The Israeli rescue service Zaka says its paramedics removed more than 260 bodies from a music festival that came under attack by Hamas militants.
The total figure of bodies found is expected to be higher, as other paramedic teams were also working in the area and Zaka added that the bodies “haven’t all been collected yet”.
Early on Saturday morning, Hamas targeted Nova music festival, a techno rave in the desert near the border with Gaza.
Videos shared on social media and by Israeli news outlets showed dozens of festival-goers running through an open field as gunshots rang out. Many hid in nearby fruit orchards or were gunned down as they fled.
This is only true because Israel is good at stopping attacks, not because Hamas isn’t trying.
Graph intentional attacks targeted at civilians and you’ll get a very different picture. Personally, if someone tried to murder my family but failed, I wouldn’t find them blameless just because they didn’t succeed.
Also missing from the picture is that for decades Hamas has been using Palestinian civilians as human shields, building bombs and rockets in the houses where children live, shooting rockets from inside schools and hospitals.
Hamas gave Israel the choice of letting it’s own children die, and not shooting back, or shooting back and Knowing that no matter how hard they tried (and they try pretty fucking hard) that they wouldn’t be able to avoid civilian deaths.
And ALL of this was because Hamas was banking on people in the west doing exactly what this gullible sap is doing: assuming that Israel is the monster.
Hmm well maybe, but is there a part of this (taken from another comment) that you reject as untrue?
I don’t disagree with any of that.
The important context is that the war in which Israel captured all that territory was a war where all of Israel’s neighbors were the aggressors.
And Israel quickly traded back land for peace, as was the case with Egypt.
And the neighboring Arab states DELIBERATELY created the Palestinian refugee crisis by refusing to take in all their former countrymen, believing that the humanitarian crisis was good politics for them, and would be a nightmare for Israel. (Correct on both counts).
I also agree that the settlements are a dick move, and purely antagonistic.
I also think Israel is using them as a bargaining chip.
I think in the Oslo Accords, Israel offered literally everything it could, and when that wasn’t enough, they leaned hard into creating settlements, a new bargaining chip, which someday they could add to future negotiations.
I also think that over time the Palestinians’ bargaining position has weakened.
Now that Israel has a security fence, the iron dome, and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, the daily threat of terrorism has been reduced to an unfortunate but livable state of existence. (This week excluded obviously)
Frankly at this point Israelis can wait out the Palestinians indefinitely, and I’m betting that when this current state of War is over, Israel is going to be in the business of securing themselves even more tightly.
I doubt if they’ll be inclined to ever offer Palestinians a peace deal as generous is the one they offered during the Oslo Accords.
So if we agree that the settlements are (today) antagonistic and generally viewed as illegal, and if our goal is to remove the motivation for people to kill each other - maybe we should couch this in terms of whether the settlements belong there instead of in terms of who has a stronger “bargaining position” like we’re haggling over a horse or something.
Because it certainly looks to me like the stronger party provoking the weaker party so they have a reason they can point to for smashing them under their heel.
Like when a cop provokes someone’s fight or flight response so they can justify using more force and/or a “resisting arrest” charge.
Maybe they should try letting the Palestinians live in peace sometime, and see how that does at stopping the attacks.
Israel had occupied Gaza like it does the West Bank until 2005 when it withdrew, in hopes that it would lead to peace.
It was very shortly followed by a barrage of rocket attacks and the current blockade was enacted.
So, that has been tried. It wasn’t very effective.
Honest question because maybe what I think is the answer is not actually the answer.
How much land does Israel currently occupy that is outside the bounds of what was originally agreed as belonging to them?
The 1967 borders are the most recent broadly recognized boundaries. After the Six Days War, Israel gained control of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and Gaza.
As of today, East Jerusalem is a diverse but uneasy mix of Jews and Palestinians. Israel maintains that a unified Jerusalem is its capital, and this is the de facto situation. According to general peace plans, an eventual Palestinian state is meant to have East Jerusalem as its capital, so this is an obvious conflict point.
The West Bank is divided into three areas: A - administered by the Palestinian Authority, B - jointly administered by the PA and Israel, and C - administered by Israel. Israel has been increasingly building more and more settlements within Area C, which are widely recognized as illegal and being incredibly counter-productive towards peace. The Israelis who move there are often extremely nationalistic and often commit violence against the Palestinians. The IDF routinely conducts operations throughout all areas in order to ostensibly maintain security, though they’ll always prioritize Israeli lives over Palestinians.
The naive and now utterly hopeless idealistic peace plan is the creation of a Palestinian state consisting of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem, with the city being managed by a bi-national coalition of both governments. Israeli settlements within the West Bank would be either abandoned or annexed into Israel with an equal amount of land being swapped from Israel to Palestine. Some kind of stable passage would be created to connect Gaza and the West Bank.
One issue is that a not-small portion of Israelis believe themselves to be entitled to the entire land by virtue of religion, and see continued settlement of the West Bank as furthering this goal. These people suck and aren’t that much better than Hamas, though they’re not quite as barbaric. The much harder issue is that no Israeli will never allow this solution to happen unless Israel’s security is guaranteed, and there is simply zero trust in that, especially now. Israel will not allow itself to sit next to a state run by terrorists that are hell-bent on killing every Jew in the country.
On the matter of international law, Israel justifies its actions by accurately stating that no internationally recognized state lays claim to the West Bank - Jordan withdrew all claims in 1967 - and as such they have a right to settle it. Essentially no other countries have recognized that claim, and there has always been a general agreement that the West Bank will form the basis of a future Palestinian state. Israel certainly hasn’t acted in a way that furthers this, but as I said before, its red line is that it will not tolerate security threats to its existence. Militant Palestinian groups attacking Israel only makes peace more and more impossible.
So long as many Palestinians see the mere existence every Jew in Israel as a crime and a target, Israel will see every Palestinian as a potential threat, and the fact of the matter is that Israel holds the guns.
Kbin refuses to let me expand your comment to see anything after the sentence beginning with “the naive and now utterly…”
But this isn’t doing much to make me more sympathetic to the Israeli plight, and is more or less what I thought. I assumed I must have been wrong or misinformed, but you seem to have confirmed I really shouldn’t have much sympathy for Israel overall, even if I agree this attack on a music festival seems hard to specifically defend.
Weird, I’m also from Kbin. Also unfortunate, given that the rest contains a lot more context.
Ultimately though, I think the desire to label one side and fundamentally right and the other wrong is simply far too simplistic to be useful. Anyone interested in peace will criticize both sides as neither has done very much to move towards peace; Israel is just a lot better at protecting its citizens from harm. But fundamentally, peace will be impossible so long as Israel’s safety is threatened, and any acts that threaten that only make peace impossible.
Apologies I missed this reply yesterday.
It happens from time to time, I’m not sure why. I tried turning off KES previously to see if it was somehow misbehaving, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.
I did go read the rest this morning on lemmy directly.
I see your points, but coming at it from the angle of what do we do today, I still come away feeling like the obvious answer (I say that recognizing this war is thousands of years old and no such thing will happen) is for Israel to stop these settlements.
Until they do, Palestinians have a pretty valid claim that Israel is the instigator and these actions (or, one would hope, more focused actions) are required to preserve their homes and community.
Pull back the settlements, take whatever measures are deemed necessary to secure the border, and leave them the fuck alone. The whole angle about no one else claiming that land feels pretextual to me, and feeds my perception that Israel is just ratcheting up the pressure to provoke the Palestinians so they can claim they are justified when the level the place by actions like OP.
I’m not by any means raging at you, I appreciate the explanation, but it sure feels to me like a situation where it’s easy to paint the Palestinians with a broad brush, but also hard to understand how anyone thinks what Israel is doing here is right.
Without a doubt, I think the settlements are abhorrent and incredibly counter-productive to peace. They’re not recognized by literally any other country for that express reason.
However, that does not justify the actions that took place over the weekend. If the aim was military resistance to Israel and a desire to assert independence, there are plenty of military targets surrounding Gaza that could have been attacked. Instead, they mostly went into civilian settings and simply murdered as many people as possible, while also raping and kidnapping many. I just read a report about babies being decapitated. You’ve probably already heard about the plans to livestream the executions of hostages.
These actions cannot be defended or justified, ever. They can be explained, and I do think it’s not wrong to say that some of Israel’s actions have contributed towards the environment decaying so much that they became more possible (though it’s beyond tactless to say if that’s your first thought in the face of the events). But it is possible to analyze the context of these events while still condemning them, which is something many many progressives have utterly failed to do. I saw just this morning someone I’d considered a friend talk about how it should be impossible to support Palestinians without supporting Hamas and all actions they deem necessary, and that any attempts to talk about nuance are a deliberate western strategy to distract.
Given what has happened, which was, again, a deliberate attempt to kill as many Israeli citizens as possible, I do think Israel is justified in taking steps to ensure that this never happens again, and it’s tragic that many innocent people are going to suffer because of that. However, Hamas could at any time give up hostages and de-militarize, and there would be no further bloodshed, whereas if Israel laid down arms, it would be a second Holocaust, as evidenced by this past weekend.
I think my ultimate position, which I’ve come to realize is not as universal as I thought, is that I believe there is no cause so righteous that it can ever justify the murder, kidnapping, and rape of innocent civilians. You can explain and understand the context that leads to the build-up of anger and resentment that ultimately causes such a violent outburst - and I dearly hope Israel does take valuable lessons moving forward, though I’d be surprised - but those actions can never be accepted, and retaliation to ensure that they do not re-occur is justified.