As Palestinians pushes for statehood, Israel finds itself more isolated
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Monday, May 25, 2026 02:10
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Eyeless in Gaza | Fintan O’Toole
In the Jewish legend, the great warrior Samson ends up, as John Milton famously puts it, “eyeless in Gaza.” He is blinded by the Philistines and harnessed to a huge millstone, forced to drag himself around and around in circles, always moving but unable to go anywhere. Eventually, in the most spectacular of suicides, he gets his revenge by pulling down their temple on top of the Philistines, killing both them and himself. The story is apparently supposed to be heroic, but it feels more like a fable of vicious futility. Cruelty begets cruelty until there is nothing left but mutual destruction.
In the Book of Judges, where we find the Samson story, God has delivered the children of Israel into subjugation by their enemies as punishment because they “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.” As it happens, Hamas’s forebears, the Muslim Brotherhood, held the same belief. The Harvard scholar of the Middle East Sara Roy tells us that, after Israel’s victory in the war of 1967, “the Brethren in Gaza especially remained convinced that the loss of Palestine was God’s punishment for neglecting Islam.” It seems that God has a peculiar way of chastising his various chosen peoples in Israel and Palestine: by inflicting them on each other. With millenarian religious believers in power on both sides of the Gaza wall, it seems that this blood-dimmed vision is again being played out as reality.
The Hamas incursion, in which more people died violently in Israel in a single day than ever before in the turbulent history of the state, is frightful. Even in the present state of the world, the murder, wounding, and kidnapping of so many defenseless civilians is shocking in its depravity. Hamas’s knowing provocation of Israel’s wrath against a Gazan population it cannot then defend shows that it cares as little for its own civilians as it does for the enemy’s. The dehumanization of the whole population of Gaza by Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who said that “we are fighting against human animals,” and his explicit threat to deprive civilians of food and electricity are also profoundly disturbing. Retaliation against noncombatants has been established as Israel’s equal and opposite reaction to Hamas’s crimes and it foreshadows horrors even greater than the many hundreds of Gazans already killed by Israeli air strikes. Yet none of this is truly surprising. Nothing justifies these assaults, but when violence has become the only means of communication, everyone knows that its language will be spoken — and not in whispers but in screams.
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It is hard, from the outside, to understand how Israel could have become so complacent about this inevitability. The country has historically had a strange naiveté about Islamism. In 1986, a year before Hamas was formed, Israel’s military governor of Gaza, General Yitzhak Segev, acknowledged that “We extend some financial aid to Islamic groups via mosques and religious schools in order to help create a force that would stand against the leftist forces which support the PLO.” Radical Islamism seemed a safer alternative to the more secular Fatah movement. But any notion that jihadism was somehow going to be nicer or more malleable than leftist Palestinian nationalism was surely vaporized a long time ago. Even if global events this century had not revealed the inherent murderousness of this strain of religious zealotry, Israel should have known from the start that Hamas’s rejection of the two-state solution supported by Fatah is rooted in the conviction that Palestine itself is a god-given Islamic endowment. The persistence in Israeli policy of the notion that Hamas is a useful force because it divides Palestinians has always seemed a form of willful blindness.
It might have made some sense had there been a consistent strategy of encouraging Hamas to move away from militarism. But democratic politics in Gaza and the West Bank collapsed after January 2006, when Hamas won what international observers judged to be fair and well-run
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If I were leadership in Israel right now, I'd go to the ends of the earth and hunt every last one of them down. That's what they should have done in the first place. Their weakness always lead to this inevitability.
But I'm not Israeli leadership. I'm not Jewish. Not my problem.
Everybody watch your backs today. These Animals are everywhere, pretty much in every country but Poland and Russia.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Israelis blame Gov’t for Hamas massacre, say Netanyahu must resign - poll
An overwhelming majority of 86% of respondents, including 79% of coalition supporters, said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country's leadership.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Updated: OCTOBER 13, 2023 14:43
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-767880
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Sure. Don't blame the actual murderers for murder.
I'll bet Democrats and NeoCons in America are eating this right up. Yanno... after a few decades of calling anybody who questioned if our own Government did the same thing on 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
What can you believe?
Pretty much nothing.
The 99.9% of people on this planet will never actually know what's really happening on any given day.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:Israeli airstrikes have left thousands dead, hundreds of thousands homeless, and millions without food or water. Worse has happened:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sure. Don't blame the actual murderers for murder.
I'll bet Democrats and NeoCons in America are eating this right up. Yanno... after a few decades of calling anybody who questioned if our own Government did the same thing on 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
What can you believe?
Pretty much nothing.
The 99.9% of people on this planet will never actually know what's really happening on any given day.
In the Vietnam War, the US killed millions, dropped more tonnage of explosives on South Vietnam, a US ally, than tons of explosives dropped in WWII. How well did that work out for the US, 6ix?
After 9/11, all the terrorists on the four planes were dead, but the USA killed people by millions as retribution. How well did that work out for the US, 6ix?
The Gaza strip only has 2.3 million people, so it will be impossible for Israel to kill as many of the wrong people as the US has done, but even trying to achieve the USA's kill totals will work out pretty badly for Israel, as it did for the good old USA.
An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Early Intelligence Shows Hamas Attack Surprised Iranian Leaders, U.S. Says
The United States has collected multiple pieces of intelligence that show that key Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas attack in Israel, information that has fueled U.S. doubts that Iran played a direct role in planning the assault, according to several American officials.
The United States, Israel and key regional allies have not found evidence that Iran directly helped plan the attack, according to the U.S. officials, an Israeli official and another official in the Middle East.
MORE AT https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/11/us/politics/iran-israel-gaza-hamas-
us-intelligence.html
After swallowing whatever USA intelligence officials said, via the NYT, don't tell me you're going to start disbelieving them now??
Unfortunately asking cui bono? [who benefits?] potentially benefits a lot of different people, all on different sides.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM
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Quote:
Palestinians rallied to the call to safeguard the Holy Mosque. It was not just Hamas; it was West Bank Palestinians and (for the first time, too, 1948 Palestinians who have Israeli passports) who all rose up to protect Al-Aqsa. Just to be clear, the rallying cry was not for Hamas; it was not for Palestinian nationalism. It was for Al-Aqsa -- an icon that goes to the heart of what it is to be Muslim (Sunni or Shi’a). It was a cry that resonated across the entire Islamic sphere.
Did the West not get it? Apparently not. It was right under their nose, but super high-tech Intel doesn’t do symbolic meaning. That was true for the 2006 Lebanon war too, by the way; "Israel" could not grasp the symbolism of Hezballah’s ‘Karbala’ stand.
In the intervening period, "Israel" has shattered into two equally weighted factions holding to two irreconcilable visions of "Israel’s" future; two mutually opposing readings of history and of what it means to be Jewish.
The fissure could not be more complete. Except it is. One faction, which holds a majority in parliament, is broadly Mizrahi -- a former underclass in Israeli society; and the other, largely well-to-do liberal Ashkenazi.
So, what has this to do with Al-Aqsa Flood? Well, the Right in Netanyahu’s government has two long-standing commitments. One is to rebuild the (Jewish) Temple on ‘Temple Mount’ (Haram al-Shariff).
Just to be clear, that would entail demolishing Al-Aqsa.
The second overriding commitment is to the founding of "Israel", on the "Land of Israel". And again, to be clear, this (in their view) would entail clearing Palestinians from the West Bank. Indeed, the settlers have been cleansing Palestinians from swaths of the West Bank over the past year (notably between Ramallah and Jehrico).
On Thursday morning (two days preceding Al-Aqsa Flood), more than 800 settlers stormed the Mosque Compound, under the full protection of Israeli forces. The drumbeat of such provocations is rising.
A whole lot more at https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/al-aqsa-flood:-the-su
rprise-is-that-some-are-surprised
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Sounds like we could learn a few lessons about clearing out illegal invaders out of our country from Israel.
America needs to sit down and STFU and let this play out.
At least it seems that the Democrat run shitholes had high police presence today. I haven't heard of anything bad happening as of yet.
Also, Hungary, France and Germany of all places put down a ban on any Pro-Palestinian demonstrations. It ain't much, but it's a start. I never thought I'd see the day.
It's time for every European nation to drive any sub-human Muslim mongrel out of their countries once and for all.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:6ix, you are [not] a brilliant tactician to suggest handling illegal aliens in the US the same way Israel handles its illegal alien problem:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like we could learn a few lessons about clearing out illegal invaders out of our country from Israel.
America needs to sit down and STFU and let this play out.
At least it seems that the Democrat run shitholes had high police presence today. I haven't heard of anything bad happening as of yet.
Also, Hungary, France and Germany of all places put down a ban on any Pro-Palestinian demonstrations. It ain't much, but it's a start. I never thought I'd see the day.
It's time for every European nation to drive any sub-human Muslim mongrel out of their countries once and for all.
The Israeli air force on Thursday said it had dropped 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets so far — a staggering number over the course of six days, according to warfare experts.
“Israel is dropping in less than a week what the U.S. was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace and a former U.N. war crimes investigator in Libya. He helped plan airstrikes for the Pentagon during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped in one year during the war in Afghanistan was just over 7,423, Garlasco said, citing U.S. military records. During the entire war in Libya, the NATO alliance reported dropping more than 7,600 bombs and missiles from planes, according to a U.N. report.
Questions also emerged Thursday after video footage appeared to show Israel using white phosphorus in a strike on Gaza’s harbor. A video verified by The Washington Post that was filmed Wednesday shows the firing of two artillery shells, followed by white strings of smoke. The controversial munition can cause severe harm when used against civilians. Human Rights Watch said it had verified videos of the strike on Gaza’s harbor and another along the Israel-Lebanon border that it said appeared to show Israel’s use of white phosphorus.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/12/israel-seeks-end-hamas
-gaza-war/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are [not] a brilliant tactician to suggest handling illegal aliens in the US the same way Israel handles its illegal alien problem:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like we could learn a few lessons about clearing out illegal invaders out of our country from Israel.
America needs to sit down and STFU and let this play out.
At least it seems that the Democrat run shitholes had high police presence today. I haven't heard of anything bad happening as of yet.
Also, Hungary, France and Germany of all places put down a ban on any Pro-Palestinian demonstrations. It ain't much, but it's a start. I never thought I'd see the day.
It's time for every European nation to drive any sub-human Muslim mongrel out of their countries once and for all.
The Israeli air force on Thursday said it had dropped 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets so far — a staggering number over the course of six days, according to warfare experts.
They're not bombing their own house because they never let the trash in their boarders in the first place.
We round them all up, ship them to the south and bomb 50 miles south of the Mexican side of the border until it's a canal.
Oh? A lot of them aren't from south of us you say? Tough titty. Mexico can deal with them.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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