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Gaza Israel bombings

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Wade Ridsdale said:
... that leads me to think the any money coming from Gulf countries is misused by Hamas and Fatah or perhaps there is little...my guess is the former...
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There is more to it. I had a friend who worked for the UN in Palestine, and was sick of Palestinian politicians to say one thing, then get bribed by Israel to do opposite. People see that and start to believe that terrorism is the only way to go, IMHO
 
Burnt State said:
The same way the rest of the world, Europe especially, funds Russia. The problem is alliances, profit and economies mean more than individual human lives.
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Ummm what? This is bullshit. Europe doesn't fund Russia, they trade with it. US hands out money to Israel, the 2 are completely different things. Trade which has STOPPED largely, by the way, since the Ukraine shenanigans started.

Please stop spreading these blatant lies.
 
Bananas said:
Ummm what? This is bullshit. Europe doesn't fund Russia, they trade with it. US hands out money to Israel, the 2 are completely different things. Trade which has STOPPED largely, by the way, since the Ukraine shenanigans started.

Please stop spreading these blatant lies.
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In a recent article in Maclean's magazine we can see how Germany still buys Russia's natural gas, Itay sells their luxury goods there, France sells their high end military equipment to them; the list goes on. There has been no real hardcore global reaction in terms of sanctions outside of a few trifles that obviously do not harm Russia, Putin or his $$$ advisor cronies. The US and Canada have placed some serious sanctions on some of his ultra wealthy friends but it's still not enough hurt. These are not lies, simply the facts of how business goes down between Russia and the rest of the world because those priorities come first. Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, is still not important enough to stop Russia from keeping its bear paws off of it. Palestine is the Eastern Europe of the middle east.
 
I like this guy, let's put HIM in charge of Palestianian affairs. A little emotion-free, agenda-free, pragmatism couldn't hurt...right ?

i don't know if these could be considered facts but they are things that have to be discussed for starters I suppose.

9 Facts About the Israel-Palestine Conflict On Which We Can All Agree | Qasim Rashid

A step back in more recent time
The Negotiations | Shattered Dreams Of Peace | FRONTLINE | PBS

I just noticed that Rashid's book Extremist is available as a kindle d/l for only $4.99 I think I'll give it a spin.

EXTREMIST: A Response to Geert Wilders & Terrorists Everywhere: Qasim Rashid: 9780989397728: Amazon.com: Books
 
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Yeah, the reason Russia doesn't care is because Asia doesn't give a toss about these sanctions, and Russia will simply get their shit from them. I don't know how recent this article you didn't bother to link to is, but there were new sanctions posed on the 29th, and they will continue to toughen incrementally, because it's how these things work.
 
Professor Pappé - the situation is soluble -

Professor Ilan Pappé: Israel Has Chosen to be a "Racist Apartheid State" with U.S. Support
LINK: Professor Ilan Pappé: Israel Has Chosen to be a "Racist Apartheid State" with U.S. Support | Democracy Now!

TEXT: "As the Palestinian death toll tops 1,000 in Gaza, we are joined from Haifa by Israeli professor and historian Ilan Pappé. "I think Israel in 2014 made a decision that it prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy," Pappé says. "It still hopes that the United States will license this decision and provide it with the immunity to continue, with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians wherever they are." A professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, Pappé is the author of several books, including most recently, "The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge."

TEXT: Pappe: "[...] Haifa, there were about 700 people. In Tel Aviv, there were 3,000. I should say that, of course, a large number of the protesters are Palestinian citizens of Israel. So the number of Israeli Jews who are courageous enough to come out and demonstrate is even smaller than these numbers indicate. And they were met by a very vicious reaction both from right-wing demonstrators and very harsh—and were harshly treated by the police.

[...]

Pappe: I think the most important thing is the historical context. When you listen to mainstream media coverage of the situation in Gaza, you get the impression that it all starts with an unreasonable launching of rockets into Israel by the Hamas. And two very basic historical kind of backgrounds are being missed. The very immediate one goes back to June this year, when Israel decided, by force, to try and demolish the Hamas politically in the West Bank and foil the attempts of the unity government of Palestine to push forward an international campaign to bring Israel to justice on the basis of the agenda of human rights and civil rights.

Pappe: And the deeper historical context is the fact that ever since 2005, the Gaza Strip is being—or people in the Gaza Strip are being incarcerated as criminals, and their only crime is that they are Palestinians in a geopolitical location that Israel doesn’t know how to deal with. And when they elected democratically someone who was vowed to struggle against this ghettoizing or this siege, Israel reacted with all its force. So, this sort of wider historical context, that would explain to people that it is a desperate attempt to get out of the situation that your previous interviewee was talking about, is at the heart of the issue, and therefore it is soluble. One can solve this situation by lifting the siege, by allowing the people of Gaza to be connected with their brothers and sisters in the West Bank, and by allowing them to be connected to the world and not to live under circumstances that no one else in the world seems to experience at this moment in time.

[Amy Goodman: Professor Pappé, over the weekend, BBC correspondent Jon Donnison reported on what was called an Israeli admission that Hamas was not responsible for the killing of the three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June. On Twitter, Donnison said Israeli police spokesperson Micky Rosenfeld told him the suspects who killed the three teenagers were a lone cell affiliated with Hamas but not operating under its leadership. What is the significance of this?]

Pappe: It’s very significant, because this was, of course, known to the Israelis the moment they heard about this abduction and the killing of the three young settlers. It was very clear that Israel was looking for a pretext to try and launch both a military operation in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip in order to try and bring back the situation in Palestine to what it was during the failed peace process, with a sort of good domicile, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in a way that they could forget about it and continue with the colonization of the West Bank without the need to change anything in their attitude or policies. [...]

[Amy Goodman: Finally, Professor Pappé, you worked in Israel for years as a professor. You left Israel and now teach at the University of Exeter in Britain. You’ve returned to Haifa. Do you see a change in your country?]

Pappe: Yes, unfortunately, a change for the worse. I think the Israel is at a crossroad, but it has already made its decision which way it is going from this junction. It was in a junction where it had to decide finally whether it wants to be a democracy or to be a racist and apartheid state, given the realities on the ground. I think Israel, in 2014, made a decision that it prefers to be a racist apartheid state and not a democracy, and it still hopes that the United States would license this decision and provide it with the immunity to continue with the necessary implication of such a policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, wherever they are.

[Amy Goodman: What do you think the U.S. should do?]

Pappe: Well, the U.S. should apply the basic definitions of democracy to Israel and recognize that it is giving, it’s providing an unconditional support for a regime that systematically abuses the human rights and the civil rights of anyone who is not a Jew between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. If America wants clearly to support such regimes—it had done it in the past—that’s OK. But if it feels that it wants to send a different message to the Middle East, then it really has a different agenda of human rights - "
 
There is much to answer for here: especially the mainstream media simply not doing good, honest reporting. How anyone - when one knows the history - can make the Gazans out to be perpetrators is beyond me.

In every news article it is stated that Israel has the right to defend itself. In those same article it should also be stated that the Gazans have the right to defend themselves as well - but that is never said. It is never made clear that the Gazans are fighting a battle in a desperate situation. They have the right to try to alleviate their impossible situation.

This is the real reason for the current slaughter - the Unity government. It is disingenuous in the extreme for the mainstream media to not make this clear to their readers/listeners.

How the West Chose War in Gaza: Crisis Tied to Israeli-U.S. Effort to Isolate Hamas & Keep the Siege
LINK: How the West Chose War in Gaza: Crisis Tied to Israeli-U.S. Effort to Isolate Hamas & Keep the Siege | Democracy Now!

TEXT: "While many trace the Israeli assault on Gaza to the series of events that began with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of three teenage Israelis in the occupied West Bank, we look at how the crisis’ immediate cause has been all but ignored. In a recent article for The New York Times, "How the West Chose War in Gaza," Nathan Thrall, senior analyst at International Crisis Group, argues the roots of the current violence lie in Israeli, U.S. and European efforts to undermine the Palestinian unity government, which Hamas joined earlier this year. Isolated by its opposition to the Assad regime in Syria and a rift with the military government in Egypt, Hamas reconciled with the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in the hopes a unity deal could help ease the crippling blockade of Gaza and help pay the salaries of thousands of its civil servants. But the United States and European Union helped Israel maintain the blockade of Gaza while denying payments to the Hamas employees. "Plan A for Hamas out of the predicament it and Gaza found themselves in was reconciliation," Thrall says. "That was thwarted — so Plan B is the crisis we’re dealing with today."

TEXT: "[...] that ceasefire, the terms of that ceasefire included various concessions to Gaza and to Hamas. And although Israel implemented some of them in the immediate days and weeks afterward, very shortly later those were retracted, and we once again went back to a situation where exports were all but nonexistent, imports were reduced, and there were severe restrictions on travel for Gazans. Nevertheless, that ceasefire basically held, and during 2013, following the ceasefire, Israel had one of the quietest years, if not the quietest year, it had had since rockets started coming from Gaza, which, by the way, began before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the fall of 2005.

Fast-forward to July 2013, [...] Very, very few Gazans were able to exit through the Rafah crossing to Egypt. This is the main exit of Gazans to the outside world. There are some Gazans who are permitted to leave via Israel, but it’s really not available to most Gazans. It’s for exceptional medical cases and high-level VIP businessmen and so forth. So, the exit was closed, and pressure started to build.

In addition, the tunnels, through which many goods were coming, particularly construction materials and fuel—were coming into Gaza through these tunnels crossing the Gaza-Egypt border. And the Sisi regime, following the July 2013 coup, basically eliminated these tunnels. And with that elimination of those tunnels, almost complete elimination, Hamas no longer had these goods coming through and could no longer tax them. They relied on those tax revenues in order to pay the roughly 40,000 employees who run Gaza and have been running Gaza even without pay for the last several months.

So, what you had was a pressure cooker inside of Gaza, and this began to build and build to the point where, December 2013, we had a massive storm here and sanitation plants started to shut down for lack of power. There was radical reductions in electricity, which are already at very, very low levels within Gaza. Sewage is being dumped in the sea. There’s sewage in the middle of the streets in Gaza. And Hamas is looking at the situation in Egypt, and they’re hoping that there’s going to be a change in regime there and they will at least if not have a Muslim Brotherhood president again, somebody who’s less hostile to them and is going to allow some kind of easing of the closure of Gaza.

And as they came to the conclusion earlier this year that that really was not going to happen in the near term, they realized that they had to do something to get out of their predicament—and in particular, the predicament of not being able to pay the employees who are running Gaza. These employees, by the way, are not simply Hamas members. Many of them are Hamas members, but many of them are members of other factions, as well. And as soon as they came to this conclusion, they decided that what they would do as a way out of this was to form a reconciliation agreement with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. And this was a years-long process of debating the various points of implementing Palestinian reconciliation. It’s a very distant dream. But Hamas basically caved on all of the demands that they had previously been making.

And I don’t want to overstate the nature of this reconciliation. This was not a reconciliation of the political programs of Fatah and Hamas. It wasn’t calling for disarming Hamas in Gaza. It wasn’t addressing the massive problems dealing with the security forces and so forth. But it was a step towards Palestinian unity, and an important one. And what it allowed for was to have a single authority, with the ministries controlled by Ramallah controlling Gaza once again.

And what happened after this agreement, Hamas expected two things at a minimum for basically caving on all of their demands. The first thing they expected was an easing in the closure imposed particularly by Egypt on the Rafah crossing. [...]

In fact, life in Gaza just became worse. And months went by without any solution to this building crisis, of Hamas having made these concessions in order to find a solution out of the predicament in Gaza—"



I will cease quoting - but the rest of the linked article - and especially Nathan Thrall's analysis of the US' active role in how this played out - is essential reading. It is a sad, sorry state of affairs.
 
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Bananas said:
Yeah, the reason Russia doesn't care is because Asia doesn't give a toss about these sanctions, and Russia will simply get their shit from them. I don't know how recent this article you didn't bother to link to is, but there were new sanctions posed on the 29th, and they will continue to toughen incrementally, because it's how these things work.
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The article was actually in a print magazine and not published online. This is a highly abbreviated reference to that article but does not contain all those details: It's time for tougher sanctions against Russia
 
As with most adversarial scenarios there are no winners either side
But hamas is insane. They have these pissy little rockets and are lobbing them at a vastly superior force.

Putting aside the rights and wrongs that might be attributed to both sides in this mess, thats a stupid thing to do

Go down to your local police station and start throwing rocks at it, it wont be long before you're in a world of trouble.
Its a chihuahua vs rottweiller dog fight with an easily predictable end.

Hamas doesnt care about civilian casualtys, they are happy to sacrifice their own people in a fight they cannot win

Hamas has instructed Gaza residents to ignore text messages and phone calls urging them to evacuate buildings, in an apparent effort to grow its supply of "human shields." The calls and messages are sent by Israeli military officials in order to give civilians time to evacuate the area, and are communicated before the IDF targets a house terrorists were using as cover for firing missiles at Israel or for other military purposes.

The Hamas-run Palestinian Authority Interior Ministry said in a message to Gaza residents that the messages "are designed to weaken our resolve and to sow panic and fear among us, in light of the failures of our enemies. We call on Gaza residents not to pay attention to these messages and not to leave their homes."
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The Israeli pov is that hamas is using civilians to protect its missiles, While Israel are using missiles to protect their citizens.

They are even blaming the other arab states for not helping them

After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.
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Arab responsibility for Palestinian refugees" six examples of "Palestinian leaders, writers and refugees [who] have spoken out in the Palestinian media, blaming the Arab leadership for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem."
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We had anti israel demonstrations here in sydney last week, Funny isnt it when jews kill muslims the streets run thick with mobs calling for jihad.

When boko haram cut the throats of schoolboys and kidnapped girls....... no protest
When Syria killed thousands and displaced millions....... no protest
When Isil behead civilians and mass execute others...... no protest

The list goes on and on muslims have killed thousands and thousands of muslims recently and no protest.
Israel does it in self defence and they are in the streets screaming jihad jihad.

I look at the faces of the children in all these examples, and think to myself why cant your grown ups behave like grownups.

Imo the root problem here is Islam and its hateful violent ideology.

Human life seems to hold little or no value to them
 
Arabs For Israel: A Letter to Gaza

Worth a read, a frank and insightful view of Islam and its failings

Salam to you,
With all of our pride in your father we pray that Allah will bless him with entering paradise, which is the wish of every person after this short prideful meaningless life.
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Thus, Muslims must claim victimhood in order to justify jihad. The entire Muslim world is using your people, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, to justify their jihad against not only Israel, but also all non-Muslim countries. That includes Iran, which supports Hamas and Hezbollah.
Your people in Gaza should have realized this game a long time ago, but you refuse to see and be open about who is your true oppressor. Arab and Muslim media is using and abusing your people in order to justify their Islamic jihad around the world. That is why they never want to resolve your problem and want you to suffer and live in constant terror against Israel.
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Hamas is making victims of its own people to justify jihad, they consider the lives lost as meaningless, Making martyrs out of its own men women and children a good thing.


After centuries of this kind of education, the Muslim world produced a dysfunctional society, unable to relate to the rest of the world. While wanting to convince the world they are a religion of peace, do not be afraid of Islam, they are still hell-bent on conquering the world for Islam. That is Islam’s dilemma today.
What I, and a few others, are trying to do is to bring the truth to both Muslims and non-Muslims to finally face this sick game. We want to encourage Arabs to look at Jews and others as human beings and not as enemies to conquer. What kind of God will tell his followers to kill more than half of humanity if they don’t submit to Islam? The Muslim world today is a disaster waiting to happen. Ahmadinejad, who is not an Arab, wants to continue the Islamic jihad against Jews by destroying Israel. I have news to especially the Left in Europe and America: Islamic jihad will not end with Israel; you will be next.
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Indeed thats the very rhetoric we are seeing from Isil, You will be next

“ISIL” Members Threatens US, Canada via Online Video
 
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As long as you've got it wrapped up in your mind like that, we will be sure not to send you as the next negotiating envoy to broker peace. :cool:
 
You're missing two points -

- cramped quarters on the Gaza strip

and

- the conditions under which the Gazans live.

Desperation breeds desperate acts. It's time for us to settle this.

I am not willing for my (US) tax dollars to keep footing this bill with Israel. Israel is the power, Israel needs to pony up and be the mensch.
 
The men said the ISIL would not stop at Spain and intends to spread its Islamic Caliphate across the world.
“I say to the entire world as a warning: We are living under the Islamic banner, the Islamic Caliphate. We are going to die for it until we liberate all the occupied lands, from Jakarta to Andalusia,” one of the men said.

ISIL threatens to invade Spain | Al Bawaba
 
mike said:
They dont want peace, their charter is death to the infidels
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People in distress say many things. It's irrelevant. It's about getting a solution without taking on the rhetoric of the participants. You can decide to keep grinding away with the rhetoric but if you do, I would ask that you then get your country to pay the bill that allows that rhetoric to have wheels. I say no - enough is enough. No more of this on my tax dollar. I think that's fair. You pay for it.
 
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