Comment by Workaccount2
4 days ago
So I suppose it's just back to the status quo? What has really changed that will make a difference in 2-3 years from now? Israel has sowed a whole fresh generation of "I will sacrifice everything to wipe Israel" Palestinian youth.
The entirety of Hamas leadership is gone, Hamas will most likely not going to have control in Gaza (still being debated which mechanism will govern, this is part of the deal), the crossing to Egypt will be handled by foreign countries which will prevent weapon smuggling. And in the broader spectrum, hizballah is not more, Assad is no more, all of Iran’s proxies can no longer support Hamas’ ambitions which basically means the “mokawamma” is dead. So in short, the entire Middle East have changed.
You still have millions of people in Gaza and Lebanon who got bombed by Israel. Whether it's the existing groups or new groups going forward, the grievances are still there and bigger than ever. Let's wait a few before we declare anything changed.
All of my Lebanese friends, quite young, have stories about the wars with Israel. The helicopters and bombs over Beirut. Waking up in fear in the night. They have been grieved in regards to Israel their whole life. In this respect not much has changed.
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Yes but Hezbollah and Hamas caused enough grievances on their own. They were violent, far-right, Iran-backed terrorists that suppressed any sort of grassroots self-organization. Isreal wanted them there, they were easy to control, easy to use as an excuse to do whatever they pleased. I doubt the youth of Gaza or Lebanon are stupid enough to fall for the same trick twice.
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Also hundreds of millions of people outside of the Middle East who now very much do not support Israel. They've lost any goodwill they may have had and that's an understatement.
Soon it will be a different name under a different symbol.
You cannot break the cycle of hatred with more hatred and violence.
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For context:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/20/benjam...
> None of this was a secret. In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/26/1226691760/the-long-and-bitte...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#Use_...
There's even a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to documenting Israel's decades long support for Hamas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
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Damn if you do damned if you don’t.
Israel approved money from Qatar to flow into Gaza as a goodwill, trust establishing gesture, and as part of previous ceasefire agreements. It was supposedly used to pay salaries for the Gaza government. Was it wrong in hindsight? Of course. Was it used to create division? No.
The “briefcases full of cash” began flowing into Gaza in the mid-2010s, IIRC. Hamas had been in power in Gaza for around a decade at that point.
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> As the Hamas leadership pointed out, this objective failed.
Israel's objective from day one has not been to expel Hamas from Gaza (that's virtually impossible), but to remove it from power. And if the rumors about the ceasefire are true (and if the ceasefire is going to be respected), that's what's going to happen.
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The wall street journal seems to disagree https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-another-sinw...
> What has really changed that will make a difference in 2-3 years from now?
The whole Iranian anti Israel coalition has been badly beaten!
Hezbollah barely exists anymore. The Assad regime is toppled. Iran itself has learned that Israel can attack them at will. The Houthis are still active, but too far away to do real damage.
Hamas itself still exists, but in a deeply degraded form. Their leaders are dead. Their armed forces have taken huge losses. Their amazing tunnel network is destroyed.
Israel will never again be invaded by surprise.
Hamas will probably start shooting rockets into Israel again, and kill the occasional civilian, but Israel is used to that and can deal with it.
The Houthis are armed with Iranian-made ballistic missiles, and do cause real damage.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lucky-there-were-no-children-s...
Is there any way to bet against this rationale? As in, putting money on it?
I can't do anything about the US having an obscenely distorted view of terrorism but it'd be nice if I could at least turn a profit off it.
Never again - I wouldn't hold my breath. Left alone, Gazans will dig new tunnels, and everything will repeat.
Gazans will probably attack again, but Israel will not be caught by surprise for at least a generation.
Of any of Israel's wars in recent history none has decimated their regional enemies as much as this. Every way you cut it they are in a much more secure position militarily. Iran (aka Lebanon/Syria) losing so badly is more important than Hamas surviving because that was the cludgle that threatened them from punishing Gaza too harshly (for ex: America pushed Israel very hard not to provoke Lebanon after Oct 7 and we saw how that turned out).
Any future Hamas actions will inherently be less secure as their external help is now crippled.
Ignoring that Hamas is still in power, the best outcome of this war is destruction of Hizbollah. That was a boogie man that everyone was afraid. Of course it took decades of preparation but the outcome is magical. It's hard to believe that only 1 year ago IDF was afraid to touch a tent that Hizbollah setup right on the border and now it freely bombs them without any response.
Israel was in an extremely secure position on October 6th. They blew it by getting soft on border security, a mistake they won’t make again. There was absolutely zero reason a single hamas fighter should’ve been able to escape Gaza.
Yes reading about the insecurity of the military outposts near the border, one only filled with all-female 20yr old comms people and only a couple guards with rifles, another base full of unarmed students in training, and the general slow response of some of the QRF was pretty shocking. Proper military response took hours to show up in some cases. It's not like the giant Ukraine border, it should be easier to manage. But I'm no expert...
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A good first step for border security would be to declare where those borders are.
Israel is weaker politically and internationally than it has ever been, dramatically so. It can only have military superiority as long as western nations are supplying it with weapons and political cover.
Disagree. Israel historically was in a worse state. The U.S. didn’t always support Israel. Additionally Israel, a nation of Jews, has seen its people in much, much, much, worse. Including pre 49.
This is just even remotely close to being true. 1948 was as weak as they have ever been. They're stronger now then they've been in a long time. I wouldn't be surprised to see diplomatic recognition with Saudi Arabia and Lebanon in the next few years.
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I guess you didn’t notice when Hamas sowed a whole fresh generation of "I will sacrifice everything to wipe out Hamas" Israeli youth.
I don't think this is a symmetrical situation. Life in Israel is quite comfortable. Young people have hopes and dreams beyond sacrificing themselves in an eternal war. Palestinians in Gaza have an extremely bleak outlook on the future and effectively no hope that anything meaningful will change in their lifetime, and they feel collectively humiliated by decades of occupation. Sacrificing "everything" is a lot easier when everything looks a lot like nothing.
Did you know that Gaza has shopping malls and waterfront resorts? Did you know that Israel had been opening up more and more jobs for Palestinians within Israel? Until they decided to throw all that progress away on October 7th.
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Honest question, but why haven't there been "I will sacrifice everything to wipe [country]" generations sowing havoc on neighbors after Dresden, Nagasaki, Nanjing or others?
I think the west learned after WW1 that it’s better to rebuild your enemies in corporation than punish them when you win and let grudges fester.
Aid to Germany after World War II under the Marshall Plan totaled $14 billion ($60 billion in today’s value), averaging $272 per capita across participating nations over four years. In contrast, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have received $1,330 per capita since 1993, or $161 annually, more than twice the per-capita annual aid under the Marshall Plan
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... after they unconditionally surrender.
Dresden and Nagasaki, we managed to convince them they were at fault to some degree.
Nanjing, well, Chinese sentiment is still very anti-Japan because of that and all the other atrocities. And proportionally to size/population, the destruction visited on Gaza in the past year and a quarter goes far beyond what Japan did in China.
Frankly, because even the Nazis weren't as much of a death cult as present-day Islamists.
I believe the reason was that the Nazis were forced to repent due to the Allied occupation. They also had to pay billions in reparations to Jews affected by the Holocaust. If that hadn't happened and the NSDAP had been allowed to continue to dominate German politics, I bet millions of Jews who lost their loved ones in the Holocaust would seek revenge on the Germans. Similarly, if the Zionist regime were toppled and replaced with one that treated Palestinians as humans, rather than as animals, feelings of deep hatred would dissipate.
Oh because the a lot of the apparatchiks of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes were absorbed into the western countries (operation paperclip, unit 731 amnesties, ratlines => colonia dignidad, jakarta method masterminded by Nazis mindset in the CIA) and the remaining nazis were propped up by the allies in west germany to continue their reign after all the dust was settled after which they eventually and successfully absorbed east germany. Note; Germany was never denazified.
Ok now a double honest question, why do zionists have unlimited justifications for committing a holocaust over the last 15 months+? And how many oceans of Palestinian children's blood does it take to wash away German guilt?
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Did the residents of Dresden have to live in an open air prison for 75 years in a tiny corner of the city after they were bombed?
Realistically, West Bank will be gone (totally settled, all Palestinians removed) in 15 years. Gaza will further be ghettoized and, pessimistically, will be basically gone in 50 years or so.
That's indeed the current trajectory, but then what exactly will happen with the Palestinian population in that scenario? All 5+ million crammed into Gaza? Driven into Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan by force? (which are already refusing to take them today, by threat of military action) What else?
It was always about ethnic cleansing. Either they get away with it or somebody stops them.
That's not realistic at all. Israel has no apparent plans to settle the major Palestinian population centers in the West Bank like Nablus, Ramallah etc. and evict Palestinians from there.
Indeed, life will probably continue getting worse for West Bank Palestinians under the Israeli apartheid regime, but there's no reason to believe they'll be literally exterminated.
Gaza has been leveled for the most part.
The only thing left is allowing developers to build on the land and setting up checkpoints to keep the previous owners out.
I don't know why this is downvoted. Do people not realize Gaza was razed to the ground?
If Israeli goals really were to displace Palestinians, maybe they'd start within Israel proper first?
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That is not likely to happen. Arabs with Israeli citizenship (who may or may not identify as “Palestinian”) are only like 20% of the population. Palestinians without Israeli citizenship are not allowed to live in Israel except in some edge cases like people in East Jerusalem which was annexed.
Israel is never going to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip and give the people there full citizenship rights, instead they will continue carving up the WB with Jewish-only settlements that are in practice part of Israel but not officially annexed and which Palestinians are not allowed to live in.
Gaza is completely unlivable and more Palestinians can be "persuaded" to move abroad now that they literally have no infrastructure to survive.
It's a telling statement about the militant nature of Gazans that not even religiously-aligned neighbouring countries will accept them as immigrants.
They neighboring countries are allowed sovereignty by the west with the condition that they do what Israel tells them to do
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No country wants them.
Gaza has changed.
Quite literally.
In genuinely morbid moment of being nerd snipped… I wonder if the ordinance dropped per square meter on Gaza is higher than the ordinance dropped be square meter on Vietnam… which was famously bombed so hard that detailed maps needed to be updated in order to accommodate how heavily cratered parts of the country were with heavily cratered hills and slopes literally shifting like a form of mechanical erosion by bombing.
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The problem is unsolvable. You have two sets of people with sets of claims on the same land. Both sides have an unshakable resolve that they are in the right and nothing is going to change that.
No, it is solved by ethnic cleansing or by prevention of ethnic cleansing.
The former solves the problem but isn't really on the table. The later doesn't settle the question. Both sides would have to come up with a mutually agreeable solution and that isn't on the table.
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A lot more Palestinians learned not to attack Israel though.
If they try October 7 style attack again, Gaza will be wiped out.
nothing this is the life of pawns has been will continue to be until humans evolve which won't be until eons from now
This Land Is Mine by Nina Paley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIdCsMufIY
This made me chuckle thank you :)
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Hamas + PIJ had a fighting force of ~45 000 at the beginning of the war.
They chose to fight it in a heavily urbanized area AMONG CIVILIANS. What human outcome would you expect out of the situation ?
Estimates of Hamas membership originating from Israeli state sources should be taken with a grain of salt.
I expect the Israeli regime's blood thirst to be counter-balanced by the desire to free hostages, but apparently not. I don't think bombing hospitals and refugee camps serve any military purpose.
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~20k civilians dead in this war (started by the Palestinians, all civilians were collateral damage thanks to Palestinian militants using civilians as shields) vs 12 million killed in Nazi camps. Maybe you shouldn't diminish far greater horrors in order to attack Israel.
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>colonial apartheid character
How does this square with the Palestinians inside Israel with citizenship having the same rights as Jewish Israeli ones? Execution issues and favoritism of the ethnostate majority aside.
They don't have the same rights. Can their relatives gain citizenship? No, that's reserved for Jewish Israelis. There are many such laws.
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Assad fell as a result of Israeli actions. Leadership of the entire axis of resistance is dead. Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank learned what the price will be for “FAFO”. Gazan citizens have started to have a negative sentiment in Hamas, but do not express it given they and their families will be killed