Why does Israel so adamantly oppose Palestinian statehood..,

@trollslayer i never said the problem was simple, in fact i said there have been wars between the Jews and Arabs for thousands of years, and conquering countries have also been involved in attempting to eliminate all of the Jews, aka Israel.

for one, if you compare Ukraine to Gaza, the neighboring countries allowed Ukrainians a safety valve, helping to save lives. While Israel battled Hamas. Why do you think Egypt and the neighbors have refused? they could also have invested in Gaza and helped transform it into a productive area.

@samueltyler2 These are good faith questions so I'll answer in kind. Also since you're arguing a lot about who started it - creating the equivalent of Israel in any part of the world would provoke a violence response. It was an inevitable response to that kind of geopolitical move. A force of nature. If you set off an explosive on a mountainside, there will be a landslide. It was inevitable.


Well even if I didn't a solution must be found and I don't think "destroy Israel" is a solution.


Dare I say that Israel could just continue on without responding to these groups and cease their atrocities on Arabs. Yes, they will weather attacks from Hezbollah and Hamas, and they've done a pretty good job of doing that to date. They should weather more while extending an olive branch the whole while, and eventually Hamas will be deprived of oxygen. You can't just blow Hamas up and make it go away or it would have worked by now.

Hamas is to me a force of nature. You cannot treat any people group as the Israelis have treated the Palestinians without terrorism being the response. Occupation is violence, and violence will be the reward.

And clearly, clearly. Even if my pollyanna ideas were never accepted and some middle solution was instead the way, "Slaughter every living thing on the Gaza Strip" is the act of demons. No human being should countenance this.

@CountScrofula I wouldn't argue, except you insist on using the term Occupation, which shows your bias. Sorry, but The argument as to who was really there first, is only answerable by both were.

@JSul3 except that they're totally different.

@Roundandroundwego Taking land that is not yours to take. Exactly the same thing.
Netanyahu wants Gaza and the West Bank.

How many Hamas did he kill in that recent bombing of a civilian tent camp?

@trollslayer sorry, you tell a slightly different story than the history books.

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war

Raising the Flag signified the Conclusion of the Conflict
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain under international control administered by the United Nations. The Palestinian Arabs refused to recognize this arrangement, which they regarded as favorable to the Jews and unfair to the Arab population that would remain in Jewish territory under the partition. The United States sought a middle way by supporting the United Nations resolution, but also encouraging negotiations between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.

The United Nations resolution sparked conflict between Jewish and Arab groups within Palestine. Fighting began with attacks by irregular bands of Palestinian Arabs attached to local units of the Arab Liberation Army composed of volunteers from Palestine and neighboring Arab countries. These groups launched their attacks against Jewish cities, settlements, and armed forces. The Jewish forces were composed of the Haganah, the underground militia of the Jewish community in Palestine, and two small irregular groups, the Irgun, and LEHI. The goal of the Arabs was initially to block the Partition Resolution and to prevent the establishment of the Jewish state. The Jews, on the other hand, hoped to gain control over the territory allotted to them under the Partition Plan.

After Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, the fighting intensified with other Arab forces joining the Palestinian Arabs in attacking territory in the former Palestinian mandate. On the eve of May 14, the Arabs launched an air attack on Tel Aviv, which the Israelis resisted. This action was followed by the invasion of the former Palestinian mandate by Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Saudi Arabia sent a formation that fought under the Egyptian command. British trained forces from Transjordan eventually intervened in the conflict, but only in areas that had been designated as part of the Arab state under the United Nations Partition Plan and the corpus separatum of Jerusalem. After tense early fighting, Israeli forces, now under joint command, were able to gain the offensive.

Though the United Nations brokered two cease-fires during the conflict, fighting continued into 1949. Israel and the Arab states did not reach any formal armistice agreements until February. Under separate agreements between Israel and the neighboring states of Egypt, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Syria, these bordering nations agreed to formal armistice lines. Israel gained some territory formerly granted to Palestinian Arabs under the United Nations resolution in 1947. Egypt and Jordan retained control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively. These armistice lines held until 1967. The United States did not become directly involved with the armistice negotiations, but hoped that instability in the Middle East would not interfere with the international balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States.

@samueltyler2 That is the US State department's synopsis, a staunch ally of Israel for decades. Other accounts exist...

@trollslayer good try.

@DallasCowboysFan people in Washington have been arming war zones illegally. Eight tenths of global war is financed by Washington. And yet you don't want to understand, so we have to say, Americans and their allies are deadly, and there's no talking that reaches them. They're perfectly likely to call the wars natural, and they're only going to blame the natives. Thousands of years all their targets have been warring thousands of years. Americans say they're peaceful

@trollslayer
When the 6-day war started, there was no real plan to occupy the Golan and the Sinai. There are a couple of books, that explain it all. Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Michael Ore, and Moshe Dayan's memoirs.

Chief of General Staff Yitzhak Rabin suffered a breakdown in the lead up to the war, resulting in the appointment of Moshe Dayan as Sec. of Defense, right before the war. Dayan, in his memoirs, says that the total victory was not expected, and when he realized what what was happening, he came up with the idea to push forward, in order for Israeli to sue later for peace/normalization, in return for the lands occupied.


This is laughable, of course. Sure, you have your freedom, but here's what we're going to do first: turn it into an open air jail. They also know that Gaza's total isolation, means that radicals will gain the upper hand. What better an audience. The situation though is pretty complicated, as Gaza was "supposed" to be part of the PA, but the PA is secular and the power broker in Gaza: Hamas, is a radical Islamist entity, whose primary goal is to occupy Jerusalem. They could give a shit about Palestine.

Netanyahu's policy is clear: annex Gaza and the West Bank. It's all detailed in the Trump son-in-law plan. This is why Trump should not become President.

They think they can erase an idea, one of a people asking for their homeland. Are you familiar with the Jewish saying "next year in Jerusalem?"

@Northwest
Yes, but I don't think I have ever thought about it as literally as you are implying. My understanding is that phrase came long before the country of Israel, but even then it implies the centuries-long goal of retaking Jerusalem.

I've never been to Israel, and have little knowledge of how the average Jew feels politically, or their knowledge of history. But for the American Jewish population, it often seems like they feel the conflict started Oct 7th, that the tunnels under Gaza are a new discovery, and that Hamas using civilians as human shields is unknown to the world. They seem overly shocked by all this, as if they hadn't read the newspaper for the past 80 years. My wife, who once lived in Golan Heights for a few months, was completely unaware that Golan was an occupied territory until I mentioned it yesterday. How she lived there for 6 months and didn't know that completely baffles me. It tells me she was either lied to by those she was staying with, or that the people she was staying with were ignorant themselves.

@trollslayer
Yes, it's centuries old. Supplanting with "we are a people without land, seeking a land without people", a myth propagated by early Zionism.

What I meant is the Israelis should realize that you cannot kill an idea, by bombing, even a Holocaust could not do that.

I've lived in Israel for a while. To answer your question, it's not much different from how American feel about politics. The educated, who carry the GDP, favor a 2-state solution, and eradicated religion's influence on the state. The others, are, well, like the Evangelists who put Trump in the White House.

I am in the tech space, and I started a company there.

@Bumbles Was it Oslo that failed? I may be confusing that with the Camp David summits late 1990s. I think there was a chance, however slight, of an agreement before Oct 7th, but that kind of trauma and emotion is difficult to move past anytime soon.

@trollslayer At the late 1970s Camp David (the one where Israel left the Sinai in exchange for peace with Egypt) the PLO didn't have a seat at the table, but this was agreed to: "Egypt, Israel, Jordan and the representatives of the Palestinian people should participate in negotiations on the resolution of the Palestinian problem in all its aspects."

Oslo was as close as it seemed to get, but I'm not familiar with Obama's efforts.

@trollslayer
i took the easy path to answer your question. agreed, history in this region is steeped in blood the blood of innocents, both sides are determined to annihilate each other. no one will prevail the victor of this disaster

aside, i'm very worried Hezbollah will kick off WW3