israel grows some balls and throws out the “settlers” who keep encroaching in the west bank. And throw them all in prison if they make a fuss and refuse to leave. Maybe annex some of the Jerusalem suburbs.
I live on land stolen from indigenous Americans. The Frankish peoples of Europe live on land stolen from the Celtic peoples. And they all live on land stolen from the people who were displaced by the early indo-europeans. Israelis can live on land stolen from Palestinians. But Jordan won’t take the Palestinians. Egypt won’t take them, either. They need to be able to form their own nation. Stop being perpetual refugees and actually be citizens. And they need enough contiguous land to do that.
If they know that the only people who are likely to be harmed are the armed and dangerous fugitives, maybe it’s within the realm of the reasonable. Taking out an entire apartment complex, on the other hand, not so much…
Do the elected officials in the cities of Watts and Compton advocate the overthrowal of the United States government, the ethnic cleansing of its people who will be driven into the sea, and the establishment of a racial supremacist theocracy, and arm militias who shoot rockets into neighboring citizens? Because if they did, I’d advocate the US army go in and stop that.
There were definitely specific triggers for this round of violence, and they’re definitely the result of ratcheting tension on both sides since the last escalation, but I think the way he puts it is far too simplistic.
They didn’t bomb the journalists. They warned the journalists to get out. Because what the op didn’t mention was that according to Israel Hamas had set up a command center in that building, probably intentionally to either use the journalists as a shield, or to create an international incident if Israel bombed them and killed journalists.
It seems rather important to at least present Israel’s side here, rather relying on spokespeople for terrorist organizations for the ‘truth’.
If they are not just harboring a cop killer, they have fortified the neighborhood and are sending out parties to shoot up adjacent neighborhoods. And the cop killing gangs have overwhelming support in that neighborhood.
Then what?
Agreed, and I don’t think we agree on most anything. 
The Jews have been hated since time immemorial and they now have their own state with neighbors who want to kill them. They took aggressive action to stop that. Those people still want to kill them and continue to kill them.
But Israel is supposed to be the “better person” and allow their neighbors who want to kill them to have their own state to form an army to more efficiently kill them. It’s suicide and they know it. Criticism of Israel is ridiculous, IMHO. They are restrained if anything. The United States wouldn’t show such restraint in a similar situation, nor would Great Britain or France.
“Neighborhood”? You describe Gaza as a “neighborhood”?
Other people use other words:
I don’t quite agree with this. I think it’s ridiculous to claim Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians or that it is the one to blame for these escalations when Hamas is launching off rocket after rocket, aiming at civilians, and without a courtesy call first either.
But it’s fair to criticize Israel for other things. I’ve criticized Israel in this very thread for being ineffective, doing little to harm Hamas while creating perfect recruiting conditions for them and generating underservadly bad press. Undeserved or not, it’s fucking predictable, and playing into Hamas’ hands in this way is a mistake.
It’s also fair to criticize Israel for its policy in the settlements. It’s not a matter of who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong. I happen to think it’s patently obvious that in these conflicts Hamas is in the wrong, again and again and again. But Israel needs to look at this from a big picture perspective and realize that the settlements are preventing a two state solution from ever happening.
FWIW I disagree that bombing Hamas is lose-lose for Israel, it depends on the context in which you view Israel and its aims. The theoretical Israel that has had a vague state policy with a goal of a two state solution? Sure, it’s bad for that. But I think that Israel exists in theory only. The real State of Israel has quite clearly been pursuing an “endless annexation” effort, and the main threat to that is Israelis willing to do what @puzzlegal says–force the settlers out, I believe that for the Israelis who want to continue the endless annexation Hamas militancy furthers their aims within Israeli civil society. It is very difficult even for liberal two-state solution Jews to feel sympathetic when they are huddled in fear in their bomb shelters. Within the Likud, Netanyahu’s predecessor Yitzhak Shamir back in the early 90s said something to the effect of “let’s spend years debating Palestinian autonomy, meanwhile I will have settled half a million settlers in the West Bank.” It’s 2021 and that’s roughly how many Israeli settlers are settled in the West Bank, up from less than 150,000 back in the 90s when Shamir said that.
The reality is any dreams of evicting them are largely just that, dreams. They represent too great a share of the Israeli state and the stomach for it likely will never be there on Israel’s side for a mass eviction of all of them. It would have to be done by force. They’re like 10% of the total Jewish population of Israel at this point.
Another thing to consider is something like 75% of the settlers are ultra Orthodox Jews who have massive families and growth rate, this problem is not going away.
No, he’s responding to another poster’s (admittedly stupid) analogy.
People advocate the overthrow of the federal government all the fucking time. And on January 6th, some actually tried to interfere with a peaceful transfer of power. We use police for that, and in some extreme cases, tactical precision attacks for that, not total warfare. Israel has arguably the most elite intelligence and special forces units on the planet. They’re pretty well armed. Seems to me that they could apply more surgical techniques if that’s what they really wanted, but like the Germans who their sent their ancestors fleeing out of Europe, they want to send a message.
Yes, but this is why I believe that @octopus’s comment was pretty insightful. Israel isn’t allowed to deal with the threat. The United States won’t “allow” it. In diplomatic back channels we tell them to defend themselves but not to get too stiff-dicked about it. That is unfair and it causes 50 plus years of warfare. I understand that the Palestinians feel strongly. So did the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. You didn’t see terrorism from them after WWII, did you?
I won’t deny that there are factions in Israel who want to do exactly what you describe, but they don’t have nearly the control of the country you seem to imagine that they do.
The most common sentiment I’ve seen from non-orthodox Israelis is that they’re not fans of the settlements, but they’d only agree to evict them if the Palestinians demonstrated an actual, real intention to make peace.
I disagree with that - I think it’s short sighted, and will ensure the Palestinians don’t come to the table in the first place, but I understand the impulse.
Your points about conquered Axis countries in Europe after WWII make little real sense to me. Those countries were well established Nationstates with a history of having normal lives prior to the…troubles. The Allied occupiers were offering ultimately a pathway back to that, after a period of occupation rule and De-Nazification and other things. The Germans had a reason to comply and be docile. Nothing like that is being offered to the Palestinians, they’re being offered a whole lot of nothing at present. They were made a decent offer during the negotiations at Camp David and it’s disputed why that fell apart, most people seem to blame Arafat and that’s my leaning as well–but I think partially because Arafat didn’t really have the control over the Palestinians to sign a deal that made any material concessions on the most extreme and unrealistic Palestinian demands–too many Palestinians simply aren’t willing to concede that they will never be resettled into homesteads from the pre-1947 borders. What is being offered to the Palestinians right now is largely a whole lot of nothing, they have no significant incentive for peace.
Lol OK, they really sent that genocide message by telling people ahead of time they were gonna blow up the building. And Hamas is blameless for shooting rockets from there in the first place.
Like I said, Israel moved into their neighbor’s garage on the premise that ‘they weren’t really using it anyway’, and then gradually expanded from one room to another, and then claimed ‘self defense’ and started pummeling them when the original occupants of their home tried to move their furniture out on the curb.