Why have they closed the border?
Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Palestinian side
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Whatâs the motivation of the Israeli settlers Mickee? Iâve never quite understood that.
Zionist goal. Grew up in late 19th century. All of the holy land should be occupied by Jewish faith is the dogma.
While I do not condone what happened to those people in the Kibbutz etc, looking at photos of where they were, literally within a few kms of the Gaza strip.
How could you live there and not think about those hemmed in (in an open prison) within shouting distance. Are they that close if not to antagonise or to make sure no Palestinian gets that land? From what I can see, everyone or nearly everyone there, whether dual citizens or not, were Jewish? What is the govt incentive for moving to Israel as a Jewish person from e.g. Ire, UK, France etc?
the thing I donât get, and probably never will, is, why is there no international protection for Palestinian civilians, they are literally closed in, with no aid, no crossing out and getting pummeled.
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They are the real victims here. What will Gigi do?
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Kinda what I figured. Is there economics or anything else behind it too?
Israel has bombed Damascus airport and Aleppo airport.
Seemingly the Iranian foreign minister was on his way to Syria but now he isnât.
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Fundamentalism. Its the core issue on both sides and why no peace has ever lasted or ever looks like lasting.
We saw it for ourselves how it can overcome fellas during the covid wars on TFK
B@ntz.
Opinion |
Israel Canât Imprison Two Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price
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Oct 9, 2023
Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance; the idea that we can do whatever we like, that weâll never pay the price and be punished for it. Weâll carry on undisturbed.
Weâll arrest, kill, harass, dispossess and protect the settlers busy with their pogroms. Weâll visit Josephâs Tomb, Othnielâs Tomb and Joshuaâs Altar in the Palestinian territories, and of course the Temple Mount â over 5,000 Jews on Sukkot alone.
Weâll fire at innocent people, take out peopleâs eyes and smash their faces, expel, confiscate, rob, grab people from their beds, carry out ethnic cleansing and of course continue with the unbelievable siege of the Gaza Strip, and everything will be all right.
Weâll build a terrifying obstacle around Gaza â the underground wall alone cost 3 billion shekels ($765 million) â and weâll be safe. Weâll rely on the geniuses of the armyâs 8200 cyber-intelligence unit and on the Shin Bet security service agents who know everything. Theyâll warn us in time.
- Israelâs leaders have been eternally judged. What are they thinking now?
- Israel must first bring home its own
- With each round of fighting in Gaza, more âcollateral damage,â and more futility
Weâll transfer half an army from the Gaza border to the Hawara border in the West Bank, only to protect far-right lawmaker Zvi Sukkot and the settlers. And everything will be all right, both in Hawara and at the Erez crossing into Gaza.
It turns out that even the worldâs most sophisticated and expensive obstacle can be breached with a smoky old bulldozer when the motivation is great. This arrogant barrier can be crossed by bicycle and moped despite the billions poured into it and all the famous experts and fat-cat contractors.
The Gaza Palestinians are willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.
We thought weâd continue to go down to Gaza, scatter a few crumbs in the form of tens of thousands of Israeli work permits â always contingent on good behavior â and still keep them in prison. Weâll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until theyâre erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.
Weâll keep holding thousands of Palestinian prisoners, sometimes without trial, most of them political prisoners. And we wonât agree to discuss their release even after theyâve been in prison for decades.
Weâll tell them that only by force will their prisoners see freedom. We thought we would arrogantly keep rejecting any attempt at a diplomatic solution, only because we donât want to deal with all that, and everything would continue that way forever.
Once again it was proved that this isnât how it is. A few hundred armed Palestinians breached the barrier and invaded Israel in a way no Israeli imagined was possible. A few hundred people proved that itâs impossible to imprison 2 million people forever without paying a cruel price.
Just as the smoky old Palestinian bulldozer tore through the worldâs smartest barrier Saturday, it tore away at Israelâs arrogance and complacency. And thatâs also how it tore away at the idea that itâs enough to occasionally attack Gaza with suicide drones â and sell them to half the world â to maintain security.
On Saturday, Israel saw pictures it has never seen before. Palestinian vehicles patrolling its cities, bike riders entering through the Gaza gates. These pictures tear away at that arrogance. The Gaza Palestinians have decided theyâre willing to pay any price for a moment of freedom. Is there any hope in that? No. Will Israel learn its lesson? No.
On Saturday they were already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza âas it has never been punished before.â But Israel hasnât stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment.
After 75 years of abuse, the worse possible scenario awaits it once again. The threats of âflattening Gazaâ prove only one thing: We havenât learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didnât start with him and it wonât end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza.
Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.
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More from Harari.
Israelis and Palestinians are facing their moment of greatest danger since 1948
There is still a slim chance of peace if wiser counsels prevail and other major powers intervene in a coalition of the willing
Thu 12 Oct 2023 07.00 CEST
Israel has just experienced the worst day in its history. More Israeli civilians have been slaughtered in a single day than all the civilians and soldiers Israel lost in the 1956 Sinai war, the 1967 six-day war and the 2006 second Lebanon war combined. The stories and images coming out of the area occupied by Hamas are horrific. Many of my own friends and family members have suffered unspeakable atrocities. This means the Palestinians, too, are now facing immense danger. The most powerful country in the Middle East is livid with pain, fear and anger. I do not have either the knowledge or moral authority to speak about how things look from the Palestinian perspective. But in the moment of Israelâs greatest pain, I would like to issue a warning about how things look from the Israeli side of the fence.
Politics often works like a scientific experiment, conducted on millions of people with few ethical limitations. You try something â whether increasing the welfare budget, electing a populist president or making a peace offer â witness the results, and decide whether to proceed further down that particular path; or you reverse course and try something else. This is how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has unfolded for decades: by trial and error.
During the 1990s Oslo peace process, Israel gave peace a chance. I know that from the viewpoint of Palestinians and some outside observers, Israeli peace offers were insufficient and arrogant, but it was still the most generous offer Israel has ever made. During that peace process, Israel handed partial control of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority. The outcome for Israelis was the worst terror campaign they had experienced until then. Israelis are still haunted by memories of daily life in the early 2000s, with buses and restaurants bombed every day. That terror campaign killed not only hundreds of Israeli civilians, but also the peace process and the Israeli left. Maybe Israelâs peace offer wasnât generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?
After the failure of the peace process, Israelâs next experiment in Gaza was disengagement. In the mid-2000s, Israel unilaterally retreated from the entire Gaza Strip, dismantled all settlements there and returned to the internationally recognised pre-1967 border. True, it continued to impose a partial blockade on the Gaza Strip and to occupy the West Bank. But the withdrawal from Gaza was still a very significant Israeli step, and Israelis waited anxiously to see what the result of that experiment would be. The remnants of the Israeli left hoped that the Palestinians would make an honest attempt to turn Gaza into a prosperous and peaceful city state, a Middle Eastern Singapore, showing to the world and to the Israeli right what the Palestinians could do when given the opportunity to govern themselves.
Sure, it is difficult to build a Singapore under a partial blockade. But an honest attempt could still have been made, in which case there would have been greater pressure on the Israeli government from both foreign powers and the Israeli public to remove the blockade from Gaza and to reach an honourable deal about the West Bank as well. Instead, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and turned it into a terrorist base from which repeated attacks were launched on Israeli civilians. Another experiment ended in failure.
00:01:54
âBring them back homeâ: families plea for help after Israelis kidnapped by Hamas â video report
This completely discredited the remnants of the Israeli left, and brought to power Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governments. Netanyahu pioneered another experiment. Since peaceful coexistence had failed, he adopted a policy of violent coexistence. Israel and Hamas traded blows on a weekly basis and almost every year there was a major military operation, but for a decade and a half, Israeli civilians could go on living within a few hundred metres from Hamas bases on the other side of the fence. Even Israelâs messianic zealots showed little zeal to reconquer the Gaza Strip, and even rightwingers hoped that the responsibilities involved in ruling more than 2 million people would gradually moderate Hamas.
Indeed, many on the Israeli right saw Hamas as a better partner than the Palestinian Authority. This was because Israeli hawks wanted to go on controlling the West Bank, and feared a peace deal. Hamas seemed to offer the Israeli right the best of all worlds: relieving Israel of the need to govern the Gaza Strip, without making any peace offers that might dislocate Israeli control of the West Bank. The day of horror Israel has just experienced signals the end of the Netanyahu experiment in violent coexistence.
So what comes next? No one knows for sure, but some voices in Israel are veering towards reconquering the Gaza Strip or bombing it to rubble. The result of such policy could be the worst humanitarian crisis the region has experienced since 1948. Especially if Hezbollah and Palestinian forces in the West Bank join the fray, the death toll could reach many thousands, with millions more driven from their homes. On both sides of the fence, there are religious fanatics fixated on divine promises and the 1948 war. Palestinians dream of reversing the outcome of that war. Jewish zealots like the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich have warned even Arab citizens of Israel that âyou are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israelâs first prime minister] didnât finish the job in â48 and didnât kick you outâ; 2023 could enable fanatics on both sides to pursue their religious fantasies, and re-stage the 1948 war with a vengeance.
Even if things donât go to such extremes, the current conflict is likely to put the last nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The kibbutzim along the Gaza border have been socialist communes and some of the most tenacious bastions of the Israeli left. I know people from those kibbutzim who, after years of almost daily rocket attacks from Gaza, still clung to the hope of peace, as if to a religious cult. These kibbutzim have just been obliterated, and some of the last peaceniks are either murdered, burying their loved ones, or held hostage in Gaza. For example, Vivian Silver, a peace activist from Kibbutz Beâeri who for years has been transporting ailing Gazans to Israeli hospitals, is missing and likely held hostage in Gaza.
What has already happened cannot be undone. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and the personal traumas will never completely heal. But we must prevent further escalation. Many of the forces in the region are currently led by irresponsible religious fanatics. External forces must therefore intervene to deescalate the conflict. Anyone who wishes for peace must unequivocally condemn the Hamas atrocities, put pressure on Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release all the hostages , and help deter Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. This would give Israelis a bit of breathing space and a tiny ray of hope.
Second, a coalition of the willing â ranging from the US and the EU to Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority â should take responsibility for the Gaza Strip away from Hamas, rebuild Gaza and simultaneously completely disarm Hamas and demilitarise the Gaza Strip.
There are only slim chances that these steps will be realised. But after the recent horrors, most Israelis donât think they can live with anything less.
- Yuval Noah Harari is a historian and the author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and Unstoppable Us
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This tweet responding to the news that that poor young Irish-Israeli woman Kim Damti was dead really annoyed me. To deny a victim their Irishness in death for the purposes of diluting sympathy - which is clearly what this tweet is designed to do - seems like a really fucking racist, not to mention heartless, thing to do.
Yet this is how that tweeter describes themselves.
Pro-unity, political graduate. I donât read DMs. #LabhairGaeilgeLiom #Think32 No FFG. Always anti-fascist
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