Israel-Gaza war

[kwabbit]

Is there any news about the actual combat? It seems like the IDF is still not in control of the situation, but I can’t imagine they would be having that much trouble in combat.

[kwabbit]

Is there any news about the actual combat? It seems like the IDF is still not in control of the situation, but I can’t imagine they would be having that much trouble in combat.

Funnily enough, I was just about to post this:
https://twitter.com/War_Mapper/status/1710746713814663358

Interesting, seems like the invasion will be pushed back to the border within 24 hours then. That looks like 5 miles of penetration at the moment.

[kwabbit]

Not to derail a fascinating thread about whether Palestinians should be able to vote in Israeli elections, but does anyone know where I can find updates on the ongoing war?

These comments are getting really annoying, far more annoying than anything you are responding to. The Palestinian POV, and everything that comes with it, is part of this conflict, idk what you guys want. Maybe start a thread where you can circle-jerk in peace I guess?

To most of us this subject has been litigated enough and we might want actual details on the new conflict. No service is being provided to anyone here by incessantly pointing out the Palestinian POV, nor the Israeli one for that matter. Anyone posting on this forum knows enough and some of us wants news/updates.

[kwabbit]

If 300 Israelis people are dead (the number is actually higher) that is 3 9/11s. Imagine if 9/11 wasn't just a plane attack though, but an invasion that also resulted in at least 1500 hostages and Americans being raped and murdered, including children, in their own homes. Can anyone who does not simply want the Israelis to give up and die tell me with a straight face that in that analogy America/Israel should just sit back and drop a couple of bombs and treat it like any other terrorist attack? If not, then what should Israel do? Should it occupy the equivalent of 80 million people forever, losing more of its own lives in the process to police people who think it not only okay but morally good to molest Israelis in the street?

9/11 was 3000 deaths not 100. I don’t see how it could be three 9/11s unless you’re using percentage of the population affected.

[kwabbit]

My hope is that Israel can fully assert control in Gaza swiftly, bring all Hamas members to justice, and establish a reasonable civilian administration for the people of Gaza.

This is the ideal outcome. I fear that realities on the ground will make such a resolution impossible, but I pray that that shall not be the case.

There is no civilian administration that is possible in Gaza that is friendly to Israel. Establishing rigged elections and hoping westerners buy it isn't gonna work.

Would a Fatah/PLO regime not be more peaceful with Israel than a Hamas regime? I don't what the outcome of a fair election would be, perhaps they might just elect Hamas so Israel could install Fatah undemocratically and it could govern in tandem with the West Bank.

[kwabbit]

IDF has now taken full control of the Southern Border after eliminating all positions taken by Hamas soldiers.  They are still looking for terrorists that may be hiding around the community.  Residents have been given the 'green light' to leave their bomb shelters.  

Significant build-up of IDF soldiers on Lebanese Border.  All signs point to a significant attack by Hezbollah, but experts aren't sure whether this will come to fruition.  Large movement of Lebanese Civilians towards Beirut from Southern Lebanon.  

Source on the second paragraph? Very concerning if true.

I'd take it with a grain of salt, given that Hollywood also casually pinned the initial invasion on Egypt earlier in the thread.

[kwabbit]

This thread is a total trainwreck and really difficult to follow because of all the spam, side arguments, and fake news. Could we please keep it a bit more in order?

Some questions:

• What is the status of Israel's ground operations? Is all Israeli territory freed now from the militants, or are there areas where Hamas still holds, or just areas where Hamas group are still roaming in Israel?
• Has Israel launched any sort of ground operation into Gaza yet? Obviously not a full-scale invasion, but like any probing or any border areas they've crossed?
• What is the situation with the Lebanon border?
• What is going on along the West Bank border? Are Israeli settlers and/or troops evacuating or being redirected? Have there been any skirmishes there, or are things very quiet on that side?

Many thanks in advance for any answers.

1. As of yesterday Israel announced that it had secured the border with Gaza. I don't think there are any areas Hamas can be said to control, though there may be some isolated mop-up operations.
2. No; IDF is massing troops for a planned ground offensive but hasn't crossed the border on land yet.
3. There has been some action on the borders with Lebanon and Syria, mortars and rockets answered with artillery; this morning, for example, Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile at a military post on the border and Israel responded with a strike in Lebanon. These sort of small-scale exchanges have been occurring pretty regularly. But the large-scale operation this morning was a false alarm.
4. Seems funny at this point to speak of a "West Bank border." Settlers are not evacuating, quite the opposite; yesterday they killed three Palestinians in the village of Qusra, and Ben-Gvir plans to give them all AR-15s so they can "secure" things themselves.

Aren’t like 30-40% of the settlers Haredi? I know economics reasons are a lot of the reason why settlers move there versus civilian governed Israel, but how many are Ben-Gvirite hyper Zionists who take pride in living on occupied land?

[kwabbit]

This thread is a total trainwreck and really difficult to follow because of all the spam, side arguments, and fake news. Could we please keep it a bit more in order?

Some questions:

• What is the status of Israel's ground operations? Is all Israeli territory freed now from the militants, or are there areas where Hamas still holds, or just areas where Hamas group are still roaming in Israel?
• Has Israel launched any sort of ground operation into Gaza yet? Obviously not a full-scale invasion, but like any probing or any border areas they've crossed?
• What is the situation with the Lebanon border?
• What is going on along the West Bank border? Are Israeli settlers and/or troops evacuating or being redirected? Have there been any skirmishes there, or are things very quiet on that side?

Many thanks in advance for any answers.

1. As of yesterday Israel announced that it had secured the border with Gaza. I don't think there are any areas Hamas can be said to control, though there may be some isolated mop-up operations.
2. No; IDF is massing troops for a planned ground offensive but hasn't crossed the border on land yet.
3. There has been some action on the borders with Lebanon and Syria, mortars and rockets answered with artillery; this morning, for example, Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile at a military post on the border and Israel responded with a strike in Lebanon. These sort of small-scale exchanges have been occurring pretty regularly. But the large-scale operation this morning was a false alarm.
4. Seems funny at this point to speak of a "West Bank border." Settlers are not evacuating, quite the opposite; yesterday they killed three Palestinians in the village of Qusra, and Ben-Gvir plans to give them all AR-15s so they can "secure" things themselves.

Aren’t like 30-40% of the settlers Haredi? I know economics reasons are a lot of the reason why settlers move there versus civilian governed Israel, but how many are Ben-Gvirite hyper Zionists who take pride in living on occupied land?

The stereotypical settler you are thinking of is dati-leumi, not Haredi. You are correct that around 30% of settlers are Haredi, but Haredim in places like Beitar Illit aren't usually particularly Zionist from what I understand (Israeli posters, correct me if I am wrong on this point). There are chardals, yes, but there aren't all that many of them. In general Haredim, even in the west bank, are more concerned with studying Torah and maintaining their government-subsidized perks and exemptions than growing the footprint of the Jewish state. The super aggro settlers are mostly "dati", a category in Israel which I would say loosely corresponds with Modern Orthodoxy in the US.

EDIT: I just checked cinyc's election results map. 58% of Beitar Illit's vote went to UTJ and another 31% went to Shas. "Only" 7% went to RZ+OY. Compare this to Efrat, a nearby non-Haredi settlement, where RZ+OY got 48% of the vote, Likud 20% and Yamina 15%. Shas and UTJ combined got only 3%.

Yeah, my question was prompted because I knew that Haredi are non-Zionist and a large part of the settlers were Haredi, but didn’t know the mindset of the non-Haredi settlers. But it sounds like even the non-Haredi are not secular either. Is it a matter of dati self-selecting to become settlers and bring their far-right inclinations with them or is the precarious of being a settler drawing them to far-right parties?

It’s a pretty unique situation. One has to wonder what a hypothetical American settlement of Baja would be like. It could draw marginal, poorer groups or it could draw MAGA nuts. It wouldn’t reflect the rest of the country though.

[kwabbit]

I can understand denial over the baby story because you don't want to believe that someone would commit such an atrocity. I can also understand denial because you have sincere belief in Palestinian liberation/statehood and are worried that the story would discredit the movement. But some of the denial, mostly among the American online left, was simply because they wanted Israel to be discredited and mocked.

I wouldn't even say that this section of the online left is anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic necessarily. The hatred is specifically focused on the State of Israel, but it isn't a result of ideology. Making cruel, tasteless remarks about Israel is simply a tribalistic rite of passage in these circles and the more cruel and tasteless the remarks, the more recognition one gets. Israel has been among the whipping boys of the left for a long time and often for good reason, yet the root cause of leftist opposition for Israel is not always what is causing actual leftist criticism for Israel.

The logic/chain of condemning Israel might have once been (and still is for many people) prioritizing human rights and equality -> leftist thinking -> learning about Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians -> condemning Israel. Nowadays, however, it's often feelings of alienation/bitterness -> seeking a radical ideology in search of an identity (leftism in the case) -> Ideology posits certain irredeemable, abhorrent villains -> hating Israel.

I don't doubt that many of the older leftists here belong to the former line of thinking and I don't doubt that even most of the tankies here came in with the former mindset, but the latter mindset is almost inescapable nowadays and permeates leftist discussion. A lot of these people don't even care about the plight of Palestinians, they don't care about about war crimes committed against civilians. Their only connection to this crisis runs through a channel of hatred and they will only interact with it through that lens.

[kwabbit]

Is the evacuation actually taking place? I know it sounds crazy, but it's an eight mile walk (assuming that's the dominant form of transport within the Gaza strip at the moment) from Gaza City to south of Wadi Gaza river, so I don't think it's as unachievable as you would think. They would hopefully be able to come back north after the Israeli campaign.

Obviously Israel has a callous and cruel attitude towards the lives of Palestinian civilians, but the goal here is for only Hamas to be left within north Gaza to make the ground invasion easier. Hamas doesn't want that because it loses them protection so they order against the evacuation. The alternative would be that an evacuation does not take place and urban combat takes place in a busy city which could cost many more civilian lives. The other alternatives is that Israel doesn't enter Gaza and continues bombing or simply does nothing, neither of which have any point. I think describing it as ethnic cleansing is premature until we know the medium term Israeli plan and describing it as genocide is inaccurate and harmful.

[kwabbit]

The IDF and Hamas do really get judged by different standards. The IDF does often operate in a cruel and callous manner to Palestinian civilians, but only by Western standards. They at least go through the motions to reduce civilian casualties, yet their failure to prioritize that above else is what gets them criticism. In trying to operate as a member of the West, however, they are still not insane enough to drop a bunker buster on a crowded hospital.

Hamas, on the other hand, has made it their mission to essentially maximize civilian casualties. Their MO is to indiscriminately fire rockets into Israel, without any ability to aim them, most of the time killing more of their own civilians than Israelis. Destroying the bridge across Wadi Gaza, concentrating civilians near likely Israeli targets, lying wholesale about Israel targeting the hospital are all actions so incomprehensible by Western standards that they escape without massive condemnation, as if Western journalists are attuned to only pick up a certain frequency of war crimes and some actions by Hamas have 'waves' too large for them to comprehend it.

With the hospital, the two theories were that Israel did indeed bomb the hospital and it was a foremost example of Israeli disregard for civilian life or that Hamas misfired the rocket and lied about 500 people dying as a propaganda tool. Western journalists had trouble comprehending that the Ministry of Health, comprised of typically honorable in the West medical professionals, would lie about something of such magnitude, so they reported on it without verifying the claim in the first place.

[kwabbit]

If 70% of the Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged during the bombing, doesn’t that put into question Israel’s tactics? The policy of only bombing civilian buildings if they housed Hamas personnel/equipment/HQs makes sense at first, but if they are knocking first and the Hamas members are able to leave too then it seems pretty pointless. They might be making some additional military progress at the cost of many Palestinian civilian lives and PR with the rest of the world.

[kwabbit]

If I took a shot everytime disagreement emerged between pppolitics and a Zionist in this thread, I'd already have been a member of Alcohols Anonymous.

This has nothing to do with Zionism and everything to do with pppress being a fanatical anti-Semite

Anti-semitism lost its meaning because Zionists started calling any criticism of Israel "anti-semitism".

"Zionist" lost meaning when it just started replacing Jew in anti-semitic tropes.

[kwabbit]

(More generally, beyond this, I think Zionism is ideologically good and I think more religions, ethnicities, and ideologies should try to set up 'homelands' on similar lines, but I think my stance here would be the same if Israelis were not the descendants of recent immigrants. That does make it seem more rather than less sympathetic to me, which I think is a reversal of the take of most people in this thread.)

Except Palestinians, for some reason.

I don't agree with Vosem, but:

Do Palestinians consider themselves an "ethnicity" even today?  If you went back to 1924 and asked the Arabs living in Acre whether they considered themselves a wholly separate ethnicity from the Arabs living in Tyre, would they have said yes?  Would they also have said yes if you then asked them if they, concordantly, considered themselves the same ethnicity as the Arabs living in Gaza?  What if you asked Arabs living in Jericho whether they considered themselves a separate ethnicity from Arabs living in Amman?  After all, in the 19th century these were all part of the same administrative subregion within the Ottoman Empire.  Do ethnicities start and stop at the Sykes-Picot borders?

Is "Palestinianism" a distinct ideology?  Did "Palestinianism" exist before 1948?  Does the Palestinian ideology encompass anything more than the desire to conquer Israel, drive out the Jews and resettle the land?  In which case, if the Jews were all killed, would Palestinianism as an ideology continue to exist in a generation?  What, people want a country, therefore their desire for a country is a distinct ideology, and distinct ideologies deserve a homeland, so simply by wanting a country they deserve that country?

Certainly I don't think you would argue the Palestinians have a distinct religion from Egypt or Syria or Lebanon or Jordan.

If you were to ask me, I would say that Palestinians are just Arabs, mostly Sunni Muslim Arabs, and they already have plenty of states that are basically Sunni Arab ethnically monogamous theocracies:  Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, etc.  and I would further say that the concept of "Palestinians" as some wholly distinct and unique ethnicity deserving of their own unique state was created out of wholecloth in the 1950s as a rationalization for Palestinian nationalism, which itself was just a thin rationalization for the genocidal pursuits of the Arab states.  Furthermore I would say that "Palestinians are an ethnicity" is mostly a Western notion even today, as such a notion was subsumed by Pan-Arabism in the mid-century and by Pan-Islamism today.

Prior to the Six-Day War, Gaza was occupied and administered by Egypt, and the West Bank was officially part of Jordan after the 1950 annexation, done at the behest of Palestinian leaders.  In both cases, peoples freely moved within their states.  Nobody considered this to be ethnic cleansing or any other sort of travesty.  The Arabs in the parts of Egypt/Jordan that would later become Gaza and the West Bank did not by-and-large consider themselves to be occupied or oppressed peoples, denied a state representing their distinct and unique ethnicity.

...because of course they didn't!  At the time, West Bank Palestinians and Jordanians saw themselves as identical peoples, two parts of the whole -- and why not, since Jordan is the eastern half of Mandatory Palestine!

So please, tell me more about how the Palestinians are a unique ethnicity deserving of their own homeland in Israel.

Isn't the answer that Israeli occupation led to the ethnogenesis of the Palestinian people? Maybe in 1948 all of the Arabs living in Mandatory Palestine were just Arabs, but the Nakba (using the term for convenience) subjected those Arabs within I/P to an event that separated them from trans-Jordanians and Egyptians, and then in 1967 Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank further set them apart from Jordanians and Egyptians. Sure, they still are similar to other Arabs but there are many Arab states that are quite similar to each other and they meet the threshold to be their own nation. Palestinians are perhaps the most dissimilar in the Arab world because they do not have their own state and have formed their modern identity around their relationship to Israel, so if they were to become independent from Israel it's only natural for Palestine to be its own state. To extend this, if Sinai was still occupied by Israel I would wager that it would be part of a hypothetical Palestinian state and would not be viewed as something to be returned to Egypt, just as the West Bank wouldn't be returned to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt.

[kwabbit]

They've lost the war regardless of what happens to Hamas.

Israel can't possibly lose this war as long as it's still standing, because 10/7 laid the stakes clear. The goal is the bloody murder of every man, woman, and child in Israel, followed by that spurring global violence targeting diaspora Jewish communities. It shouldn't surprise anyone that any alternative is preferable to that.

. Israel has shown its, true colors to the world the origins of it's barbaric roots, how they have treated Palestinians for years following their purge by the incoming European Zionists. Hooray for the only "democracy" in the Middle East.

Yes, Israelis are ontologically evil, they can never redeem themselves from their original sin of killing Jesus the Nakba

The original sin of Israel. The same goes for my nation of America with how the European colonizers wiped the indignious people, or how Austraila banished the aboriginals to a marginal group today.

Once again, the Israelis are indigenous people of the Middle East and they will never be displaced again.

Based off DNA, Jews don't have some sort of unique claim to the southern Levant.

Ashkenazi Jews are not the closest relatives to ancient Southern Levantines, but they are much closer to them than their European country of origin. From what I've read, Ashkenazi Jews are about 80% ancient Jews and 20% European. So they are indigenous to the Southern Levant, but they are not the only people indigenous to the region. The alternative to Jews being indigenous to Israel is that they are indigenous to Poland or Brooklyn, which are both definitely not the case.

[kwabbit]

They've lost the war regardless of what happens to Hamas.

Israel can't possibly lose this war as long as it's still standing, because 10/7 laid the stakes clear. The goal is the bloody murder of every man, woman, and child in Israel, followed by that spurring global violence targeting diaspora Jewish communities. It shouldn't surprise anyone that any alternative is preferable to that.

. Israel has shown its, true colors to the world the origins of it's barbaric roots, how they have treated Palestinians for years following their purge by the incoming European Zionists. Hooray for the only "democracy" in the Middle East.

Yes, Israelis are ontologically evil, they can never redeem themselves from their original sin of killing Jesus the Nakba

The original sin of Israel. The same goes for my nation of America with how the European colonizers wiped the indignious people, or how Austraila banished the aboriginals to a marginal group today.

Once again, the Israelis are indigenous people of the Middle East and they will never be displaced again.

Based off DNA, Jews don't have some sort of unique claim to the southern Levant.

Ashkenazi Jews are not the closest relatives to ancient Southern Levantines, but they are much closer to them than their European country of origin. From what I've read, Ashkenazi Jews are about 80% ancient Jews and 20% European. So they are indigenous to the Southern Levant, but they are not the only people indigenous to the region. The alternative to Jews being indigenous to Israel is that they are indigenous to Poland or Brooklyn, which are both definitely not the case.

My Jewish family has lived in this country for five generations. I am more indigenous to Ohio than I am to the Levant.

And you are lucky that your family immigrated to the United States. The Jews that remained in Central and Eastern Europe were subjected to genocide. If every single one of your family members in Ohio were killed for being Jewish, I think you might have a different attitude. That you feel safe and indigenous to Ohio is a blessing.