Hamas attacks southern Israel

[Legio_Italica]

A good interview on this. Why Israel is in deep trouble: John Mearsheimer with Tom Switzer

Thanks. I thought about posting that a few days ago, but I figured no one else would watch/discuss a video that long. If you understand Mearsheimer’s thesis, you understand what I mean when I say Israel is in deep trouble because of fallout of the 10/7 attacks and has no good options to escape it.

The whole premise of you argument is made as if Israel had no choice but to invade Gaza and kill 35,000 people. Which is of course not true. This has been building up from a looong time ago, and Hamas itself is an entity that was funded in the first place by the people that are attacking it now, Netanyahu and his cronies accepting that very fact. They propped up Hamas in order to create division and discord between the Palestinians and in the aim of one day completely taking over all Palestinian lands (which is what they are openly attempting now.)

This is a weird take considering you also posted a presentation on why 10/7 blew apart the widely held belief that the strategy of abandoning Gaza to Hamas and playing Palestinian factions off against each other was not only a sustainable, but strategically shrewd way of preventing war through deterrence. To summarize, Israel is now “stuck” in Gaza and has no feasible way out in the short to medium term, the 10/7 attacks represent an unprecedented strategic disaster for Israel and the US, and a huge success for Iran.

You have very little understanding of the reality of this conflict... and there's no point even to inform you because you are speaking from an ideological mindset, not rooted to the reality of the issue of the ground. In your world, 2+2=5. No need to prove to you that it's 4. You will continue believing in what you believe, just like the other brainless Fox News drones out there, until mankind wipes itself out.

Fact of the matter is that Israel has been hijacked by religious right wing nut jobs that are religiously motivated. They couldn't care less for the future of their own country. If they were interested in Israel's survival, they would not have antagonized the entire world against them. They are more interested in their apocalyptic yearnings of bringing the messiah and making sure their self-fulfilling idiotic prophecy plays out than they are in hoping for a future where Jews and Israelis have a peaceful place they can call home.

It’s ironic to talk about ideological blindness and brainwashing when your argument is a paragraph away from alleging Israel false flagged 10/7 to justify a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem. Not to mention the premise that this is all supposed to be a function of humanity’s struggle against an Anglo-Jewish conspiracy of world domination that will end the species if they aren’t stopped. If the horseshoe fits…. But I suppose the real purpose of framing the conflict in themes of Christian/Islamic apocalypticism, with Jews paving the way for the arrival of their false god and Armageddon, is to equate Netanyahu’s government with Palestinian militant factions and justify jihad. Neither are good or accurate analysis, and you posted a source that would appear to undermine key tenets of your position.

It ultimately doesn’t matter if Netanyahu and his cronies were voted out of office tomorrow, and replaced by an Israeli government that is 110% committed to a two state solution. The majority of Palestinians reject peace with Israel or a two state solution, except as a temporary strategy to retake everything from the river to the sea. Nearly half believe this outcome is divinely ordained. Israel’s survival depends on convincing people with that mindset they cannot win and should not try. They only convinced the other Arabs after the latter suffered a series of humiliating military defeats trying to destroy Israel. Many Israelis and outside observers thought they might have finally convinced the Palestinians too. 10/7 proved they were very wrong about that. In any case, the necessity of restoring strategic dominance/deterrence will remain a core security interest for the state of Israel, regardless of who is in charge. To quote:

A tragedy is about to unfold in Gaza made worse by the long learning curve it will take for Hamas to grasp the depth of Israeli resolve. It has robbed Israel of any other interest but its destruction. In the Israeli mind, any brutality Hamas can commit it will commit. And so it cannot be allowed to ever commit any act ever again.

There is no realistic scenario in which any democratically elected government would not do the same after October 7th.

^^

[Ludicus]

I’m not interested in the efforts of UN press agents to save face

Those figures only account for 70% of deaths fully identified.I'm not interested in what you believe.
---
Speaking of "saving faces" ( I'm not talking about plastic surgery) how are Netanyahu and Gallant going to be saved?



arrest warrants for Israel

a group of a dozen Republican senators wrote a letter to Khan earlier this month warning his office: "Target Israel and we will target you."

I can’t say I’m surprised. They're Not Joking: House Republicans Actually Compare Themselves to the Mob.

They call themselves the Five Families.

And then there's the ICJ judgement, which we're waiting for, which concerns states and not individuals.I presume that the judges of this court will also be (or are already being) threatened.

[Legio_Italica]

Those figures only account for 70% of deaths fully identified.I'm not interested in what you believe.

I don’t care that you believe Hamas is credible. That figure was the press agent’s attempt to deflect a question about what changed. What changed is Hamas was caught counting men as women/children or unidentified to inflate civilian casualties by almost double, as they have done before and will do again, a strategy in which the UN is openly complicit.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

If you are finding this mystifying, you are not alone. As Adesnik explains, part of the confusion arises from the Ministry of Health’s shifting accounting labels. Its system has evolved, and it now tallies named and identified corpses that have passed through its morgues—as well as, in a separate category, “unidentified” dead, for whom it has neither a body nor a name, just a vaguely-defined “report” from outside the hospital system. If, for example, first responders bring in a body, and they say seven other bodies are probably still under the rubble, the body in the morgue would count as identified and the seven others as unidentified. The additional source of confusion is seriously aberrant numbers from the Government Media Office.

Neither Hamas source, Adesnik writes, has fully explained where it gets its estimate of the number of unaccounted-for dead: more than 10,000 people…. When Hamas alleges that Israeli soldiers are shooting everyone in sight, and murdering families by flattening buildings devoid of military purpose, it can point to the dead children. Israel can deny the charge and hope that the world trusts it over an avowed terrorist group. The world seldom obliges.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-count/678400/

[Infidel144]

Mr. Segev says he had regular contact with Sheikh Yassin, in part to keep an eye on him. He visited his mosque and met the cleric around a dozen times. It was illegal at the time for Israelis to meet anyone from the PLO. Mr. Segev later arranged for the cleric to be taken to Israel for hospital treatment. "We had no problems with him," he says.

3: 28 Let not the believers take the disbelievers as protectors apart from the believers. Whosoever does that has no bond with God, unless you guard against them out of prudence. And God warns you of Himself, and unto God is the journey’s end.

Ibn Kathir comments in his tafsir: "For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, "We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.'' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, "The Tuqyah is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"

[AqD]

Reread the beginning of this discussion. We all condemned the terrorist acts of October 7. Do we have to head each post denouncing the current barbarity that is the invasion of Gaza with a condemnation of the murders of civilians on October 7?

Hamas is the natural result of their inability to defend themselves or even create a functional state, and the current invasion (and all future invasions if this one does not finish) is the response of Hamas' unpreventable yet futile attacks.


When two persons hate each other so much, the only way to end this violence is to let one of them die or lose hope completely. We're trying to find a solution that does not exist and never actually worked in our own countries. Ask yourself - what would happen if American Indians still run independent governments and control the countryside? There would be endless fights, and Americans born into warzones would be nothing like what they're today.

[Ludicus]

UN is openly complicit.

The UN is cumplict, the ICC is the legal arm of the Hamas, and we'll soon see the ICJ portrayed as a the legal arm of..what?

From your source, The Atlantic,

On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians

Don't make me laugh.

Israel can deny the charge and hope that the world trusts it.

Don't hope too much.

In detail, published today, read it all.Read slowly.
Report of the Panel of Experts in International Law
Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC

And then, speaking of the occupation that Israel has maintained for almost 57 years, a vehicle for colonizing land, appropriating resources, violently displacing and killing people, daily violations of international humanitarian law, it would be a miracle if oppression didn't generate resistance.

That's why history matters. Let's look to the past. Israel's first president Weizmann described Einstein as "the greatest Jew alive”. The greatest Jew alive visited Palestine for 12 days in 1923 giving lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and never returned to Palestine again. When Weizmann died (1952) Einstein diplomatically declined the offer to become Israel's President: "I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people".
But what did he write when he wasn't being diplomatic? In the wake of the Deir Yassin Massacre -April 9-1948 , more precisely, on the following day, April 10, in a letter addressed to the Executive Director of American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, based in New York? –he didn’t mince his words and was sincere and direct,



The horrific slaughter took place just a month before Israel declared its independence (May 14, 1948).You know, the nature of the Jewish government in Israel hasn’t changed much from Einstein’s time.

[Siblesz]

Thanks. I thought about posting that a few days ago, but I figured no one else would watch/discuss a video that long. If you understand Mearsheimer’s thesis, you understand what I mean when I say Israel is in deep trouble because of fallout of the 10/7 attacks and has no good options to escape it.

This is a weird take considering you also posted a presentation on why 10/7 blew apart the widely held belief that the strategy of abandoning Gaza to Hamas and playing Palestinian factions off against each other was not only a sustainable, but strategically shrewd way of preventing war through deterrence. To summarize, Israel is now “stuck” in Gaza and has no feasible way out in the short to medium term, the 10/7 attacks represent an unprecedented strategic disaster for Israel and the US, and a huge success for Iran.

It’s ironic to talk about ideological blindness and brainwashing when your argument is a paragraph away from alleging Israel false flagged 10/7 to justify a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem. Not to mention the premise that this is all supposed to be a function of humanity’s struggle against an Anglo-Jewish conspiracy of world domination that will end the species if they aren’t stopped. If the horseshoe fits…. But I suppose the real purpose of framing the conflict in themes of Christian/Islamic apocalypticism, with Jews paving the way for the arrival of their false god and Armageddon, is to equate Netanyahu’s government with Palestinian militant factions and justify jihad. Neither are good or accurate analysis, and you posted a source that would appear to undermine key tenets of your position.

It ultimately doesn’t matter if Netanyahu and his cronies were voted out of office tomorrow, and replaced by an Israeli government that is 110% committed to a two state solution. The majority of Palestinians reject peace with Israel or a two state solution, except as a temporary strategy to retake everything from the river to the sea. Nearly half believe this outcome is divinely ordained. Israel’s survival depends on convincing people with that mindset they cannot win and should not try. They only convinced the other Arabs after the latter suffered a series of humiliating military defeats trying to destroy Israel. Many Israelis and outside observers thought they might have finally convinced the Palestinians too. 10/7 proved they were very wrong about that. In any case, the necessity of restoring strategic dominance/deterrence will remain a core security interest for the state of Israel, regardless of who is in charge. To quote:


^^

Israel is in trouble precisely because they politically opted out of the two state solution after Sharon. Like I said, this has been building up for a long time, so it's not that they were intentionally planning on ethnic cleaning in 2003... but they enacted measures in 2003 that eventually led to the situation of 2024. The situation in Gaza has been unsustainable for a long time... I find it reaaallly hard to believe that the IDF did not know what Hamas were planning. There is also a whole video on this, with very strong evidence suggesting that not only did the IDF know that Hamas was planning an attack, but that they let it happen on purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mxfnya3ZRc&t=10s

I mean, this is the IDF we're talking about. And Mossad. One of the most well-funded, experienced spy agencies in the world. And they were caught by surprise? I doubt it... there was plenty of evidence of Hamas' plans. And there's plenty of evidence in Israel's political scene that shows a 1.) desperate attempt of Netanyahu to hold on to power by forfeiting his centrist policies and catering to the religious extreme right, as well as 2.) a more religious fervor taking over Israel since 2010. Most notable of all is how it is the youth in Israel that is becoming more religious, very contradictory to the general rule in the rest of the world.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/young-...igious-survey/

You put all of these factors together, and you get a very volatile situation that had been building up for years, but that everyone ignored until after October 7th. So was it their original plan to enact ethnic cleansing and to take all the lands away from the Palestinians? No... Is it their plan now? For the right wing people behind Netanyahu, they are not even hiding their intentions anymore...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...-israel-hamas/

That any sensible human being can defend a government that is enacting ethnic cleansing and that has been planning what it is doing in secret since at least 2018 is a whole other matter (unless you have a faint memory, that's the year when the Israeli government made their views very clear in their intention to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and when Trump was all excited about the prospect of fulfilling the Zionist dream of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel).. like I said, it takes extreme naivite, extreme brainwashing, or just an evil heart to be able to justify what they are doing to the Palestinians now. Yes... Hamas is evil. But they have approximately 1% of the power that the state of Israel has in order to enact that evil. And the PLO and Hamas has been played by pawns by Israelis political elite for years in some crazy Game of Thrones game for power and control of greater Israel. So pointing the finger at Hamas or the PLO is a bit like pointing the finger at the people who were rioting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and calling them extremist. And it's not that the Palestinians did not try peaceful protest before. They did so several times over decades. How did Israel respond? By setting up snipers and shooting children.
https://www.thenation.com/article/ar...th-a-massacre/

The Palestinians have been pinned to a corner for over fifty years, and they have been forced to extremism by the failed ability of Israeli politicians to find a solution to this crisis. The way that reality works is that those who wield the maximum amount of power are those who are responsible for the ill effects of that power. The Israelis have been holding the maximum amount of power since at least 1948, and they have wielded supreme political power over Palestine/Greater Israel since 1967. They are the only ones to blame for how they have wielded that power.

[PointOfViewGun]

Israeli soldiers vow to ‘destroy Rafah’ as they prepare to invade the city

Israeli soldiers gather round in the occupied Gaza Strip as an army officer pumps them up with chanting ahead of their invasion of Rafah. 'Let's go and destroy Rafah!' comes the call and response after the officer blows into a ram's horn, which is used in Jewish ceremonies. Palestinians have frantically begun to leave Rafah, which is currently home to about 1.1 million displaced people, for other so-called 'safe zones', as the Israeli military steps up its bombing campaigns and ground presence in the southern border region of Gaza.

It is clear from what the Israeli soldiers share, not what some random Hamas account claims, that what they're interested in Gaza is not eradication of Hamas but making Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians.

[Ludicus]

The Palestinians have been pinned to a corner for over fifty years, and they have been forced to extremism ...The way that reality works is that those who wield the maximum amount of power are those who are responsible for the ill effects of that power. The Israelis have been holding the maximum amount of power since at least 1948, and they have wielded supreme political power over Palestine/Greater Israel since 1967. They are the only ones to blame for how they have wielded that power.

Very well said.
--

France shows support for ICC after arrest warrants

With regard to Israel, "France has been warning for many months about the imperative of strict compliance with international humanitarian law and, in particular, about the unacceptable nature of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip and the insufficient humanitarian access".

Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz journalist, commented on X that "The siege and the lack of any humanitarian plan alongside the battle plans gave the ICC a much easier decision than if it had only concentrated on Israeli military moves”.

In an interview with CNN journalist Christianne Amanpour, Khan emphasized that Israel has the right to defend itself and "has every right, indeed an obligation", to get hostages back, but "must do so by complying with the law"."The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza,” he added.

International law professor Juliette McIntire, from UniSA (University of South Australia), commented on X that "We expected it was coming but it's still huge. This is very, very significant. No more business as usual. No State that purports to uphold the rule of law should send arms to someone with an ICC arrest warrant hanging over them".
---

The same court that issued arrest warrants for Putin for war crimes in Ukraine could do the same to Netanyahu. Western countries are comfortable with the accusation against Putin, or others like Omar al-Bashir, wanted for genocide in Darfur, and with the convictions of various African militias in Congo, Mali, and Uganda, but they will hardly look with the same leniency at the attempt to capture Netanyahu.

In a recent interview with the Portuguese newspaper PUBLICO, Chinese activist Ai Weiwei said that the West faces the issue of speech censorship, as if all criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza were synonymous with anti-Semitism, but "also an abandonment of the ethical and moral foundations that traditionally supported the pursuit and safeguarding of justice and freedom. This abandonment inevitably leads the West into the abyss of moral degradation"
Here,Ai Weiwei: “O activismo sem liberdade de expressão é tipicamente inepto.
Brutality of oppression: Ai Weiwei speaks on Gaza, China ...
-----
It is the consequence of the cynicism and hypocrisy with which we deal with the tragedy of a people.

Edit,

The UN, "complicit" in Hamas war crimes, suspends Rafah aid distribution and warns US pier may fail.

The United Nations has suspended food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah due to lack of supplies and insecurity.
It also said no aid trucks have entered the territory in the past two days via a floating pier set up by the US for sea deliveries, and warned that the $320m project may fail unless Israel starts providing the conditions the humanitarian groups need to operate safely.

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the Unrwa distribution centre and the WFP’s warehouses in Rafah were “inaccessible due to ongoing military operations.”

When asked about the ramification of the suspension of distribution, Dujarric replied: “People don’t eat.”

the WFP had also stopped distribution in Rafah after exhausting its stocks.

One of the main hospitals still operating in the north, Kamal Adwan, was forced to evacuate after it was “targeted” by Israeli troops, the Gaza Health Ministry said. About 150 staff and dozens of patients fled the facility, including intensive care patients and infants in incubators “under fire from shelling,”

The nearby Awda hospital has been surrounded by troops the past three days, and an artillery shell hit its fifth floor, the hospital administration said in a statement Tuesday. A day earlier, the international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said Awda had run out of drinking water.

[Legio_Italica]

Israel is in trouble precisely because they politically opted out of the two state solution after Sharon. Like I said, this has been building up for a long time, so it's not that they were intentionally planning on ethnic cleaning in 2003... but they enacted measures in 2003 that eventually led to the situation of 2024. The situation in Gaza has been unsustainable for a long time...

It’s easy to say that now, and there were times peace seemed more possible than others. In any case, Palestinian public opinion has been relatively consistent where it counts. In the wake of the Camp David discussions with Arafat and Barak in 2000, over half of Palestinians felt their representatives were too deferential/willing to compromise, and this negatively impacted their popularity, according to the PCPSR source I referenced previously.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

~90% opposed the adoption of a de-radicalization school curriculum aimed at fostering acceptance of Israel’s existence, nonviolence and a permanent two state solution.
~70% opposed any agreement with Israel that would deprive Palestinians of modern offensive military capabilities.
~70% said the top priority of the Palestinian people should be to pursue a single unified state. Peace and economic prosperity, respectively, came in at a distant 20-30%.
-After the attempted compromise at Camp David, support for the PA and its leadership fell by 5-10 points to 30-40%, and it remains relatively unpopular today, with the possible exception of specific jihadist leaders like Barghouti.
~60% voiced support for violent attacks on Israel as the best way to achieve lasting gains for Palestinians
-Over 60% said in particular Hezbollah’s war against Israel since the 80s was an example Palestinians should follow.

That was when the Second Intifada was launched. We are now in the Third or Fourth, depending on how you separate sporadic attempts to wipe Israel off the map. The Israelis are the group that has consistently been “pinned down” by people who want to kill them all and who will readily sacrifice their own lives and welfare to do it. It’s easy to criticize the trial and error methods invented to deal with that problem when no other country has had to face an issue of that magnitude while simultaneously constrained in the permissible ways of confronting it.

I find it reaaallly hard to believe that the IDF did not know what Hamas were planning. There is also a whole video on this, with very strong evidence suggesting that not only did the IDF know that Hamas was planning an attack, but that they let it happen on purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mxfnya3ZRc&t=10s

I mean, this is the IDF we're talking about. And Mossad. One of the most well-funded, experienced spy agencies in the world. And they were caught by surprise? I doubt it... there was plenty of evidence of Hamas' plans.

People are still making videos in 2024 explaining all the evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. I watched the report you referenced, and the guy makes some interesting points. It’s one of those things only the Israelis themselves would ever be able to investigate and draw definitive conclusions from. The problem with any conspiracy allegations of that magnitude is the scale of people who would necessarily need to be complicit to pull it off, and an even greater number who would need to keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. So I’ll await the sufficient volume of evidence needed to make that likely.

And there's plenty of evidence in Israel's political scene that shows a 1.) desperate attempt of Netanyahu to hold on to power by forfeiting his centrist policies and catering to the religious extreme right, as well as 2.) a more religious fervor taking over Israel since 2010. Most notable of all is how it is the youth in Israel that is becoming more religious, very contradictory to the general rule in the rest of the world.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/young-...igious-survey/

The Jews have wanted to go home and rebuild their temple for longer than almost any country in the world today has existed, and Jewish theology is powerful enough to have spun off into two separate religions, to which most of humanity belongs. That kind of commitment and impact transcends any modern, let alone secular context. Since Judaism is not evangelical, I have no problem with young Jews becoming more invested in their heritage and their religion. Young men in general are becoming more conservative around the world. We can speculate about why that is, but the relation to Israel-Palestine is probably tangential at best.
https://www.economist.com/internatio...-men-and-women

I have no doubt Netanyhu’s alleged corruption and personal ambition may have harmed Israeli security interests in hindsight, but that’s for the Israelis to sort out. I don’t see the current conflict as a function of any one leader’s politics.

You put all of these factors together, and you get a very volatile situation that had been building up for years, but that everyone ignored until after October 7th. So was it their original plan to enact ethnic cleansing and to take all the lands away from the Palestinians? No... Is it their plan now? For the right wing people behind Netanyahu, they are not even hiding their intentions anymore...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...-israel-hamas/

I assure you, in the wake of 9/11 my prescriptions for the appropriate response would have made any of the worst comments from Israeli politicians today seem charitable, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge. It’s not surprising there is political incentive among certain circles and in the wake of terrorism and mass murder to call for revenge, as there was in the US at the time. Whether that translates into the alleged plan of action is another question. Of course there’s no concrete exit strategy for Gaza. It’s an impossible situation. Nobody wanted to admit in 2002 we’d be in Afghanistan until 2020, and I doubt Israeli policymakers are more brilliant than ours. Lack of planning and angry bravado doesn’t mean we planned to genocide the Afghans.

That any sensible human being can defend a government that is enacting ethnic cleansing and that has been planning what it is doing in secret since at least 2018 is a whole other matter (unless you have a faint memory, that's the year when the Israeli government made their views very clear in their intention to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and when Trump was all excited about the prospect of fulfilling the Zionist dream of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel).. like I said, it takes extreme naivite, extreme brainwashing, or just an evil heart to be able to justify what they are doing to the Palestinians now. Yes... Hamas is evil. But they have approximately 1% of the power that the state of Israel has in order to enact that evil. And the PLO and Hamas has been played by pawns by Israelis political elite for years in some crazy Game of Thrones game for power and control of greater Israel. So pointing the finger at Hamas or the PLO is a bit like pointing the finger at the people who were rioting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and calling them extremist. And it's not that the Palestinians did not try peaceful protest before. They did so several times over decades. How did Israel respond? By setting up snipers and shooting children.
https://www.thenation.com/article/ar...th-a-massacre/

The Palestinians have been pinned to a corner for over fifty years, and they have been forced to extremism by the failed ability of Israeli politicians to find a solution to this crisis. The way that reality works is that those who wield the maximum amount of power are those who are responsible for the ill effects of that power. The Israelis have been holding the maximum amount of power since at least 1948, and they have wielded supreme political power over Palestine/Greater Israel since 1967. They are the only ones to blame for how they have wielded that power.

The Arabs don’t want Jews around and they especially don’t want them to have a state of any kind, in or near Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa mosque in particular. There are far more Arab Muslim countries than Jewish ones, and they surround Israel on all sides. Their relative incompetence and weakness does not mean Israel holds all agency over the vanquished. If they did, intifada wouldn’t be a recurring nightmare before and after 1948.

From a western perspective, Israel can be negotiated with and has been a solid ally for most of their existence. Even the other Arabs have come to realize this and the Abraham Accords were a historic achievement that made the Palestinian factions fear for their geopolitical relevance and motivated the 10/7 attacks. It is these factions which remain ethnoreligiously committed to the destruction of Israel and the US by extension. The heart has no place in geopolitics, since it does not tell us anything useful about the conflict or the parties involved.

[Siblesz]

It’s easy to say that now, and there were times peace seemed more possible than others. In any case, Palestinian public opinion has been relatively consistent where it counts. In the wake of the Camp David discussions with Arafat and Barak in 2000, over half of Palestinians felt their representatives were too deferential/willing to compromise, and this negatively impacted their popularity, according to the PCPSR source I referenced previously.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

~90% opposed the adoption of a de-radicalization school curriculum aimed at fostering acceptance of Israel’s existence, nonviolence and a permanent two state solution.
~70% opposed any agreement with Israel that would deprive Palestinians of modern offensive military capabilities.
~70% said the top priority of the Palestinian people should be to pursue a single unified state. Peace and economic prosperity, respectively, came in at a distant 20-30%.
-After the attempted compromise at Camp David, support for the PA and its leadership fell by 5-10 points to 30-40%, and it remains relatively unpopular today, with the possible exception of specific jihadist leaders like Barghouti.
~60% voiced support for violent attacks on Israel as the best way to achieve lasting gains for Palestinians
-Over 60% said in particular Hezbollah’s war against Israel since the 80s was an example Palestinians should follow.

That was when the Second Intifada was launched. We are now in the Third or Fourth, depending on how you separate sporadic attempts to wipe Israel off the map. The Israelis are the group that has consistently been “pinned down” by people who want to kill them all and who will readily sacrifice their own lives and welfare to do it. It’s easy to criticize the trial and error methods invented to deal with that problem when no other country has had to face an issue of that magnitude while simultaneously constrained in the permissible ways of confronting it.

You are quoting what the Palestinians think and were polled on as if the Israelis ever cared what the Palestinians thought about. Most Israelis, and especially those in power, are least concerned about what the Palestinians think and feel. They didn't care in 1948 when the Nakba happened, and they don't care now. What should have happened from the very beginning was a U.N. brokered forced ceasefire and peacekeeping mission in 1948 that would have ensured that Palestine and Israel were never divided as they were. Too late now.

As for the argument that the Israelis have been "pinned down", it's a hard argument to make after the 1967 war. Before the 1967 war, you could have perhaps argued that way, saying the poor Israelis are the victims of Arab aggression and what not. After 1967, especially after the U.S. started funding the Israelis military state, the Arab world was no longer dealing with Israel, but with Israel and the combined forces of the biggest military superpower in the World: the United States. You can see the graph of this process and the upward tick in funding from the U.S. since 1970 in the link below:
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts

The fact of the matter is that the Israelis held supreme political and military power over Palestine, and an impregnability afforded to it by its military alliance with the United States since the 1967 war. Hubris accounts more for the situation of today's Israel than anything else. To be sure, Israel before had a more progressive government that was much more sensible and directed more towards the aim of creating a secular state in Israel than of creating a religious Jewish state. But there was always the religious element lurking in the background. 1995 was the year when things turned downhill, after Rabin's assassination by Israeli right wing fanatics. Since then, instead of spending their political and military capital to ensure a long-term solution to the obvious crisis that they commenced in 1948, they instead slowly aimed to disentangle themselves from the two-state solution.

Sharon was for sure the guy who instigated that change, and he was already planning his moves well in advance of the second intifada. 911 of course only facilitated this backwards slide into a militant, apartheid state that Israel is now. The problem with the Israeli state and the people in power in Israel, and its military in particular, is that they are very trigger happy, they are very vengeful, and very unwilling to negotiate if the Palestinians don't behave like little blessed angels. And how would you be expected to behave in such a situation? If your homes were demolished, if you were exiled to live in poverty and then vilified as a terrorist if you attempt to resists the aggression that was enacted against you? If you were walled off, literally from the rest of the world and forced to live in subhuman standards?

People are still making videos in 2024 explaining all the evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. I watched the report you referenced, and the guy makes some interesting points. It’s one of those things only the Israelis themselves would ever be able to investigate and draw definitive conclusions from. The problem with any conspiracy allegations of that magnitude is the scale of people who would necessarily need to be complicit to pull it off, and an even greater number who would need to keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. So I’ll await the sufficient volume of evidence needed to make that likely.

You don't have to have a huge conspiracy with so many people involved to pull off such a plan.. you just have to have one or two guys who are really high up in the command chain and who are willingly ignoring intelligence reports that are in the know, while the rest of the people below them continue following orders in total ignorance of the plan behind the drawing board.

The Jews have wanted to go home and rebuild their temple for longer than almost any country in the world today has existed, and Jewish theology is powerful enough to have spun off into two separate religions, to which most of humanity belongs. That kind of commitment and impact transcends any modern, let alone secular context. Since Judaism is not evangelical, I have no problem with young Jews becoming more invested in their heritage and their religion. Young men in general are becoming more conservative around the world. We can speculate about why that is, but the relation to Israel-Palestine is probably tangential at best.
https://www.economist.com/internatio...-men-and-women

Again, that depends on your definition of what constitutes Jewish people first. If Ashkenazis can be included in that or not. As a Mediterranean, I have more Semitic blood than most Ashkenazi Jews... and yet you don't see me trying to build some fancy temple in Jerusalem... But that's another issue. In the end, religion is just a fancy word for conditioned brainwashing. There is no such thing as Jewish people, as there is no such things as "Arabs" or "Americans" or "Christians" or what not... there is just conditioned brainwashed monkeys thinking that they are something when they are nothing but brainwashed monkeys who can talk and have opposable thumbs.

As for people becoming more conservative, it depends where... some countries are becoming more liberal, some more conservative. It's not so clearly defined.

I have no doubt Netanyhu’s alleged corruption and personal ambition may have harmed Israeli security interests in hindsight, but that’s for the Israelis to sort out. I don’t see the current conflict as a function of any one leader’s politics.

It's a progressive fault of all of Israeli politics and military, but mainly the fault lies with Sharon.

I assure you, in the wake of 9/11 my prescriptions for the appropriate response would have made any of the worst comments from Israeli politicians today seem charitable, so it’s a good thing I wasn’t in charge. It’s not surprising there is political incentive among certain circles and in the wake of terrorism and mass murder to call for revenge, as there was in the US at the time. Whether that translates into the alleged plan of action is another question. Of course there’s no concrete exit strategy for Gaza. It’s an impossible situation. Nobody wanted to admit in 2002 we’d be in Afghanistan until 2020, and I doubt Israeli policymakers are more brilliant than ours. Lack of planning and angry bravado doesn’t mean we planned to genocide the Afghans.

Wake me up when you realize that most Afghan people had NOTHING to do with 911, when the millions that were killed in Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Yemen, also had NOTHING to do with 911. Even the politicians of these latter mentioned countries didn't have anything to do with 9-11. You are clearly conditioned and brainwashed as hell, just by this quote alone. And actually pretty irrational.

The Arabs don’t want Jews around and they especially don’t want them to have a state of any kind, in or near Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa mosque in particular. There are far more Arab Muslim countries than Jewish ones, and they surround Israel on all sides. Their relative incompetence and weakness does not mean Israel holds all agency over the vanquished. If they did, intifada wouldn’t be a recurring nightmare before and after 1948.

It shows your ignorance of the Middle East when you claim that the Arabs don't want Jews... they had been hosting Jews for over a thousand years in a much more amicable basis that the Western Christian nations ever did...

And I'm sure that if the Israeli leaders and Arafat would have finally made a settlement, most Arabs would have gone along with it... the situation now is a bit different. Harder to argue for Arab leniency after what the Israelis have done. Not that I'm not against peace, forgiveness, and compassion... but I doubt that the hate will magically disappear after the atrocities committed.

Fact of the matter is that this story is much older than the creation of the state of Israel. You can look back at it as the existential fight between European civilization and the Arabs. This has been waged since the first Arab invasion of the Byzantine Empire... but you can even argue that this fight is even older than that, with the Persian/Hellenic wars... this is a conflict as old as time itself... the players are different, the interests are the same. Control over the wealth, the resource extraction, and the trade of the Middle East.

From a western perspective, Israel can be negotiated with and has been a solid ally for most of their existence. Even the other Arabs have come to realize this and the Abraham Accords were a historic achievement that made the Palestinian factions fear for their geopolitical relevance and motivated the 10/7 attacks. It is these factions which remain ethnoreligiously committed to the destruction of Israel and the US by extension. The heart has no place in geopolitics, since it does not tell us anything useful about the conflict or the parties involved.

Israel will end up being the worst ally the Western world ever committed to helping... Already European powers have formally distanced themselves from Israel. It's only the U.S. that is too blind by its ideology to see that Israel is unravelling basically every single tenet that the West had going for them. Human rights? Meh. Democracy? Only for the selected few. Equality? Only if you belong to our clique and if you abide by our brainwashing... and if you are not black. Or Muslim. But hey look! Gay marriage! Woopee! The West is so free... you'll have transgender soldiers bombing brown children in a third world country in a year or two. Or is that already the case?
https://time.com/4421400/transgender...aeli-army-idf/

It has been the case since 2015.

The actions of Israel and the U.S. government's supportive actions and its suppression of peaceful protests is making China's autocracy look like child's play.... And it's showing... soon with Trump being elected, the final nail in the coffin will come, and the world will throw away Western liberalism at the wayside. And unfortunately so in many ways... the advancement of human rights as a basic universal tenet of humanity is one of the few things that paradoxically we do have to give the Western world credit for, even if the U.S. has basically completely disregarded this tenet in its foreign policy and even domestic policy since the proclamation of the universal declaration of human rights by the U.N. in 1948.

In any case, if Western liberal democracies start collapsing left and right as they appear to be doing so already, it will mostly be the fault of Israel's and the U.S.' warmongering and foreign policy.... the U.S. and Israel will have no one but themselves, their bigotry, and their inability for compromise and diplomacy, for their own fall. What comes after is anyone's guess... I truly do fear for our future once the U.S. and Israel make a not-so-quiet exit from their last camouflaged pseudo-democratic militancy and into an open totalitarian autocracy.

[PointOfViewGun]

Israel is in trouble precisely because they politically opted out of the two state solution after Sharon. Like I said, this has been building up for a long time, so it's not that they were intentionally planning on ethnic cleaning in 2003... but they enacted measures in 2003 that eventually led to the situation of 2024. The situation in Gaza has been unsustainable for a long time... I find it reaaallly hard to believe that the IDF did not know what Hamas were planning. There is also a whole video on this, with very strong evidence suggesting that not only did the IDF know that Hamas was planning an attack, but that they let it happen on purpose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mxfnya3ZRc&t=10s

Haven't seen it put so well together before with even more details than I knew. Great video.

[sumskilz]

People are still making videos in 2024 explaining all the evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. I watched the report you referenced, and the guy makes some interesting points. It’s one of those things only the Israelis themselves would ever be able to investigate and draw definitive conclusions from. The problem with any conspiracy allegations of that magnitude is the scale of people who would necessarily need to be complicit to pull it off, and an even greater number who would need to keep their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. So I’ll await the sufficient volume of evidence needed to make that likely.

Unsurprisingly, a lot is left out that video that makes most of the claims either questionable or unremarkable. For example, Hamas lulled Israeli intelligence into complacency by repeatedly acting out the first stages of the operation, so that when it actually happened, the Israelis at first assumed it was another drill. The actual reasons the IDF was so slow to react are well-known. Seemingly objective on the surface, Al Jazeera, which is effectively the state media of one of Hamas’s biggest sponsors, is about as objective as RT News is on the war in Ukraine. They’re just more sophisticated in their presentation.

That said, I wouldn’t completely rule out what is arguably criminal negligence at the highest political echelons due to their inordinate focus on the West Bank and their attempt to dismantle the Israeli high court check on their power.

As a Mediterranean, I have more Semitic blood than most Ashkenazi Jews...

Unless both your parents are Samaritan, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Israeli Druze, or Palestinian Christian, then you don’t have more ancestry from the Bronze Age Southern Levant than the average Ashkenazi Jew does, regardless of whether or not you think that should have any political relevance.

It shows your ignorance of the Middle East when you claim that the Arabs don't want Jews... they had been hosting Jews for over a thousand years in a much more amicable basis that the Western Christian nations ever did...

Jews, like other ethnoreligious minorities in the Middle East, were at best tolerated when they accepted their place as second-class citizens. In other words, if they “pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” as the Quran (9:29) states. Otherwise, they should be killed, according to the same verse. Jews were regularly subjected to abuse and occasionally slaughtered en masse. From time to time, talented individual Jews were seen as useful by Muslim monarchs, which allowed them to rise to some level of prominence. One such example is Yehosef ha-Nagid who became the vizier of Granada. Yehosef was accused of treason and executed by a Muslim mob who subsequently slaughtered the entire Jewish population of the city.

Bernard Lewis (The Jews of Islam 1987: 44–45) cites a translation of an Arabic poem that addresses the event:

Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them, the breach of faith would be to let them carry on.
They have violated our covenant with them, so how can you be held guilty against the violators?
How can they have any pact when we are obscure and they are prominent?
Now we are humble, beside them, as if we were wrong and they were right!

The covenant/pact referred to is the so-called Pact of Umar which enshrines in Islamic law the aforementioned verse of the Quran. Jews, like other dhimmi, are only allowed to live if they know their subservient place and act accordingly. The notion of Jewish sovereignty is an insult to Islam, which likewise carries over to some degree into nominally secular Arab nationalism.

Arab pogroms against Jews predate political Zionism and they took place all over North Africa and the Middle East. You only have to look at what happened to the Samaritans, the Yezidis, and the Armenians to see what happens to ethnoreligious minorities in the Middle East who don’t have enough power to sufficiently defend themselves. Most of the Samaritans were slaughtered in the 17th century. Now there are only about 900 of them left, most of whom are Israeli citizens.

[Siblesz]

Unless both your parents are Samaritan, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Israeli Druze, or Palestinian Christian, then you don’t have more ancestry from the Bronze Age Southern Levant than the average Ashkenazi Jew does, regardless of whether or not you think that should have any political relevance.

45% of the population of Israel is Ashkenazi, which if you know the truth of their DNA (including Netanyahu's DNA), have either nothing or very little to do with the original Arab Jews of the Levant. They are fake Jews. How about you discuss this with genetics and not with me:

"Overall, we estimate that most (>80%) Ashkenazi mtDNAs were assimilated within Europe. Few derive from a Near Eastern source, and despite the recent revival of the ‘Khazar hypothesis’16, virtually none are likely to have ancestry in the North Caucasus. Therefore, whereas on the male side there may have been a significant Near Eastern (and possibly east European/Caucasian) component in Ashkenazi ancestry, the maternal lineages mainly trace back to prehistoric Western Europe. These results emphasize the importance of recruitment of local women and conversion in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and represent a significant step in the detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

Jews, like other ethnoreligious minorities in the Middle East, were at best tolerated when they accepted their place as second-class citizens. In other words, if they “pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” as the Quran (9:29) states. Otherwise, they should be killed, according to the same verse. Jews were regularly subjected to abuse and occasionally slaughtered en masse. From time to time, talented individual Jews were seen as useful by Muslim monarchs, which allowed them to rise to some level of prominence. One such example is Yehosef ha-Nagid who became the vizier of Granada. Yehosef was accused of treason and executed by a Muslim mob who subsequently slaughtered the entire Jewish population of the city.

I am not arguing the case that the different Muslim rulers since the prophet Mohammed were not occasionally cruel to Jews (as they were as well occasionally to Christians or other members of Islamic sects), but that they were nicer to the Jews than the Christian overlords of Europe. As opposed to places like Spain, Portugal, France, or Italy, where most of the Jews of those countries were persecuted time and again quite harshly by the Catholic overlords, and where in some cases no Jews were left of the original Jewish communities that were residing in these countries, most of the Middle East had big Jewish populations until very recently. In fact, the largest population of Jews in the 1600s were found in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the preferred home of Jews who fled from persecution was not any country in Europe... it was actually the Ottoman Empire. Every single major city in the Ottoman Empire had a sizeable Jewish community. And some Jews reached high positions of state as well, and were allowed much more freedom than they could ever afford in any Western European country.

Quoting,
"During the Middle Ages, Jewish people under Muslim rule experienced tolerance and integration.[10]: 55  Some historians refer to this time period as the "Golden Age" for the Jews, as more opportunities became available to them.[10] In the context of day-to-day life, Abdel Fattah Ashour, a professor of medieval history at Cairo University, states that Jewish people found solace under Islamic rule during the Middle Ages.[10]: 56  The Muslim rule at times didn't fully enforce the Pact of Umar and the traditional Dhimmi status of Jews; i.e., the Jews sometimes, as in eleventh-century Granada, were not second-class citizens. Author Merlin Swartz referred to this time period as a new era for the Jews, stating that the attitude of tolerance led to Jewish integration into Arab-Islamic society.[10]: 56 "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...er_Muslim_rule

“ Iraq's Jewish community reached an apex in the 12th century, with 40,000 Jews, 28 synagogues, and ten yeshivot, or Rabbinic academies. Jews participated in commerce, artisanal labor and medicine. Under Mongol rule (1258–1335) Jewish physician Sa’ad Al-Dawla served as musharrif, or assistant director of the financial administration of Baghdad, as well as Chief Vizier of the Mongol Empire.”

"...in the Ottoman court and administration include Mehmed II's minister of Finance ("Defterdar") Hekim Yakup Pasa, his Portuguese physician Moses Hamon, Murad II's physician Is'hak Pasha, and Abraham de Castro, who was the master of the mint in Egypt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor...Ottoman_Empire

Again, the case not being that there is no history of cruelty or persecution against the Jews in the Middle East, but that not only did most Jewish communities survived to this day when they were hosted by the Muslim world, but that in some cases, they even thrived. Compare that to the plight of Jews in the West and the hostile/violent attitude that Western countries had to Jews... The history of for Jews in Europe was quite much more dramatic, and marked by subhuman treatment and continual abuse and systematic violence.

Quoting,
"Historian Mark R. Cohen proposes a comparative approach to understanding Jewish life under Islamic rule, noting that Jews in Islamic lands often experienced less physical violence than Jews under Western Christendom.[10]: 58  He posits that Muslims considered Jews less theologically threatening than Christians did, suggesting that the Christians wanted to establish a separate religious identity from Judaism, from which their faith split and diverged.[10]: 58  According to him, instances of persecution were occasional, more the exception than the rule,[10]: 59  and claims of systemic persecution at the hands of Muslim rulers are myths created to bolster political propaganda.[10]: 56  [dubious – discuss] The situation where Jews in the Muslim world both enjoyed cultural and economic prosperity at times, but were widely persecuted there at other times, was summarised by G. E. Von Grunebaum:"

In any case, the Jewish people owe more to the Muslim world than they would care to admit.... The fact of the matter is that most of the real Semitic Jews survived to this day in part because the Muslim World offered them a place in their Islamic societies since 700 A.D. Who knows how many Jews would be alive today if this was not the case. Probably a small fraction of real Semitic Jews would be left.

[sumskilz]

45% of the population of Israel is Ashkenazi, which if you know the truth of their DNA (including Netanyahu's DNA), have either nothing or very little to do with the original Arab Jews of the Levant. They are fake Jews. How about you discuss this with genetics and not with me:

"Overall, we estimate that most (>80%) Ashkenazi mtDNAs were assimilated within Europe. Few derive from a Near Eastern source, and despite the recent revival of the ‘Khazar hypothesis’16, virtually none are likely to have ancestry in the North Caucasus. Therefore, whereas on the male side there may have been a significant Near Eastern (and possibly east European/Caucasian) component in Ashkenazi ancestry, the maternal lineages mainly trace back to prehistoric Western Europe. These results emphasize the importance of recruitment of local women and conversion in the formation of Ashkenazi communities, and represent a significant step in the detailed reconstruction of Ashkenazi genealogical history."
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

Citing an mtDNA (Mitochondrial DNA) study on this issue is a good way to demonstrate that you don’t know anything about it. Mitochondrial DNA is only inherited from one’s mother. Therefore, unique mtDNA markers are useful for tracing direct mother to daughter lineages only, not genome-wide ancestry. Similarly, unique Y-chromosome markers are only useful for tracking direct father to son lineages, and the paternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews are from the Levant. Genome-wide, Ashkenazi Jews are about half Levantine and half (mostly Southern) European. At this point, the genetic evidence is clear that the founders of the Ashkenazi population were male Jews from the Levant, who mostly took Southern European wives in the first generation, and thereafter married fairly strictly within their own community.

Genome-wide, Ashkenazi Jews form a fairly tight cluster with other Jewish groups, Samaritans, and Druze:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some Ashkenazi Jews are pulled a bit toward the Caucasus populations due to small amounts of Eastern European admixture.

Here are some of the most important studies:

Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews

North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters

And this:

Finally, we show that the genomes of present-day groups geographically and historically linked to the Bronze Age Levant, including the great majority of present-day Jewish groups and Levantine Arabic-speaking groups, are consistent with having 50% or more of their ancestry from people related to groups who lived in the Bronze Age Levant and the Chalcolithic Zagros. ...

The results show that since the Bronze Age, an additional East-African-related component was added to the region (on average ∼10.6%, excluding Ethiopian Jews who harbor ∼80% East African component), as well as a European-related component (on average ∼8.7%, excluding Ashkenazi Jews who harbor a ∼41% European-related component). The East-African-related component is highest in Ethiopian Jews and North Africans (Moroccans and Egyptians). It exists in all Arabic-speaking populations (apart from the Druze).

The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant

In Figure SG.1 of the supplements PDF of that study, you can see that Ashkenazi Jews have a ~54% affinity with the samples from Bronze Age Megiddo.

The estimation that Israeli Jews are 45% Ashkenazi is based on surnames and immigration records not genetics, and that’s somewhat misleading because there are a lot of mixed marriages and on average non-Ashkenazi Jewish women have a lot more children, so over a few generations Ashkenazi ancestry probably makes up less than that. In any case, Ashkenazi Jews obviously aren’t “fake Jews” and the term “Arab Jews” is kind of silly, considering Jewish identity predates the concept of Arab as an ethnic identity. In Semitic languages, it originally just referred to anyone who lives in the wilderness/desert.

[Jozam]

Genome-wide, Ashkenazi Jews form a fairly tight cluster with other Jewish groups, Samaritans, and Druze:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Some Ashkenazi Jews are pulled a bit toward the Caucasus populations due to small amounts of Eastern European admixture.

Here are some of the most important studies:

Abraham's Children in the Genome Era: Major Jewish Diaspora Populations Comprise Distinct Genetic Clusters with Shared Middle Eastern Ancestry

The genome-wide structure of the Jewish people

No Evidence from Genome-Wide Data of a Khazar Origin for the Ashkenazi Jews

North African Jewish and non-Jewish populations form distinctive, orthogonal clusters

And this:

Finally, we show that the genomes of present-day groups geographically and historically linked to the Bronze Age Levant, including the great majority of present-day Jewish groups and Levantine Arabic-speaking groups, are consistent with having 50% or more of their ancestry from people related to groups who lived in the Bronze Age Levant and the Chalcolithic Zagros.

The Genomic History of the Bronze Age Southern Levant

Two comments.

Doesn't that refute Lord Thesaurian's claim that modern Levantine populations are recent "Arab invaders" and not indigenous Levantines who adopted an Arab identity?

According to what you've posted, Palestinian Christians have even more indigenous or "Bronze Age Levantine" ancestry than any Jewish population in the world today, but I doubt many Zionists would agree that Palestinian Christians have a more legitimate historical claim to the land than Jews. So it seems genetic evidence will be of limited utility in this debate.

[Ludicus]

As opposed to places like..Portugal... where most of the Jews of those countries were persecuted time and again quite harshly by the Catholic overlords,

Yes, yes, yes...and no.
If you are interested- Jewish Presences in Portugal: Between History and Memory

In fact, the largest population of Jews in the 1600s were found in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, the preferred home of Jews who fled from persecution was not any country in Europe... it was actually the Ottoman Empire.

Absolutely correct. And again, if you are interested, use goole translate. "Peregrinações Sefarditas — Intercâmbios Culturais: 1492-1919

And there is much more to say ...in fact, Jews from Portugal were welcomed, more than anywhere else, in Turkey. Letter smuggled from Rabby Sarfati of Constantinople to Lisbon: "Turkey is a land where nothing is lacking, and where all be well with you. Is not better to live under Muslems then under Christians? Here every man may dwell at peace beneath his own vine and his own fig tree"
The Sultan even offered to send ships to rescue them. The Sultan threatened to have anyone who armed the refugees from Portugal, executed. But, it is also true that the new Cristian merchants and bankers who left Lisbon mostly migrated to Antwerp.
--
Now, back to the subject. Prosecutor Khan wanted to send a clear message: no one is above the law. The fact that Israel was a victim of an attack on October 7, 2023, does not change the obligation of its leaders to respect international law regarding the protection of civilians, and in general, non-combatants. It is unacceptable, under any pretext, to respond with brutal and unlimited force against the civilian population of Gaza.
Furthermore, the fact that Prosecutor Karim Khan considers that arrest warrants should be issued for three senior Hamas officials and two senior Israeli officials does not support, on the factual or legal plane, the thesis of an unacceptable equivalence between Israel and Hamas. The ICC exercises its jurisdiction over individual crimes. What is at issue is a specific leadership of Israel, for acts that, in the prosecutor's view, may constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes. As we know, Israel is also responding to the jurisdiction of the ICJ as a state, following a complaint filed by South Africa, invoking the Genocide Convention.
Therefore, at this moment, there is no ICC accusation for the hypothetical individual crime of genocide by Netanyahu and Gallant. When Biden says that "What is happening in Gaza is not genocide " he cannot be referring to the ICC accusations, which are of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the Israeli civil and military leadership.
In the committee of experts that worked for months to substantiate the accusation and the request for the issuance of arrest warrants, there are well-known names such as Theodor Meron, former president of the ICTY. Meron is an American of Jewish origin, born in 1930 in Poland, and suffered Nazi persecution, later moving to Palestine. Certainly, no one would accuse him of anti-Semitism.
Prosecutor Khan's decision to announce the requests for the aforementioned arrest warrants, without waiting for their issuance, serves to respond to the pressures and threats that the ICC has already had the opportunity to denounce.

Bio-Judge Theodor Meron
Biden administration signals it will support push to hit ICC with sanctions

Blinken told the committee that while the “devil’s in the details”, the Biden administration would consider Republican proposals and “take it from there”.

The evolution of funding for the International Criminal Court : Budgets, donors and gender justice
[QUOTE]Published 31 Jan 2023

(…) States may also increase their funding of courts to discipline rivals. Even the United States is exploring how it can support ICC prosecutions in Ukraine. As of May 2022, bipartisan negotiations in Congress were examining how to provide financial assistance to the Court without violating existing US law designed to limit cooperation with the ICC (Goodman, Citation2022).
For its part, the ICC has the impossible task of delivering impartial justice while depending on capricious states to keep the lights on
As Mahmood Mamdani noted, the ICC “is dancing to the tune of Western States. Given Africa’s traumatic experience with the very same colonial powers that now, in effect, direct the ICC, it is an unfortunate case of déjà vu” (New African, Citation2012).
Tim Murithi (Citation2012) has been most explicit in indicting finance as a cause of the “African Criminal Court” critique.
While establishing intent would be extremely difficult—state parties do not announce that they seek to protect the interests of the United States, United Kingdom, or Israel in insisting on conservative budgets—the donations that state parties have attempted to earmark for the Ukraine investigation demonstrate that when state parties support investigations, they are able to back up their support with financing (Office of the Prosecutor, Citation2022).
Current attempts in the US Congress to find ways to fund the ICC, the jurisdiction of which the United States refuses to accept, also make the Court appear to be a tool of the wealthiest states in the international system (Goodman, Citation2022).

Sweden became the first EU country to recognize a Palestinian state in October 2014. As we now, around140 of the 193 UN member states have recognized Palestinian statehood since 1988.And now, Ireland, Spain and Norway to recognise Palestinian state

The foreign minister, Israel Katz, ordered the immediate return of the Israeli ambassadors to the three countries for consultations and warned that further “severe consequences” could follow.
“I am sending a clear message today: Israel will not be complacent against those who undermine its sovereignty and endanger its security,” he said.

Israel's threats should be taken seriously.

[sumskilz]

Doesn't that refute Lord Thesaurian's claim that modern Levantine populations are recent "Arab invaders" and not indigenous Levantines who adopted an Arab identity?

The most indigenous populations are Samaritans, Levantine Jews, Druze, and Levantine Christians (including Palestinian Christians), if indigeneity is defined by ancestry dating back to the Levant during the Bronze Age. The reason these groups are more indigenous by ancestry is that they have been mostly isolated from inward geneflow, through endogamy for the first three, and by semi-isolation for the Christians.

Muslim Palestinians are a lot more diverse in ancestry than the aforementioned groups, because they weren’t socially isolated from other North African and Middle Eastern Muslims. Some have Circassian ancestry and/or Egyptian ancestry, etc. They also have about 10% sub-Saharan African ancestry on average from the sex slave trade, because the offspring of a Muslim and a slave was considered free. They tend to cluster more with Saudis, Jordanians, and Yemeni Jews, which suggests they have a fair amount of Arabian ancestry, but Arabia was largely populated by migrations from the Levant during the Neolithic, so we’re already talking about similar populations. By their uniparental markers, it can be determined that they are also descended from local Christians, Samaritans, and Jews who converted to Islam. Unsurprisingly, you can be descended from both Arab invaders and indigenous Levantines, among others.

Palestinians often get misidentified as having small amounts of Ashkenazi ancestry when they take a 23andMe test. The best explanation for this is that they share very small IBD segments with Ashkenazi Jews dating back to before the diaspora. The 23andMe system just labels those segments as Ashkenazi because the vast majority of people in their database who have them are Ashkenazi.

[Ludicus]

Very interesting, I don't want to be rude, but I don't think the genetic history of the Middle East adds anything to the political discussion, unless I'm missing something.

[Legio_Italica]

You are quoting what the Palestinians think and were polled on as if the Israelis ever cared what the Palestinians thought about. Most Israelis, and especially those in power, are least concerned about what the Palestinians think and feel. They didn't care in 1948 when the Nakba happened, and they don't care now. What should have happened from the very beginning was a U.N. brokered forced ceasefire and peacekeeping mission in 1948 that would have ensured that Palestine and Israel were never divided as they were. Too late now.

I’m referencing what Palestinians think because they have agency. I am unable to find this period of recent history where they were secular democrats until the Israelis drove them into the arms of the jihadists. A minority may have been more disposed to permanent compromise or may still be, but the reason intifada keeps happening is because there has been consistent, broad support for it independently of any Israeli administration or policy. Justification is one thing, but there is no and hasn’t been a realistic scenario in which Palestine and Israel coexist peacefully side by side. Westerners may think so because liberals can’t grasp the concept of religious certainty and value money above anything else, but that’s exactly the sort of projection and hubris you’ve suggested will destroy us all, so Idk how that translates to the notion it would be realistic if not for Israeli machinations.

How else could the UN (read: America and Britain) enforcing a two state solution at any point constitute anything less than the world-ending imperialism you allege? It would be functionally indistinguishable from the external management of the Ottomans or the Romans or the Greeks before them, and today jihadists would be blowing up American and European peacekeepers in addition to Arab and Jewish civilians, while periodic uprisings of Jewish partisans are rounded up and executed for sedition in Jerusalem, just like old times.

As for the argument that the Israelis have been "pinned down", it's a hard argument to make after the 1967 war. Before the 1967 war, you could have perhaps argued that way, saying the poor Israelis are the victims of Arab aggression and what not. After 1967, especially after the U.S. started funding the Israelis military state, the Arab world was no longer dealing with Israel, but with Israel and the combined forces of the biggest military superpower in the World: the United States. You can see the graph of this process and the upward tick in funding from the U.S. since 1970 in the link below:
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts

The fact of the matter is that the Israelis held supreme political and military power over Palestine, and an impregnability afforded to it by its military alliance with the United States since the 1967 war. Hubris accounts more for the situation of today's Israel than anything else. To be sure, Israel before had a more progressive government that was much more sensible and directed more towards the aim of creating a secular state in Israel than of creating a religious Jewish state. But there was always the religious element lurking in the background. 1995 was the year when things turned downhill, after Rabin's assassination by Israeli right wing fanatics. Since then, instead of spending their political and military capital to ensure a long-term solution to the obvious crisis that they commenced in 1948, they instead slowly aimed to disentangle themselves from the two-state solution.

I don’t dispute the value of American support, but this is just another way of assigning all agency to the US and our allies. US military aid to Israel functions similarly to aid for any other country. To the relevant extent, it’s more of a stimulus for our own defense industry to replace old/surplus stocks we ship to our allies. Sure, that might make the recipient more powerful relative to its neighbors in a certain sense, but the idea this confers any degree of omnipotence is bad analysis. If it did, the now extinct government of Afghanistan would instead dominate central Asia, and Iran would be an Iraqi client state.

What it does indicate is varying degrees of dependence. Reading the article you cited, Israel is the most dependent of the sample, but that speaks to its weakness rather than its strength. Moreover, many Arab Muslim countries get the most significant portion of their arms imports from the US. Many of these countries host and support Islamic terrorism and Palestinian jihadist factions including Hamas, not to mention they have sought to destroy Israel during the period of time this aid was being doled out. Say what you will about American realpolitik, the support of the most powerful country does not confer relative invulnerability or any other superpowers on the recipients.

Sharon was for sure the guy who instigated that change, and he was already planning his moves well in advance of the second intifada. 911 of course only facilitated this backwards slide into a militant, apartheid state that Israel is now. The problem with the Israeli state and the people in power in Israel, and its military in particular, is that they are very trigger happy, they are very vengeful, and very unwilling to negotiate if the Palestinians don't behave like little blessed angels. And how would you be expected to behave in such a situation? If your homes were demolished, if you were exiled to live in poverty and then vilified as a terrorist if you attempt to resists the aggression that was enacted against you? If you were walled off, literally from the rest of the world and forced to live in subhuman standards?

I haven’t alleged that Palestinians ought to be liberal democrats. In fact I’ve argued this is nigh impossible because of how most of them view the world. In an environment where nothing less than the destruction of Israel is acceptable in the long term, and the worst case scenario is preferable to any compromise that might preclude it, the worst case scenario is exactly what we should expect to see and have seen. “Decolonizing” Gaza to the point of exhuming dead Jews, exactly the sort of neutral or anti-Israel proposition meant to solve the conflict, merely created the conditions for jihadists to use as a base of operations and launch further attacks. You are correct that few other people have had to live like Palestinians have for the last 20 years. No one else has to live like Israelis either, which is why I don’t have a bomb shelter in my house, let alone one that gets used regularly. The main difference is only Israel is expected to behave like little angels in response just because they are aligned with the US.

Again, that depends on your definition of what constitutes Jewish people first. If Ashkenazis can be included in that or not. As a Mediterranean, I have more Semitic blood than most Ashkenazi Jews... and yet you don't see me trying to build some fancy temple in Jerusalem... But that's another issue. In the end, religion is just a fancy word for conditioned brainwashing. There is no such thing as Jewish people, as there is no such things as "Arabs" or "Americans" or "Christians" or what not... there is just conditioned brainwashed monkeys thinking that they are something when they are nothing but brainwashed monkeys who can talk and have opposable thumbs.

I don’t see the purpose of arguing X identity is nothing more than a social construct, when the premise is supposed be the unique claim to victimhood conferred on Arab nationalists and Islamists by their membership in some nebulous oppressed class seeking to liberate mankind by destroying my country and its allies.

Wake me up when you realize that most Afghan people had NOTHING to do with 911, when the millions that were killed in Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Yemen, also had NOTHING to do with 911. Even the politicians of these latter mentioned countries didn't have anything to do with 9-11. You are clearly conditioned and brainwashed as hell, just by this quote alone. And actually pretty irrational.

I merely pointed out that no other nominally democratic country would react to 10/7 differently than Israel did, and strategic error or overcorrection is not evidence of a genocidal conspiracy. What’s irrational is to call this reality heartless and brainwashed.

It shows your ignorance of the Middle East when you claim that the Arabs don't want Jews... they had been hosting Jews for over a thousand years in a much more amicable basis that the Western Christian nations ever did...

And I'm sure that if the Israeli leaders and Arafat would have finally made a settlement, most Arabs would have gone along with it... the situation now is a bit different. Harder to argue for Arab leniency after what the Israelis have done. Not that I'm not against peace, forgiveness, and compassion... but I doubt that the hate will magically disappear after the atrocities committed.

Fact of the matter is that this story is much older than the creation of the state of Israel. You can look back at it as the existential fight between European civilization and the Arabs. This has been waged since the first Arab invasion of the Byzantine Empire... but you can even argue that this fight is even older than that, with the Persian/Hellenic wars... this is a conflict as old as time itself... the players are different, the interests are the same. Control over the wealth, the resource extraction, and the trade of the Middle East.

It’s a little weird to expound on the virtues of the Islamic system of ethnoreligious segregation as “hosting” when incendiary characterizations of Israeli policy on that basis is what has outraged you in the first place. It makes even less sense to argue the Arab nationalists are in the best moral or other position to manage the place when their desert cult largely displaced and replaced thousands of years of Mediterranean civilization through ethnic cleansing. Suffice to say none of this is as relevant as the modern history which shows the Arab factions will only come to accept the existence of Israel at all when they are repeatedly and resoundingly defeated by Israeli force of arms and the consistent support of the US.

Israel will end up being the worst ally the Western world ever committed to helping... Already European powers have formally distanced themselves from Israel. It's only the U.S. that is too blind by its ideology to see that Israel is unravelling basically every single tenet that the West had going for them. Human rights? Meh. Democracy? Only for the selected few. Equality? Only if you belong to our clique and if you abide by our brainwashing... and if you are not black. Or Muslim. But hey look! Gay marriage! Woopee! The West is so free... you'll have transgender soldiers bombing brown children in a third world country in a year or two. Or is that already the case?
https://time.com/4421400/transgender...aeli-army-idf/

It has been the case since 2015.

The actions of Israel and the U.S. government's supportive actions and its suppression of peaceful protests is making China's autocracy look like child's play.... And it's showing... soon with Trump being elected, the final nail in the coffin will come, and the world will throw away Western liberalism at the wayside. And unfortunately so in many ways... the advancement of human rights as a basic universal tenet of humanity is one of the few things that paradoxically we do have to give the Western world credit for, even if the U.S. has basically completely disregarded this tenet in its foreign policy and even domestic policy since the proclamation of the universal declaration of human rights by the U.N. in 1948.

In any case, if Western liberal democracies start collapsing left and right as they appear to be doing so already, it will mostly be the fault of Israel's and the U.S.' warmongering and foreign policy.... the U.S. and Israel will have no one but themselves, their bigotry, and their inability for compromise and diplomacy, for their own fall. What comes after is anyone's guess... I truly do fear for our future once the U.S. and Israel make a not-so-quiet exit from their last camouflaged pseudo-democratic militancy and into an open totalitarian autocracy.

Soviet propaganda was telling this story long before the modern state of Israel existed. It reveals more about how much time you might have spent in your current location than the nature of the war with Hamas. In any case, the context of all this talk about death by hypocrisy, world domination and humanity vs America&Co is clearer to me now, so at least there’s that. A broken clock is always right eventually, but that doesn’t make it good analysis. Assigning such grandiose implications to any ethnic conflict in the Middle East can be dismissed out of hand as pure conjecture and hyperbole.

Unsurprisingly, a lot is left out that video that makes most of the claims either questionable or unremarkable. For example, Hamas lulled Israeli intelligence into complacency by repeatedly acting out the first stages of the operation, so that when it actually happened, the Israelis at first assumed it was another drill.

I think I had heard about that, maybe from you. Naturally, the point of alleging it was an inside job is to shift responsibility from Hamas, but I at least hope I don’t find myself reviewing hot takes in the future about how Chinese drills around Taiwan prove the invasion was an American plot to take over the world all along. I suppose the real takeaway is that Israel will be blamed regardless of how aggressive or passive their policy is towards confronting Palestinian terrorism.