A new low for Israel. How low can they go?

“Finish them” doesn’t mean “finish Hamas”. It means “finish Gaza”. It’s the language of genocide.

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No the point is why engage in a war at all.

Why, knowingly, kill hundreds/thousands of people, and enter into something which you must commit to for years just to save face. Even when it is going against you, keep killing.

And in the end probably not achieve your objectives only with thousands of your country folk dead. Kids without a father, father without a daughter - and for what?

A bunch of people living on this earth are going to clash but thankfully we have communication and intelligence to work it out, rather than a few egomaniacs in power happy to shoot women and child in the head.

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Neither side is a rational actor here. Both are to some degree driven by hardcore illogical religious beliefs, one side probably more so than the other. There is no reasoned logical solution when that is intertwined. It goes beyond a question of a more simple national or cultural identity. Add in the geopolitical angle and various other outside actors stoking the fire for strategic reasons, and it’s hard to see an easy bloodless way out of this.

Why are Ukraine engaging in a war? They have no fucking choice. They did nothing to bring it on themselves.

Why did the Allies engage in World War II?

War is unavoidable sometimes. War is occasionally a necessary evil.

War can usually be prevented. But prevention usually requires military strength.

It is the ideologies that cause war that are the main problem.

What we see in Israel/Palestine to this day is the result of thousands of years of history. It’s the result of Jews believing they are the chosen people, a result of World War I, of World War II, a result of extreme Islamism, a result of extreme nationalism, a result of rival ideologies of conquest. Nationalist dogma, religious dogma. Rival supremacist ideologies.

Supremacist ideologies kill.

All conflicts throughout history fought under the flag of religion always boiled down to land and/or money. This one is no different.

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That may be true to a large extent. But religion is a like an accelerant, an intensifier. If your particular beliefs/doctrine are telling you that the other side are less than human and/or should be driven into the sea, then you’re less likely to be reasoned with and more likely to commit horrendous and even seemingly suicidal acts.
You can negotiate over land and money. You can’t make a deal with beliefs.

Central to the idea of all nationalism is the idea that an ethnically and/or religiously homogenous people have some God given spiritual tie to a piece of land. Blood and soil.

But people have always moved around. And they aren’t making any more land. And there are many competing claims to the same pieces of land throughout the world.

The basis for the ideas of a Greater Israel, an Islamic Caliphate, a Greater Germany, a Greater Russia, a Greater Serbia and a united Ireland are all essentially the same.

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

You’re some flute.

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You genuinely think that the attacks by Hamas were actually committed by Israelis dressed up as Hamas lads? Because that’s what a “false flag” actually means.

Now if you mean to say that the Israelis were wise to what was going on but decided to let the carnage happen so they could use it as an excuse to retaliate, then that’s a different story (though still a bit far fetched).

So are you going with the former or the latter?

Egypt saying they warned Israel an attack was imminent.

Another view I read is that Israel military was focussed on the West Bank pogroms and underestimated any threat from Gaza.

I’ve great faith nowadays.

You’ll be judged on how you treat your fellow humans.

If we all done a little bit more for those less fortunate we’d all be much better off.

Going killing fellas because of religion I’m sure was never the idea.

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The slight problem with your quote above is that it hangs on the second word in your sentence. However, just because something is being ridiculed does not make it the truth.

In this case, its a wildly stupid hot take that just exposes you as a simpleton…

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Also expressed and latent anti Semitism which has followed Jewish people around since they came into existence.

I am talking about the agressors in a war context. Of course if you are attacked then you must defend yourself, and that may well be the free world as was the case in WWII.

This fucking guy…

You said the same when I suggested a covid lab leak at the beginning of the covid crisis. When you can’t get your little head around something, you automatically resort to ridicule & personal abuse. It’s the TFK way I suppose.

A bitter blame game will follow Israel’s wartime unity

The inquest into what went wrong ahead of Hamas’s attack could lead down a dangerous

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Wars unite nations. The shock and horror of the Hamas attacks on Israel have brought a deeply divided country together. It is possible that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, may now form a national unity government.

Israeli unity will last a while because this crisis is very far from over. The fate of the hostages inside Gaza, including children and old people, will continue to torment Israel. The government also faces the risk of new fronts opening in the occupied West Bank or on the border with Lebanon. But, fairly soon, Israel will be plunged into a divisive political argument about what went wrong. Two failures will have to be addressed. The first is an intelligence and security failure. The second is strategic.

Israel has long taken pride in its intelligence services. It was generally assumed that nothing much could happen in Gaza without Israel knowing about it. But Hamas was able to plan and execute a complex and multipronged attack and storm across a border that the Israelis thought was secure. In doing so, they carried out the most deadly attacks inside Israel since the foundation of the state in 1948.

Both the right and the centre are primed to blame each other for the intelligence and security failure. (The left barely exists anymore.) As prime minister, Netanyahu is the natural person to blame for what has happened.

The prime minister’s working assumption that the threat from Hamas was contained now looks delusional and complacent. As he struggles to avoid conviction in a corruption case, Netanyahu has also formed a government reliant on parties from the far-right. Those parties have supported increasing aggression by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Army forces were diverted to the West Bank to contain the resulting violence — which weakened the country’s defences on the border with Gaza.

The Israeli right and far-right, however, have a counter-narrative ready. They are prepared to blame the opposition and intelligence establishment for weakening the security of the country.

In recent months, there have been huge anti-government demonstrations — protesting against judicial reforms pushed by Netanyahu that the opposition say threaten Israel’s democracy. Some senior figures from the security world have supported these demonstrations, and many Israeli reservists have been refusing to report for duty.

When the head of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service, warned Netanyahu earlier this year that deadly attacks by settlers on Palestinians would increase the security threat to Israel, he was roundly denounced by members of Netanyahu’s Likud party. One Likud member of parliament complained: “The ideology of the left has reached the top echelons of the Shin Bet. The deep state has infiltrated the leadership of the Shin Bet and the IDF.”

The far-right will certainly repeat those kinds of arguments in the coming weeks, as they press for vengeance against Hamas. But Israel’s inquest will have to go well beyond the immediate intelligence and security failure — profound though that is. Netanyahu’s entire strategy towards the Palestinians now looks like a failure.

This essentially involved containing and “shrinking” the conflict with the Palestinians — while providing security to Israeli citizens, building the economy and normalising relations with Arab states. Netanyahu believed that Israel could cope with occasional rocket attacks and live with international condemnation of Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

The Israeli leader rejected the argument that Israel would never be accepted in the Middle East until it made peace with the Palestinians. He argued instead that establishing normal relations with Israel’s Arab neighbours would help to bring internal peace — by cutting off external support for the Palestinians.

This plan was gathering momentum — with growing talk that Israel and Saudi Arabia were on the brink of establishing diplomatic relations. But that normalisation is now likely to be put on hold. While much western coverage of the crisis will focus on the horrors perpetrated by Hamas, the focus in the Middle East is likely to be on the suffering of Palestinians caught up in the Israeli strikes on Gaza. In that climate, it is likely to be impossible to conclude an Israel-Saudi deal.

However while Netanyahu’s Palestine strategy has fallen apart, it is far from clear what can replace it. In the current climate of grief and fury inside Israel, it is inevitable that the government will embrace a ferocious military response. But the Israeli government does not yet have any vision that goes beyond killing Hamas leaders.

Over the long term, it is hard to believe that Israel can any longer accept Hamas’s control of Gaza. But although there is plenty of talk of sending the Israeli army back into Gaza, that looks like a trap. As the academic Lawrence Freedman points out, the army “neither has the capacity nor the staying power to take control of Gaza. This remains a territory of 2 million people, and as they have nowhere else to go, they will stay, still angry.”

The shock and fury in Israel are reminiscent of the emotions in the US after 9/11. That provoked a display of American unity and power. It also led to a decade-long “war on terror” — which many Americans now regard as misconceived and self-destructive. Israel may be heading down the same dangerous path.

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Not a false flag in the typical sense but let them in, maybe with the aid of double agents in hamas. The Orthodox Jews won’t cry over a bunch of international ravers which also might help with winning international support.
Either that or they have been bullshittng us all along about the sophistication of Isreali security.

You’re claiming that the massacre of Israeli (and other) civilians at the music festival in Israel was carried out by Israeli forces/actors pretending to be Hamas i.e. a “False Flag” .

That deserves to be called out.

Reverse Fran Healy GIF by Travis