For Hamas the cause is more important than the people. They were slowly losing support, now after the attack and Israel's counter attack Hamas support is stronger than ever in Gaza, the West bank, the wider Arab world, and even the West.
After all this is over the lost foot soldiers will be easily replaced by eager recruits, and they will have plenty of funding from actors who like seeing Israels international reputation damaged like this.
I think Hamas in its curent form is finished. It may appear it is receiving international support but it’s probably a reaction towards Israel’s indiscriminate harm to civilian Gazans. Lots of children dead, lots and lots. An act of terrorism met with a tenfold response in terrorism and violence is needless and cannot be condoned. Not that Israel doesn’t have a right to defent itself, it surely does but the current right wing leadership doesn’t shy away from seizing as much land and kicking out palestinians away from their lands, many times simply in a retaliatory fashion. No amount of excuses justify that. If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice? I’d love to see that scenario. If something changes with Palestinians something must also change with Israelis too.
> If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice? I’d love to see that scenario.
That's easy -- just take a look at the West Bank. The response to Palestinian "pacifism" (or whatever we can call what is happening in the West Bank) is apartheid, continuous seizure of land and colonization, nightly raids, military law for civilians and children for everything and anything, constant terrorist attacks by extremist settlers protected by IDF, etc.
Its a thorny issue so I will point out that this is the exact line of argument of Israel for their behaviour.
In 2005 they left their settlements in Gaza, it was met with the death of democracy, the establishment of a terror group as the local goverment and 18 years of endless escalations of violence.
In the 90s Israel voted for a socialist leader who offered so much to Israel that 80% of Israel thought he had offered too much. Palestine denied the 2 state solution. The Israeli leader was killed by local far right terrorists. And after Palestine stepped out of the talks they launched the 2nd intifada which was the largest amount of violence since 1967 war.
Israel 20 year decline into far right goverments comes on the back of what seemed to them genuine efforts for peace, genuine offers (some over gracious, despite Palestinians feeling it wasnt enough) and the removal from the palestinian side to come to the table.
Since the Camp David accords Israel has had 3 peace offers, Palestine did not even come to the table for 2 of them.
As appaling as the current state of settlements in the west bank is, and the far right members of goverment. Israel had 5 elections 2 years ago and the far right only won by a marginal difference. The worst Israeli goverment ever is an unsustainable allience after 5 elections of deadlock. The political will in Israel has always been peace.
> The Israeli leader was killed by local far right terrorists.
Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
[1]
> On October 5, the day the Knesset had endorsed Oslo II by a majority of one, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem. The leaders of the opposition were on the grandstand while the demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in an SS uniform. Netanyahu set the tone with an inflammatory speech. "Today the surrender agreement called Oslo II was placed before the Knesset," he said. "The Jewish majority of the State of Israel did not approve this agreement. We shall fight it and we shall bring down the government."
Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
> after Palestine stepped out of the talks they launched the 2nd intifada
Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
> The political will in Israel has always been peace.
When have hey ever accepted a two state solution? They have denied everyone since 1947, in Oslo they agreed that resolution 338 (the 1967 borders) should be the basis for negotiation but Arafat walked out of Camp David despite what many Palestinians considered favorable terms and what most Israeli's considered an over generous offer.
> Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
His rise to power happened 2 years after though, after an entire year of Hamas suicide bombings. He was not ahead in the polls until the security situation went completely tits up.
If a crazy person kills the president (like in Japan 2 years ago, or in America with JFK) there is no sudden far right take over. If a country is attacked by its neighbour, people who promise security tend to do well in the polls.
> Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
The settlements are a complicated subject. There are some legitimate reasons for some of them, and the reality of the two state solution is that land swaps will happen.
The 1967 war ended in 6 days and ended with incredibly awkward borders. It is not unnatural that Israel and Palestine wrestle for borders that make more sense geographically. (Belgium and Germany did this post ww2 and now most of their border is forest or rivers, mountains. The usual suspects for national borders).
There are however also religious settlements, formed by crazy people based on ridiculous readings of the torah. All of those should be burned to the ground with every person on them jailed, and the leader of the movement who I shall not named probably put in a cross due to her devotion to religious literature.
Talking about settlements as a whole makes the conversation too broad and unfocused, and I doubt all military outposts that exist will be dismantled when peace is achieved.
> Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
Its pretty cool how people have no agency. Lets ignore that the temple mount is more holy to the jews than to muslims. And lets act like a far right agitator is purposefully going to somewhere holy.
Imagine Trump goes to the vaticam. Do you think that the pope would use a loud speaker to tell people to attack him Abu Qteish did?
Or that Italians would suicide bomb around american civilians for the next 3 years?
Like even if we take Ariel visit as provacation, even if we hold him repsonsible for the horrible mismanagement of the police during his interior minister time, we hold him responsible for every death occured in every over trigger happy incident. Why fall for the bait? Why kill innocent people who are not responsible for his actions?
Also if we are gonna use the word fascist, I think its important to note the different countries and structures between Israel and lets say Gaza. Fascism purges "the other", there are no minorities in Gaza. Israel has 20% arab population and 7% other (mostly chrristians). Fascism promotes youth and violence as means of authority. Gaza has the youngest population in the world, and a military dictatorship as a goverment. A big part of fascism is social hierarchy, in the case of Gaza a strong men over women duplicity is seen across all civilian and political life. And finally an important aspect of fascism is the idea of forming an empire. This tracks with two biggest groups in Gaza having ideas about a pan arabic caliphate.
> Liar. [1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall
To begin with "the political will" usually refers to the people
here is some of the data from 03 - 12 during a series of escalations of violence the Israeli opinion was still very much in favour of a two state solution. This has been the case since 1947.
Now in response to the book. I will say that I love the work the new Historians are doing but Shlaim is with Benny Morris one of the modern historians where its very easy to see their ideology through their work.
and here is Benny Morris (who despite being racist towards arabs recently has written and opened most of the secrets about the formation of Israel) talking about the blind spots of the Iron Wall.
Another thing to point out is that Shailm tends to ignore things that are inconvinient. For example in that interview he emphasises the push from Egypt to normalise relationships with Israel in the 50s. He somehow forgets that the Egyptian push for the 1947 was crazy. Azzam Pasha leader of the arab league said " it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades". With the King Farrouk later repeating the sentiment saying "the jews will be expelled from Palestine". So that same state "reaching out" less than 5 years later is pretty throny and it seems irresponsible to call that Israel rejecting peace, when at the time the Suez Crisis was bubbling and Egypt had tons of troops in Gaza.
> It's quite strange to write off fully half the population of Israel
I am not trying to, the decline towards right wing politics has been slow but never ending since the early 2000s. But its important to note that 20% of the Israeli population is arab israeli and their voices also matter. The 50% is usually the 50% of Israeli jews not of all Israelis.
> including an assassination coup
If you meant the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, I did mention it in my comment
> directly funding Hamas asa weapon again Fatah/ the West Bank
I would not give intentions to actions taken by political actors in Israel. I was just pointing out that the narrative of "if Palestine does not fight back they get settlements" is the same as "if the IDF is not strong then Palestine will vote for hamas and more oct 7th's".
The blockade of money going to gaza was criticised as well before the money was allowed to reach Hamas. Building a narrative against Israel is fairly easy regardless of which actions they take, so I understand why the "they arm hamas to destabilise Fatah" took hold, but the main source for it is an unsourced quote that netanyahu was claimed to have said at a private Likuud meeting. It is entirely possible he did say it, and it would fit with some of the intentions of some of the more aggresive members of his cabinet. But there is no proof this was not just them caving to the international pressure they suffered post 2011 blockade which Obama heavily criticised as well as europe as being excessive etc.
> as being not responsible for their own actions.
I am pointing out narratives, nothing else. In the same way pointing out West Bank settlements is not justifying oct 7th, pointing out the fact that the removal of them in Gaza was met with the voting in of Hamas does not justify any of the aggresive policies in the west bank and east jerusalem.
Since 1947 both countries have created 2 narratives, now both are so divorced from each other that most of the time they talk past each other. In most conflicts there is 1 narrative, in some there is 2 for a bit and then a winner gets to write their side. In this conflict for the past 70 years the two stories have grown in a myriad of complicated ways
> An act of terrorism met with a tenfold response in terrorism and violence is needless and cannot be condoned.
I don't think this is an accurate description. It wasn't "an act of terrorism". It was an invasion and jointly, a rocket attack, by a neighboring semi-state with a military, that has stated it will invade over and over again. And of course, the capture of 250 hostages.
This isn't a kind of one-off terror attack that was met with revenge for the sake of it. For the months after the initial invasion, Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel, essentially shutting down the country for a few weeks, until they were forced to stop. Hamas militants were literally running around inside of Israel for two days.
No nation on Earth could afford to effectively cease functioning as rockets rained down on it, and as other parties like Hezbollah were threatening to widen the conflict to a far more serious attack as well.
> If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice?
I can't answer that, but it's worth noting that during the 1990s there was a sizeable Israeli left that was pushing for peace, there were talks, there were accords that gave the Palestinians self-governance in the West Bank, etc. This was met with terrorism, with the express purpose of stopping the peace process.
It's also worth noting that Israel completely left Gaza in 2005, removing all its settlements there and the soldiers there. Gaza then elected Hamas, which immediately started shooting rockets at Israel.
So while I highly dislike Israel's right-wing government and extremism, and highly dislike the settlements, I don't think it's accurate to say that the terrorism is helping protect against anything. It comes from a worldview in which Israel will eventually be completely destroyed and the Palestinian will take over all the land.
Look, it's a complicated issue. There is some validity to it being "their land", but... even if you don't think the historical connection of Jews to the land means anything, my father was born in Israel. I was born here. My kids were born here. Do we not have any connection to the land at this point? If Hamas's goal of "going back home" (as you put it) is met, what should happen to us?
Figure out a way to live together and not shoot at each other for 80+ years. Since I have been a baby it has been a conflict and blame throwing around, please don't kill anymore people, any people on any side!
The only way to achieve that is a two-state solution, where each populace has its own state. The root problem is that there has never been a Palestinian leadership willing or capable of agreeing to a deal (despite multiple efforts), or at least not at the same time as an Israeli leadership existed that could make it possible. And given the failures and continued violence (and demographics!), the Israeli left has lost almost all power, and Israel's right-wing has ruled for most of the last 15 years, and is at best, not contributing to peace. (And I'd say much worse - very actively preventing peace!)
Approximately zero Israelis have a connection to Israel that wasn't created by immigration, invasion, and conquer in the last 100 years, vs centuries of continuous inhabitation by Palestinians.
A great question, but not very relevant anymore. Let's set aside for a minute whether Israel should have been founded in that land in 1948 - it was founded there, and it's been 75 years. There are 9 million Israelis (or 7 million Jews if you want to break it down that way) that live there now. I was born here, my father was born here, my son was born here. Do I have less connection to the land, right now, than the million Gazans who are under the age of 18 and have never lived here? More importantly, what do you propose? That all 7 million Jews in Israel be relocated somewhere else? Where? Who would pay for moving an entire country elsewhere?
As for the question itself of why the Israeli state should be in Palestine, like I said, while I think it's relevant, it is a good question. Personally, I would've chosen to locate it elsewhere, but then I don't really care about religion or sentimentality "for the land" or anything like that. Practically, I don't think Jews really had another place to go - remember, most of the Jews of Israel were either fleeing Europe before the Holocaust, or were the survivors of the Holocaust, or were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab countries. It's not like they had anywhere else to go.
That said, I do question your premise:
> Approximately zero Israelis have a connection to Israel that wasn't created by immigration, invasion, and conquer in the last 100 years.
This is very wrong. For one thing, you're ignoring the 20% of Israelis that are Arabs/Palestinians, but I'll assume you meant the Jewish ones. There has been continuous Jewish habitation of Palestine for literally 2,000, since the Jews were forced out. If you look at the demographic history of Palestine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...), you can see that roughly 100 years ago, 10% of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish. And IIRC, all of them got there by completely legal immigration, not "invasion" or "conquest".
> Practically, I don't think Jews really had another place to go - remember, most of the Jews of Israel were either fleeing Europe before the Holocaust, or were the survivors of the Holocaust, or were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab countries. It's not like they had anywhere else to go.
Not true. One proposal was the Kimberly plan, which received strong push back from proponents of Zionism that simply refused to settle for anything less than Palestine. Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.
> This is very wrong. For one thing, you're ignoring the 20% of Israelis that are Arabs/Palestinians, but I'll assume you meant the Jewish ones. There has been continuous Jewish habitation of Palestine for literally 2,000, since the Jews were forced out
Not the person you're responding to, but personally I'd say that's largely irrelevant. Any perceived connection to a land that anyone has is something learnt from cultural context. There's nothing that empirically literary connects people to an arbitrarily divided portion of land. Countries are an abstractional fiction. Religions and cultures build stories upon these abstractions with varying levels of historic accuracy. Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.
A small portion of the perceived connection to an area is obviously related to literal experience and exposure to said area. The fact that the is often mentally tied to back to an abstraction like a "country" implies that these experiences are secondary to the broader cultural stories.
In terms of immediate (non-cultural) connection, it seems pretty accurate to say that immigration and conflict is going to be a significant factor for everyone currently in Israel. Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area (having ancestors that lived there doesn't historically doesn't preclude them or their parents from being impacted by the creation of modern day Israel)
> Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.
Maybe. I honestly don't know enough to say one way or the other, though I do know enough to say that most countries closed their doors to Jews during the Holocaust specifically, and I'd be rather astounded to discover a country that was willing to absorb millions of new people. E.g. I don't know anything about the Kimberly
plan except reading Wikipedia just now, but it seems like it was vetoed by the Australian government? Ironically, there are signs from European countries in the 1930s telling the Jews to "go back to Palestine".
> Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but I couldn't care less about this specific land itself. I wouldn't have minded Israel being located somewhere else.
I do live here though, that's my connection to the land, as well as the connection that 9m other Israelis have to the land. We're not going anywhere.
(And neither are the Palestinians! If both sides just accepted the obvious reality that neither side is going to disappear, we could just divide up the land and sign a peace treaty already.)
> Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area
But, if I'm understanding you correctly... that's true of literally everyone everywhere. Everyone is a descendent of someone who at some point came to that land, and in many cases that's even fairly recent. Including many (though not all) Palestinians.
> The only way to achieve that is a two-state solution, where each populace has its own state.
Or the Tel Aviv regime could just follow the steps of South Africa and end apartheid. The regime can't claim in good faith support for a two-state solution while pumping the palestinian territories in the west bank full of settlers, over 700 thousand of them, so far. There's even a video of Netanyahu boasting on how he sabotaged the Oslo Accords and the prospects for a two-state solution. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqCWvi-nFo
Well I completely agree with you about the fact that Israel hasn't been doing anything to work towards a two-state solution for many years, and has been doing plenty to work against peace.
That said...
> Or the Tel Aviv regime could just follow the steps of South Africa and end apartheid.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't agree with the characterization of what's happening as apartheid, but semantics aside, how is that different from me saying I think we need a two-state solution? Do you think Israel needs to unilaterally go for a two-state solution? How, by removing all its forces and all settlements from the West Bank?
Cause that's what Israel did in Gaza, and we see how well that went. Everyone in Israel assumes, probably correctly, that if we ever did that in the West Bank, we would be viciously attacked in a manner that's 100 times worse than October 7th within years.
> If they couldn't stop the settlements, there was no self-governance.
Forgot absolute terms for a minute. The Oslo accords gave Palestinians more self governance than they had before. It was a step in the right direction.
The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state, and I hope that we reach an agreement in which the Palestinians do get statehood, but we're not gong to get there by insisting that steps in the right direction are meaningless, and certainly not by increasing the amount of terror attacks to prevent the peace process.
> Whereas Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir were just peace loving dudes right?
No, of course not. They were terrible terrorists. In the case of Yigal Amir, he's sitting in jail where he belongs (Baruch Goldstein was beaten to death in the place he was attacking). Luckily Goldstein didn't derail the peace process, though Amir probably did.
> The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state
Yes, it is, and it is recognized by much of the world as such (its a state that has spent its entire existence at war with and partially occupied by Israel, but saying it isn't a full state is like saying Ukraine isn't because of the war and Russian occupation.)
What are you referring to? It's nowhere even close to the same scale.
Although if you consider the assassination of Rabin, which was carried out by an Israeli settler extremist, then yes, that was something that caused a terrible impact. It's possible that if that had not happened, Rabin would have managed to get us to an actual peace agreement. (Still his murder didn't stop the peace process - it continued. What really stopped it was the refusal of Arafat to agree to a deal, and the second intifiada.)
It's a chronological distortion to say that the peace process was stopped by the second Intifada. It did not start until after the breakdown of the peace process.
Well I think that really depends on what exact "peace process" you're referring to. Hamas started terror attacks during the Oslo process IIRC, and intensified terror attacks before the elections after Rabin's assassination, probably helping get Netanyahu elected. And there were peace proposals in 2000, but also in 2007.
But really what I meant wasn't that any specific peace process was ended, more that the Israeli pro-peace left lost a lot of political power and a lot of legitimacy because of the continued terror attacks. When the left pushes for disengaging from the West Bank, the right points to the disengagement from Gaza as a case study, and it's kind of hard to argue against.
> Hamas started terror attacks during the Oslo process IIRC, and intensified terror attacks before the elections after Rabin's assassination,
Portraying Hamas as a unilateral spoiler is completely disingenuous.
[1]
> In early January 1996 Peres faced another difficult decision. The Israeli General Security Service--Shabak--asked him for permission to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, the so-called "Engineer," who had personally masterminded several Hamas suicide atacks, which killed 50 and wounded 340 Israelis. The Israeli media presented him as public enemy number one, greatly exaggerating his status within Hamas and omitting to mention that the attacks he organized came as a response to the massacre perpetrated by Dr. Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in February 1994. In mid-1995 Ayyash went into hiding in Gaza, and the Palestinian preventive security service told the Shabak that he would not organize any more attacks on Israelis. But the head of the Shabak, who was about to be removed from his post for his failure to protect Rabin, badly wanted to be remembered for one last spectacular success. Peres gave the green light, thinking that apart from dealing out rough justice, the operation would boost the morale of the nation and of the security services. On 5 January, Ayyash was killed in Gaza by means of a booby-trapped cellular phone. The decision to kill Ayyash turned out to be the greatest mistake of Peres's political career.
This is what spurred Hamas attacks prior to Netanyahu's election, not opposition to Oslo.
After all this is over the lost foot soldiers will be easily replaced by eager recruits, and they will have plenty of funding from actors who like seeing Israels international reputation damaged like this.