Israel - Gaza - Palestine CONFLICT

[Balance]

Where is the democracy for the Palestinians?
Israel will not recognize them as a state let alone have a Government or vote to elect leaders. Israel has a democracy as much as apartheid South Africa did.

And stop with Jew hating rhetoric as it's just rubbish and you know it.
Or keep it up & hopefully you will get banned.

Democracy for the Palestinians?

Try the 2006 Gaza election which brought in Hamas and that was the end of democracy for the Palestinians.

More than that, the billions of dollars in aid provided to build Gaza into a progressive state and economy were diverted into building a terrorist infrastructure with the knowledge and approval of all Palestinians.

Only Jew Haters would equate what's happening in Gaza with genocide (try Hilter's final solution and Pol Pot's return to year zero for genocides) and democracy in Israel (where Palestinian citizens of Israel can and do vote) with apartheid in South Africa.

Democracy for Palestinians - do ask Hamas and the Gaza citizens what happened to elections and democracy.

[Daytr]

Democracy for the Palestinians?

Try the 2006 Gaza election which brought in Hamas and that was the end of democracy for the Palestinians.

More than that, the billions of dollars in aid provided to build Gaza into a progressive state and economy were diverted into building a terrorist infrastructure with the knowledge and approval of all Palestinians.

Only Jew Haters would equate what's happening in Gaza with genocide (try Hilter's final solution and Pol Pot's return to year zero for genocides) and democracy in Israel (where Palestinian citizens of Israel can and do vote) with apartheid in South Africa.

Democracy for Palestinians - do ask Hamas and the Gaza citizens what happened to elections and democracy.

When have I ever said what's going on is genocide?
Indiscriminate killing of thousands of people, of which circa half are children, what's the term for that?

[Daytr]

This appears to be a pretty well balanced article on the situation since 2006.
No one on here has defended Hamas.
However they have criticized Israel for mass murder & war crimes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...estine-israel/

[fungus pudding]

This appears to be a pretty well balanced article on the situation since 2006.
No one on here has defended Hamas.
However they have criticized Israel for mass murder & war crimes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...estine-israel/

If you want punters to read the article, then post the article. It's pointless posting a link to an article that the vast majority can't access.

[Daytr]

If you want punters to read the article, then post the article. It's pointless posting a link to an article that the vast majority can't access.

Why can't you access? I could & I don't subscribe. Anyway I will see what I can do.
But perhaps a better way to approach would be to say, I can't access, would you mind posting the article.
Manners seem to be left at the fate on this forum.

TODAY'S WORLDVIEW
The election that led to Hamas taking over Gaza

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor
Columnist
October 24, 2023 at 12:01 a.m. EDT

Palestinian supporters of Hamas gather for a pre-election rally in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Jan. 23, 2006. (Muhammed Muheisen/AP)
The death toll amid Israel’s devastating campaign against the Islamist group Hamas in Gaza is soaring. More than two weeks after Hamas militants orchestrated their appalling strike on southern Israel, killing more than 1,400 people in a slaughter unprecedented in Israeli history, Israeli bombing and raids have killed at least 5,087 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 2,000 children, according to local authorities. Those numbers are bound to rise as Israel ramps up its offensive.

Israel’s boosters reason away the hideous collateral damage as an inevitable fact of a conflict in which a rogue enemy operates in zones crammed with civilians. Innocent Palestinians, wrote Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, are “caught between the hammer of Hamas’ atrocity and the anvil of Israel’s rightful retribution.”

Others in Israel and elsewhere have been even less sympathetic. They cast the more than 2 million people living in the Gaza Strip — a territory subjected to an immiserating economic blockade for the past 16 years — as accomplices to Hamas, which has held sway in Gaza since capturing it in 2007 from rival Palestinian factions.

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog told reporters. “This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.”

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A core part of this talking point lies in what happened close to two decades ago. In 2006, the Palestinian political entity operating in the West Bank and Gaza staged elections. Little did observers know that it would be the last vote allowed by the Palestinian Authority, led then, as it is now, by President Mahmoud Abbas. The vote took place in the aftermath of a turbulent series of events: the fiery years of the second intifada, the death of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the 2005 Israeli withdrawal of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.

The election yielded a shock victory for Hamas, which won the most seats with some 44 percent of the vote. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, which advocates for rapprochement and peace between Israelis and Palestinians, recently observed that in no single district in Gaza did Hamas win a majority of votes. At present, children make up roughly half of Gaza’s population, meaning only a fraction of the territory’s current population ever cast a ballot for Hamas.

Given the horror of what Hamas unleashed on Oct. 7, it is difficult for many to imagine the Islamists as genuine democratic actors in a fledgling parliamentary structure. But the faction, which emerged in the 1980s in Gaza (with a degree of Israeli help) as a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, won the votes of many Palestinians who were tired of the entrenched Palestinian clique of Abbas and his allies in the secular Fatah party.

“Mostly, they were voting for opposition and voting against Fatah — against corruption, against nepotism, against the failure of the peace process, and against the lack of leadership,” Mustafa Barghouti, an outspoken, independent Palestinian politician then and now, told CNN at the time.

Story continues below advertisement
That analysis was echoed by a conspicuous onlooker. President George W. Bush had pushed for Palestinian elections, in part as an outgrowth of his administration’s ideological zeal for spreading democracy in the Middle East through whatever means necessary. As Hamas’s victory became clear, Bush said the vote reflected Palestinians’ disenchantment with their prevailing leadership, who had been elected a decade prior in the wake of the signing of the Oslo accords.

“There was a peaceful process as people went to the polls, and that’s positive,” Bush told reporters. “But what’s also positive is that it’s a wake-up call to the leadership. Obviously people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services.”

Within the Bush administration, there was anguish. A recognized terrorist organization that was refusing to disarm its armed wing or revise elements of its charter that sought the destruction of the state of Israel had secured democratic legitimacy. “Everyone blamed everyone else,” an official with the Department of Defense told Vanity Fair in 2008. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the f--- recommended this?’ ”

As it turned out, Hamas never ended up steering the Palestinian democratic experiment. Western powers temporarily turned off the tap of aid to the Palestinian Authority; Israel clamped down on the Gaza Strip and detained dozens of Hamas officials, including elected legislators. The schism between Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza exploded in a bloody set of battles that saw Hamas violently wrest full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, allegedly after the Bush administration tried to foment an anti-Hamas putsch in the territory.

What followed is the tragic course of the past decade, with the Palestinian national movement drifting into crisis, Israel placing siege conditions on the whole Gaza Strip, and periodic eruptions of deadly violence from Hamas and other armed factions in the territory reminding the world of the perennial threat they pose and the disproportionate price paid by Gaza’s civilian population. With U.S. and Israeli blessing, Qatar provides an economic lifeline by helping Gaza’s authorities pay for things like infrastructure and the salaries of public officials. Meanwhile, through more covert, illicit means, Hamas has received Iranian aid and support to retool its military capacities.

In the wake of Oct. 7, even fewer governments will treat Hamas as a normal political operator. But in the years preceding the current war, Palestinians in Gaza had more immediate concerns than finding the means to oust the armed faction in their midst. “Many Gazans would prefer not to be governed by Hamas militants, but they can’t simply start up a campaign to get rid of them — not without grave risks to their lives, livelihoods, and families. For one thing, they are too busy struggling to survive from day to day,” wrote Jonah Shepp in the Intelligencer.

“For another, Hamas cements its hold on power through an outsize role in the Gazan economy: It is the only organization that can reliably pay salaries, it maintains a stranglehold on inflows of foreign aid, and it keeps Gaza dependent on Israel for water and electricity by refusing to build infrastructure instead of rockets,” he added.

Other analysts suggest that the moment may also demand more reflection within Israel. Hamas militants “are arsonists, and we must remember that arsonists seek a world in which everything burns,” wrote Ben Rhodes, a former Obama administration official. “Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-standing policy of squeezing Gaza, expanding West Bank settlements, and making deals with Arab autocrats has not delivered security but led Israel to let its guard down while Hamas plotted its attack.”

washingtonpost.com

[iceman]

Why can't you access? I could & I don't subscribe. Anyway I will see what I can do.

I can't read it without signing up

[Blue Skies]

All innocent lives are equally precious, Israeli or Palestinian but some on here seem to believe only Jewish lives matter, Palestinian lives esp the children, sisters & brothers, mothers and fathers don’t matter their lives don’t count.

It’s abhorrent, evil, anyone could think those innocent lives count for so little, they deserve to die as retribution, revenge for the 1,600 people killed by Hamas on October 10th, or their lives are just collateral damage.

22,000 Palestinians killed, mostly children & women, over 55,000 maimed, thousands missing buried under bombed buildings, 1.9 million displaced from their homes, refugee camps bombed, hospitals bombed, life saving medical supplies and anaesthetics blocked, food and fuel blocked, water infrastructure destroyed, most people literally starving. Children are having limbs amputations with no anathetics.

The children are unbelievably stoical. A 9 year girl was having breakfast with her family but woke up in hospital to find her leg amputated and all her family killed from a bomb blast. She said she hoped she could get a prosthetic leg & wanted to become a doctor when she grew up because so many children were injured & needed help. Within hours she too was dead, the area of the hospital she was in hit by another IDF bomb!

As President Jimmy Carter said, most people have no idea the level of repression Palestinians have suffered over the last 70 years from Israel, they have been forgotten. There are powerful political forces preventing media and politicians from speaking up.
If any good can come out of this human catastrophe, its that is changing, people are becoming better informed.
The West must demand a ceasefire now, and force a return to a political negotiated 2 State solution.

[Daytr]

All innocent lives are equally precious, Israeli or Palestinian but some on here seem to believe only Jewish lives matter, Palestinian lives esp the children, sisters & brothers, mothers and fathers don’t matter their lives don’t count.

It’s abhorrent, evil, anyone could think those innocent lives count for so little, they deserve to die as retribution, revenge for the 1,600 people killed by Hamas on October 10th, or their lives are just collateral damage.

22,000 Palestinians killed, mostly children & women, over 55,000 maimed, thousands missing buried under bombed buildings, 1.9 million displaced from their homes, refugee camps bombed, hospitals bombed, life saving medical supplies and anaesthetics blocked, food and fuel blocked, water infrastructure destroyed, most people literally starving. Children are having limbs amputations with no anathetics.

The children are unbelievably stoical. A 9 year girl was having breakfast with her family but woke up in hospital to find her leg amputated and all her family killed from a bomb blast. She said she hoped she could get a prosthetic leg & wanted to become a doctor when she grew up because so many children were injured & needed help. Within hours she too was dead, the area of the hospital she was in hit by another IDF bomb!

As President Jimmy Carter said, most people have no idea the level of repression Palestinians have suffered over the last 70 years from Israel, they have been forgotten. There are powerful political forces preventing media and politicians from speaking up.
If any good can come out of this human catastrophe, its that is changing, people are becoming better informed.
The West must demand a ceasefire now, and force a return to a political negotiated 2 State solution.

I couldn't agree more Blue Skies.
Well articulated.

[Balance]

I couldn't agree more Blue Skies.
Well articulated.

Fools seldom differ.

Anyone told Hamas and the cheering Palestinians that lives are precious before they slaughtered babies and children on Oct 7th? And that they should fight like men rather than hide behind children and women?

By the time Israel wipe Hamas out, there could be at least 100,000 Palestinians dead - thanks to Hamas. Many will be terrorists drowned like diseased rats in the tunnels being flooded with sea water. Nobody else to blame.

“Never again shall Masada fall.”

[Bjauck]

I can't read it without signing up

Ditto - sub nag screen blocks the article.

Thanks for posting the item Daytr.

In the effort to exterminate Hamas there is an horrendous civilian casualty toll in Gaza. It is a place with such a high population density. It is virtually a crowded internment camp for the Arab refugees from Israel and their descendants. I hope the result of this conflict won’t be even more terrorists in future generations.