Israel has given Hamas a proposal through Qatari and Egyptian mediators that includes up to two months of a pause in the fighting as part of a multi-phase deal that would include the release of all remaining hostages held in Gaza, two Israeli officials said.
Why it matters: While the proposal doesn’t include an agreement to end the war, it is the longest period of ceasefire that Israel has offered Hamas since the start of the war.
Driving the news: More than 130 hostages are still being held in Gaza. Israeli officials say several dozen hostages either died on October 7 or in the weeks since then.
Qatar is the primary source of external funding for Hamas. Israel allowed these funds through after having been pressured to do so - and they justified caving in to themselves that having two weak groups fighting each other instead of one strong group would be more advantageous to them. This was obviously a grave miscalculation, but if you want to blame anyone for the funding of Hamas, it’s the country that owns Al Jazeera.
No I blame the country that stole the land promised to the Palestinians by the British from them and has ever since made their lives a living hell, while doing everything in its power to stop them from improving their situation because it’s more beneficial for them to have a hostile enemy to justify their push for lebensraum.
You do know that Arab Palestinians rejected the last offer the British made through the UN? This would have netted them far more land than they’ll have ever a chance of ever controlling now. They wanted it all, without any Jews in it, and launched, with the help of the Arab “allies” (who would soon sideline them, e.g. during the Egyptian occupation of Gaza), to eliminate Israel and - in their words - drive the Jews into the sea. They failed and that’s how they ended up expelled, powerless and stateless. Several more attempts followed, every time without success, until the Arab nations grew tired of losing against the IDF.
This violent rejection of the UN plan does not justify the Nakba (which was also used as an excuse to expel almost 1 million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa - two wrongs don’t make a right) and the eternal conflict that came with it, but it would not have happened without the war the Arab side started.
Some asshole that has nothing to do with you brutally murdered my extended family. The rest of my family lived in your house 10 generations ago. I’ve talked to authorities that have nothing to do with you or your town, and they agree that we should cut your house by half for my family to move into it. If you disagree, I’ll call you unreasonable and antagonistic to diplomacy, and will occupy half your house using firearms anyway. If you dare to fight back, I’ll shoot without mercy and take the kitchen too.
International politics can’t be broken down using simplistic analogies. That’s not how things work.
The ethics of the situation are the same: an ethnic group was victimized by the Nazis and some wealthy assholes decided an unrelated, colonized people would pay reparations with their own lands. The only ethical way for Jews to move into Palestine was by immigrating, coexisting with the locals and buying land, but coexisting with Muslims wasn’t in the plans of supremacists. They wanted a settler state and weren’t going to take a ‘no’ for an answer, and you’re deluded to claim Palestinians had any sort of freedom in that situation.
Well there sure is an ethical way now. Gaza gave up their future to kill 1,200 civilians. Hope it was worth it for them.
Why should they settle for half their land just because some genocidal fucks invaded?
Would you give up half your country to an invading force?
Because it’s not an invading force and the entire country is not Palestinians and it never was. The other side has always been there and for much longer. Dig anywhere and sooner or later, you’ll find something ancient with Hebrew writing on it - Hamas would know, because they make a killing from any ancient artifacts they come across when they are digging their tunnels. Modern Palestinians, while sharing a common ancestry with Jews, are the much later product of the often ignored Arab colonization of the Middle East.
Yes, there was a massive influx of Jews into Palestine, primarily directly after WW2, because they didn’t feel safe anywhere else after they realized that most of their neighbors were happy to either look the other way or betray them outright when the Nazis came for them. Do you really blame these people for wanting their own state where they could be the masters of their own fate and not be under the boots or at best a temporarily tolerated minority that has to think twice about showing their identity in public ever again? There are 49 Muslim-majority nations on this planet, there are 22 Arab majority countries, but only a single tiny one where Jews aren’t a minority. Why is this small spec of land such a big problem?
It is.
Just because there were Jewish people there in the past does not change that the people who came over before WW1 and started killing people in the region because they believed they had a god given right to land they’d never set foot on before in their lifetime are the ones the state of Israel was founded and is largely populated by.
There were literal Israelis who tried to form an alliance and work with Nazi Germany DURING WW2 because they hated the British for not giving them the country more than they hated the people actively killing them. Those same people went on to work in all areas of the Israeli government post WW2 and even held prominent positions such as prime minister while still saying Hitler did nothing wrong. It’s a fucked country to it’s core.
Do you also disagree with First Nations or Aboriginal peoples who fought against their colonisers? Should they have been happy with being rounded up and forced into scraps of their country?
Incorrect. The Aliyah movement to return to the land of Israel was primarily secular communists, and they purchased the land they moved to under the Ottoman and British mandate - they didn’t conquer it by force. Most Israelis are of Judean/MENA descent, not European.
750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel. There are now millions of them due to incredibly high birth rates, all of them recognized by the UN as refugees (which is unique to Palestinians). The vast majority of these people never set foot on the land they claim to be theirs in their lifetime. Using your own logic, does this mean it’s not theirs either?
I have no idea what you are talking about. There’s the Haavara Agreement from 1933, which enabled the move of tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi Germany to Palestine before the war (but they lost all of their possessions and it was hardly voluntary). There was most certainly absolutely nothing during WW2 - and no Jew ever said that Hitler did nothing wrong nor was there an Israeli prime minister involved in any of this. What a ridiculous story.
On the other hand, there were literally Palestinians who actually did form an alliance with the Nazis during WW2, encouraging them to push through with the Holocaust and wishing that the Arab world would do the same to their Jews. These people were the Palestinian leadership for decades after the war.
There are legitimate and illegitimate forms of resistance. What Palestinian terrorists are doing is not legitimate. They are just oppressors of the Palestine people who wish to amass more power and satisfy their cruelty. There is no noble cause here. Hamas are indistinguishable from the Islamic State in their methods and their goals. Have you ever looked into their actual vision for Palestine, what they want to do with it? They want to create an Islamic caliphate, based on shariah rules and from there on out launch a global Islamist conquest. No rights for women, no rights for any non-Muslim, guaranteed death for any LGBTQ+ person or anyone who doesn’t agree with their rule.