Israel & Hamas situation

I can see both sides, more towards Isreal

What do you guys think?

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Quite clever of Hamas to keep firing rockets into Israel because;

If Israel does nothing then it appears weak.

If Israel actually invades Gaza again it will recieve global condemnation.

Lose Lose scenario.

Quite a worrying series of events that could possibly lead into a world war. What I mean by that is if Iran gets involved it will be Iran backed by China and Russia vs Israel backed by USA.

The more I've looked into it Israel originally went to that area in the BC era with the mindset of Arab annihilation (I read this from a Jewish scholar) and when the whole British colonization thing ended Britain placed Israel in the part of the Middle East that would be a thorn in the side of the Palestinians. So, from that point of view, Israel already wanted to take the land by force, and Britain was immoral enough to give them the opportunity. If you want to play the blame game, that's essential to what you need to know.

That said, I don't support the violence coming from the other side whatsoever, but I'm getting live feeds via AlJazeera and Israel are blowing the f**k out of Gaza, as in 50% of deaths and injuries are children, the journalist offices were destroyed, their stadium was destroyed, schools even, and the Israeli spokesman keeps saying "our missiles have pinpoint accuracy." Sounds like what the Obama administration said about his drones, except our statistics are far worse than Israel's.

Let's not get carried away here...

Hamas instigated it by firing the missiles. They do this once in a while to keep showing they're still the revolutionary party the people chose to be in power. Those rockets killed 3 people.

Every time they do it, it causes a sh!tstorm of rockets to rain down on them, because you hit Israel with your fist, they'll hit you with a sledgehammer. They've always responded like that and always will.

Now, both parties are acting like children, claiming one needs to stop first before the other one will stop. And the innocent bodies keep piling up, on both sides.

Israel is ready to invade if necessary. That'd be catastrophic in such a densely populated region. Whoever you think is the culprit, you can't help but think about all those innocent citizens (especially children) who already got killed and will still get killed in the near future.

Just an FYI: this topic is totally fair game, but virtually every thread ever created in this forum about these issues has gotten quite nasty and eventually had to close. So this is me preemptively urging everyone to try to be calm and relatively civil no matter how strongly you disagree, so the thread can stay open and people can voice their opinions. Thanks in advance.

You can't follow up the first sentence with the second sentence; it's nonsensical.

That first sentence was actually in response to Gandalf saying we might be leading to WW III.

Ah ok noted. But still, they've been warring perpetually. Kinda hard to say one side instigated it with something that happened in the past couple months.

Also, to speak to a possible invasion, one must consider that Israel has a full fledged army and Palestine has some brave rock throwers. It wouldn't be a real war.

It depends on what "it" is. They didn't just now instigate the entire conflict, of course, but they instigated this latest, more strenuous volley of attacks.

As Brod says, they just do this now and then. Not as a response to some specific threat, not to a new development, and not because of any existential threat. They do it just because they haven't done it in awhile. That, it seems to me, is a pretty fundamentally different act than firing back. If you want to say you can't meaningfully trace the very "first shot" all the way back to the beginning of the conflict, I'm not sure I'd agree. But even putting that aside, there's still a "first show" that shatters every temporary basis or relative stasis, and Hamas takes that kind of shot as a matter of routine.

I think more than anything, it was the fact that 3 Israeli's actually got killed now. Usually, the missiles just hit dirt and nothing more, but when 3 people get killed... Whole other story. That region is a powder keg and it only needs a spark like that to explode.

I don't think Israel is 'just' going to stop either. This weekend, a Hamas missile hit a school (no one present, weekend) and one landed pretty close to Jerusalem, which probably sufficed for Israel to throw another 500 missiles into the mix.

Well what would confuse me then is that the Israeli spokesman said Gaza fired the missiles, but before the talks about a peace treaty, of which I don't know much about, but I guess Israel backed out of the talk?


Btw, Obama's response to this is hilarious, "there is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders," you mean like Pakistan and Yemen and so on?

On the news today, they were talking about the Israeli force field...I forget the name! It's like in Star Wars: You have a protector shield , when missiles are fired upon your city it will be destroyed by another missile. Something like that anyway.

Iron dome, right?

My memory is crap. Though it probably was.

Sounds exactly like Netenyahu at his UN speech, "we need to stop war by killing everyone, and if we kill the wrong people..well they were hiding behind civilians!"

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Laying out some chronology, it seems Israel tries to occupy Palestine for a while, and when they retreat, Hamas spends a couple years with a bunch of minor, by comparison, attacks.....since 1834

I've always compared war to kindergarten but they make it too easy.


How come?

Most countiries would respond the same way if they've been getting rockets fired at them for years, the only reason te death rate from those rockets are so low is a lack of accurac6 if they kept advancing though this would be a whole different situation. A country can only take so much, y'know?

When Hamas is encouraging rockets or just being neutral to it, it's not acceptable. I like how Brodinski put it though with getting hit by fist and responding with a sledge hammer.

I'm not really fully sure though, because I don't know, and Im not gonna act like i know, enough on the history of the fued.

I'm not sure how to critique a nation for overreacting when half the country has PTSD and has been beset on all sides by other people publicly declaring their intent to "drive them into the sea" for almost 70 years. All the land they've given up has been used, at some point, to shoot something at them that explodes. If someone uses land to shoot at you, why is it wrong to take that land so they can't do it any more? And what is unreasonable about worrying that, should you give it back, they'll probably shoot at you from it some more?

I'm not trying to be a smarta** here. Those are real questions.

One day of cease-fire is plenty?

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Israeli's and the pro-Israeli lobby are fond of saying that Arabs want to push Israel into the sea, and that they will never be satisfied until Jews disappear from the face of the earth. I am Arab, as you know, and I have never encountered anyone in my daily life that believes that. I acknowledge Israel exists. I accept that. I would just like to see the Palestinians have a state of their own so that they can have the same kind of freedoms that Israel enjoys. The Palestinian people live in poverty in large part due to the restrictions Israel places on their society. In 2005, the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, proposed a comprehensive peace agreement. They stated that if Israel withdrew to the borders of the land they occupied before 1967 (the most recent war), that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be over, and the Arab states would sign security and economic guarantees with Israel. Israel has repeatedly agreed to withdraw to these borders, with "mutually agreed upon swaps," but their government refuses to implement those agreements. Not only this, they continue to build settlements on the border lines of a future Palestinian state. Israel was created in 1948. The Arab states are not asking for the Israeli's to agree for Israel not to exist. This is a compromise position.

Not only this, Israel is frequently the aggressor in this conflict. A few years ago, when a few soldiers were kidnapped, Israel's response was to practically invade Lebanon, bomb roads and bridges, and kill 1300 Lebanese civilians. Israel is fond of saying it has the right to defend itself, but that is not defense. It is a massacre. Israel has the right to defend itself, but it doesn't have the right to do it in a disproportionate way. Israel's responses do not match the level of the threat. Israel acts like it is the weak and defenseless party when it has the strongest military in the Middle East, and a couple of hundred nuclear weapons. When Russia used overwhelming force to quell an uprising a few years ago, the entire international community condemned it, saying that it was a disproportionate response, yet when Israel uses virtually the same tactics few say anything about it. This is blatant hypocrisy.

The bottom line is basically this: Israel is causing most of its own problems with its policies. If Israel would agree to enforce their own agreements, and withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, this conflict would be resolved. The Arab nations have already agreed to recognize Israel. It is Israel that is stonewalling. Unilaterally deciding to withdraw from an area here and an area there, as Israel is doing, does not demonstrate a commitment to a comprehensive peace. The Arab states are not satisfied with that because firstly, it is tremendously disrespectful and secondly, it does not resolve the fundamental issues that give rise to this conflict.

It might be a war of attrition, which is what the I/P debacle has essentially turned into. A war of attrition is often when little people resort to somewhat sneakier tactics in order to kick the bigger people in the knees, if one gets the drift.

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"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men." -- Samuel Adams (1722-1803)