Israel’s military has told some 1 million Palestinians to evacuate northern Gaza and head to the southern part of the besieged territory. That's an unprecedented order applying to almost half the population ahead of an expected ground invasion against the ruling Hamas militant group.
So I just heard about this whole thing last night. What is the preferred Israeli response to this?
To me it looks like Hamas using occupied buildings as places to attack from, the Israel being told they aren’t allowed to hit back at people using human shields.
Stop the occupation of Palestine, stop the settlement of the West Bank, and stop the apartheid status of Palestinians in Israel. Then either allow Palestine to be an independent country in the UN, responsible for their own security and economy. Or give all Palestinians voting rights in Israel as a one state solution. After that is set and done set up an independent criminal court to judge on all war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in this region, this will of course also include Hamas.
Israel used to occupy Gaza the same way it currently does the West Bank; there were even Jewish settlers living there. The IDF withdrew in 2005 as a token of goodwill towards peace and a future Palestinian state, evicting all Jewish residents as well. Gaza then elected Hamas, whose founding charter calls for the extermination of all Jews, and started lobbing rockets. Israelis aren’t exactly keen to see a repetition of that.
I really get wanting to believe that this would be a solution, but the fact of the matter is that there are very real security concerns; a not-small number of Palestinians believe that the state of Israel should be destroyed by violently removing all Jews from the land, as we saw last weekend. You can say that that anger and resentment is somewhat justified - hell, I’d largely agree - but Israel is under no circumstances going to allow its existence to be threatened. The fundamental purpose of Israel existing is to provide a safe homeland for Jews, and Israel will stop at nothing to ensure that.
Giving all Palestinians full voting rights is not going to happen so long as there’s such a complete lack of trust between the two groups. Israelis, probably correctly, fear that they’d quickly become a minority within their own state and ultimately be subjected to government persecution or expulsion. You have to keep in mind that a huge chunk of Israelis come from Arab countries that forcibly seized their assets and expelled them. Israelis will not accept the possibility of their own government doing the same.
Idealism simply is not applicable in this situation. If Israel fully withdrew from the West Bank, they have no reason to believe that it wouldn’t simply be a repeat of the Gaza fiasco from 2005, with the situation being even worse since attacks out of the West Bank could threaten Jerusalem. Any analysis of the situation must begin and end with the immutable fact that Israel will prioritize its own security above anything else, including Western condemnation.
None of this is to excuse the many unjustifiable travesties that Israel does commit against the Palestinians, which are numerous, nor does it excuse settlements in the West Bank at all, which are disgusting abominations that actively serve to make peace even more impossible than it already is. But fundamentally, Israel is never going to make any kind of withdrawals or concessions unless it feels its security remains guaranteed, and any proposal that doesn’t accept this is doomed.
I’m gonna nitpick here, but:
Statements like this really need to be more clear, because they can otherwise severely muddy the waters of an already extremely messy situation. What exactly are you referring to here by “Israel”? Arab citizens of Israel, Palestinian or otherwise, have full rights. Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza are severely restricted and oppressed a lot, and sure, you can make an apartheid analogy if you want. But is it not our entire fundamental premise that the West Bank is not Israel, but rather is Palestine? Palestinians do not live under any kind of apartheid within Israel, unless you are including the West Bank as part of Israel, which no one but the most extreme Israeli nationalists would ever do. So either Palestinians live under apartheid and the West Bank is a legitimate part of the state of Israel, or Palestinians live in Palestine under a strict foreign military occupation and not under an apartheid in Israel.
In your statement you are completely disregarding the security concerns of the Palestinians, calling the current state of the Gaza strip a ‘token of good will’ is absolutely ludicrous. If you really believe this I would invite you to read the wikipedia article on the great march of return: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018–2019_Gaza_border_protests.
On apartheid I will simply refer to the judgment of HRW: https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/07/19/israeli-apartheid-threshold-crossed
And finally it is not stupid idealism to want to end the current status quo in Israel, I think it has become clear over the last few days that it is not possible to suppress a population without some kind of response: an apartheid state is a state of violence. And I hope we can all agree (at least if you are not an ethnonationalist) that the current state of South Africa is much much better than it was during apartheid.
I’m speaking to pragmatism.
The Palestinians absolutely have legitimate security concerns. They are also, in no universe, ever going to be able to resolve them by violently overthrowing the Israelis, and no amount of winning the moral argument will change this fact. This notion of establishing a Palestinian state through violent resistance must be abandoned - no matter how righteous it may or may not be - because Israel will defend itself down to the last Jewish life before allowing another Jewish diaspora, and it will win. If Egypt, Jordan, and Syria were all defeated in 1967 in six days, it is simply not in the realm of possibility that some loosely organized Palestinian resistance is going to be re-taking Jerusalem.
There is a plausible, though still mostly confined to dreams, path to peace that involves the Palestinians de-militarizing, Israel abandoning all settlements and withdrawing to the 1967 borders, the establishment of a joint security force between Israelis and Palestinians that has zero tolerance for nationalistic violence, and a gradual opening of economic and cultural integrations over time. There’d probably need to be some land-swaps, and Jerusalem would probably need to be governed by some kind of joint administration as well, but there does exist a framework where peace is imaginable.
Key to this, though, is that Israel stops settlements and that Palestinians completely abandon any consideration of violence. Under no circumstances will Israel make any steps towards peace if it feels its security is threatened, and seeing as they’re the ones with the guns, anyone hoping to see peace simply must accept this fact. So long as aggressive violence is seen as a way to solve the conflict, there will never be peace.
The West Bank has seen minimal Palestinian-initiated conflict, and in exchange, Israel has built more settlements, let them burn fields, and kicked people out of their homes. It’s not security that drives the settlement projects. They want the land.
Not going to get into an argument about Hamas vs Isreali tactics, but you should be aware that it is far, far from the case that Palestinians inside of Israel let alone in OPT have the rights you think they do:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/
Not murder innocents.
I forgot though, because of the fact that someone else did something wrong we can do the same and not be the bad guys. Right?
Your response seems to be equivalent to “never defend yourself against someone holding an innocent hostage.”
To clarify, I’m not sure what response doesn’t result in more innocent people dying.
I don’t really care about this specific conflict more than any other. And morally I don’t care for the lives of one side more than the other. And morally I don’t care who lived in what cities 100 years ago (note: unless those specific people are involved).
My confusion seems to be that the ‘right’ response people seem to want to this is no response.
Israel definitely is well within their rights to retaliate against Hamas, it would be foolish to claim otherwise. It’s the exact way they are doing it that is the issue, they are behaving nearly as poorly as their enemy. You can’t just tell the world “look at the barbarity of Hamas slaughtering innocent civilians just out there kibbutzing” and then turn around and bomb civilian hospitals, completely disregard rules of engagement around medical aid killing humanitarian volunteers you were aware of, shutting off all power, water and closing food supply to the Gaza strip, and then act like it’s somehow better than that.
Hamas absolutely sucks and Israel has every right to defend themselves from terrorism, but the Palestinian children buried under rubble didn’t deserve any of this. (Neither did the Israeli citizens who were slaughtered and kidnapped for that matter.)
Israel has the technology, the troops, and the tactics to be far more precise and surgical in their retaliation, but their response has been punitive and brutal, and seems to almost maximize collateral damage. Of course that’s what Netanyahu and his thugs will all but directly say they want given the opportunity to speak. I do not believe that properly represents the citizens of Israel who are generally much more sympathetic to the people of Palestine.
Both the citizens of Israel and Palestine have been failed by their leadership. Agree or disagree, at this point, I just had to write that down somewhere. I know people from both Palestine and Israel, wonderful people, all this is heartbreaking.
War is hell, even if you play by the rules, why make it even worse?
Thanks. It’s hard for me to judge tactics from video, as I can’t really tell what is accidental collateral damage vs purposeful. The statements by Israeli leadership definitely supports the view that they are purposefully being punitive… which is monstrous.
Idk but bombing innocents doing what you said and trying to evacuate isn’t 1 of the steps.
Neither is bombing near one of the few border crossings they could use isn’t one either