Gaza is described, by Amnesty International and the Norwegian Refugee Council, as the world largest open air prison. It depends for all life necessities on Israel and has all of two neighbours, Israel and Egypt. The former being also the former occupier which refuses to lift the embargoe and prevents Gazans from participating in normal life in Israel, incl. working there. All Israel did to technically not make it an occupation is to withdraw troops, getting rid of that cost and risk. They did not so get rid of accountability and responsibility.
That situation is the perfect breeding ground for extremism. Israel is not at all innocent in the FUBAR that is the middle east and Gaza in particular, regardless of the excuses Israel finds.
Why should they be obligated to allow Gazans to participate in normal life in Israel? They're de-facto two separate countries. Why isn't Egypt getting the same criticism? They could do the same, but they don't. And there are many other Arab nations in the region that, while not directly bordering Gaza, could help out if they wanted. Iran does (though not Arab), but they provide them with weapons.
Before the attack, Israel was issuing work permits to Gazans to let them work and earn badly-needed money in Israel; so much for that.
I can see why Israel doesn't want Gazans participating in normal life there: they keep shooting rockets at them. And after the latest atrocity, they'll probably never entertain the idea of good relations with them.
Is Korea an "apartheid state" because North and South Korea refuse to let each other's citizens "participate in normal life" on the other side of the DMZ?
>Israel is not at all innocent in the FUBAR that is the middle east and Gaza in particular
It seems like the reverse to me: their actions in the West Bank continue to be wrong and cause problems (illegal settlements). But I don't see how they've done anything wrong in Gaza in 17 years: they simply don't want that group of people in their country, and they have that right.
Also, why is it that people like you never criticize Egypt for not taking in the Gazans? There's really nothing stopping Egypt from annexing Gaza.
Egypt gets the same criticism when it comes to the embargoe so.
But you know who is stopping Egypt from annexing (interesting choice of words, by the way) Gaza? Israel. And you actually have not the slightest idea what apartheid is and how it works.
a) Egypt used to own Gaza (they lost it in a war they started, along with a big chunk of Sinai, which was later returned in a peace deal)
b) Gaza doesn't shoot rockets into Egypt regularly, so of course they don't bomb them
c) I've never seen it
d) Last I heard, Israel tried to get Egypt to take Gaza back. How is Israel preventing Egypt from taking them?
I do know what apartheid is: it's what happened in South Africa, when two groups of people lived in the very same place (i.e., in the same towns and cities) and were treated differently by the state. It's just like how Black people were treated in the US during the Jim Crow era. What's happening with Gaza is nothing like this.
> I do know what apartheid is: it's what happened in South Africa, when two groups of people lived in the very same place (i.e., in the same towns and cities) and were treated differently by the state.
> The Pretoria government established ten Bantustans in South Africa, and ten in neighbouring South West Africa (then under South African administration), for the purpose of concentrating the members of designated ethnic groups, thus making each of those territories ethnically homogeneous as the basis for creating autonomous nation states for South Africa's different black ethnic groups. Under the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970, the government stripped black South Africans of their South African citizenship, depriving them of their few remaining political and civil rights in South Africa, and declared them to be citizens of these homelands.[3]
The Jim Crow era was very different from apartheid. There was redlining and segregation, but African Americans weren't stripped of citizenship and marshaled into enclaves the way South Africa did with the Bantustans and their Citizenship Act. Apartheid means "kept apart," South Africa, like Israel, sequestered its undesirables into enclaves.
> I do know what apartheid is: it's what happened in South Africa, when two groups of people lived in the very same place (i.e., in the same towns and cities) and were treated differently by the state. It's just like how Black people were treated in the US during the Jim Crow era.
Apartheid was different, it combined a version of the forced relocation and reservation system that the US used for Native Americans (only with the pretense -- with very little substance, but merely as an excuse for the central government to disclaim responsibility -- that the reservations ("bantustans") were independent states rather than territories of subordinate sovereigns) with the racial discrimination in services and facilities within the rest of the country proper that Black Americans faced in the Jim Crow era.
> Egypt used to own Gaza
Egypt occupied Gaza, the same as Israel later did, but did not claim it, establishing a separate protectorate (it was merged into the UAR with Egypt and Syria, and from which Syria later rebelled, but even then it was considered distinct from Egypt, and it was formally transferred to the authority of the PLO (though practical governance was exercised by Egypt) after 1964.
> Last I heard, Israel tried to get Egypt to take Gaza back.
Egypt can't take it back, because Egypt never claimed it.
The UAR can't take it back, because the UAR has been disbanded.
Egypt could reoccupy it, but why would they want to? (Especially given that the people there don't want Egypt to do so, and have been rather...prickly...about occupations imposed on them.)
> Especially given that the people there don't want Egypt to do so, and have been rather...prickly
I have worked closely with young educated Gazans on projects that outsourced to them. They claimed that they would love to get access to the Egyptian labor market, and get an Egyptian passport so that they could have a hope of working in other markets internationally. They’d leave Gaza for better opportunities elsewhere in a heartbeat. Yes, of course some other Gazans wouldn’t want to leave at all, and Hamas wouldn’t permit Egypt authority over the area. But Egypt’s refusal to open the borders to Gazans is about a series of security concerns of its own, and not so much about universal Gazan resistance to the idea.
> But Egypt’s refusal to open the borders to Gazans
Egypt's refusal to assist Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza via forced deportation is a different issue than the one raised upthread about Egypt’s earlier refusal reoccupy Gaza.
Again, the Gazans I have known complained about being forced to stay; they saw it that way, and not being forced to leave if the border with Egypt opened. Some people want to fight for their ancestral homeland or whatever, but other people want money and opportunities. But yes, as I suggested in my post, Egypt’s behavior re: opening the border or annexing the Strip has always been significantly driven by how its own population and other Arab states would perceive things, and not necessarily what a young educated Gazan might want.
Are you referring to the refusal to open the border crossing that Israel has repeatedly bombed during the present crisis or the on-again-off-again status of the crossing in the years prior?
Because, yes, the closures prior to the crisis, between the openings, have been due to Egyptian security concerns (mostly breakdowns of various agreements between Egypt, Hamas, PIJ, and the Palestinian Authority on border management), COVID-19, and various other issues.
>> The United Nations, International Committee of the Red Cross, and many human rights organization however continue to consider the occupying power as Israel controls Gaza's borders, with the exception of the Egyptian border, airspace and access to the sea and exercises what they consider to be effective military control over the territory.[21][22][23]
>> In his statement on the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur wrote that international humanitarian law applied to Israel "in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war."[181] Amnesty International, the World Health Organization, Oxfam, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Fact Finding Mission to Gaza, international human rights organizations, US government websites, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a significant number of legal commentators (Geoffrey Aronson, Meron Benvenisti, Claude Bruderlein, Sari Bashi, Kenneth Mann, Shane Darcy, John Reynolds, Yoram Dinstein, John Dugard, Marc S. Kaliser, Mustafa Mari, and Iain Scobbie) maintain that Israel's extensive direct external control over Gaza, and indirect control over the lives of its internal population mean that Gaza remained occupied.[182][183] In spite of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Hamas government in Gaza considers Gaza as occupied territory.[184]
>> Several rights groups have characterized the situation in Gaza as an "open-air prison", including the United Nations,[193] Human Rights Watch,[194] and the Norwegian Refugee Council.[195] This characterization was often cited by a number of human rights activists, politicians, and media news outlets reporting on the Gaza-Israel conflict and the wider Palestinian-Israeli conflict.[196][197][198][199][200][201] Former British Prime Minister David Cameron,[202] US Senator Bernie Sanders,[203] former Israeli diplomat Gideon Levy,[204] and Israeli historian Ilan Pappe have endorsed this characterization as well.[205]
>> Human Rights Watch issued a report on the situation in the Gaza Strip, which it called an "open-air prison" due to the blockade and held Israel responsible as the occupying power, and to a lesser degree Egypt, which has restricted movement of Palestinians through its border.[194]
Seems we have a choice now, either we believe all the entities having prepared extensive reports (all cited in the wikipedia article) or we believe Israelian PR and legalese on the status of Gaza according to international law (which doesn't change the an iota when it comes to the humanitarian situation there). Your choice.
I am not saying Hamas actions are justified. And I am not saying Israel shouldn't get support. Ehat I am saying is, that we cannot ignore the humanitarian crisis affecting millions of people that is at the core of the conflict. And whatever support the West can give should aim at renewed, and serious, peace talks. That means that Israel has to give up something, too. After all, Israel has the right to exist as a state the same way Palestinians have the right to live freely, un-oppressed and peacefully.
That situation is the perfect breeding ground for extremism. Israel is not at all innocent in the FUBAR that is the middle east and Gaza in particular, regardless of the excuses Israel finds.