Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the country is “embarking on a long and difficult war” as it deals with an unprecedented hostage crisis after Palestinian militants launched a surprise land, sea and air attack from Gaza, killing hundreds and infiltrating into Israeli territory.
Saturday’s shock attacks by Hamas led to the deadliest day in decades for Israel and come after months of surging violence between Palestinians and Israelis with the decades-long conflict now heading into uncharted and dangerous new territory. Questions are also swirling over how the entire Israeli military and intelligence apparatus appeared to be caught off guard in one of the country’s worst security failures.
Israel’s political-security cabinet convened late Saturday and made a “series of operational decisions aimed at bringing about the destruction of the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, in a way that would negate their ability and desire to threaten and harm the citizens of Israel for many years to come,” according to a statement from the office of Israel’s Prime Minister.
If Israel had just stuck to its original borders, none of this would have happened.
The right ring / orthodox of any religion is always a loose cannon and dangerous to any nearby.
It’s a shit show largely enabled by the US.
It’s fucking baffling to me that the same people who would be first in line to blame ALL JEWS (and do so in a derogatory manner) for all sorts of things (space lasers, anyone?), but the MOMENT you bring up halting monetary and military aid to Israel, they get extremely defensive about it, like the mere thought of not supporting Israel is so un-American you might as well be a terrorist.
Same thoughts here.
Watching the world’s reaction to the Ukraine/Russia conflict compared to the Israel/Palestine conflict is equally baffling.
The world’s moral compass spins like a top. At what point can we just declare all these attacks and wars unjust and a waste of life and resources?
We have the technology and resources to make a utopia for all humanity but instead we spend our time and money coming up with new ways to kill each other and reasons to be hateful. It’s only going to get worse as the world shrinks from climate shift.
What a time to be alive. History will look back on us with disgust.
That is honestly an incredibly naive and oversimplified view of things. Which mostly comes from the general lack of challenging media (because not having a villain who kicks puppies makes things confusing) and our lives inside content bubbles.
Let’s break that down on a few points
At what point can we just declare all these attacks and wars unjust and a waste of life and resources?
Someone just kidnapped somebody you care about, stripped them naked, beat them, who knows what else, and is parading their body around in the back of a pickup truck as others defile it. And now you have been told you should just drop it because a counter attack to stop those responsible is “unjust and a waste of life and resources”. Maybe you would be fine with that, but it should not be hard to realize that most people aren’t.
And… that is because the reality is that they also had a reason to feel they had to do that. You did absolutely nothing, but your neighbors or your government commit similar atrocities and so forth.
We have the technology and resources to make a utopia for all humanity
We really don’t.
Even before the ongoing hell that is global warming, there were a lot of parts of the world that just don’t support human life. People find ways to make it work but getting supplies and resources there is an ongoing challenge.
So… let’s move people to the more hospitable regions. Well, population density would increase such that you more or less require a city. And ignoring the ecological impact of that, what about the people who are there? Do you evict people, tear down their family home, and a few months later let them know they now live in an apartment complex with a couple hundred people who do not speak teh same language as them and have customs/rituals that may be outright offensive? And I am not talking about “they don’t hate gay people” and more “they play music at 7 am on a Saturday”
That is what this always boils down to. We should be living in a utopia. But to achieve that, we would need the world to be a utopia to begin with.
The reality is that the world is shit and so much of what is done is in retaliation for what was done. And while it is easy to be a kid in their mom’s basement talking about how people should just drop it… it is a lot harder to do so when it is your loved ones who suffered most recently.
And this is a “perfect” example. it is easy to focus on the fascist government locking an entire ethnic group in an open air prison when you live off scraps from reddit. And… that is 100% accurate.
But if you do a bit of research into the origins of israel you see a giant mess of basically The West helping a persecuted people relocate and telling the locals they would live alongside them. And neighboring countries (what few who were coherent enough to have a say because of how borders were drawn in the region) mostly didn’t care because… EVERYONE hated and persecuted the Palestinians. But as other construct nations gained a sense of being and Other Reasons, various (generally “arab”) nations rallied behind the concept of the Palestinians as an excuse to restrict israel’s growing military might and funded terrorist attacks. Which led to israel using even harsher responses and an environment where blatant fascists could take power.
And that is how you get an environment where both sides can say “Well, this is massively fucked… but the Others are assholes so…”. And neighboring countries are perfectly happy to stoke the flames but will never actually step in to stop anything.
It’s not baffling, they need Israel to exist for their end times prophecy to happen.
It’s not that they suddenly like Jewish people, they just want that box ticked.
Yeah, that’s honestly what I’ve always figured. Gotta have Israel around as a shape and name on a map, otherwise sky daddy can’t come home.
Is that seriously what goes on in their heads?
Most of them? No. They just believe what their preachers tell them to believe, even if it’s contradictory. Jews are bad, Israel is good. They’re do heavily propagandized they don’t even think in the normal sense really.
But the preachers have that rationale, and the military industrial complex loves the situation, so they push it.
It’s a shit show largely enabled by the US.
Tale as old as time
Why do they back and support them so much? Pragmatically, what do they get in return???
Relief of white guilt and a democratic ally in a strategically important region dominated by theocratic regimes.
This “long war” business is a pack of bullshit. The Gaza Strip, Hamas’s stronghold, could be occupied by the Israeli army in a week.
Netanyahu will be looking to drop the “democratic” part of what the West gets from the alliance with the surge in public support for “extreme measures,” there isn’t a doubt in my mind.
No one in politics gives a shit about “white guilt”, that’s some Fox-esque talking point that means nothing.
And a country that promptly installs and supports authorities and genocidal dictators gives no shit about democracy in the M.E.
The reasons are much simpler, oil, conflict, and Christi-Fascist end days dogma.
The 1967 borders also have the Gaza Strip as Palestinian territory, and so long as it’s a security threat (regardless of whether or not you think it’s a morally justified struggle or not), the fact of the matter is that Israel is going to do everything possible to ensure it cannot threaten the lives of Israelis.
The only way Gaza will be allowed to peacefully exist is when it stops being a threat to Israeli citizens, and no amount of appeals to history or particular ethics will change the fact that Israel has the power here. There is no universe in which insurgents from Gaza are able to actually topple Israel (ignoring how horrendously violently that would be), and so any actions in pursuit of that do nothing but cause Israel to tighten down even further and make peace even more impossible than it already is.
Nethanyahu and friends enabled Hamas as a way of undermining Fatah and Palestinian statehood.
In a very real sense, he caused this.
Make no mistake, I certainly wouldn’t hold Netanyahu even remotely blameless either. Like Hamas, he also has no real interest in peace, and continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank in also an atrocity, to say nothing of day-to-day oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank.
However, none of that makes it acceptable to kidnap and murder random civilians. If Hamas continues to see the existence of every single Jew in Israel as a crime, then Israel will see every single Palestinian as a threat, and that isn’t a situation that ends well for Palestinians.
People can argue about who started what, who should have accepted which deals, and who escalated what and when and thus justified something else until the end of the world. The only way peace gets achieved is when both sides decide that a peaceful future is more important than avenging past grievances. Until that happens, nothing will get better.
But one side is avenging current grievances, because Israel’s treatment of Palestinians has been ongoing for 50 years, it hasn’t stopped.
As long as the powerful abuser keeps pushing people to breaking point, you can’t fault them for lashing out.
I am actually going to fault murdering 200 people at a festival and raping women and then parading their naked body through the streets.
I’d also fault bulldozing Palestinian villages to make land for settlements. I don’t think saying Side A Good, Side B Bad is particularly productive in a situation this messy.
It’s not good vs bad.
It’s oppressed vs oppressor.
If your resistance to oppression causes you to rape and murder civilians, you deserve to be oppressed.
There are ways to fight back that are not the intentional murder of innocents, and you know that just as well as I do. Do you really have such little faith in Palestinians as to think that they don’t know that rape and murder are wrong? That they’ve simply been forced into these actions by the twisted machinations of the West?
Treat people like animals and you don’t get to be shocked they act like animals.
Israel has now cut off the water to 2 million Palestinians, do you not understand the difference in scale of atrocities being committed here?
Hamas could unconditionally surrender, release the 130 hostages, and vow to abandon any further attempts to attack Israeli citizens, and the water and electricity would be turned right back on.
I genuinely do not understand how someone can see a group that has murdered and raped civilians, taken over a hundred hostages, and then attempt to justify their actions.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Saturday’s shock attacks by Hamas led to the deadliest day in decades for Israel and come after months of surging violence between Palestinians and Israelis with the decades-long conflict now heading into uncharted and dangerous new territory.
Netanyahu announced Israeli forces have started an “offensive formation” which will “continue without reservation and without respite until the objectives are achieved.” Among the decisions made by the cabinet is to stop the supply of electricity, fuel and goods to Gaza.
The highly coordinated assault, which began Saturday morning, was unprecedented in its scale and scope and came on the 50th anniversary of the 1973 War in which Arab states blitzed Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
“We had no warning of any kind, and it was a total surprise that the war broke out this morning,” Efraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad, Israel’s Intelligence Service, told CNN.
“This Iron Dome is being fired up all around us right now, it’s illuminating the sky here,” said CNN’s International Diplomatic Editor Nic Robertson in Zikim, Israel, referring to the Israeli rocket defense system.
On Saturday he tracked her phone and saw it was located in Gaza; later that day he recognized her in a viral clip of people loaded into the back of a truck flanked by Hamas militants.
The original article contains 1,772 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 88%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It boggles the mind that the army and mossad fumbled the bag here so bad.
I mean, you live in a dodgy neighbourhood, you aggro the neighbours, you know their mates are arming them, and you just sleep on it so hard that they smuggle in thousands of weapons, build thousands of rockets, and start an airborne division, some fellas with aks can overrun your army outposts and the 3 tanks you parked near the fence? Its really no black swan event, its just more of the same.
The whole Israeli govt and army leadership needs to be sacked for their incompetence.
Air attack?
