Over 100 Israelis have died and more than 900 were injured after rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas militants, Israeli officials said Saturday.
The Palestinian Health Ministry said 198 were killed in Gaza and at least 1,610 were injured Saturday in retaliatory attacks from Israel.
“We are at war. We will win,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.
The Israeli Defense Forces earlier declared “a state of alert for war,” according to a statement issued by the IDF.
“Over the past hour, the Hamas terrorist organization launched massive barrages of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and its terrorist operatives have infiltrated into Israel in a number of different locations in the south,” the IDF said early Saturday.
A victim of bullying will eventually lash out whether or not they think they have a chance because they become desperate.
Why leave out the fact that the Jews also have an equally legitimate claim on the land, in addition to having been taken close to the brink of total extermination by circumstances completely beyond their control? A normal, compassionate individual would welcome these people in, make room for them, and live at peace under a stable society, tolerant of different points of view. However, that is not what the Jews encountered upon the creation of Israel. It was just a continuation of the campaign to exterminate them, from a different group. Are you going to argue that it’s bad for Germans to murder Jews, but it is okay for Muslims?
Firstly, see “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012:
Not even the Israeli government or the Israeli Supreme Court agree with you that Israel has a legitimate claim to the territories beyond their internationally recognised borders. Maybe somebody here is talking about the entirety of Israel, but I am not, nor have I ever. If Israel were to withdraw to their borders, and Palestinian attacks still continue, then there’d be at least room for discussion of blame.
Until then, as long as Israel itself legally recognizes that it is an occupying power, there is none.
Secondly, people’s experience of being oppressed does not recognize law. Irrespective of who has ownership of what, Israel is engaged in treating Gaza in particular as an Apartheid-style bantustan, and is committing crimes against humanity by doing so.
Whether or not you agree with the legal position on that, when someone places people in those conditions, then it is entirely on them when they hit back.
Blaming people for resisting gross abuse because you don’t like how they do it when you’ve put them in a situation where they have no realistic opportunity to fight clean is victim-blaming.
Nice try. I’ve not argued it is okay for anyone. I’ve argued in some threads that unless you’ve provided a better alternative (and not suggested it; actually tried to make it come to pass), then like the rest of us you’re not in a moral position to judge people for taking desperate steps to try to fight back.
That doesn’t mean not feeling for the victims, because they had no power to end this either. It doesn’t mean not thinking it’s a horrible situation. It doesn’t mean you can’t get angry. It means resisting the urge to assign the blame to a people the vast majority of whom have been born into effective bondage under an apartheid regime for taking desperate and irrational actions to try to end a gross abuse they have no realistic power to change.
Are they a victim of bullying when their official policy is the destruction of their neighbors culture?
They are a victim of bullying when they’ve been under decades of illegal occupation. Hamas is an awful organization, but it was only formed as a result of ongoing brutal oppression. When you keep punching someone in the face, sooner or later they’ll start punching back, and sometimes they’ll fight dirty. That doesn’t make them good, but the bully is still the one who kicked things off in the first place and the one who should be first and foremost held responsible for the situation they created.
Hamas individual victims get my full sympathy; they’re victims of both Hamas and Israel. Israel as a state does not - without their brutal oppression, extensive war crimes, and apartheid regime, there wouldn’t be any Hamas in the first place.
What if the bully went up to someone and said “I’m going to fucking kill you” and then tried to kill them using all means possible all because the bully and the other person exist in the same area? Only Palestine and Hamas before now were the ones saying the Jews deserved death AND acted upon it multiple times. I had sympathy for their plight until they indiscriminately killed people who had zero interaction with their problems. I’m sure those thai workers and rave tourists, massacred, raped, killed and kidnapped has a lot to do with the fucking situation between Israel and Hamas/Palestine. Israel isn’t clean, but in 1 day and 1 act became the cleaner of the 2 in non Arab public perception.
This sentence alone shows your complete and utter lack of understanding of the situation and the history that has led to it.
Jewish population in 1917 was 8%, but 1936 that was 28%. In 1948, during the Nakba, it jumped from 32% to 82%. Palestinians were the indigenous people of Palestine until the Zionist movement INTENTIONALLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY took over, killed, burnt down, and destroyed not only men women and children, but every facet of Palestinian culture they could.
They shut Palestine out of negotiations and diplomatic channels, and ran straight-up propaganda campaigns in America to convince numbskulls like you who believe the slant they hear on Fox news about how Hamas are just terrorists.
Hamas actually attempted to be a legitimate government that played by the rules, as did the PLO. They were backstabbed, lied to, led on, and ignored by US, UN, Israel, Britain, etc.
You can have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people while condemning actions taken by militants. Nuance is possible here.
And yet the Palestinian population grows each year.
Wow it’s almost as if Palestinians want to return to their fucking homes that they were forced out of, Jesus what a shocker, zomg
Nice “whatabout”, but the bully here is the party that engaged in an illegal occupation, the crime of apartheid, and extensive war crimes (annexation through settlement of occupied territory) in the first place. That you try to redefine away the fact that Israel created this situation in the first place borders on apartheid-apologism. It’s exactly the same tactic used by supporters of South African apartheid to dismiss the situation in South Africa whenever the ANC carried out a violent operation, and it was apologism for oppression then, and it is apologism for oppression now.
Nah fam, if you want to play that game Arabs invaded Jewish communities that had settled there during the muslim conquests, that’s over 2,000 years of illegal occupation. If you’re fine with that, you should be fine with Israel taking back their land at the “edge of a sword”.
Also it’s funny to hear you say killing innocent people not involved with the conflict is “apartheid apology”
Only one party is currently illegally occupying land they have legal claim to and engaging in the crime of apartheid. Only one party is engaged in fighting against an illegal occupier. That you choose to argue in favour of the apartheid regime engaged in an illegal occupation says enough.
Do they have a legal claim to it? If they stole the land it shouldn’t matter how long ago it was right? That’s the Palestinian logic I’m seeing.
Who? Israel? No, they do not have a legal claim to the occupied areas, or they wouldn’t be occupied. Both irrespective of the occupation, the crime of Apartheid is a crime against humanity under the Rome statute.
The Israeli Supreme Court has ever since 1967 consistently accepted the Israeli government’s own contention that the territories are occupied, and not part of Israel proper, because if they were part of Israel, then Palestinians affected by Israeli oppression would have far stronger legal claims.
So if you want to argue that the occupied territories belong to Israel, you’re arguing against the position of both Israel the state and the Israeli Supreme Court.
See “The law of belligerent occupation in the Supreme Court of Israel”, David Kretzmer, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published in the International Review of the Red Cross, 2012
That “game” of which you speak is an appeal to privilege in its most obscene form: claiming an ancestral myth that allows you to impact extreme violence against other humans whose only crime is being born into the wrong bloodline.
It’s 2023 CE out here but some cultures are pretending it’s 2023 BCE
When you say ‘destroying their neighbors culture’ - are you talking about Israel or Palestine?
Clearly Palestine. They’re the ones with a government they elected that literally put “destroy all Jews” in their founding charter.
Well, Israel was actively destroying culture as well. We’ve all seen the videos of Palestinians being evicted from their homes by Israeli military /police.
In fact Id say thats way worse than words on paper. Systemic actions to destroy