And what lack of knowledge about this conflict do I have? Please enlighten me. Did Israelis not tell every possible Gazan “hey, leave this area, your terrorist leaders are hiding here and we don’t like killing civilians”?
It’s like ya’ll leave in a fantasy world where no wrong could ever be done towards a side in a conflict which is weaker. It’s like you forgot how war actually works.
As in apartheid South Africa, Israel classifies its citizens according to ethnicity and privileges one group over all others.
Today, there is a de facto caste system within the territories that Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. At the top are Israeli Jews, while Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are at the bottom. Between them are Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem. Each has different rights according to the regime Israel has implemented, with Jews enjoying the full benefits of democracy in a “Jewish state,” and Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza accorded no political rights whatsoever, being ruled by Israeli military decree.
In apartheid South Africa, blacks weren’t allowed to vote for the national government.
While Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote in Israeli elections, millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories cannot, even though Israel has ruled them for almost half a century.
In apartheid South Africa, the government used a complex pass system to control the movement of blacks, while Israel has instituted an elaborate permit and checkpoint system to control Palestinian movement in the occupied territories.
**In South Africa, blacks were forced into bantustans where they were more easily controlled by the apartheid regime. **
Israel has divided the occupied territories into several isolated territorial units, cut off from one another and from the outside world and surrounded by walls and checkpoints, so that the Israeli army can more easily control the Palestinian population. Meanwhile, within Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders, approximately 93% of the land is state-owned and controlled by the Israel Land Authority and quasi-governmental agencies like the Jewish National Fund, which systematically discriminate against non-Jewish citizens in its allocation. Combined with private discriminatory rental policies, Israeli government policies have ensured a concentration of the non-Jewish Arab population into several geographically constricted, overcrowded and underserviced ghettos.
In apartheid South Africa there were whites-only areas, while inside Israel there are more than 300 rural Jewish-majority towns that under Israeli law can reject residents who do not meet a vague “social suitability" standard.
Critics, including Human Rights Watch, have slammed the law as an attempt to allow Jewish towns to keep Arabs and other non-Jews out. In the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has built a network of Israeli-only roads that Palestinians are barred from traveling on, while Jewish settlers living right next door in exclusive housing can use them.
**Many veterans of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to be a form of apartheid. **
One of the most outspoken voices has been that of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, one of the heroes of the struggle against South African apartheid. Tutu has repeatedly made the comparison, writing in 2012 that Israel’s version of apartheid is actually worse than South Africa’s, stating: “Not only is this group of people [Palestinians] being oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa, their very identity and history are being denied and obfuscated.” In June 2013, the recently retired South African ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, wrote that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a “replication of apartheid.”
One of the first people to use the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who warned following the 1967 War of Israel becoming an “apartheid state” if it retained control of the occupied territories.
In 1999, then-Israeli prime minister and current defense minister Ehud Barak stated: "Every attempt to keep hold of [Israel and the occupied territories] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.” In 2010, Barak repeated the apartheid comparison, stating: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Over the entirety of its 65-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-67) that Israel has not ruled over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights simply because they are not Jewish. Prior to 1967 and the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Palestinians who remained inside what became Israel in 1948 were ruled by martial law for all but one year, similar to the way that Palestinians in the occupied territories have been ruled ever since.
Inside Israel there are more than 50 laws that privilege Jews or discriminate against non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, affecting everything from immigration and family reunification to land ownership rights.
In the occupied territories, Palestinians have lived under a brutal and repressive Israeli military regime for more than 46 years while Jewish settlers protected by the Israeli army colonize their land and lord it over them. In the words of a 2010 Human Rights Watch report entitled "Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”
Is there going to be a military solution on the ground?
The answer is, no, there isn’t going to be a military solution. Whatever Israel is engaged in right now is pure revenge. It doesn’t have any strategic value. And it doesn’t have any direction. Israel is just bombing Gaza nonstop, killing as many civilians as it could, simply because it’s being enabled by the international community. No one in the international community is asking the tough questions. Is there going to be a military solution? What will this look like? What will this mean for the region?
Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian scholar and policy analyst from Gaza. He’s the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C. shared the following.
"Let me tell you about my 88-year-old grandmother who lives in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. She is frail, she is old, and she’s ill. She was sleeping in her bed when an Israeli bomb hit the neighborhood where she lives, and she was injured by shrapnel and glass. My cousin, who was taking care of her, had to carry her on his shoulders and run down the stairs, run across the neighborhood as the bombs were falling, carrying a frail 88-year-old grandmother who witnessed more than eight or nine wars so far since she was born. Her entire life has been defined by war, by bloodshed, by aggression, by losing loved ones.
So, I think this entire narrative about north versus south, safe versus unsafe, is nothing but a false narrative that I think we should resist and we should not accept. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. Hundreds of people have been killed and lost their lives regardless of where they reside. That’s why we need a ceasefire now. And this is the demand by Palestinians from Gaza, whether they live in northern Gaza or southern Gaza."
Kinda blows to shit your “They should have moved someplace safe” narrative.
Classifying Israel as Apartheid is valid if and only if Israel and Palestinians in the west bank define themselves as Israelis and treat themselves as part of the Israeli national.
Surprise surprise - they don’t. Neither. Israel classifies Palestinians as basically foreigners, hence no citizen right. And Palestinians don’t try to push against it because all they want is a country of their own. Now, providing a Palestinian state is a whole subject in itself, but basically it’s hard. And not enough foreign power is used to make it happen - that’s the real disservice done to the Palestinians. They never ever talked about Israel accepting them to Israeli society, and no one expects that of them. They’re literal foreigners to Israel, with work permits. Of course they won’t have a government vote.
Another point was the jewish nature of Israel and how it discriminates - and that’s just true. There’s indeed a case to be made of Israel needing to be some part jewish, but Israel politics and laws are fucked up, especially regarding settlements. Let’s hope they get their shit together and have a working government who actually does good.
And lastly, Gazans moving south.
Does anybody in this world remember what war’s like?
Does anybody remember how many German civilian homes were bombed by the brits in WW2? Does anyone remember the civilian casualties Germany suffered?
War is war. And war is horrible. But expecting a country who just had its worst attack on its land ever to not fight the ones responsible, is extremely privileged by the world. Any state encountering such a big threat on civilian lives would do everything to destroy that threat. And that’s what they’re doing. The war won’t end when all Gazans are dead - it’ll end when Hamas has 0 armed terrorists, and 0 threatening capabilities. And that’s a goal no one can criticize Israel for pursuing. (Obviously you can criticize their methods - but relative to all recent conflicts - they really are avoiding civilian lives as much as possible considering their enemy.)
Keep making excuses for the apartheid state you seem to feel the need to stan for as they conduct an ethnic cleansing.
History will look back on you with shame and disdain.
You keep repeating over and over hoping for your point to be true, while it’s just not. Keep crying and keep turning a blind eye to the fact that there are 2 sides here who both have valid goals and disregard one of them just because they’re bigger and pretty much achieved their goal is bullshit or straight up racism.
History is and forever was on the side of the bigger powers, so no. Looks like history would not be on the side of terrorists.
YOU keep equating all Palestinians to Hamas. Amazing how you needed to toss out racism only when it doesn’t agree with how the Israeli govt is acting presently.
Criticizing a govt is not racist.
I have not taken the side of Hamas. I have taken the side of not killing civilians on any side of the conflict.
2021 was a major turning point for pro-Palestinian emancipation because in the beginning of 2021 in the spring Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch openly admitted that Israel is an apartheid state Israel had been an apartheid state at that point for 50 plus years, but them admitting this was a major step.
Why do you disagree with Holocaust Scholars, the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and professionals that dedicate their entire lives to war crimes and human rights violations that Israel is an apartheid state?
How can you sit there and tell me that both Israeli activist organizations dedicated to Human Rights and numerous former Israeli officials have declared Israel to be an apartheid state are wrong? As well as those who have fought and won against the South African apartheid State and have always considered Israel to be an apartheid State?
Why do you think your opinion is more valid?
Sadly you don’t see the people in Gaza and the West Bank as human so it poses no moral issue for you. You are the racist in this situation.
Dude when have I equated all Palestinians to Hamas exactly?? I said that war is horrible and that innocents die in it, and that’s how it always has been. That doesn’t equate to me saying all Palestinians are Hamas. Heck, I think Palestinians are the biggest victims of Hamas, being the main reason for thousands of deaths on innocent Palestinians.
And taking the side of no civilian casualty is just a very privileged position you can say only from thousands of kms away - when your life is threatened, some civilian casualty is justified under war. That’s what I meant when I said war is horrible, and that’s why everyone no matter who you are should try and prevent it always.
But saying a side who has pretty rightfully opened a war, and saying they should stop because you’re against all civilian lives lost, is just not helpful and not gonna do anything, since it really is just privileged, having not experienced any part of the conflict yourself. Saying “from my point of view it’s bad so don’t do it” while not looking at it from the point of view of the other party is really just not helpful in understanding or doing anything.
And about the Apartheid, my bad, I talked about Gaza, not the West bank, where the Israelis are actually entering the region and oppressing Palestinians. I still don’t compare it to south africa where it was oppression of your own citizens, but it’s still really horrible and the right wing government of Israel needs to fall. For that I’ll protest all day.
But again, I really see the people of Gaza as prisoners not of Israel, but Hamas. Israel willingly just fell back from the region in 2005, and from then onwards Palestinian civilians were truly doomed by Hamas (Israel literally physically just walked away) to a constant state of war.
And what lack of knowledge about this conflict do I have? Please enlighten me. Did Israelis not tell every possible Gazan “hey, leave this area, your terrorist leaders are hiding here and we don’t like killing civilians”?
It’s like ya’ll leave in a fantasy world where no wrong could ever be done towards a side in a conflict which is weaker. It’s like you forgot how war actually works.
Oof where to start?
How about how the palestinians are oppressed.
As in apartheid South Africa, Israel classifies its citizens according to ethnicity and privileges one group over all others.
Today, there is a de facto caste system within the territories that Israel controls between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. At the top are Israeli Jews, while Muslim and Christian Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza are at the bottom. Between them are Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem. Each has different rights according to the regime Israel has implemented, with Jews enjoying the full benefits of democracy in a “Jewish state,” and Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza accorded no political rights whatsoever, being ruled by Israeli military decree.
In apartheid South Africa, blacks weren’t allowed to vote for the national government.
While Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote in Israeli elections, millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories cannot, even though Israel has ruled them for almost half a century.
In apartheid South Africa, the government used a complex pass system to control the movement of blacks, while Israel has instituted an elaborate permit and checkpoint system to control Palestinian movement in the occupied territories.
**In South Africa, blacks were forced into bantustans where they were more easily controlled by the apartheid regime. **
Israel has divided the occupied territories into several isolated territorial units, cut off from one another and from the outside world and surrounded by walls and checkpoints, so that the Israeli army can more easily control the Palestinian population. Meanwhile, within Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders, approximately 93% of the land is state-owned and controlled by the Israel Land Authority and quasi-governmental agencies like the Jewish National Fund, which systematically discriminate against non-Jewish citizens in its allocation. Combined with private discriminatory rental policies, Israeli government policies have ensured a concentration of the non-Jewish Arab population into several geographically constricted, overcrowded and underserviced ghettos.
In apartheid South Africa there were whites-only areas, while inside Israel there are more than 300 rural Jewish-majority towns that under Israeli law can reject residents who do not meet a vague “social suitability" standard.
Critics, including Human Rights Watch, have slammed the law as an attempt to allow Jewish towns to keep Arabs and other non-Jews out. In the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel has built a network of Israeli-only roads that Palestinians are barred from traveling on, while Jewish settlers living right next door in exclusive housing can use them.
**Many veterans of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to be a form of apartheid. **
One of the most outspoken voices has been that of Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, one of the heroes of the struggle against South African apartheid. Tutu has repeatedly made the comparison, writing in 2012 that Israel’s version of apartheid is actually worse than South Africa’s, stating: “Not only is this group of people [Palestinians] being oppressed more than the apartheid ideologues could ever dream about in South Africa, their very identity and history are being denied and obfuscated.” In June 2013, the recently retired South African ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, wrote that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is a “replication of apartheid.”
One of the first people to use the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel was Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who warned following the 1967 War of Israel becoming an “apartheid state” if it retained control of the occupied territories.
In 1999, then-Israeli prime minister and current defense minister Ehud Barak stated: "Every attempt to keep hold of [Israel and the occupied territories] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.” In 2010, Barak repeated the apartheid comparison, stating: “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
Over the entirety of its 65-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-67) that Israel has not ruled over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights simply because they are not Jewish. Prior to 1967 and the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Palestinians who remained inside what became Israel in 1948 were ruled by martial law for all but one year, similar to the way that Palestinians in the occupied territories have been ruled ever since.
Inside Israel there are more than 50 laws that privilege Jews or discriminate against non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, affecting everything from immigration and family reunification to land ownership rights.
In the occupied territories, Palestinians have lived under a brutal and repressive Israeli military regime for more than 46 years while Jewish settlers protected by the Israeli army colonize their land and lord it over them. In the words of a 2010 Human Rights Watch report entitled "Separate and Unequal: Israel’s Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”
Is there going to be a military solution on the ground?
The answer is, no, there isn’t going to be a military solution. Whatever Israel is engaged in right now is pure revenge. It doesn’t have any strategic value. And it doesn’t have any direction. Israel is just bombing Gaza nonstop, killing as many civilians as it could, simply because it’s being enabled by the international community. No one in the international community is asking the tough questions. Is there going to be a military solution? What will this look like? What will this mean for the region?
Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian scholar and policy analyst from Gaza. He’s the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund in Washington, D.C. shared the following.
"Let me tell you about my 88-year-old grandmother who lives in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. She is frail, she is old, and she’s ill. She was sleeping in her bed when an Israeli bomb hit the neighborhood where she lives, and she was injured by shrapnel and glass. My cousin, who was taking care of her, had to carry her on his shoulders and run down the stairs, run across the neighborhood as the bombs were falling, carrying a frail 88-year-old grandmother who witnessed more than eight or nine wars so far since she was born. Her entire life has been defined by war, by bloodshed, by aggression, by losing loved ones.
So, I think this entire narrative about north versus south, safe versus unsafe, is nothing but a false narrative that I think we should resist and we should not accept. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. Hundreds of people have been killed and lost their lives regardless of where they reside. That’s why we need a ceasefire now. And this is the demand by Palestinians from Gaza, whether they live in northern Gaza or southern Gaza."
Kinda blows to shit your “They should have moved someplace safe” narrative.
Shall I continue?
Classifying Israel as Apartheid is valid if and only if Israel and Palestinians in the west bank define themselves as Israelis and treat themselves as part of the Israeli national. Surprise surprise - they don’t. Neither. Israel classifies Palestinians as basically foreigners, hence no citizen right. And Palestinians don’t try to push against it because all they want is a country of their own. Now, providing a Palestinian state is a whole subject in itself, but basically it’s hard. And not enough foreign power is used to make it happen - that’s the real disservice done to the Palestinians. They never ever talked about Israel accepting them to Israeli society, and no one expects that of them. They’re literal foreigners to Israel, with work permits. Of course they won’t have a government vote.
Another point was the jewish nature of Israel and how it discriminates - and that’s just true. There’s indeed a case to be made of Israel needing to be some part jewish, but Israel politics and laws are fucked up, especially regarding settlements. Let’s hope they get their shit together and have a working government who actually does good.
And lastly, Gazans moving south. Does anybody in this world remember what war’s like? Does anybody remember how many German civilian homes were bombed by the brits in WW2? Does anyone remember the civilian casualties Germany suffered?
War is war. And war is horrible. But expecting a country who just had its worst attack on its land ever to not fight the ones responsible, is extremely privileged by the world. Any state encountering such a big threat on civilian lives would do everything to destroy that threat. And that’s what they’re doing. The war won’t end when all Gazans are dead - it’ll end when Hamas has 0 armed terrorists, and 0 threatening capabilities. And that’s a goal no one can criticize Israel for pursuing. (Obviously you can criticize their methods - but relative to all recent conflicts - they really are avoiding civilian lives as much as possible considering their enemy.)
What a load of apologetic tripe.
Keep making excuses for the apartheid state you seem to feel the need to stan for as they conduct an ethnic cleansing. History will look back on you with shame and disdain.
You keep repeating over and over hoping for your point to be true, while it’s just not. Keep crying and keep turning a blind eye to the fact that there are 2 sides here who both have valid goals and disregard one of them just because they’re bigger and pretty much achieved their goal is bullshit or straight up racism.
History is and forever was on the side of the bigger powers, so no. Looks like history would not be on the side of terrorists.
YOU keep equating all Palestinians to Hamas. Amazing how you needed to toss out racism only when it doesn’t agree with how the Israeli govt is acting presently. Criticizing a govt is not racist.
I have not taken the side of Hamas. I have taken the side of not killing civilians on any side of the conflict.
2021 was a major turning point for pro-Palestinian emancipation because in the beginning of 2021 in the spring Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch openly admitted that Israel is an apartheid state Israel had been an apartheid state at that point for 50 plus years, but them admitting this was a major step.
Why do you disagree with Holocaust Scholars, the Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and professionals that dedicate their entire lives to war crimes and human rights violations that Israel is an apartheid state?
How can you sit there and tell me that both Israeli activist organizations dedicated to Human Rights and numerous former Israeli officials have declared Israel to be an apartheid state are wrong? As well as those who have fought and won against the South African apartheid State and have always considered Israel to be an apartheid State?
Why do you think your opinion is more valid?
Sadly you don’t see the people in Gaza and the West Bank as human so it poses no moral issue for you. You are the racist in this situation.
Dude when have I equated all Palestinians to Hamas exactly?? I said that war is horrible and that innocents die in it, and that’s how it always has been. That doesn’t equate to me saying all Palestinians are Hamas. Heck, I think Palestinians are the biggest victims of Hamas, being the main reason for thousands of deaths on innocent Palestinians.
And taking the side of no civilian casualty is just a very privileged position you can say only from thousands of kms away - when your life is threatened, some civilian casualty is justified under war. That’s what I meant when I said war is horrible, and that’s why everyone no matter who you are should try and prevent it always. But saying a side who has pretty rightfully opened a war, and saying they should stop because you’re against all civilian lives lost, is just not helpful and not gonna do anything, since it really is just privileged, having not experienced any part of the conflict yourself. Saying “from my point of view it’s bad so don’t do it” while not looking at it from the point of view of the other party is really just not helpful in understanding or doing anything.
And about the Apartheid, my bad, I talked about Gaza, not the West bank, where the Israelis are actually entering the region and oppressing Palestinians. I still don’t compare it to south africa where it was oppression of your own citizens, but it’s still really horrible and the right wing government of Israel needs to fall. For that I’ll protest all day.
But again, I really see the people of Gaza as prisoners not of Israel, but Hamas. Israel willingly just fell back from the region in 2005, and from then onwards Palestinian civilians were truly doomed by Hamas (Israel literally physically just walked away) to a constant state of war.