Israel has been using their overwhelming firepower to ethnically cleanse the West Bank. As for Israel's commitment to finding a PEACEFUL solution, civilian casualties -- even prior to this -- have run about 20:1 Palestinian to Israeli: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties When Palestinians protested PEACEFULLY a few years ago, Israeli snipers shot hundreds of them.
A related question: let's imagine that Hamas disappears from the face of the earth, and the Palestinians are PEACEFUL, as you believe the Israeli state to be for some reason. What do you suppose is their eventual reward? Do they get a state along the lines of the 1992 Oslo Accord? Does Israel at least cease ethnically cleansing the West Bank, something you've shrugged off as the spoils going to the victor (something that apparently doesn't make them less PEACEFUL)? Or is your ideal of a PEACEFUL resolution that the Palestinians lose all of their lands, lands that Israel has through multiple international agreements recognized, with the Palestinians simply ceasing resistance? Because that doesn't look like peace to me, just a genocide genteel enough that the international community can pretend it isn't happening.
I wonder how one can reconcile Israel striving for peace with the constant settlement expansion? You claim shad is naïve but your post is incredibly one sided and does not attempt any nuance at all. Yes, no doubt hamas are terrible, but is it not possible that Israel are hardly angels themselves?
Israel have been actively looking for a two state solution. They’ve been open to peace talks & peaceful borders for a long time. I think your left wing woke ideology has rotted your brain. Neither side is innocent but you seem to be fixated on defending terrorism. “Hamas official Ghazi Hamad says they will repeat October 7-like attacks until Israel is annihilated.” You still didn’t answer the question. What are Israel supposed to do, in the face of an existential threat?
Israel have, by government decree, effectively turned a blind eye to Israeli settlers moving on to Palestinian land on the West Bank and forcibly removing the people there. There was a guy on PM on Radio 4 yesterday, who works with an Israeli organisation concerned with the human rights of Palestinians, and he detailed many acts of violence by Israeli settlers, including the murder of two shepherds, which have gone univestigated and unpunished. I wish you would stop categorising anyone critical of the Israeli government as being automatically pro-Hamas. It’s disingenuous and completely untrue.
This is the issue with this one. There's no group in this that is 'innocent', so you end up with circular arguments.
It was invalid from the start. Yours and others comments re the treatment of Palestinians are ignored as are the majority on here calling the Hamas attack an atrocity whilst calling out Israel's continued infringements of the Oslo accord and human rights agreements. There are a number of Israeli activist groups and huge and growing opposition to the current regime. These are some of those calling for better treatment of the populations of Gaza and the west bank. https://gisha.org/en/about-gisha/ https://www.btselem.org/ and international condemnation report in several articles https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/west-bank-palestinian-villages-israeli-army-settlers https://reliefweb.int/report/occupi...al-community-stop-forcible-transfer-west-bank https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/30/west-bank-settlers-violence-palestinians/
Worth noting. The religious affiliation of the Israeli population as of 2022 was 73.6% Jewish, 18.1% Muslim, 1.9% Christian, and 1.6% Druze. The remaining 4.8% included faiths such as Samaritanism and Baháʼí, as well as "religiously unclassified".
Such untruthful disingenuity from someone who promotes himself as an intellectual superpower who regularly denigrates others mental capabilities is some measure of the person.
This was a brave post Loading, I'm surprised there hasn't been a lynch mob organised but the lack of replies probably speaks volumes. How much of the leave vote was based on true racism I don't know but I feel that the racism label is over used to discredit leavers by angry remainers. It was used on here more than once. Understandable that remainers are upset at the result but concerns over immigration doesn't equate to racism. These concerns may not be correct when the net immigration figures are closely scrutinized but I feel that some people already living in a crowded country didn't want any more arrivals from overseas. Ironically, that includes immigrants already here who now feel this country is overcrowded. (Nuanced seems to be the new favourite word on here, so that's just say the situation is terribly nuanced. Hope I got that right ) Personally, I think that leavers voted that way for a variety of reasons not just immigration. For whatever their reasons, the remainers failed in a big way to get the benefits of the EU over to the population and for that they should take a big share of the responsibility for brexit. The above views are not necessarily my own.
Absolutely. That was the biggest error, assuming a remain win and no real attempts to sell the benefits of staying in the EU. I agree that there were populations in areas of the country who quite rightly feared for their futures as immigrants seemed to flood in, and when Leave offer these people an alternative to what they could see happening around them, they saw it as a positive choice. The leave propaganda worked well, and Remain sat on their hands going Lalalalala la. There are lots of things that were and are still said, such as not all leave voters are racists, but all racists voted leave. And that's certainly not true as there are plenty of racists who voted remain it but was used as an easy stick with which to beat leave voters - the inference being that most leave voters were racists and it was a difficult one to deny when immigration was such a key element of our relationship with Europe and a key driver in the leave campaign. Trouble is a lot of people wanted immigration reduced, not because they were racist, but because they needed jobs and good wages. It's done now, and it's a mess but there can be no real blame put on leave voters because the alternative wasn't sold to them.
I missed Loadings post so hadn't commented, but I have had similar experiences so don't disagree with anything he said. The whole Brexit campaign has been oversimplified and polarised so it's very difficult to debate it now without it quickly collapsing into insults and 2 camps who won't talk to each other.
Hamas isn't remotely an existential threat. Don't get me wrong: they would like to be. But 4000-5000 guys with small arms aren't taking down a nuclear-armed nation in our lifetime, particularly given that they were deeply unpopular in Gaza prior to this. And there will be more members of Hamas after this than there were before, because that's what happens when you indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of civilians. Israel also isn't looking for a two-state solution. Bibi has long refused to endorse the principle, while also overseeing the annexation of vast swathes of the West Bank, making a two-state solution utterly impossible. https://www.timesofisrael.com/while...-tells-trump-israel-will-not-annex-west-bank/ Note the slight of hand there: he doesn't want to annex Palestinians. He was perfectly happy to keep pushing them off their land and annexing that peacemeal, however. Hamas holds sway in Gaza specifically because Bibi preferred them as a foil given that they were, as he is, uninterested in a two-state solution (unlike Fatah): https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news...ext-term/0000017f-da73-d718-a5ff-faf7614a0000 You freely admitted a couple weeks ago that you don't know anything about the history of the conflict, and that you were going to do the reading. Before you move on to your usual nonsense about 'woke mind virus', I'd suggest that you continue doing that reading.
This is an interesting read https://decolonizepalestine.com/myth/from-the-river-to-the-sea-is-a-call-to-genocide/
There were also many people on this very thread who openly criticised those who voted leave as stupid, and far, far worse names iirc, and the whole process wasn’t as simple as that. I felt then and still do, and made a light ref to this recently on here, that Labour voters cling on so much to ridiculing the incumbent Gov, rather than focusing on their leader, Labour policies or letting people know how things can be different, that it makes people, at times, come across as slightly deranged - it is an unbelievable agenda against the Gov rather than actually, you know - promoting the good policies and ways things will be under labour. I did wonder from IOAG’s post above, about believing the two jokers on here, that he must have been referring to Badger and Jabbo, so made me actually start watching the video to see if he was talking about them Although the former at times is relentless in just posting videos, mainly poking the Gov, without really offering an opinion. Doesn’t help imo. The Bexit vote was very difficult to make many informed decisions imo, and I could see both sides of the fence. My real irk with the whole debacle was Cameron allowing the vote, and May then thinking she was the second coming of Thatcher by calling the GE when she did, significantly weakening our negotiating position and making it almost impossible to get legislation through. I did naively hope that all parties would work together over Brexit, to make sure it went as well as possible, but that was never going to happen, and something I dislike both reds and blues over. As for the next GE, whilst I have always sat slightly right of centre, I have no idea who I will vote for just now. If I went by the way in which many Labour supporters on here act, that may scupper Labours chances in the GE, although that would be a big leap suggested this forum is very reflective of Labour voters. Just imagine if their own supporters ****ed it up for them. What a ****ing triumph.
