By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.
Everytime I read an article like this, my immediate reaction is posting a comment expressing my disgust with the Israeli State’s actions and everytime I hesitate because I don’t want to suffer the inevitable wave of people defending the Israeli State’s actions as somehow justifiable because Hamas did something vile first.
It’s a continuing cycle of violence and the Israeli State holds a humongous power advantage. They don’t use that power disparity to deescalate and integrate the Palestinian people to prevent Hamas from having support. Instead they do shit like this where they drive Palestinians straight into Hamas’ hands, because the Palestinian people are given no other option to turn to.
the inevitable wave of people defending the Israeli State’s actions
I think that wave has broken. They were a very vocal minority and some of them have been banned already.
Imagine trying to justify thousands of murdered children because some people decided to attack a festival.
An attack, I might add, the government had been informed of and bafflingly did the opposite of adding protection to heavy traffic areas…
That’s because Netanyahu has a long history of supporting Hamas for his own political gains.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
The symbiotic relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas, The Hill, October 22, 2023
Netanyahu’s policy, however, was in direct opposition to most of the Israeli defense and security establishment, which viewed cooperation with the PA to be in Israel’s security interest. Fans of the Netflix series “Fauda” will recognize that cooperation. Most security experts felt the PA needed to be strengthened, not weakened.
Since returning to power in 2009, Netanyahu made no secret of his desire to keep Hamas and the PA apart for his own political purposes. For example, in 2017, the PA and Hamas were negotiating a possible takeover by the PA of civilian control of the Gaza Strip. Even though the United States and Egypt supported this reconciliation, Netanyahu was adamantly opposed — lest it empower the PA.
Why Netanyahu helped fund Hamas and how that backfired for Israel, India Today, November 1, 2023
“Whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Prime Minister Netanyahu as saying in 2019.
Prince Turki al-Faisal’s accusation against Israel comes days after a report by Reuters, citing a source privy to the matter, stated that Qatar’s financial aid to the Palestinian families in Gaza passes through Israel. The funds are transferred electronically from Qatar to Israel, following which Israeli and United Nations (UN) officials hand-carry the same over the border to the Gaza Strip.
How Netanyahu’s Hamas policy came back to haunt him — and Israel, CBC News, October 28, 2023
Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013 that “if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas’s strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister.”
In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu’s “strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking … even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.”
Netanyahu’s current finance minister, West Bank settler Belazel Smotrich, explained the approach to Israel’s Knesset channel in 2015: “Hamas is an asset, and (Palestinian Authority leader) Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is a burden.”
“But each time Netanyahu was asked, ‘Why don’t you negotiate with Abbas,’ he would say, ‘I can’t negotiate with a Palestinian Authority that doesn’t represent all Palestinians.’ And so he would use Hamas and this division to justify his absolute objection to any negotiated peace agreement.”
“Both Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas and planned to cut ties with them. Suddenly Netanyahu appears as the defender of Hamas, as though it was an environmental organization. This is a policy of submission to terror,” he said, adding that Israel was paying Hamas “protection money” to maintain the calm.
The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
I posted this article even though I nominally support what Israel is doing here. This war has a legitimate human cost and there’s no reason to belive that reasonable people will never view that cost as too high.
I think the story painted here shows both the horrid cost on civilian life that these bombings have and the extensive efforts to avoid civilian casualties that the IDF takes.
Short of an Jeff Bezos takeover of Gaza to turn it into the world’s biggest Amazon warehouse, I literally don’t know what could possibly solve the situation. It’s clear from the cheering crowds praising raped corpses that there’s too much hatred to reasonably integrate Gaza into greater Israel. And it’s clear from the massive terror the Muslim Brotherhood caused in Egypt, that they could never integrate into an Egyptian society . And is clear from the 4-6x Marshall Plan per person they’ve received in aid that aid to Gaza is a black hole that will never lead to a thriving society. After 2004 I remember this optimism and a belief that this Israel/Palestine thing was really back on pace for a 2 state solution. And now I just don’t see it.
Some solution has to be found. If Israel just empties Palestine of Palestinians and claims it all as Israel, that won’t give them the safety they want from attacks by nutters. The crazy thing that is, there are right wing nutters in Israel wanting to exactly that. Ethnic cleansing is no way to peace. Even the US won’t support them doing that. Even doing it salami slicing with nutty settlers isn’t going unnoticed.
There needs to be a justice system to deal with nutters. You can’t deal with harsh collective punishment. It’s a nutters response that just creates more nutters on the other side. Which nutters of the side partly want to justify their own nuttiness and to create more of them on their own side.
I don’t think that goal this time is to evict Palestinians from Gaza. I think the goal is simply to try to get a “new deal.” Most terrorist organizations aren’t as evil, incompetent and aren’t as ridiculous as Hamas is. I mean imagine how much better Gaza would be with a Taliban-esque leadership group in charge. Or even just a leadership group physically located in Gaza.
Like how many jihadists can really be left in Gaza? At some point, they’ve got to run out of these idiots.
There are some who are calling for it to be the end of Palestinians. Nuking them and other means of clearing the land.
You never run out of idiots. They will be coming to Palestinian to fight. Young men are prone to look for causes to fight for and there is a real injustice happening to Palestine.
Israel can’t just kill it’s way to peace. No justice, no peace.
Hamas aren’t helping the Palestinian cause either because they are clearly terrorist nutters.
Oh I’m sure there are some people at that point on the Israeli political spectrum. I just don’t think the ruling coalition is there.
It doesn’t take much sanity to see nuking would be a terrible idea.
It doesn’t take much sanity to see that attacking your much larger and stronger neighbor and indiscriminately murdering their elderly and children and parading raped corpses through your streets would be a terrible idea. But we have idiots on both sides.
