https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-united-states-iran-an...
It's really difficult to predict what would have happened had Trump not torn up the nuclear deal. That changed not only the political incentives in Tehran (between moderates, who favoured opening up and co-operating with the West, and hard-liners at the IRGC, who profit from a state of perpetual war), but also its regional posture and thus that of its proxies.
Agreed. But as a close friend -- who spent years living and working in the Middle East, including Gaza, and very well connected there -- pointed out to me, it's very hard to believe that Israel, with one of the most, if not the most, heavily guarded borders in the world, with arguably the best intelligence force in the world that is very embedded in the Palestinian Territories, did not know of the attack in advance, if not the details. Think about how much Israel had to gain from letting it happen and it becomes an easy decision.
Would note that there is a huge divide between violent resistance and terrorism, same as there is between counter-insurgency and war crimes.
There... is? Really?
Even for Palestinians, the PA’s rule was hardly a path to peace or progress. Billions in foreign aid were stolen by elites, elections were canceled, dissent was crushed, and everyday life was marked by both authoritarianism and insecurity. So while today’s Hamas reality is undeniably worse, pretending the old PA era was some kind of lost golden path to peace overlooks that it was already a dead end for both peoples.
“it became notorious for corruption, power struggles, and failing to deliver basic services”
Why do people keep bringing this up as if it matters? Every piece of land has had someone living on it for the last 10,000 years, how does it matter that some group lived there in like 500 bce then a jewish tribe came in and then later some other tribe came in and so on.
Think of how many Arab states exist.
Now think of how many Jewish states exist.
Israel is literally the only claim to land Jews have. Have you seen the size of Israel? It's not exactly gigantic
Its almost as if the Muslims conquered Israel to take the land for their own.
At some moment in time, the first human built a house there, then sometime later some other people showed up then sometime later the israeli tribe conquered the land then the romans conquered it and so on until some muslim tribe conquered it and then in 1950 or whenever the current people conquered it.
Which one of those groups is supposed to have some kind extra special entitlement to live there?
Not doubting you--I'm still learning about this conflict--but source?
So while I'm not closed to the idea that Netanyahu is a bad man. I find it hard to rationalize the actions of the people who were "backed into a corner"?
While I personally condemn Hamas's tactics and don't recognize their political legitimacy, Ukraine has billions in modern military equipment, including tanks and fighter planes. They have conventional military options Palestinians could only dream of.
Ukraine has also been supplied with intelligence, weapons and materiel from other countries in Europe, with which they also share land borders, as well as the United States. Palestinians can't even get food from Egypt, their immediate neighbor.
> there is not a single documented case where they [Ukraine] have attacked civilians or civilian infrastructure.
It must further be observed that Israel has likely killed over 100,000 civilians and miles of civilian infrastructure, even as they enjoy the upper hand economically and militarily. Whatever damage Hamas has done to Israel, Israel has retaliated far out of proportion to Palestinian civilians, in a way that is judged calculated to be genocidal.
It's funny because until they started winning, it was basically, "they're done in 3 days", now it's, oh they have billions in equipment etc.
Here's a question for you, why didn't Hamas have that? Why didn't the rest of the world send them more aid and weapons aid? Hmm strange.
>A 'United Ukraine' rally was attacked by pro-Russian separatists where Stones, petrol bombs and gunfire were exchanged. The pro-Ukraine protesters then moved to dismantle a pro-Russian protest camp in Kulykove Pole, causing some pro-Russian activists to barricade themselves in the nearby Trade Unions House. Shots were fired by both sides, and the pro-Ukraine protesters attempted to storm the building, which caught fire as the two groups threw petrol bombs at each other.
But also, that's forty-eight dead. The fiasco started after "a 'United Ukraine' rally was attacked by pro-Russian separatists." And this was criminality by a protest group (in predominantly pro-Russian territory, no less) not any party claiming to govern Ukraine.
Killing civilians is bad, killing soldiers invading your land is protected by international law.
October 7 is a tragic grain of sand in an desert of horrors the palestinian people suffered for nearly a century.
If you were in an "open air prison" (silly term, but ok), would your next move be to raid a peace and love festival and slaughter kids ? Just wondering?
Crimea contains multiple resorts! (And they've been selectively targeted when political and military elites are present [1].)
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/other/ukrainian-drones-strike...
Shortly after the election Hamas murdered the Fatah in Gaza and those elections were the last time the Palestinians had a say over who controls Gaza.
Nethanyahu only after the 7th of October decided that letting hamas rule Gaza is unacceptable, and this decision was only made after the terrible cost.
There Palestinians simply preferred hamas and terrorism over the PLO and relative peace in the one historical vote they were given. The situation might've changed since then. Making deals of two state solution when that second state could turn into another hamas state overnight would be an even bigger mistake.
The Palestinians can't barely make peace with themselves, between Fatah and hamas and agree to resolve their political conflicts in peace rather than armed conflict. When that's the case you can hardly blame Israel that they can't make peace. They need to commit to non violence between themselves before it's possible to commit to non violence with their enemies.
There's also a generation of Palestinians who's never even voted in Palestinian elections because there weren't elections in a decade.
Hamas won 44% of the vote and then, as you noted, they murdered their political opposition. For this, everybody in Gaza should suffer both under a terrorist group running their lives and Israel bombing them?
I only wish that the Palestinians would view hamas the same way Germans view Hitler. Imagine if instead Germans cried about how the allies split their land instead of taking responsibility for allowing Hitler to rise.
I feel like there might, in fact, be other ways to do that.
Here's the thing, we don't have to answer that to allow more food into Gaza. There is a credible argument to be made that flooding Gaza with food actually reduces Hamas's ability to recruit by devaluing something they offer their fighters.
You're quite literally showing your ass there.
And while I don't support Hamas at all (from my safe, comfortable chair in the West), I can understand why desperate people, whose land is increasingly stolen, whose rights are increasingly abused, and who cannot see their lives improve would turn (or be turned) to an organisation who would ultimately commit such abhorrent acts.
I can't. It doesn't work and makes you the bad guy. Even if just temporarily, that's enough for the other side to exploit. It's always been enough for the other side to exploit. Terrorism has a terrible track record for a reason.
That said, I challenge the premise. Palestinians didn't vote for October 7th. They didn't vote to suspend elections. They voted to kick Fatah out.
There are a lot of examples of really bad stuff happening to groups of people over the centuries, very few of them have resorted to October 7 levels of horror.
I'm not Jewish, but the soviets did some really horrific shit to our family, and we actually lost all our land, our whole livelihoods and strangely, no one in our family killed women or children over it. We never resulted to terrorism to deal with the issue. We did get our land back in the 90s though.
I can guarantee you that if the Palestinians / Hamas didn't do October 7, they would be in a much better position than they are now. 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy for them after that. Which is why Israel can basically make the plans. Most of the world just gave up.
And you act as if Oct 7th is the be all and end all of the story of the Palestine/Israel. "Oct 7th levels of horror". I won't excuse Hamas for what they did, but worse levels of horror have been inflicted on the Palestinian people. It's odd you ignore those levels or are ignorant to them. Just saying.
And you say 99% of people lost the ability to feel sympathy. I'll dispute that because the sane among us don't blame civilians for the actions of a paramilitary organisation gone wild. But let's pretend you're right. Isn't it ironic then that the world has so strongly turned against Israel now? (at least in the UN and your average people).
I'll contend that Israel may have destroyed Gaza, but in so doing they have destroyed their reputation and brought ill and hatred to their people now for a generation.
I'll defend Jews always as many have stood side by side with those against what's happening in Israel. But Israel has made their lives harder. Israel's actions have now made it much, much easier for the crazy people among us to do crazy things (c.f. today's Manchester, UK synagogue terrorist attack).
Yeah the over thirty thousand dead kids really shouldn't have "done" october 7, a response done by completely different people to decades of violence, it was so stupid of them.
This is vile and incredibly dehumanising if not straight up violently racist.
Source? Even Hamas claims fewer than 70,000 [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Gaza_war
The only thing gaza didn't have under Israeli occupation was democratic election. And guess what, they didn't have that after the occupation stopped either. They don't have it in most Arabic countries either.
He let Qatari cash find its way to Hamas.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel’s regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday’s Likud faction meeting said.
The prime minister also said that, “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...
The PA is a captured extension of the Israeli security state. The PA is standing by while Israeli settlers systematically kill, chase off and terrorize Palestinians on the West Bank. IOF soldiers will idly stand by while a settler just comes up with a (government-supplied) gun, shoots a 60 year old farmer and then complains to the Army that the locals are harassing them.
Furthermore, if you're dragging out the HN guidlines, it clearly states that comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Your comment was neither thoughtful nor substantive. Further furthermore, that document states that Hacker News should not be used for political or ideological battle - yet that is all that we see in these Israel posts that happen here every few days. The top of that document states that most stories about politics are Off-Topic. Yet HN happily drags many non-tech discussions about Israel on for over a thousand comments, whereas discussions about similar situations are completely absent from HN.
As the GP said, there needs to be an actual alternative.
Israel is here to stay. Gazans need to an accept that and try to progress towards civilized society. And Hamas definitely needs to go.
All of these can be true without using food as a weapon.
So no, what really happened was precisely the opposite of “eliminating all other avenues of Palestinian political expression.”
He undermined the two-state solution and Palestinian Authority. When you do this, you back people into a corner. There's no path to peacefully making progress on anything you care about. It also conveniently gives Netanyahu a boogeyman for his own political ends.
You might argue the PA was corrupt, etc. But that status quo was far better than what exists now.