This is the second megathread for discussion regarding the crisis.
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What's the educated opinion of how could this been handled by Israel? Honest question. (Ignoring the fact that Israel failed with intel)
To me it seems like Gaza had no intention to get rid of Hamas though at the same time bombing is unnecessary as the culprits can't really leave other than the secret tunnels to Egypt which can't really be bombed.
So the only real alternative is a full Blockade and ultimatum or something? Clearly Gaza doesn't stand a chance against IDF too so Israel had all of the cards to conjure any response they wanted.
I've tried to Google similar modern scenarios and couldn't find anything.
There hasn't been elections for 16 or 17 iirc so how can Palestinians "get rid of" Hamas?
Hamas was supported & funded by Netanyahus likud party specifically because it drove a wedge between those in Gaza and in the West Bank. Classic divide and conquer technique.
As for what Israel can do? They can get rid of the genocidal crook that's running their government and his two murderous far right henchmen and grasp that he had concocted this situation for several reasons:
To divert attention away from his corruption and fraud indictments
To quell the protests that have been going on for months against him because of the corruption and legislation he has passed to curtail the supreme courts ability to hold the executive to account.
To level Gaza, ethnically cleanse it & genocide the Palestinian people so he can get to the natural gas and oil reserves there.
Yes, there's a lot Israel can do and it needs to be quick about it.
It sounds like you just put everything you don't like about Israel in that answer, but without actually giving an answer how this actually could be handled. "Just don't to bad stuff, do good stuff" How would that have been an appropriate response to the terrorist attack?
You're talking as though the attacks happened in a vacuum, without intelligence from several sources pre-warning of it and without a certain level of collusion from the Israeli executive to allow it to happen and bring capitalised by then for it's maximum effect.
When you can genuinely approach the subject not from such a disingenuous perspective then my response may well be perceived by you as a bit more than "If you don't want to be taken for a cunt then don't act like one "
For me it sounds like you are you saying, they deserve the terrorist attack and are not allowed to react to it.
That would be the exact reactionary response I would expect from someone with no grasp of the history, its complexity or even a miniscule amount of knowledge of the atrocities that have been carried out against civilians by both sides
Then you're just ignoring geopolitics and talking about who said what.
We can't change the past. What should Israel do now?
So you didn't bother to read my comment then?
If you're too lazy to do that, why the fuck should I put any effort beyond this in replying?
I did. Replacing the government with one less bad would be good, but what should such a theoretical good government do in response to the Hamas attack? For example, I think more fewer air strikes and more ground combat would be better for minimizing civilian casualties, though more Israeli soldiers would die as a result.
Restore Palestine to the 1917 borders. Grant all Palestinians equal rights within those borders. All zionists who were involved in perpetrating war crimes either directly, or indirectly via policy, to face trial at the Hague
That would desolve the state of Israel wouldn't it? That isn't really tennable for an Israeli government to do.
I really don't care whats tenable for a state born out of terrorism that has been carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous people for the last 70 plus years.
They have no fucking legitimacy and as much right to continue to exist as the NSDAP government after WW2.
Do you think there are any solutions short of that? Because saying Israel should just dissolve is supremely unhelpful.
They could allow Palestinians full rights and statehood in Israel, with protections from the racist inhabitants.
To clarify, are you saying give the West Bank and Gaza strip statehood as a Nation of Palisade separate from Israel, or give the people there citizenship as Israelis?
Israel has no intentions of backing down, so in my feeble mind they should be given Israeli citizenship with extra protections.
Stop using the phrase "terrorist attack" to mean "unspeakable evil that can never ever be justified by anyone for anything and can never be questioned and must be responded to with all possible violence means necessary".
Terrorism is an act of political resistance, by definition. It is any violence used to inspire fear and bring about political change.
The political change being sought is the end to slow genocide, the end to apartheid, the end to violent displacement, the end to violent neglect, the end to subjugation. When analyzing the situation, the decision was made by the resistance fighters that this action would lead to political change, and so far that possibility is still there.
Israel's response should have been ages ago. It has no legitimacy anymore. It exists purely through violent domination. There is no way for Israel to respond correctly except to begin the political process of dissolving itself and ceding power to the Palestinians. They won't do this, so literally anything else is just going to be a continuation of the last 80 years of violent oppression. There's no way for Israel to act correctly because it hasn't been acting correctly for decades and responding to this attack isn't going to change that.
What might change it is their military being bested by the resistance, their missile defense shield being shown to not protect anyone, fear on the part of settlers causing them to abandon settlements, and internal rebellion demanding justice and ending the illegal occupation.
Ideally Israel wouldn't have been oppressing Palestinians in the first place so that Hamas would never have come to power. They could have engaged in dialogue and diplomacy with Hamas and the Palestinians to figure out something that would work for everyone. They could have negotiated a prisoner swap or something for the hostages.
But Israel, specifically Likud and the right-wing parties, have no interest in this. They want all of Palestine gone, and to control it all themselves.
Not to mention that Hamas had accepted the 1967 borders back in 2017 and it was Netanyahu who rejected it. Hamas is a pet project by Netanyahu to divide Palestinians in Gaza from the West Bank. He’s helped nurture and support them as a means to do more land grabs and expand Israel’s territorial grip. So the starting point has to be a full withdrawal of the occupation, the ability for Palestinians to have a democratic government that is free from Israeli influence, and the restoration of the 1967 borders. The withdrawal of all Israeli settlers from within Palestinian borders.
You leave out that in the same statement, Hamas denied the statehood of Israel, indicating that they wanted Israel to make huge one-sided concessions, without making any concessions of their own.
Because Israel has been literally stealing land while demanding Palestinians give up more.
Edit: added context.
They literally started a land grab in 2017.
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/50-years-illegal-settlements/index.html
They can also currently stop protecting murderers in the west bank. So we don't have to ask how did a radical movement take power there a couple of years from now.
Israel could stop being an apartheid state and stop illegally occupying Palestinian land and imprisoning millions of gazans and hamas would no longer be a political force. Because hamas is a violent reaction to colonial violence after nonviolent reactions failed for decades.
Dealing with this situation logically doesn't work, because it's not logic that got it started.
Both sides have majority support for essentially exterminating the other side.
Add to the fact that both sides are receiving massive external support in order for those external nations to wage a proxy war against each other, and it's just a shit show all around.
You’re right, logic didn’t start the current conflict. The British did when they disarmed Palestinians and armed and trained Zionist paramilitaries. This enabled the Zionists to forcibly evict hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign. The pace at which Palestinians are being displaced has slowed but it has never stopped. While Palestinian resistance movements have received outside support it pales in comparison to the military support Israel receives from the US and other western countries. This conflict is unfortunately very one sided.
If you think Arabs and Jews fighting started with the British, you'd be a thousand years late to the party.
Changing the balance of the power did not start the conflict.
Okay so you’re just going to ignore the hundreds of years of relative peace in the region under Ottoman rule immediately preceding WWI?
So peaceful.... Multiple massacres and entire towns getting sacked for being Jewish sure doesn't sound like peaceful to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Antisemitism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Yishuv
The Ottomans lost in WWI, and the empire got split up. It's not surprising that non-Muslim groups in the area got control of some of the parts.
“Got control” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. You can’t just paper over British involvement and the hundreds of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in a mass ethnic cleansing campaign by Zionists. This was clearly a dramatic escalation in any religious or ethnic violence that occurred in the region as compared to years prior. You can’t just ignore that and expect anyone to think you’re discussing the issue in good faith.
Speaking of which, Palestine under Ottoman rule was more peaceful. The wiki articles you linked don’t even reference massacres happening in Palestine. So your point is moot.
Yes they do...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1660_destruction_of_Safed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1660_destruction_of_Tiberias
The British didn't start this shit. Not even close.
Who started it is moot though, neither side wants to peacefully end this so they're going to keep fighting.
You think that if the west stops supporting Israel that Hamas is just going to stop attacking? That's naïve as fuck. Hamas with Iran's support will just push into Israel and the table will just be tilted the other way instead.
That’s all you can come up with? An event that happened 288 years before the events of 1948? That’s supposed to disprove what I said about relative peace in the region for hundreds of years? You have to be kidding me.
Also saying the British had no role to play is just an outright lie. Who controlled Palestine from 1920-1948 I wonder? Could it have been an empire know for stoking sectarian conflict in order to further their own agenda, most famously in 1947 with the partitioning of India? This isn’t rocket science. It’s historical fact.
That said, the war crimes Israel is committing, the children they are killing, the collective punishment they are enforcing right now are not a rational response to Hamas. You can’t tried to murder and ethnically cleanse a people from their land and expect them to not be radicalized in the process. What Israel has been doing, what it is currently doing, will only make things worse for everyone including their own citizens.
If you can’t see that then you’re either blinded by propaganda or your own bloodlust.
Whats the rational response to Hamas then? Overwhelm them with aid?
If either side eliminates the other, peace will happen. That's generally how wars have worked through history. Even the ottomans didn't expand without conquering.
We act all morally enlightened these days, but we really aren't. We're just talking from the comfort of far away.
What you’re describing is genocide plain and simple. If I really have to explain to you why genocide is not a solution there really is no hope for you.
Yes it is Genocide, from both sides. That tends to happen in wars.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_genocide: The War and Genocide school of thought encompasses the vast majority of scholars and contends that those killed in war can be considered victims of genocide. Scholars in this school reference the genocidal capacities of certain methods of war, such as nuclear weapons, pattern-, fire-, and carpet-bombing, or other indiscriminate strategies, as the use of genocidal violence.
War may not be the best solution, but given that both sides want to exterminate the other, I'm not sure what compromise you expect until one side is weakened enough that they are forced to give up.
The plan is for there to eventually be no people left to become terrorists. It's not the stupidest plan, it has worked throughout history.
They are on the path of doing this, the more they kill, the more will join the resistance. New acts of resistance (terrorism) will be committed. Then they have an excuse to kill even more. Rinse and repeat, until genocide complete.
This isn't exactly an answer for how it could have been handled, but it's got a lot of great info on the complicated factors at play.
Causes of the war https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY
Israel's reaction/overreaction https://youtu.be/B4H95DlII2s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/zMxHU34IgyY
https://piped.video/B4H95DlII2s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Get a peace-keeping force made up of Iranians. If missiles are still being shot from Gaza after that, Israel can go to war with Iran and cut out the middle-man.