It's more "playing" (quite irresponsible as it is, giving a rifle to an untrained person. It's with no magazine and I hope it was vetted first to see that it has no bullet in the barrel. The first thing you should learn about using a rifle is that it can kill and that you should avoid it).
No, you're lying, again. Settlers in the illegal settlements on the West Bank incur in regular acts of violence against Palestinians, and teach their kids to hate Palestinians.
But what could you expect from an obvious troll like you if it's not lies to justify a genocide...?
The fact that many Israeli children are taught to hate Palestinians is no more an argument for the murder of Israeli children than the indoctrination of many Palestinian children is for the murder of Palestinian children.
@KarunaX I'm sorry, but I have to say it despite feeling dirty about it. These are not rifles, but automatic pistols. It's not an offensive weapon, it's mostly used in self-defence.
The Uzi is a military weapon @rato The image posted by @KarunaX is actually quite revealing. It illustrates the indoctrination of Israeli youth into a militaristic culture. What else their indoctrination involves, I shudder to think.
That article in Al-Jazeera is filled with half-truths and exaggerations. Yes, Arabs are not always portrayed that well in some children's books. But there are concerted efforts to change that. Cherry-picking everything that might look wrong is a great way to feel good, but not very handy beyond that.
Sure. While stealing more land in the occupied West Bank, killing over 300 Palestinians in just a few months, raiding and bombing homes, not allowing anyone out of the fenced areas but allowing settlers in to cause harm.
Such bullshit
No matter what you say or pretend to believe and justify, trying to justify starvation and genocide, never going to be on the side of right
No, the post talking about children being taught to hate was used to excuse 14,000 dead Palestinian children. We all know that Jewish children, especially in the West Bank, are taught to hate Palestinians.
There is absolutely no excuse for murdering 14,000 children. It is a genocide
I wrote a long reply and deleted it because I'm not falling into your excuses. There are now over 14,000 dead Palestinian children and you're trying to excuse that. As if there is any excuse for a genocide or killing children.
We're absolutely done. Go excuse genocide to someone who might buy your crap
You are eager to attend protests against your current government in favour of retrieving hostages from HAMAS and to throw your current government out (https://restart-israel.co.il/all-hafganot/) but seemingly fail to understand that a ceasefire is the safest, fastest, and surest was to ensure the remaining hostages are returned.
Meanwhile the official Israeli stance is that any Israeli who dies in the crossfire is unavoidable collateral damage, whether they are hostages of civillians; a stance that has been promoted for decades.
Israel have turned a legitimate retaliation for the HAMAS attack into an excuse to carry out a genocide the country has always wanted, extending the Dahiya doctrine into one of total destruction of an ethnic group, regardless of their religious beliefs.
It really depends on the terms of the ceasefire. My real concern is that no alternative will be established for the Hamas and we go back to the dynamics of a Hamas state in the Gaza Strip.
Right now it is only the actions of the US that push against that.
And this is why (among many other concerns) that I want to replace the Israeli government.
Terribly sorry to inform you that Gaza is not a State. Not only the USA vetoed Palestine's recognition as a member State of the UN recently, and Netanyahu has vocally opposed a Palestinian State, Gaza is a small strip of land surrounded by Israel on all sides but the Rafah crossing. It's been described as an "open air prison" and "the world's largest concentration camp".
Gaza before Oct 2023 was a de-facto state. It had a government, a well-defined border, guarded by a military force, collected taxes, police force, etc. It did not have its own currency, but neither does e.g. France.
De-facto. Not internationally recognized. And being separate helped hampering the establishment of a single Palestinians state.
No, that's a lie. Gaza was, and still is, an occupied territory. This is not just my opinion, the UN special rapporteur, and international law, and international human rights associations, and academic text, all coincide in describing Gaza and the West Bank as occupied territories, even after Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza.
In one sense it was never a state. The Hamas government never really assumed responsibility of the population. The population was Someone Else's Problem (mostly UNRWA). They spent the taxes they collected on themselves and on their military forces.
Indeed, if Palestinians were to follow that model, there would never be a Palestinian State.
Don't change the subject, you PoS. Israel is committing a genocide, and they need to stop. The problem is not "a Hamas State in the Gaza strip". Hamas has already negotiated a cease fire with Qatari and Egyptian mediators, where they would vow to stop any attacks on Israel AND release all the hostages. Yet the Zionist onslaught continues. And yet, people like you defend it.
Netanyahu does not really want an end to the war. But then again, Hamas does not an end to the war either. And it is not keen on giving up its hostages either.
Are you reading out of a script, you looser? I just said HAMAS HAS ALREADY AGREED TO A CEASE FIRE. The same day Israel invaded Rafah and murdered over 40 people there.
Itamar Ben Gvir and other high level politicians are openly asking for blood.
Setting aside the obvious fact that this is not true—the Israeli state routinely imprisons hundreds or thousands of Palestinians without trial or even charges—most of these convictions occur in military courts that rubber-stamp the mass imprisonment of Palestinians.
An infant had a better sense of false pretenses than you do.
If Israel wanted to destroy all of Gaza, they'd have done it long ago. They're the only nation who offered any land to create a Palestinian state. When Jordan controlled the West Bank & Egypt controlled Gaza, neither nation offered any land to the Palestinians.
Gaza was never a state. There was never an institution in Gaza that controlled Gaza’s borders, its airspace, or its sea access. There was never an institution that could issue passports with which Gazans could travel abroad without interference. There was never an institution that could collect customs revenue. There was never an institution that controlled water, electricity, medicine, or food imports.
Most critically for any useful definition of the state, there was never an institution that exercised a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, because the Israeli state could and did export violence and kill Gazans with impunity.
Rafah Crossing has been in control of the Gaza government from 2008 to 2017. At that time it decided to cede control officially to the Ramallah government (but still maintain practical control).
The other side is under Egyptian control, naturally, because it it is a border crossing.
None of that changes the fact that both Gaza and the West Banks are by no mean "States" but occupied territories, both under international law and by using the concepts coherently.
Your claim that Gaza is a State, and that Hamas control over it is the problem has been disproved.
You are still on denial over Hamas having accepted a ceasefire proposal.
I'm not asking you what your opinion on the West Bank is, I'm telling you that both Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories, not States or "de facto State".
I'm also telling you Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal mediated by Egypt and Qatar, and that blood thirsty Israel's response was to start an assault in Rafah.
“To exit their territory, Gazans had to dig tunnels underground like burrowing animals” is not the evidence of statehood you freakishly imagine it to be.
> “So if you wanted to get in and out of the Strip, you had to get the approval of the Hamas government.”
Unless you’re the IDF.
Gaza most closely resembles the Bantustans established under Apartheid South Africa to create the pretense that Black South Africans were really citizens of another country and not citizens of South Africa denied rights on the basis of their racial identity.
Having control of one side of a border crossing does not mean that some Gazan institution controlled Gaza’s borders, much less that a state existed in Gaza. Gazans could not leave Gaza and, as Israel has demonstrated throughout its genocide in Gaza, external actors could trivially pre-empt that control by ie bombing aid crossing the border at Rafah.
Gazans could leave Gaza if the Egyptians allowed it (or if they paid someone on the Egyptian side. In addition to paying someone on the Gazan side, because they are very honest).
Generally for one to cross from Gaza to Israel (through Erez) one would need clearance from Hamas, Ramallah government and Israel. And that one would be automatically suspected by both Israel and Hamas as spying for the other side (which was occasionally the case).
This is a border between two bitter enemies. Not fun to cross. Kind of Check Point Charlie.
Gazans are not free to leave Gaza at all to go anywhere which is not a condition for any state anywhere in the world, but it is a condition for all prisoners everywhere.
Why is that a condition? If you want to go from country A to country B, you need country B's permission. There are many cases where this permission is granted semi-automatically, and thus you tend to ignore it.
When country A and country B don't like each other, it's a problem. Try to see what it take for Indians to visit Pakistan and vice versa.
The claim isn’t “Gazans lack permission to travel to Israel.” The fact is that Gazans cannot leave Gaza at all. They cannot travel by air because the IDF long ago destroyed the only airport in Gaza and controls Gaza’s airspace. They cannot travel by sea because the IDF patrols and has mined the coast, periodically murdering Palestinian fishers who stray too far from land. They cannot travel by land because the Israeli state has forbidden it and uses its control of Gaza’s borders to periodically murder any Palestinians who merely get close to the border.
Asking “isn’t this just like getting country b’s permission” is so fucking asinine. There’s no comparable situation in which the citizens of one country have to ask a second country for permission to travel to a third. Just vile shit that would be trivially obvious to you if you thought about it for even a moment.
(Past tense. Pre Oct 2023)
They could travel by land though Egypt. Some of them. Why not more? Because of their government that failed to negotiate it.
You can’t weasel out of this by noting that the Egyptian military dictatorship cooperates with the Israeli state to maintain the occupation and blockade. It doesn’t somehow make it ok if you’re getting help from a vile military dictatorship.
Why do you think "Egypt helps Israel"? Egypt is an independent country with its own interests that only partially align with those of Israel. It kept the border closed because it is its own interest.
So fucking what? Your whole argument boils down to “waaah people criticize Israel more than Egypt so reality isn’t happening waaah”
Israel has maintained Gaza as a concentration camp in which Palestinians have been trapped for decades. That Sidi colludes with that atrocity or Biden arms the forces committing that atrocity doesn’t make it any less atrocious.
I'm not sure I understand the question. There are very few people in Israeli prisons since before 1990 ("before Hamas was a thing").
Israel was close to reach an agreement with the gevernment of the Palestinian Authority in 2008. But then Netanyahu came. Now both sides are more in blame-game mode.
There was no agreement close to being made in 2008. Not only was that offer rejected, but PA leadership never even made a counter offer. Besides, Jihadists are notorious for breaking treaties.
How many times has Netanyahu specifically stated that he is against a two-state solution or any existence of a Palestinian state "in any post-war scenario", and that there can be no "safety" for Israel so long as Palestine exists on its borders?
There is no question that Israel does not want peace, and will jeopardize any attempt at it.
There can be no peace as long as the doctrine of Jihad remains in effect. Gaza is living proof that any Palestinian state would only be used as a base from which to attack Israel.
I remember, after 2001, how pervasive this sort of casual racism was towards any group of Muslims, but it sort of faded away along with the GWOT. It’s been disgusting but fascinating to watch it get resurrected as if the last 23 years hadn’t happened.
Gaza is indeed a concentration camp, and Sharon withdrew forces from Gaza explicitly to sabotage the peace process and prevent the emergence of a single Palestinian polity.
The fact that Hamas rules Gaza does not change these facts.
No, Sharon withdrew to try and show Israel's willingness to make concessions. They pulled out of Gaza & even left their businesses behind for the Arabs to use for themselves. All they asked for in exchange was peace. Hamas simply burned the businesses & chose war.
“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. That is exactly what happened.”
Dov Weissglass, senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, explaining the disengagement plan in 2004.
So much so that Olmert contiued the process in the West Bank in 2006. But momentum was lost due to the war in Lebanon in which Olmeft lost much popularity.
Well, That's indeed Netanyahu's policy (unlike Olmert, the PM in 2006-2008 that was against Hamas and was working on a peace agreement with Abu Mazen).
That's a misconception. Israel somewhat supported islamists in the Gaza Strip in the 1980s because they seemed harmles and to counter the PLO. However, that was before the Intifada started, and hence before Hamas was created.
In retrospect, no. Recall that up until the mid 1980s, the Fatah was an active terrorist organization. Other secular organizations (e.g. the Popular Front) never gave up terrorism.
But Israel did negotiate the Oslo Accords less than a decade later with the PLO.
Neither Fatah, nor the PFLP, not even Hamas are "terrorists". They are national liberation movements and their violence is sanctioned by their right to fight colonial occupation.
Now, answer me, who broke the Oslo accords? Who undermined Fatah's credibility by doing so? Who murdered Yasser Arafat?
Sure, so planed hijacked by Black September Organization (a front for Fatah) were acts of freedom? Passengers were freed by the freedom fighters from the air crew?
Leila Khaled, seen in this picture, is one of those freedom fighters. She was part of one successful and one failed such hijack.
Yes, and Arafat was telling Arab nations right after the Accords that the agreement was only a temporary means to an end. He never had any intention of making peace. He was simply changing his tactics.
“Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood” and “Israel deliberately cultivated Hamas as a counterweight to the PLO” are not mutually contradictory.
Israel did not cultivate Hamas. At the time the PLO was simply an umbrella organization for numerous Palestinian terror groups. Israel at times didn't know which one posed the more serious threat, but they didn't promote one over the other.
Long after Israeli leaders knew exactly what Hamas was, they continued to prop up Hamas because Hamas was a convenient excuse to avoid engaging in a substantive peace process.
Quite a few nations don't like Palestinian terrorists. Jordan kicked them out in 1970 because they tried to take over. Egypt doesn't want them cause they're allies with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Lebanon they helped plunge the nation into Civil War, & in Kuwait they supported Saddam when he invaded, so they kicked them out after he was ousted.
Whatever they think about Hamas, 143 countries in the UN General Assembly just voted to give Palestine more rights and privileges in the UN, against only 9 'No' votes and 25 abstentions.
It seems like quite a few countries don't like the Israeli government.
@tzafrir
1-Israel has no borders. It refuses to define them.
2 -Israel built an illegal wall around the Gazans, with automatic weapons and cameras every 150 meters. Gaza is an open-air prison
3- Israel controlled everything that entered or exited Gaza through check points. They decided Gazans will not be allowed chocolate or pizza. #Facts https://youtu.be/hmac4ZiX_XM?si=vy8mwmKf5Mc_HEpV
That wall was only built because of ongoing attacks from Gaza, and Oct. 7th proved why it's necessary. Egypt also built a wall along their border with Gaza for the same reason.
Every builder of a concentration camp’s walls has justified their actions by pointing to a threat. The validity of that threat does not somehow legitimize the act of building a concentration camp.
@ThinkIsrael
Following your logic, Israel should be walled in also, and under blockade, because of the ongoing attacks on Palestinian territories for the last decades. Settlements are illegal under international law.
So why is it OK for 2 million Arabs to live on one side of the 1949 line, but unacceptable for any Jews to live on the other side? There was no peace before the settlements, so what makes you think there will be peace when they're gone? Israel evacuated over 10,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005, but things didn't get better, it just got worse.
@ThinkIsrael
Question: what were 10,000 settlers doing in Gaza before 2005, if Israel keeps behind the 1949 line, as you say? You just proved by your own words that it's a lie. We all see that Israel refuses to live within closed established borders.
The settlers weren't in Gaza until after 1967 when Israel took over the region during their war with Egypt. Prior to then, Egypt controlled Gaza from 1949-1967 and during that time, there were not settlers, yet Fedayeen terrorist attacks were still being carried out against Israel from Gaza. So no, it's not a lie.
There was an Israeli occupation of the region from 1967-2005. During that time 10,000 settlers lived there, many of whom opened businesses that employed thousands of Gazans who were previously unemployed. During this time it was unknown what would happen to this region. When the 1993 Accord was signed, Israel began withdrawing from the region, which they completed in 2005.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in the same sense as prison guards withdrawing from cell blocks—they still controlled the fences, and Gazans are still prisoners.
Furthermore, no agreed upon border as ever been established. From 1949-1967 there was not a single Jew in Gaza or the West Bank, yet Jihadist terror attacks were ongoing then, as they are now. So there has never been peace, settlers or no settlers.
Israel did not attack Palestinian territories because no nation called Palestine ever existed, & no final boundaries agreed upon. Israel was continually being attacked, and they took those territories in a defensive war. They repeatedly offered land back for peace, and were always rejected.
By your logic, nations like Turkey, China & Iran should be walled in due to Iranian proxies attacking territories in other nations, China occupying Tibet, & Turkey for illegally invading Cyprus (not a disputed territory but a sovereign nation) and holding territories that previously belonged to Armenians, Greeks, & Kurds. May I add China & Turkey offered nothing to these people.
1-Isreal has no defined borders because their enemies refused to acknowledge the right of their state to exist.
2-Israel did not build a wall around Gaza until after Hamas turned it into a terrorist base, & Oct. 7th proves why it's necessary, because Hamas is in a constant state of war against Israel
@ThinkIsrael
If your enemy deny your right to exist, that's when you define your borders, and have them certified and recognized by every nation and international organism possible.
Israel never did. It kept gnawing away at Palestinian land. There are 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers on Palestinian land.
Israel has no defined borders because the Israeli state has never attempted to assert a claim to formal borders. To assert the 1967 ceasefire line would invalidate the colonial settlement project; to claim the mandatory borders would run afoul of the whole post-WWII prohibition on territorial aggrandizement through conquest.
So the Israeli state deliberately eschews formal borders to exploit the resulting ambiguity.
The 1967 Cease-fire Line was never an official border between two nations, and during this time, Gaza & the West Bank were not part of a "Palestinian nation." They were territories occupied by two different Arab nations.
3-Israel controls what goes it and goes out because even with these controls Hamas stockpiled huge amounts of weapons & stole aid to build terror tunnels, which they used to slaughter over 1200 Israelis.
Israel has internationally-recognized borders with Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon (though not with Syria).
Before Oct-7, the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip was well-defined and part of basically any draft of agreement between Israel and various Palestinian parties (but none of those was finalized).
Israel has well-defined borders with its state neighbors. It has eschewed formal claims on borders with Palestinians because doing so would either a) place the territories outside of Israel’s borders, confessing the occupation, or b) place the territories inside Israel’s borders, confessing conquest. Israel’s lack of borders is a deliberate strategy of ambiguity.
Because? Are you sure? The border between Israel and Lebanon wasn't really internationally recognized even before 1967, despite being based on a well-defined previous international border.
Syria claims lands that were part of Palestine, because it annexed them by force in 1948.
Israel left Sinai ("To the last grain of sand") in the peace treaty with Egypt. And this treaty was signed by the right winger Begin.
Dayan indeed said in 1971(?) that Sharm El Sheikh with no peace is better than peace with no Sharm El Sheikh. But 7 years later he was one of the negotiators in Camp David.
At the time the Camp David agreement was signed, and up until 2005, Israeli forces were holding the Philadelphi corridor. So I can't see how this specifically is a violation of the Camp David agreements.
The de facto Israel-Syria border is not internationally recognized because the world adopted a norm after World War Two of not rewarding states for territorial conquest.
Yeah, the Charter of the UN establishes both the inviolability of territorial integrity of countries and people's right to self determination. Both were violated in 1948 in the Nakba/ "War of Independence", when Israel annexed up to 80% of Palestine. You could even argue that the original UN partition of Palestine was in violation of the UN Charter.
The fact that the Egyptian military dictatorship colludes with the Israeli state to maintain the imprisonment of Gazans is hardly evidence that Gaza was somehow ever a state. “Egypt does it too!” lmao
The facticity of the observation that Gaza is not and never has been a state does not change because you think it’s unfair to point out its primary architect—the occupying power in Gaza—is the Israeli state.
Boo hoo. Cheese with your whine. Tiny violin. Etc.
Apples to oranges. The Israeli state can and does routinely project force into Gaza with impunity. There is no interstate conflict, as you might find between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Israeli warplanes control Gaza’s airspace. Israeli naval ships and sea mines control Gaza’s airspace. Israeli troops enter Gaza at will and kill tens of thousands of Gazans as they please.
Apples to oranges. The Israeli state can and does routinely project force into Gaza with impunity. There is no interstate conflict, as you might find between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Israeli warplanes control Gaza’s airspace. Israeli naval ships and sea mines control Gaza’s coast. Israeli troops enter Gaza at will and kill tens of thousands of Gazans as they please.
Before Oct 2023, Israeli troops did not enter Gaza (except as part of the two previous wars, after long escalations, and even then: not that much) - 2008 and 2014. Only one of those was in Netanyahu's time.
“Before the current invasion, Israeli troops only repeatedly invaded Gaza before” is not the credible evidence of Gazan statehood you think it is.
This also does not count the number of times the IDF has conducted air and artillery strikes into Gaza, or simply shot Gazans inside Gaza from Israeli territory.
I can’t tell if you genuinely don’t understand or if you’re just being obtuse for rhetorical value, but there’s a substantive difference between interstate conflict and the sort of “guards in literal guard towers shooting at prisoners in a concentration camp” that we see in Gaza.
There are material differences and political differences, which I’m happy to explain to you.
The one that doesn't learn, not even when confronted with international law, international human right organizations, or even dictionary definitions is you Tzafrif.
You are justifying a genocidal regime, which is the most bankrupt stance anyone can take.
What do you have to say about the mass protests outside Netanyahu's house, asking him to accept the cease fire?
Rich now, as we speak, Israel is ensuring more hostages will be killed, not by Hamas but by their own mass bombing of Rafah. The Netanyahu regime has zero interest in bringing the hostages home alive. Yet YOU endorse said regime.
Did the cat got your tongue, you yellow coward? What do you have to say abut the thousands of Israelis demanding that Netayahu accepts the cease fire agreement, to which Hamas has already agreed, that would bring the surviving hostages back home?
Do you think that the "right" answer to the hostage's families plight is to beat them up with police batons?
@tzafrir The Gaza Strip fails to fill out the requirements for a "de facto state" under any definition - from having no monopoly on violence (the simplest definition possible) to having no access to customs, the airspace or even things like electricity, phone service and water.
I had clearly defined borders, sure. But so does a ghetto.
No monopoly over violence? If you said anything bad against Hamas, you would be taken to an interrogation and likely your knees would not survive the ordeal. There's a reason there's not much criticism on the Hamas from within the Strip.
“The ability to commit violence” is not “a monopoly on violence.” As murderous as Hamas is, it kills far fewer Palestinians in Gaza each year than does the Israeli state, which can bomb, shell, and shoot Gazans with impunity.
Guys, tzafrir is a habitual troll that likes to provoke… I blocked him few months back being tired of him regurgitating at me his posts from the fascist Hebrew Wikipedia where Palestinians don’t exist and every dead settler is a martyr (look up Bente’s Wikipedia editing Zionist bootcamp for info on how it started). You’re wasting your time … he’s not here to learn he’s here boost signal of his Neo Zionist propaganda.