I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state - that too with no word of objection from its allies.
We'll see where all of that goes.
I also found Trump's signalling in the whole issue odd. His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire.
Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there?
While I was in school, I studied with many Palestinians in my college of engineering. I wonder often what happened to them.
At the same time, within Israel, Intel is the largest civilian employer. The Pentium M is an Israeli rework of the Pentium Pro legacy, and Israel is key to Intel's gains over the past two decades.
I wish that everyone that I knew from the Middle East was fully involved in the advances of Intel.
Perhaps my lost schoolmates' absence was precisely what Intel lacked, but such cultural divides are not easily bridged.
This is a great pity.
Israel, as it it currently constituted (based on 1967 borders) is not a viable state if the West Bank is a hostile entity with a standing army, and funded to a similar extent as Hezbollah. The West Bank bulges into Israel and effectively cuts the country in half and places all strategic targets within shelling distance.
The Palestinian position seems to be "trust us that if you give us full, un-fettered independence, then we will not be a hostile entity" - but that's asking for Israel to place an enormous amount of trust in present and future Palestinian people and leaders, without any historical reasons to base this on, and highlighted by the worst case scenario of Hezbollah in the north, a foreign-controlled militia funded to the tune of 1 billion / year, and potential a hostile party in the West Bank (and Gaza) - effectively surrounding the country.
And it is more than just demilitarization. A demilitarized Palestine is not enough if, for example, Iran funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in arms to militia groups.
Hence we are where we are .. with Israel unable to disengage because doing so presents an existential risk to their nation.
This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea; "it's strategically important for us" isn't really sufficient justification for mass murder, and - on a purely geographic point - talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate.
And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?
> Iran funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in arms to militia groups.
This is the side that's not really been raised enough in this whole discussion. If Israel's war is with Iran, why is that war not being carried out in Iran? Does this have something to do with the fact that Iran is 1000km away from having a land border with either Israel or Palestine?
It should be either be bilateral militarization (a miniaturized MAD if you will - similar with the Korean peninsula I guess), or bilateral demilitarization and extensive UN force deployment.
Should they?
That’s why the peace before 1967 was so important. But Israel ended it and was left with a mess that now all young people are drafted into service.
I don't agree, that's an optimistic view of things. Most Palestinians (Hamas for sure, Abbas as well) never agreed to give up on the 'Right of Return' so its not really independence in a 2 state solution that they're looking for, it's the abolishment of Israel.
They are able to do this in large part because Palestine is not a recognized state.
The longer they prevent Palestine from getting statehood, the more dunams of land they can steal.
There is a justifiable argument for Israel to occupy the west bank and/or the Gaza strip (whether one agrees or not is another matter that I will not get into). Settling it is another matter entirely, and this action is what causes so much grief.
But what Palestinian supporters continuously fail to grasp is that every time Israel has tried to give (and there were many attempts in the 1980s and 1990s), bad actors have caused violence. This violence was a huge cause in support shifting to right-wing parties in Israel.
The tragedy is that a plurality of Palestinians would otherwise love to have a peaceful (two state or otherwise) solution, but the "bad" ones are well funded by outsiders, in particular Iran. If a Gandhi/Martin Luther King/Nelson Mandela figure emerged, they'd almost certainly be killed by Hamas,Hezbollah,etc.
But at the end of the day, there's no way the extreme elements of either side will agree to a permanent and dignified peace, because even if it would work it would mean the end of either of them (and Israeli PM was assassinated by a far-right Jewish nationalist).
I'm sympathetic to both sides myself. I'm sympathetic to Israel's position, need for security, and the fact that hostility against them is a given. I'm also sympathetic to the fact that the Palestinian people were pushed off their land, often with violence to a level that can fit the definition of genocide, during Israel's independence and subsequent annexations.
But there will never be a true peace so long as the extremists on both sides have as much power as they do. I know most Iranians are fed up with their government. My Iranian colleagues all are commenting that even devoutly religious Iranians back home are getting fed up. A lot of this is a house of cards, so I guess we'll see.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Megiddo_%2815th_cent...
That's an incredible statement, as if the rest of the world is somehow different. The only thing special about these regions is that they've had complex states for longer, so of course state-based warfare would go back farther.
On another level, there absolutely have been periods of stability in regions of the middle east, for periods of time we would consider long.
The current conflict is a different beast. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the careless meddling of western powers in the aftermath. The Jewish diaspora, Zionism, and the Holocaust. The Sunni-Shia conflict.
I agree with you, although I certainly hope you and I are wrong. It would be nice to see people let go of past injustices on both sides long enough to have a lasting peace.
It’s hard to disagree. But Ireland was an impossible problem at one stage, and while it’s still far from resolved, it’s a hell of lot less violent.
I am not smart enough to have an opinion on the situation in Gaza that's much more complicated than "people dying is bad", but I struggle to understand how the continued annexation of the West Bank by Israeli settlers, supported by the government and army, is anything other than clearly ethnic cleansing. If it had stopped ten years ago, and it was now a conversation about uprooting the established communities there, maybe then there's room for nuance and so on, but it didn't: it's ongoing.
As opposed to the neighboring states (and Hamas), which mostly have religiously tolerant, fully democratic governments that fully respect civil rights, and which of course have never openly stated that they want Israel to disappear from existence, not at all leaving it implicit that its millions of Jewish residents should be ethnically cleansed from the region.. Yes?
Break them down further and you can find the actual monsters--those self-interestedly seeking either their own aims, or, some random aim at any cost, even when the aim is impossible and its costs massive.
Who killed Rabin?
Israelis killed their own PM to prevent the Oslo Accords, the goal of the Oslo Accords was to provide a 2 state solution.
Don't rewrite history.
Democratic structures like fatah and hamas ?
Very few of the Fatah concessions ever led anywhere despite promises from Israel, leading many palestinians to think that Fatah was weak. Which other "strong" democratic options were there? PNI? Third Way? They were never serious options.
Now, the Fatah party has been incompetent and corrupt. I am not saying democracy would have sorted itself out in Palestine, but I am saying that if Israel would have wanted a democratic development in Palestine, it would not have dealt with Fatah in such bad faith.
Nor, I must add, would they have killed any palestinian (Gaza) leaders opening up to peace with Israel. Ahmed Yassin was killed just months after started proposing a long term truce on the condition of a Palestinian state in the west bank and gaza. his successor (al-Rantisi) suffered a similar fate after a similar proposal. Then Jabari in 2012. Then they killed Haniyeh who was the principal negotiator during all recent peace talks.
None of these men were innocent cute bunnies by any means, but Israel has been sending a clear message for many many years: negotiation will be done by force.
This refers (I imagine) to internal Israeli politics - a certain portion of the Israeli populace fears that Netanyahu is attempting to make Israel less democratic by various means. This was a topic that caused mass protests in Israel before October 7th, and continues in some form even now.
Yesterday they were called terrorists by the mainstream, tomorrow when they win they will be hailed as heroes and freedom fighters.
the zionists were also called terrorists by the UK in the beginning, especially when they bombed king david hotel
This is an intra-Israeli conflict that is (mostly) independent of the Israel-Palestine conflict (and also of the question how democratic a state is anyway that keeps ~50% of its inhabitants under permanent military rule). It falls more in line with the other shifts towards populist or authoritarian governments we have seen in the West. (Trump, Orban, Erdogan, etc)
It does have a unique Israeli flavor to it though, which does circle right back to Israel/Palestine: That the political force that's driving this authoritarian shift forward is closely associated with the settler movement and the most extreme voices regarding the Palestinians. This was also the case before the war - however, they took the war as opportunity to further erode civil rights, e.g. free speech and manipulate institutions such as the police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Natio...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-21/ty-article-ma...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-06-13/ty-article-ma...
It was pretty much like that before. They're just being a lot more open about wanting to wipe them out.
And what would Gaza have if it were independent?
The most religious/fundementalist of the the parties UTJ believes in land for peace and have said so many times over the years (but like the majority of the Israeli public, they wont mention it, let alone push for it, during wartime so as not to reward terrorism) and was fully behind all the ceasefire proposals in the past 18 months.
And it's certainly not authoritarian. Israel has full powers of protest, free speech, and in fact it's generally the press that have the strongest voice not the government.
And "that is actively at work undermining democratic structures" is also wrong. They are trying to reform Israel's supreme court system which many legal scholars agree badly needs reform as the justices are largely self-selected yet have the power to override legislation without referring to existing law (the so-called reasonableness test which no other country has).
Israel maintained a prerogative from early in the war to assassinate essentially every known journalist in Gaza, and they did it by bombing their homes and killing their families. West Bank and pro-Arab Israeli journalists were merely arrested and held without charge.
"Israeli State-sponsored Internet propaganda include the Hasbara, Hasbara Fellowships, Act.IL, and the Jewish Internet Defense Force. Supporters generally frame this "hasbara" as part of its fight towards improving their image abroad given continued Israeli human rights abuses, and also against anti-Israeli agitation and attempts to criticize it. There is substantive evidence that Israel heavily uses data-driven strategies, trolling and disinformation and manipulated media, as well as dedicating funds to state-sponsored media, for overt propaganda campaigns."[1]
"In June 2024, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was revealed to have paid $2 million to Israeli political consulting firm STOIC, to conduct a social media campaign, fueled by fake accounts and often employing misinformartion, targeting 128 American Congresspeople, with a focus on Democratic and African-American members of the House of Representatives. Websites were also created to provide young, progressive Americans with Gaza news with a pro-Israel spin. Among the objectives of the campaign was amplifying Israeli attacks on UNRWA staffers and driving a wedge between Palestinians and African-Americans to prevent solidarity between the two groups. "[2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_Internet_propa...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_in_the_Israel%E...
3. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-0...
His base and the people surrounding him have the habit of ostracizing anyone who doesn't fall in line behind him, rather than being guided by principle (Which is why Pence is no longer his VP pick, and why basically his whole cabinet is full of sycophants compared to last time).
Trump's whole shtick is to take whatever is happening, and spin it into "This was my whole plan all along", then take the credit for it. This is why you never see him give concrete policy proposals in interviews, and is also what will likely happen with the russia/ukraine war. Whatever happens is good, and was part of Trump's plan, and his base will fall in line or disappear politically.
This is the exact platform of at least one political party on either side.
Over and above any underlying cultural or historical conflict.
It's when misguided political parties gain power that puts that kind of thing on steroids.
Actually they don't want them to vanish completely. Just suffer enough. They are the reason the far right government is leading Israël.
But the Palestinians cant keep living under occupation. Everyone should continue to exert pressure for a free Palestine or the cycle will continue. The fundamental goal of the current Israeli government is to never have a Palestinian state, which will always be a major barrier unless sanctions are introduced.
Trump was interesting.. Im sure we’ll find out one day what it was all about. But if he really was the catalyst in this I will take back my words and eat humble pie. Someone has suggested the ceasefire is just a show, so we watch carefully.
Possibly. There does seem to be an uptick in previously unvoicable sentiment that was quickly squashed anywhere it showed on social media. I will say this. My parents went out of their way not to discuss some political events with their children ( communism - different rules apply and kids are dumb ), but in 90s, when similar 'war' raged and newshead was convincingly telling me, who to root for, my father unusually said 'you may want to check how Israel came into existence.' For the longest time, I did not. October surprise was a reason to get some of the dust removed from those books. It is not a good look. One could argue it is worse than US colonization of Indian lands.
I am sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, but the truth of the matter is that Israel has a valid claim too and military superiority to back it. If Palestine is to self govern, it and the rest of the nations around it need to convince Israel that they won’t try to wipe Israel off the map (or, alternatively, to succeed at it, which I’m sure many Western protesters would celebrate). Until then Israel will just dominate them instead.
If you think a 78 year old alone is capable of such feats of planning, you have more faith in the elderly than most. Read any of his speeches that are off the cuff and you will see that Trump has incredibly poor working memory, vocabulary, and attention. This is to be expected from an elderly individual, but not from a great strategist. These are the results of large groups of people working towards goals, not heroic individual feats.
Don't hold your breath, Isreal already announced a ceasefire in Lebanon in the past and didn't respect it.
> The timing of the release of the hostages gave rise to allegations that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the 1980 United States presidential election to thwart Carter from pulling off an "October surprise".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis#October_Su...
So it could be a tactic to get Hamas to release whatever hostages are still alive, then get right back to the new status quo.
This actually makes perfect sense for Trump. He's only claimed to care about the Israeli hostages. I'm sure he feels great about taking credit for their return.
[1]: https://trendsinthenews.substack.com/p/gerald-celente-on-gaz...
It takes both sides to agree to a better future.
Keep in mind:
Israel killed 100x more civilians than Palestine during this conflict, and more damage was done to Gaza than any European city during wwii. 90% of the population is displaced. 10% are casualties. Israel intentionally blew up all the civil infrastructure (hospitals, doctors, engineers) first.
There are > 17,000 children that have no adults to care for them any more. That’s 10 orphaned kids for every Israel civilian casualty in the middle of a famine with no support infrastructure.
Posting that video was Trump's way of telling Netanyahu that he will burn him by turning him into public enemy #1 with his base. That's how he got him to agree.
Netanyahu destroyed his reputation within the Democratic base and it did not concern him in the slightest. Because Israel stopped truly needing the approval of the US a long time ago.
And so the idea that he is suddenly worried about what the Trump base thinks has no basis in fact. Especially when the Trump base is not 1-1 with the Republican base i.e. the majority of the Congress still supports Israel.
There is no evidence of this.
Every single time Trump has blustered about doing something e.g. turning Canada into a 51st, buying Greenland the parties have been concerned but not particularly worried. Because he doesn't follow through.
So the idea that we should credit Trump for his words and ignore the months of diplomacy and pressure from not just the US but Middle Eastern countries is bizarre to me. Ceasefires are always far more complex and nuanced than they look from the outside.
> Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there
He thinks past a certain point it looks bad to the median American and isn’t ideological enough to push it past that.
Because you weren't listening to Trump. Throughout all of his campaigns he's been pretty clear he doesn't want to be paying for other country's defense/military spending.
It doesn't seem odd at all. Trump just went up against the mainstream Israeli-American power structure and won. He was very open that he supports Israel, but not this war. He ran on a premise that he would end the war before he took office. Appointing hard-line pro-Israel people is par for the course. It shows he supports Israel, but it makes those people beholden to him. In one of his books Trump talks about how he would give people he didn't like / wasn't sure about promotions. If they did a good job and impressed him great. If not he would fire them and felt that firing someone from a higher position was more meaningful and had a greater impact for the people below them.
Trump understands what American power is he doesn't really give the context that other world leaders are looking for, he just goes about it with the premise of comply, or we will make things difficult for you.
Trump basically tells Israel, you can do what you want, but you can't do it like this because it looks bad. The average person just doesn't like what they are seeing with regard to Palestine. Trump isn't ideological about Israel so he's not hellbent on the destruction of Palestine like so many. He gives the same attitude to most of our allies, in that you can be our friend, but you can't make us look bad.
It's not odd, considering that most pro-Israel figures (and most Israelis themselves) are not pro-Netanyahu.
Only Nixon could go to China [1].
To the degree the Israel-Palestine war could have helped America, it already has. Hezbollah has given way to a power-sharing government in Lebanon. Syria, miraculously, is a wild card--with major implications for Russia and Iran. Hamas has been downgraded from a threat to a nuisance. And not only is Iran on its back foot, we also got a free PR campaign for the efficacy of American weapons and worthlessness of post-Soviet Russian air defences.
Realpolitikally speaking, any more war is an expensive distraction. (Potent for a media-time savvy guy.) I'm sure Netanyahu could find something new to bomb in Gaza. But it's not a bad time for him to consolidate gains, politically and geopolitically, and possibly re-aim Washington's eye towards Iran.
(On a human level, it does seem Trump gets moved by images of war deaths. Maybe the carnage actually touched him.)
Idk, what we had to watch Israel do and fund with our own money may not have been worth all those achievements. Only time will tell... We made a lot of advancements in Iraq and Afghanistan too, and that was nowhere near as careless about human suffering as this latest flare up. And we lost all that progress extremely rapidly due to the hatred the local populace and neighboring countries had due to our actions. I think Israel (and us, since we are tied together) might face the same unforced error.
Fifty thousand people are dead, many of whom were underage, and most of the universities and hospitals in Gaza are destroyed. Like the Iraq war or Tianamen Square, this is something people are going to keep bringing up for decades.
Syria is arguably the only good outcome, and it's not clear whether that was anything to do with Israel/US action at all?
LOL
Trump just wanted a deal - he loves being the "deal guy". Frankly, I'm shocked he didn't push Bibi into waiting until after the inauguration. Guess he felt like it was close enough that he could still take credit for it.
If you read between the lines it was clear Biden was also pushing hard to wrap it up before his term ends to add it to his legacy (that's how NYT spun it at least). But Trump also had his people negotiating there as well and enough of add a hard-line persuasive influence to force Bibi to show up in Doha last-minute on a weekend during Sabbath [1]. While Biden really didn't seem to have much influence there in the last yr.
But ultimately they both get to take credit.
The cease-fire ending will eventually need a conclusion during Trumps term as well.
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-salty-envoy-may-forced-1549...
He's a private citizen. It isn't legal for him to engage in foreign diplomacy. Conveniently we have a feckless DoJ that won't hold people accountable.
Trump's a die hard Israel supporter but I think personally he feels disgust for Netanyahu, for reasons that arent too clear.
(As we all should - Netanyahu is a deeply racist genocidal maniac who cynically used this conflict to try and save his own political career)
What makes you think this causes Trump to think lesser of Netanyahu? Seems like the kind of person Trump fawns over as being "tough".
Oh, and like a sibling pointed out -- Trump wasn't mad at Netanyahu for being a racist, opportunistic genocidal maniac. He was mad that Netanyahu was the first to congratulate Biden on his election victory in 2020.
Responding by killing tens of thousands of civilians is on them a bit, too.
There likely are thousands upon thousands of hours of footage from October 7th from private/personal security cameras and also from the camera equipment on the attack helicopters and tanks.
Yet, despite all the footage that likely exists, a total of 46 minutes has been screened for the purpose of hasbara.
We could easily have an actual accounting of which of the 1200 were killed by Hamas and which were killed by the IDF if there was actual transparency and all the footage was released instead of selectively released to insinuate that 100% of the deaths were committed by Hamas.
Absent transparency, I'm inclined to place most of the 1200 deaths on IDF. There's more than enough footage of testimonials from IDF soldiers afterwards talking about how they engaged on October 7th to know for certain that they killed many of their own either due to the fog of war or due to the Hannibal Directive.
Personally, I would not be surprised if more than half of the 1200 were killed by the IDF given the ratio between how much footage has been shown relative to how much footage exists.
Absent transparency, the only fair thing to due is assume an intent to maximally deceive the public about what actually happened on October 7th.
In many ways, this is comparable to how the United States was misled about January 6th, 2021. A lot of the footage released in March 2023 contradicted much of the narrative that was spun in the weeks following Jan 6th, 2021. Even now, a lot of the footage still has yet to be released and we still have no idea how many undercover agents and other agent provocateurs were in the crowd that day.
This did not start on oct 7th. I too was ignorant about the situation in palestine but its obvious after just a bit of research that israel isn't a good faith actor here.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MknerYjob0w&t=37s&ab_channel...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFjbnvkmQ0&ab_channel=Amnes...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYgwKhzHeGc&t=569s&ab_channe...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2unZIzIwp0&ab_channel=AlJaz...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMYEHhCkedo&ab_channel=TheGu...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhXIYns7ZeM&ab_channel=AlJaz...
PS: yes I know I'll be flagged for this but truth is important.
And never mind that Hamas is still the same old non compromising, cut throat, maximalist and some would say genocidal terrorist organization it has always been. You forgot to mention that. The PLO is only slightly better.
Israel doesn't want to annex Yehuda and Shomron (the place you call West Bank). This is a complete misunderstanding of the people in the West about Israeli politics. Israel wants to have nothing to do with Arab population. Never wanted it, and doesn't see it wanting it in the future. It's completely antithetical to what the absolute majority of Israeli population (and the politicians who represent it) want.
The reason why Israel holds that territory is that after one of the wars, Israel tried to use it as a bargaining chip to convince its Arab neighbors to recognize Israel as a country and to sign a peace treaty, once the territory is returned (so-called "land for peace" series of UN treaties). But, the Arab neighbors outsmarted Israel by abandoning their people in occupied territories, and, essentially, handing Israel an armed grenade that it now has no idea what to do with.
With respect to this problem, Israel has different approaches to its solution, that range from the "transfer" (the idea that Israel will force / subsidize the Arab population to migrate out of the occupied territories, this is the extreme right-wing position, assassinated "Gandhi" was one of the major proponents of it.) to the two-state solution on the far left, where Israel makes territorial concessions, esp. in Jerusalem and around.
But there's no political force that wants annexation (including the population), and nobody would realistically dare to vanquish / force to move the whole population of Gaza / Yehuda and Shomron. Of course, you could probably find some oddball idiot declaring "death to all Arabs" or similar, but they don't hold any real political power. But even these people wouldn't want annexation if it meant they have to put up with the people from annexed territories.
All true, very true. Of course the other bunch will slaughter you for drawing a cartoon.
I submit that you have a responsibility to be comprehensive when posting.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-resolutio...
You're confusing Al-Qaeda with Muslims.
* Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Hamas political wing, was killed in Tehran
* Yahyah Sinwar, the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades, was killed in Gaza
* Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanese Hezbollah, was killed in Beirut
* Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah's successor, was killed a week later
* Large swathes of Hezbollah's command and control were wiped out in the pager attack
* Bashar al-Assad, Iran's most important military client, fled Syria
The Al-Qassam Brigades are shattered. Mohammad Sinwar, its current leader, is reported by ISW not to have communications with most of its new recruits, who are scavenging improvised weapons from unexploded ordinance. Iran's "Axis of Resistance" lies in tatters, their foreign/military strategy, of which Hamas was a key component, now seems totally repudiated. Hamas has lost most of its remaining infrastructure, supply chains, and support.
They should have taken the deal when it was first offered.
At the end of April (iirc), Israel agreed to a set of terms; Qatar and Egypt then gave Hamas a different set of terms, which Israel hadn't agreed to. Note that stories about Hamas "accepting" a ceasefire date from May 6th. The terms today are the same as those of May 27th.
If it helps, it seems like it wouldn't be worth arguing, and easy to stipulate, that Hamas had accepted ceasefire terms prior to May 27th. You could say that the Qatar switcheroo never happened, and it was Israel being intransigent up to that point. That's not the reporting I read, but fine, ok. The only point my comment makes is that the terms they received on May 27th were ultimately the ones they ended up accepting. Given that: they should have accepted on May 27th.
It could be that they were holding out for international support that never came, and are now cutting their losses
This is the fourth or so deal that Hamas has accepted, the surprising thing is that Israel has accepted it too
If you can cite a source clearly stating Hamas accepted these terms, the May 27/today terms, I'd like to read it. Thanks in advance!
Later
I want to be clear: I'm not saying Hamas didn't offer alternate terms, many many times, over the last year. But you can't "take" a deal your counterparty refuses. What's important about the May 27 terms is that Hamas was forced to accept them anyways. As a descriptive statement, based on the facts of what happened: they should have taken that deal.
This is complete opposite of actual facts which is often the case with Israeli apologia. Hamas wanted a permanent ceasefire and full withdrawal from Gaza. Israel wants a temporary ceasefire - which if one comprehends english - is not actually a ceasefire at all. Quoting Netanyahu (in June) : “Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” which translates to "Return the hostages and we will kill you all at a time of our choosing". Even then Netanyahu never had any intention of pursuing a ceasefire deal to completion at the time because his cabinet members publicly threatened to withdraw from his coalition and collapse the government which would likely lead to Netanyahu's impending trial and incarceration.
You can think those terms are dreadfully unfair; that's fine, that has nothing to do with the argument I made.
It is a foregone conclusion that (the despots in charge of) Hamas aren't operating on the same trade-offs as you & I. Despite the toll, they'll consider it a victory if the IDF withdraws from all its positions.
Not taking the deal has indeed caused more mayhem, but on the flipside, Likud+ are being dragged through the mud, and for some, they were made to look every bit the "terrorists" they seem to hate with a vengeance.
Do you think that the Hamas' attacks aimed at civilians, such as Oct 7th, or indiscriminate launching of missiles it performed for decades, are not terror attacks?
Obviously if everything went unambigiously right for Israel, hamas would be offering an unconditional surrender not a ceasefire. If everything went well for Hamas they would be negotiating a very different deal.
Just curious. I do think they should have taken the deal.
Pager attack is a notable exception here, that was actually targeted badassery.
It goes on.
Whatever else Hamas is now, whatever improvised explosives they blow up in Tel Aviv or Haifa or Jerusalem, they are as a military force with a complex and carefully designed order of battle done, utterly broken. WSJ reports Al-Qassam isn't even communicating with the Hamas political branch. Of course they're going to recruit terrorists. There's no such thing as stopping that kind of activity.
weird to call killing people "targeted badassery"
Even if we grant that Israel offered this ceasefire deal in good faith in May, a bungled deal by Qatar/Egypt/Hamas does nothing to justify the ethnic cleansing they conducted in 2024.
I agree that most reporting, and most statements from US officials, put the blame squarely on Hamas for not having accepted a deal earlier.
But there is also at least some sense, definitely reported on in Israel, that this time Israel was far more serious about getting a deal done - ergo, in the past rounds of negotiations Israel was not pursuing a deal as seriously.
In particular, Ben Gvir (a right-wing extremist Israeli politician) a couple of days ago took credit for causing the previous ceasefire deals to not happen. This has been talked about a bunch in Israel.
I think you're right in thinking of it as Hamas should've called Israel's bluff and had a deal sooner, but let's also be realistic in understanding that they might've correctly seen Israel as not really trying to get a deal.
That's a pretty good summary of basically the last 100 years of that region's history lol
You cannot break the cycle of hatred with more hatred and violence.
What happened is that the image of Israel has been shattered in the globe.
The whole Iranian anti Israel coalition has been badly beaten!
Hezbollah barely exists anymore. The Assad regime is toppled. Iran itself has learned that Israel can attack them at will. The Houthis are still active, but too far away to do real damage.
Hamas itself still exists, but in a deeply degraded form. Their leaders are dead. Their armed forces have taken huge losses. Their amazing tunnel network is destroyed.
Israel will never again be invaded by surprise.
Hamas will probably start shooting rockets into Israel again, and kill the occasional civilian, but Israel is used to that and can deal with it.
I can't do anything about the US having an obscenely distorted view of terrorism but it'd be nice if I could at least turn a profit off it.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/lucky-there-were-no-children-s...
Any future Hamas actions will inherently be less secure as their external help is now crippled.
Nanjing, well, Chinese sentiment is still very anti-Japan because of that and all the other atrocities. And proportionally to size/population, the destruction visited on Gaza in the past year and a quarter goes far beyond what Japan did in China.
Ok now a double honest question, why do zionists have unlimited justifications for committing a holocaust over the last 15 months+? And how many oceans of Palestinian children's blood does it take to wash away German guilt?
Indeed, life will probably continue getting worse for West Bank Palestinians under the Israeli apartheid regime, but there's no reason to believe they'll be literally exterminated.
The only thing left is allowing developers to build on the land and setting up checkpoints to keep the previous owners out.
If they try October 7 style attack again, Gaza will be wiped out.
I think this cease fire somehow legitimises, to the public eye, Netanyahu's strategy of intense attack.
It gives the message of "we won't stop until we get the hostages back" and gives the world a reminder of what this is all about, at least according to what he claims.
Again, just trying to observe the message
Bibi did not force the Palestinians into a ceasefire. He was the bottleneck behind it. Trump effectively threatened no more weapons. Which is why we have a ceasefire.
It'll take at least a few days to see if that stops.
It’s been growing smaller since 1973 (and never technically annexed any area it did temporarily take in a war)
Of course it "needs to be take longer" since lots of money was made by government contractors in this war and why would it need to end earlier if Biden was throwing money on Israel instead of reaching a ceasefire deal much earlier with the first deal.
All would have been avoid had it not been for Biden's weak leadership which was shown on display in-front of the world for the last 4 years.
There is no denying or spinning that.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-mediators-sea...
EDIT: Of course no-one can begin to answer this question, since the answer is there was no reason to prolong this war.
And I wish Biden had done a better job of supporting Israel, this war could have ended a lot sooner if Hamas had realized that the entire world was pressuring them to surrender. Instead the message got diluted with support for Palestinians, which Hamas interpreted as support for themselves.
Did you hear a single call by any country for Hamas to surrender? I didn't.
Edit: I got a very quick -4 mod on this, I assume because people don't like to realize Trump is doing more for both Israel and the Palestinians than Biden, and the Democrats lost the election partly because of their lack of support for Israel.
US, UK, France, Germany, Italy in a joint message: https://it.usembassy.gov/joint-statement-on-israel/
Spain: https://www.politico.eu/article/pedro-sanchez-spain-humanita...
Italy, France, Germany ask for EU sanctions to force Hamas surrender: https://www.reuters.com/world/italy-france-germany-call-ad-h...
Secretary of State calls out other countries for not demanding Hamas to surrender: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/politics/blinken-israel-hamas...
You should expand your media diet.
Looks more like the Iranian hostage situation when Carter lost against Reagan.
>if Hamas had realized that the entire world was pressuring them to surrender.
I guess you mean the entire western world. The rest doesn't care or doesn't Israel vs Hamas as good vs evil. Same with Russian vs Ukraine.
Trump started posting Jeffrey D Sachs videos on Truth Social and the chosen people got Hamas (which the chosen people also largely control, by the way) to accept the deal.
What a weird take. Without Biden's support of Israel this genocide would not have been possible. How do you mean it should have supported Israel more? Allow these psychopats to nuke Gaza?
During all of this, Assad was deposed. Israel's main adversary is Iran. They are the ones who fund and supply Hamas and Hezbollah, and were the key ally of Assad. They attacked Israel multiple times during the war and Israel responded in kind, the assesments seem to be that Israel's responses were quite strong.
So prior to October 7, Iran had strong proxies and allies all over the region. They are now either in shambles or deposed.
The goal of the war for Israel is to prevent another October 7th style attack from occuring. I'd say they have made significant steps towards accomplishing that from a military perspective.
There are some clear indications that the intention of the Israeli government is to destroy in whole, or in part, the Palestinian people, for example by killing members of the group, or inflicting upon it conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.
There's a wealth of quotes from high ranking officials, going all the way up to the Knesset, stating almost exactly that. One quote I think of from time to time is "Erase them, their families, mothers and children." given in a motivational speech directed at the IDF.
Given that this is their intention (and I have every reason to believe it is), I'd say that this has been a pretty successful affair for Israel. Sure, Jews worldwide (including Israel) are much less safe now than they were two years ago, but the Israeli government does not give me the impression that this is at all their goal.
1. Hezbollah suffered heavy blows and lost significant political and military power in Lebanon. Didn’t retaliate nearly as heavy as feared.
2. For the first time Israel struck with its military directly in Iran and showed real abilities by destroying most of Iran’s air defenses.
3. As a result of the two points above and other reasons, there was significant shift of powers in Syria which led to Assad regime collapse (significant amount of supplies to Iran’s main proxy Hezbollah went through Syria), but the affect of the regime change in Syria is yet to be determined.
For the Gazans, the next months and years will be more determinative. Will they get the support and aid they need to rebuild and keep terrorist organizations from running their country? (They should have their own country instead of being effectively an open air prison)
Gazan's now have a ruined country with exactly nothing to show for it.
Depending on how you interpret it, this war was actually a good thing for Lebanon (they have a government for the first time in years), and Syria who finally overthrew their sadistic monster.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. *If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.*
Really major political developments often have a thread on HN.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/with-epic-deal-...
This is not just Trump bragging and taking credit, search other sources.
Am I missing something or did they really only agree to _just_ a ceasefire?
I’m completely ignorant as to the public sentiment on this topic, no social media besides this site.
Given the sheer global size of one group vs the other tiny ethnical minority it’s no surprise who wins in a count of opinion votes. That applies in the UN, and it applies here. And is ironically the reason the ethnic minority must have self determination.
Must be those pesky chinese or russian bots. Or could it be something else entirely? A chosen group of bots perhaps?
> that aren’t dead in a thread before.
Give it some time. They start with the downvotes and when things quiet down some, then come the mass flagging of comments.
Unlike those highly motivated people, normal people don't spend time upvoting and vouching, so you end up with a tattered mess of a thread.
Many people believe they need to add support to their cause at the expense of accuracy, so instead of elaborating or explaining why they just try to drown out discourse that doesnt automatically help them
But fortunately there is no need to debate your beliefs anymore, just go bet on them in the prediction markets
You get paid for being more correct that someone else, geopolitics is greater than sentiment
If you've never seen it, these videos from a banking conference in 2023 are "enlightening":
https://x.com/mtracey/status/1647811834039136258
Mitch McConnell's comments about Ukraine and it's natural resources also support this plan. If assets become to expensive to buy, just cause them to be distressed so you can buy them cheaply.
Pretty much all wars are banker's wars.
As a dev, I hate jargon to dress up trivial products or when distressing things are watered down. Usually I keep my feelings to myself but in this case, allowing a genocide to be watered down would make me complicit.
P.S. I understand this will be downvoted. But HN karma is a small price to pay to call out the softening of a literal genocide. Imagine standing by when someone calls Germany’s genocide “punishments”.
In other news: Israel strikes Gaza within hours of ceasefire accord with Hamas, residents say
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-hamas-cease...
Noting that, ceasefires are wonderful things.
I remain convinced that HN is simply not the place to have a reasoned discussion about this conflict, and probably nowhere on the internet is.
Rest, and re-arm time.
A poll showed 60% of Israelis wanted a ceasefire but the 40% who want the war to continue are making a big noise. Violence was never going to take down a resistance group, we all knew this.
I don’t think there can be a future with Hamas in charge. Only a peace deal will will secure safety for both sides. But this negotiation between Hamas dismantling and a two-state solution is not the rhetoric coming out of Israel.
Only sanctions will gain a two-state solution and actual peace for Israel and Palestine.
And Gaza are still currently launching missiles at Israel.
IMO Iran is the winner (least damaged) out of all this. Their proxies are smashed, but the core strength is still the same.
Israel has blown all its international credibility. The International Court of Justice verdict will be very interesting. If it goes against Israel then BDS will (should) become the policy for all countries.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/consequences-i... (from Nov) | https://www.understandingwar.org/publications?type%5B%5D=bac... (daily report history)
With other conflicts wrapping up, there are people expecting more attacks into Iran, especially by Israel. They are in a weakened state. Their missile attacks amounted to nothing. Much like Russia, they likely look better on paper than in practice. That being said, one nuke from them against Israel would be devastating, but also likely mean the end of the regime
