Off Topic The Politics Thread

[WBA2_QPR3]

I can't see how that would be a viable option at all. Egypt would be seen to appease Israel, which is a non-starter

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

Al Jazeera reporting the Iranian Foreign Minister met late last night with Nasrallah, so expect Hezzbollah to react violently once the next Israeli phase starts.

'Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, met the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon on Friday, local Lebanese media outlets reported.
Reuters cited Al-Mayadeen television reports that Amirabdollahian, who arrived in Beirut late on Thursday, met Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.'

The Lebanese acting PM has just appealed for calm but the government is non functioning - Hezzbollah control most of the country south of Beirut airport

Blinken meeting Abbas now, shuttle diplomacy to avert a **** up in full effect

 

[QPRNUTS]

Al Jazeera reporting the Iranian Defence Minister met late last night with Nasrallah, so expect Hezzbollah to react violently once the next Israeli phase starts. The Lebanese acting PM has just appealed for calm but the government is non functioning - Hezzbollah control most of the country south of Beirut airport

Hard to know how many fighters or how much of their equipment they have used over the last decade to prop up Assad.

Lebanese economy which is already bankrupt would collapse with a war. That in itself might be worthwhile for Israel!!!

interesting that Turkey despite years of trying to stabilise relations with Israel have been very critical of them over the last few days.

Would Israel take a preemptive strike on Tehran?

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

The official line is they are 100,000 strong but probably very overstated. If Hezzbollah react then probably Rafic-Hariri airport will be hit first to put it out of action. The black market $/lira rate will go way above 100,000 further crippling the people

A pre-emptive strike on Tehran would be unbelievable given even the US has said there is no clear evidence of Iranian involvement and would guarantee a regional war - I can't see the US letting that happen

Turkey China and Russia have not come out against Hamas which is very telling. The Israelis have admonished China this morning for their silence

It's Friday so as you know big day for the Friday Prayers - expect demonstrations from both sides at Temple Mount

 

[QPRNUTS]

The official line is they are 100,000 strong but probably very overstated. If Hezzbollah react then probably Rafic-Hariri airport will be hit first to put it out of action. The black market $/lira rate will go way above 100,000 further crippling the people

A pre-emptive strike on Tehran would be unbelievable given even the US has said there is no clear evidence of Iranian involvement and would guarantee a regional war - I can't see the US letting that happen

Turkey China and Russia have not come out against Hamas which is very telling. The Israelis have admonished China this morning for their silence

It's Friday so as you know big day for the Friday Prayers - expect demonstrations from both sides at Temple Mount

Another interesting point to consider is that of the Lebanese Army. In 06 they were not considered a threat and happily stood aside to allow Hezbollah to fight the Israeli’s.
17 years later and they are a different prospect after US funding for equipment and training. If they are to have any credibility with the Lebanese people, they can’t stand aside again.

 

[rangercol]

Col…that’s a good question. One that the Israeli government will have had contingency plans for. The only problem is that these plans all include using the preverbal sledge hammer. There is no simple solution anymore. This is a sh1te show.

The Palestinian’s are like a cornered rat. They have been treated horrendously for decades and the world largely ignores them mainly because of the Israeli - US political relations. The suffering they have endured is mind blowing. People can’t get their heads around this as the vast majority of their suffering has been brushed over by SKY, BBC, FOX etc etc. The Israeli’s have penned them in and slowly but surely are wiping them off the face of the earth. Is it any wonder when the world refused to listen that they turned to extremism!!!!
Now…..what has happened over the last few days is truly shocking. Indefensible. It seems small children were shot indiscriminately and Israeli solders beheaded. The war in Ukraine and the impending SA-Israeli normalisation talks had taken the eye of their cause and they needed to strike hard to bring the worlds focus back on their plight. They have achieved this.

I said in my first post that the US needed to act fast to prevent escalation. Unfortunately Biden showed his weakness. He was too emotive. They have been backtracking since. The Israeli’s don’t need any encouragement or green light. They will always do first and explain later. Locking millions of people up is not an acceptable foreign policy. US has foo*ed up again.

For anyone who knows the Gaza Strip there’s nowhere to go unless the Egyptians allow/facilitate entry to the Sinai Peninsula. Hamas have a very strong hold over the population and won’t let people go easily. That’s their human shield. They don’t care how many thousands will die. What’s the chances of the innocent Palestinian’s turning on Hamas….zero. The consequences would be huge. And meanwhile all Israel’s response is doing is ensuring the next generation of Hamas extremists.
Keep an eye on the north. If Hezbollah open up, this will escalate into a bigger nightmare.

Let me be clear, I’ll not in anyway condoning what these animals have done but Israel’s treatment of the ordinary Palestinian people over decades, has come back to bite them firmly on the ass

I agree with all of that.
But I ask again, following the butchery from Hamas and the taking of hostages, what other response would you have found acceptable from Israel?

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

Another interesting point to consider is that of the Lebanese Army. In 06 they were not considered a threat and happily stood aside to allow Hezbollah to fight the Israeli’s.
17 years later and they are a different prospect after US funding for equipment and training. If they are to have any credibility with the Lebanese people, they can’t stand aside again.

I can't imagine the Lebanese army can even begin to control nor confront Hezzbollah, it would lead to a countrywide civil war. The average (non Shia) Lebanese wants nothing to do with Hezzbollah/Israel, no one can contemplate the entire country on fire again

The army are patrolling the border area this morning ostensibly to prevent any build up but when push comes to shove can you see them taking on Hezzbollah?

Where does UNIFIL stand in this?

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

WHO asks Israel to reverse evacuation order, says it amounts to 'death sentence' for vulnerable patients
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said asking vulnerable patients to evacuate hospitals in Gaza amounted to a “death sentence”, and the director general of the agency called upon Israel to reverse its decision to order an evacuation.

 

[sb_73]

Thanks to @WBA2_QPR3 and @QPRNUTS for really well informed, well thought out and passionate posts on this thread regarding Israel.

When this latest round of violence kicked off I realised how ignorant I was/am about the history and politics of the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Although I’ve found various iterations of the Israeli government pretty repugnant, I’ve been vaguely sympathetic to the idea of the Israeli state. Hamas, as a fundamentalist religious organisation, is complete anathema to me, though the Palestinians have always seemed hard done by to me. That’s about the extent of my thinking.

So I’ve spent the last few days reading up, trying to triangulate sources to balance out bias. The roots go back thousands of years and I won’t bore you with a full history lesson, but it’s worth putting all this in context.

The Jews have been persecuted by just about everyone, but much more, historically, by Christians than by Muslims. For nearly two millennia until 1948 they have been a minority group in the area now known as Israel.

Key recent dates - 1917 when two different bits of the British government promised to support and facilitate a Jewish homeland in Palestine on one hand and full independence for the Arabs (including Palestinians) in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks on the other. After the end of the First World War we, and the French with the tacit support of the US decided to stick with the Balfour Declaration for the Jewish homeland and carve up the Middle East into ‘mandates’. So the Palestinians had their first taste of being dumped on.

1948 - the beginning of the current cycle of endless violence. Pre the establishment of the Israeli state the government in waiting hatched a plan to ethnically cleanse the territory of Arabs. Terrorist groups (British government definition) like Irgun and the Stern Gang started the process with the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinian villagers who had signed an armistice with the ‘official’ Zionist forces. What happened here sounds eerily similar to Hamas’ attacks last Saturday - men, women and children slaughtered in obscene ways. Look it up. Zero excuse for Hamas’ actions of course. In the aftermath of violence which morphed into the first Israeli/Arab war 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 700,000, 80% of the Arab population of Israel, fled. Their land was appropriated with no compensation in most cases and they are not allowed to return.

1967 - more land annexed and occupied by Israel in the Six Day war.

1987 - Israel begins covertly supporting and funding Hamas as a ‘religious non political’ competitor to the PLO. Seriously.

2022 - the Israeli government takes a massive lurch to the right by including Jewish Power in the coalition and its leader Ben- Gvir, as security minister. These guys want to resume ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs seen as ‘threats’.

There were decades of negotiations and discussions between the Israeli government and representatives of the Palestinians, sponsored by multiple US presidents and Secretaries of State. All ended in complete failure, the end of the ‘two state’ solution and the tragedy of extremists now representing both sides of the equation.

As a result of all this reading my sympathy for the Palestinians has rocketed. They’ve been shafted by everyone, including their own leaders.

But now we have the nightmare scenario - the Palestinians being manipulated by a medieval theocracy with modern tools in the shape of Iran, which would love the whole region to explode; the Israeli’s being represented by people who would be happy with a violent end to the Palestinian ‘problem’, and the US backing them up - the US who’s policy is heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalists who couldn’t care less about Israel and the Jews, but think that an apocalyptic war in the area is the beginning of the ‘end times’ which will lead to their ascent to heaven and, of course, the descent into hell of all those who don’t think like them.

**** me, what a mess. We now rely on Netanyahu, influenced by the new entrants to his wartime coalition, to be reasonable. He has seen a massive failure of his intelligence and military forces which must be an incredible shock to the system. There is still the chance of an Iran inspired escalation of the conflict on multiple fronts, and if the situation in Gaza deteriorates even further more ‘moderate’ Arab states might also feel obliged to act.

And Israel, and possibly Iran, has nuclear weapons.

 

[Stroller]

Collective punishment is a war crime prohibited by treaty in both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II.

Leo Varadkar:

“To me, it amounts to collective punishment. Cutting off power, cutting off fuel supplies and water supplies, that’s not the way a respectable democratic state should conduct itself.”

Why won't our own political leaders state this obvious fact?

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

Arguably it was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that set this all in motion, the pivot point summed up thus -

"The late Awni Abd al-Hadi, a Palestinian political figure and nationalist, condemned the Balfour Declaration in his memoirs, saying it was made by an English foreigner who had no claim to Palestine, to a foreign Jew who had no right to it."

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Out of interest, how do you know this dishonourable woman is a Tory?

She’d be inside by now if she wasn’t.

 

[QPRNUTS]

I agree with all of that.
But I ask again, following the butchery from Hamas and the taking of hostages, what other response would you have found acceptable from Israel?

Col

this was all so predictable and the answer simply is that Israel never has and never will be proportionate.
Targeted strikes led by intelligence, actively work with Egypt to get innocent people out through Sinai, power allowed to hospitals etc etc. there was loads that could or should be done before starting a siege and targeting 2million+ innocent people.

our PM summed it up well in govt yesterday by simply saying that the pubic outcry towards Hamas and the sympathy towards Israel will all quickly disappear if the Israeli military response is disproportionate.

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

Everyone's favourite - Ursula The Confused - is under fire for showing double standards between the Ukraine conflict and the Gaza crisis -

Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the EU Commission President labelled Moscow’s attacks on its eastern neighbour as "pure terror" and actions "constituting "war crimes," condemning them on numerous occasions.

Von der Leyen said Russia was guilty of carrying out targeted attacks in Ukraine against civilian infrastructure, as well as having a "clear aim" of cutting off men, women and children of water, electricity and heating" despite the cold winter.

**** me what a mess, and we have donkeys making key life or death decisions

 

[sb_73]

Arguably it was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that set this all in motion, the pivot point summed up thus -

"The late Awni Abd al-Hadi, a Palestinian political figure and nationalist, condemned the Balfour Declaration in his memoirs, saying it was made by an English foreigner who had no claim to Palestine, to a foreign Jew who had no right to it."

I knew about the Balfour Declaration but I didn’t know before this week about the promises also made to the Arabs. Bizarrely it seems both sets of promises were made in good faith at the time, the people talking with the Arabs didn’t know that the British government was also making promises to the British Jewish leadership.

Of course the British also need to be held to account for standing by in the last months of the mandate in Palestine as the ethnic cleansing of Arabs took place. I can kind of understand that by this stage the Brits were exhausted after the war and at leadership level there might have been repressed guilt at the failure to prevent the holocaust. But really no excuse for the Palestinians to suffer so much for this.

 

[QPRNUTS]

Thanks to @WBA2_QPR3 and @QPRNUTS for really well informed, well thought out and passionate posts on this thread regarding Israel.

When this latest round of violence kicked off I realised how ignorant I was/am about the history and politics of the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Although I’ve found various iterations of the Israeli government pretty repugnant, I’ve been vaguely sympathetic to the idea of the Israeli state. Hamas, as a fundamentalist religious organisation, is complete anathema to me, though the Palestinians have always seemed hard done by to me. That’s about the extent of my thinking.

So I’ve spent the last few days reading up, trying to triangulate sources to balance out bias. The roots go back thousands of years and I won’t bore you with a full history lesson, but it’s worth putting all this in context.

The Jews have been persecuted by just about everyone, but much more, historically, by Christians than by Muslims. For nearly two millennia until 1948 they have been a minority group in the area now known as Israel.

Key recent dates - 1917 when two different bits of the British government promised to support and facilitate a Jewish homeland in Palestine on one hand and full independence for the Arabs (including Palestinians) in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks on the other. After the end of the First World War we, and the French with the tacit support of the US decided to stick with the Balfour Declaration for the Jewish homeland and carve up the Middle East into ‘mandates’. So the Palestinians had their first taste of being dumped on.

1948 - the beginning of the current cycle of endless violence. Pre the establishment of the Israeli state the government in waiting hatched a plan to ethnically cleanse the territory of Arabs. Terrorist groups (British government definition) like Irgun and the Stern Gang started the process with the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinian villagers who had signed an armistice with the ‘official’ Zionist forces. What happened here sounds eerily similar to Hamas’ attacks last Saturday - men, women and children slaughtered in obscene ways. Look it up. Zero excuse for Hamas’ actions of course. In the aftermath of violence which morphed into the first Israeli/Arab war 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 700,000, 80% of the Arab population of Israel, fled. Their land was appropriated with no compensation in most cases and they are not allowed to return.

1967 - more land annexed and occupied by Israel in the Six Day war.

1987 - Israel begins covertly supporting and funding Hamas as a ‘religious non political’ competitor to the PLO. Seriously.

2022 - the Israeli government takes a massive lurch to the right by including Jewish Power in the coalition and its leader Ben- Gvir, as security minister. These guys want to resume ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs seen as ‘threats’.

There were decades of negotiations and discussions between the Israeli government and representatives of the Palestinians, sponsored by multiple US presidents and Secretaries of State. All ended in complete failure, the end of the ‘two state’ solution and the tragedy of extremists now representing both sides of the equation.

As a result of all this reading my sympathy for the Palestinians has rocketed. They’ve been shafted by everyone, including their own leaders.

But now we have the nightmare scenario - the Palestinians being manipulated by a medieval theocracy with modern tools in the shape of Iran, which would love the whole region to explode; the Israeli’s being represented by people who would be happy with a violent end to the Palestinian ‘problem’, and the US backing them up - the US who’s policy is heavily influenced by Christian fundamentalists who couldn’t care less about Israel and the Jews, but think that an apocalyptic war in the area is the beginning of the ‘end times’ which will lead to their ascent to heaven and, of course, the descent into hell of all those who don’t think like them.

**** me, what a mess. We now rely on Netanyahu, influenced by the new entrants to his wartime coalition, to be reasonable. He has seen a massive failure of his intelligence and military forces which must be an incredible shock to the system. There is still the chance of an Iran inspired escalation of the conflict on multiple fronts, and if the situation in Gaza deteriorates even further more ‘moderate’ Arab states might also feel obliged to act.

And Israel, and possibly Iran, has nuclear weapons.

Good man SB

I genuinely don’t want to sound or be accused of being antisemitic, but if you ever worked or travelled in that area and you saw the Palestinian camps and the way they have been treated AND the unbelievable atrocities that they have endured you simply couldn’t but feel sympathy for them. NOT for Hamas but for the innocent people who have no human rights and have had EVERYTHING taken from them.

 

[QPRNUTS]

I can't imagine the Lebanese army can even begin to control nor confront Hezzbollah, it would lead to a countrywide civil war. The average (non Shia) Lebanese wants nothing to do with Hezzbollah/Israel, no one can contemplate the entire country on fire again

The army are patrolling the border area this morning ostensibly to prevent any build up but when push comes to shove can you see them taking on Hezzbollah?

Where does UNIFIL stand in this?

I may have not got my point across well.
Was not suggesting that the Lebanese Army would attempt to control Hezbollah, because they can’t but meant that instead of being a bystander like last time, any future war in Lebanon may see the Lebanese Army fighting side by side with Hezbollah.

 

[WBA2_QPR3]

I second what Nuts says above.

Do many people realise that Palestinians have no actual country, hence no passport at all? They are a stateless people. They all have secondary status - Palestinian-Lebanese, Palestinian-Jordanian etc.

I hold no truck with hamas hezzbollah Fatah or any other terrorist entity but I hold sympathy for the Palestinian people

 

[QPRNUTS]

That sums it up perfectly.

I think it’s important to add that we all obviously feel for the innocent Israeli people who have died in this particular incident too. It’s deeply shocking. But this is only a scratch on the surface of the atrocities that both sides have carried out against each other.

The world has a collective responsibility to sort this mess out.

 

[Star of David Bardsley]

Col

this was all so predictable and the answer simply is that Israel never has and never will be proportionate.
Targeted strikes led by intelligence, actively work with Egypt to get innocent people out through Sinai, power allowed to hospitals etc etc. there was loads that could or should be done before starting a siege and targeting 2million+ innocent people.

our PM summed it up well in govt yesterday by simply saying that the pubic outcry towards Hamas and the sympathy towards Israel will all quickly disappear if the Israeli military response is disproportionate.

Egypt doesn’t want them. There’s no realistic proportionate response. It’s kill or be killed.