Comment by edanm
4 days ago
So Israel has been conducting genocide against Palestinians for decades? That's simply preposterous. There's zero reason to think so, and many, many reasons to think it's not true.
> since decades before its for for-show semi-diseengagement from Gaza
So when Israel does do what Palestinians supposedly want - completely remove all its citizens from the territory and hand it over to Palestinians to control - then it's all "for show"? In what way exactly? What should Israel do then that would satisfy you/Palestinians?
> (heck, even for decades before it fostered the creation of Hamas while it occupied Gaza to split Palestinian resistance from its unified backing of the less Islamist, more pan-Arab nationalist PLO.)
You're kind of skipping over the part where Israel engaged in a peace process with the PLO, signed the Oslo accords with them, recognized them as the official representatives of the Palestinian people in the form of the Palestinian Authority, continued working towards peace with the PA until 2008 (ending in, as always before it, an offer for a two-state solution presented to the PA by Olmert, which they rejected). And has worked in security cooperation with the PA since.
Although to be clear, I think Israel has not engaged in any meaningful attempt at peace since 2009, and has in fact done quite the opposite. Criticism of Israel propping up Hamas on purpose to weaken the chance of a two-state solution is a valid one, but it happened after Israelis got largely disillusioned with the idea of any peace being reached, given the multiple failures of PA leadership to sign 2SS deals with Israel, and the simultaneous launching of the Second Intifada.
> So when Israel does do what Palestinians supposedly want - completely remove all its citizens from the territory and hand it over to Palestinians to control
They didn't actually do that; they continued to assert a set of layered security exclusion zones within Gaza where Gazans were forbidden to enter except under limited conditions, and continued to shoot unarmed civilians across the border within and beyond those zones, whether or not they were complying with the unilaterally-asserted terms.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Israel kept a small buffer zone around the border, but other than that, I'm not sure what "layered security exclusion zones" you mean.
And Israel didn't just randomly shoot at unarmed civilians, it shot at people approaching the border. Given that Gaza was controlled by a terrorist organization with a stated goal of carrying out attacks on Israel, and given what happened on October 7th, I think it's hard to say Israel wasn't justified in guarding its border to the extent it did. Had it guarded it better on October 7th, a whole lot of bloodshed on both sides could've been saved.
> I'm not sure what you're talking about. Israel kept a small buffer zone around the border, but other than that, I'm not sure what "layered security exclusion zones" you mean.
The buffer zone had different rules at different distances, and while you call it small it consisted of 17% of the land area of Gaza when Israel "completed" its "disengagement", and was later unilaterally expanded to 24% of the land area of Gaza.
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