I dont want to start a thread which results in racism.
The only thing i want to say is, i wish that the conflict would end so that all the children and young people on both sides could be safe for once.
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It’s an interesting conflict. When it comes to the likes of Russia/Ukraine, we have quite a clear aggressor and victim; a good side and a bad side.
This conflict doesn’t really have that. The Israelis have treated the Palestinians like rubbish for decades; the Palestinians have attacked the Israelis for decades. Neither side has the moral high ground. It gets even more complicated when you realise that Israel essentially created Hamas, in order to counterbalance the more secular PLO, which was a terrorist organisation at the time.
The above said, a swift end to the conflict one way or another is the only good approach; it’s the only way that civilian casualties and collateral damage can be minimised. If it was just Hamas vs the IDF, frankly I wouldn’t care less what happened. But where civilians are involved, as they are on both sides here, the conflict needs to be brought to a close as rapidly as feasible.
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Unless you have a secure two-state solution which has been postulated for years, all the way back to the Camp David agreement agreed between Arafat of the PLO and Begin the Israeli PM then peace will never happen. Iran is behind the vast majority and Hamas have as their mantra, ‘From the river to the sea’.
Golda Meir, one of my political hero’s despite being a member of the Irgun in the late 40s in a comment to the then Senator Biden, ‘Israel has to defend itself as we have nowhere else to go’
Israel is castigated for a siege, and stopping water and electricity, well you don’t provide your enemy with logistics in a war as Israel provides the vast majority of both, and the main power station in Southern Israel was attacked by Hamas on Saturday when this kicked off.
The other underlying piece on the chessboard is the rapprochement between the Arab states and Israel, which I suspect that Iran is trying to destroy. Egypt has sealed the border to the south and I suspect the Jordanians will do the same as they don’t want Palestinians on their lands if they can avoid it either, probably because of their ties to Iran.
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Just as the west created the Mujahideen etc to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. The PLO eventually came to the table under Arafat, but Hamas and it’s splinter groups in approx 2006 were voted into power in Gaza, there has never been an election since. Hamas according to polls.
This is from 2021:
The poll numbers have not changed that much.
The idea of a 2 state deal goes back further than that, the Arabs were offered a 2 State deal before the creation of Israel by the Peel Commission in 1937 and again before the 1948 war, on both occasions the said no.
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Israel has fought wars of survival in '56, 67 and 73, in the last one they nearly fell. In '67 the Israeli’s attacked first with the Israeli air force destroying 300 out of 360 Egyptian combat aircraft in the morning and then went onto destroy the combat effectiveness of the Jordanian Iraqi and Syrian air forces from the afternoon and in the following days.
After this and in the lessons learned NATO started to build hardened aircraft shelters across NATO airfields, that lasted until GW 1 when the USAF went shelter ‘plinking’; with LGBs.
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A two state solution was viable in the 1940s and I especially liked the idea of Jerusalem becoming an international city, but now it’s clear that the ‘Palestinian Territories’ are not viable as a single state. It is t just the geography but the violent disagreements between Gaza and the West Bank.
Gaza was captured from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan: these are the states to which these territories should be returned under standard post-war treaty practice, rather than trying to create a pseudo-state from people who hate each other and are determined to bite the hand that feeds them.
I think that, infuriatingly, there’s an awful lot of nuance being missed with this subject (speaking generally).
Hamas committed an atrocity. Civilians should not be attacked to change the policy of a government. But there is nuance that asks, well what else should an oppressed peoples really do? They don’t have the power here, and these desperate actions seem oddly familiar from a time not that long ago, when the boot was on someone else’s foot, and kicking a different people…
To be clear, that nuance does not undermine my initial statement. They committed an atrocity, and a people and its government are never the same thing.
But people in Palestine die frequently, and are dying a lot in Israel’s current response, as we consider this, to speaking nothing of the land being stolen against international law, or the endless blockade of what is essentially an open-air prison.
Why would journalists ask the Palestinian ambassador, moments after hearing him speak of his freshly-killed relatives as a response to Hamas’ actions, be asked to condemn Hamas’ actions? Why are people not being asked to condemn the group punishment of an entire people as a tactic of war against Hamas? It is a war crime.
The narrative has been poisoned to confuse criticism of a nation state with racism against its people, and the effect is damaging. It ultimately prevents us pressurising the state of Israel to not treat the Palestinians as they do.
And frankly, and this is the bit that grips me the most. If anyone on planet earth should understand what is wrong with the way the state of Israel treats the Palestinian people, it’s the government at the helm of the state of Israel, which acts as a means to protect them from having to endure such horrors ever again.
They need a mirror holding up, or the only alternative is the endless death and suffering that inevitable follows dogmatic decision making in conflict.
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I suggest that the question is addressed to Hamas, Islamic jihad, Hezbollah, PLO, PFLP, Black September and Iran et al and their policy of the ‘river to the sea’.
Unless there is a two-state solution there will never be peace!
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Would Egypt even want Gaza back? They aren’t exactly a fan of Hamas or the Palestinians in general.
Israel certainly won’t give up the Golon Heights as possessing it is key to defending Israel.
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Allegedly (the sources I have for it are 50/50), Hamas had called for today to be the International Day of Jihad. Looks like it may have begun: Teacher killed in Arras school attack in northern France | France | The Guardian
Tensions between Jews, Muslims and Christian’s isn’t exactly a new thing in France.
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You’d think being a Securlar society would help with that really, wouldn’t you?
All being Secular does is breed intolerance for each other and lower understanding.
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This is not correct.
A secular society is one in which no one holds privilege over the other in society as a result of religious (or lack of such) affiliation.
What would that look like in the UK? Christians losing the privilege that comes from having an established state religion and representatives in the legislature solely because they are representatives of that religion.
It doesn’t put anyone above them, it simply removes that unjust privilege in the system.
People can still seek whatever representation they want in the political system, but those representatives wouldn’t then be expected to, say, swear on the bible (or be given a non-religious alternative).
The authority figure would be the state. Religious ideologies wouldn’t be woven into the fabric of the state.
Back onto the topic, I saw this short video which summed up my issue with media discourse surrounding the current flare-up of tensions (flare-up meaning Hamas hitting back).
Unsurprising to hear Senator Graham talk about the Israelis being given a pass to eradicate the Palestinians. Makes me sick.
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Neither the Israeli nor the Palestine sides seem to be getting any support from what I have seen in comments on various news posts. We all want the conflict to be resolved peacefully, with an end to the unlawful killing of civilians. Preferably, like, Right Now, children.
I do not support the UK Government’s direct support of Israel and the IDF in this conflict.
We as a nation should be impartial in this case, and therefore should work with Jewish and Muslim people living in Britain to stop divisions that exist between people living in the Middle East causing hatred and violence between our own citizens.
The UK Government’s support of Israel brings our country no benefits, and might lead to the following outcomes: a renewed Islamist terrorist campaign against our extremely vulnerable population; the resurgence of anti-Semitism; loss of moral authority by being complicit in the IDF’s war crimes - how can we criticise Putin’s similar tactics used in the urban areas of Ukraine after the indiscriminate and ineffective shelling and bombing of Gaza? There is the risk of the UK Armed Forces being drawn into this conflict, for which they no longer have the strength or resources to win, or even survive any prolonged fighting in a large scale regional war.
In this matter the UK Government is not speaking for me, is not acting in my name, and has no justification for taking a side. It would be a disgraceful action for our armed forces, as agents of our government’s foreign policy, to commit any ships, units, squadrons or military supplies in support of the IDF.
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What happened in Southern Israel is only a precursor of what will happen in the future in the UK.
We have seen only a small view:
7/7
21.7
Lee Rigby murder
MEN Arena
Liverpool Women’s Hospital
Reading Park
London bridge
And that is just a starter.
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Major, if you check both the Gov.UK and Holocaust Memorial websites for defining anti-Semitism, there is the same list of examples within that definition on both. Along with the usual ones common to any definition of hateful or prejudiced behavior (Holocaust denial, treating Jewish people unfavourably, generally being horrible and racist etc etc), there are three relating to Israel as a nation: criticism of Israel’s political policies is allowed, like one can criticise any other country’s policies and actions; denying the right of the people of Israel to their self-determination as a state is not; comparing Israel’s contemporary policies to Nazi Germany’s - such comparisons are defined as anti-Semitic.
In my main post on this subject in this topic, I compared Israel’s bombing and shelling of Gaza to Putin’s similar treatment of the urban areas of Ukraine, so I might be just one step ahead of being cancelled there. 
I’ve seen plenty of support going both ways. Just today I’ve seen comments comparing Arabs to Rats and stating they should be treated the same way, likewise I’ve seen posts stating that the Arabs need their own Adolf Hitler as he had the right idea.
For me it depends what form that support takes, boots on the ground? No. RFA’s to provide humanitarian assistance and P8’s to deter other regional powers from jumping in (which so what appears to be the plan) I have no issue with that.
Alright Enoch take a breath.
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I’d agree, you’ve got a very narrow viewpoint
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