Because the goal of the Zionists has always been to conquer all of Palestine and the State of Israel has been following those foot steps since day one. From the river to the sea. This has been declared illegal under international law more than half a century ago but Israel does not care about the law. Therefore Israel should be forced to comply, which means boycotts and sanctions or military force. And we should probably try boycotts and sanctions first before we send tanks. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon anyway as that would mean opposing the USA and we have seen in recent history what happens to people and countries supporting the Palestinians.
To the dead comment Israel agreed to the UN partition in 1947, and then Arabs started a war to kill all the Jews there.
You do not even understand what the UN general assembly does, it expresses majority opinions, it does not make legally binding decisions. That means the UN partition plan is only what a majority considered the best solution, not a legal decisions to divide Palestine. And the Palestinians vehemently opposed that solution and later violently its implementation.
And should one really be surprised that the Arab neighbors attacked Israel? The Jews had just occupied half of the Palestinian land, violently displaced hundred thousands of Palestinians, and established their own state on Palestinian land.
The German policy of more or less unconditional support for Israel is plain stupid. This policy exists because of the horrors that Germans have inflicted upon Jews but it now supports similar [1] horrors inflicted by Israelis upon Palestinians. I can not wrap my head around that. If anything, Germany should try to stop Israel with all available means to protect them from themselves. Germany should do the same as Ireland and so should everyone else.
[1] Feel free to mentally replace similar with any other word that you think more accurately compares the two scenarios.
It's very easy to wrap your head around - Germany is Israel's main arms supplier after the US.
Germany accounted for 30% of Israel's arms imports between 2019 and 2023. In 2023 it accounted for 47% of Israel's total imports of conventional arms.
Between October 2023 and May 2025, Germany greenlighted the delivery of weapons and military equipment worth €485m to Israel
They since stopped the export of weaponry 'used in gaza' but it's naive in the extreme to accept assurances from the incumbent Israeli government to the contrary.
N.B. Israel continues to illegally carry weapons through Irish airspace, and kindly refers our government agency to El Al's Legal department on inquiry.
That does not seem like nearly enough money to make a bad policy decision because of the money and that policy is probably much older than the arms deals.
Because that's not the reason (Israel primarily imports weaponry and munitions from the US and India [0]).
The issue is the other way around. A significant portion of Germany's ground AD and defensive systems are sourced from Israel- most notably the Arrow 3 missile shield [1] deal that recently went through. Germany is heavily dependent on Israeli cybersecurity companies as well [2]. Germany is also subsidizing Arrow 3 sales to Ukraine [3].
Protecting your nations citizens always trumps morality, and in Germany's case, it's become even more critical after what happened in Poland this week.
Politicians will always politick, but they do not tend to be the ones who make policy in a parliamentary system like Germany of Ireland.
Ireland basically has no army, and is entirely dependent on the UK for it's defense. As such, their politicans are free to say whatever (as long as it is not against the UK) because it's not going to come back and bite them in the behind. That said, that's now changing as the UK is trying to renegotiate the deal [0][1]
The Irish strategy is to make the pubs too attractive for any attacker to bother with armed conflict. ;)
The Irish position should not be underestimated. It tends to be a bellweather for what others will align with in the future. Ireland tends to use it's soft power very effectively at the global table.
> The Irish position should not be underestimated. It tends to be a bellweather for what others will align with in the future
This really overstates Ireland's position in foreign policy studies. No one at Bruegel, ECFR, Institute Montaigne, GMFUS, and the 2-3 other major EU think tanks that are the de facto voice of European policy are taking Irish policy into account. Ireland lost any chance it had of being at the table when the Eurozone crisis happened. Even Spain and Italy have barely rebuilt their credibility.
> Ireland tends to use it's soft power very effectively at the global table
How? Ireland barely comes up in most conversations aside from using IDA Ireland as a model for attracting services FDI.
Citing the Eurozone crisis as if we were analogous on an economic or policy level to Spain/Italy/Greece is just farcical in the extreme. Given our population of ~5 Million we're probably punching above our capita to the largest extent of any EU member-state. Hell, even the Asylum laws governing Europe are named after us:
We are also the only EU country where the Constitution ordains a referendum to validate ratification of any amendments that result in a transfer of sovereignty to the European Union; such as the Nice Treaty which we can prevent from passing on an EU level.
Putting aside the multiple times we have held EU Council Presidencies, how about you take our two-year term on the UN Security Council from 2021 to 2022, where we got UN Security Council Resolution 2594 passed – the first ever Resolution on UN Peacekeeping transitions.
Since 1958, Ireland has maintained a constant presence on UN and UN-mandated peace support operations to the point where many English speakers in the South Lebanon do so with an Irish accent. 86 Irish soldiers have died in service of the UN since 1960.
We also have a particular legacy regarding the IDF and war crimes - Like in 1996 UN position 6-52, near Maroun al-Ras, a platoon of 33 Irish troops was surrounded and isolated from UN headquarters by a mechanised IDF unit. Or in May of this year when Irish peacekeepers in Lebanon came under fire from Israeli forces near a bombed out village at Yaroun
We have lost almost 50 troops in Lebanon alone. Approximately 50% of our casualties have been inflicted by Islamist resistance groups such as Hezbollah – the other 50% by the IDF and their paramilitary proxies in the area.
The Ultra-Orthodox can't even join the IDF. The issue is that the US HR Bill passed which legally equated Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism, and the US control the narrative in the english-speaking world around the Genocide. It's Orwellian in the extreme.
This statement betrays a deep lack of imagination about other things one could do against Jews. Killing them, for instance, or putting them in concentration camps are both far worse than any association you might choose to make with Israel.
> but it now supports similar [1] horrors inflicted by Israelis upon Palestinians
I would say that Israel is historically worried about the fact that his enemies want it to make it disappear. There are many things to criticize from them but this is the basic premise.
But the solution to that is not making some other people disappear in order to make some room for Jews. And they have already stolen half of Palestine and turned it into their own state and that state is - despite its illegal origin - now internationally recognized and therefore unlikely to be undone. They just have to be satisfied with what they took and stop attempting to take the rest of Palestine, too.
> Israel as a society is much more tolerant and does not make human shields with their own population.
It is an objective fact that Israel has killed almost 20,000 Palestinian children since the beginning of the latest conflict (post Oct 7, 2023).
For comparison, a total of less than 1,200 Israeli's were killed. Which is also unacceptable and Hamas should be condemned. But Israel's continued slaughter of innocent children has gone beyond "defending themselves" and is just as bad, if not worse, than what they claim the other side to be.
You blame Hamas for using people as shields, but do you think Israel is justified in killing all these innocent children in the first place?
> You blame Hamas for using people as shields, but do you think Israel is justified in killing all these innocent children in the first place?
No. I do not justify it. What I say is that Hamas is literally a group that does not care even about their own people as facts show. They usually falsify the data also. So I am not sure how that data is but I acknowledge this is wild.
When I think of these things I think that governments and rulers are what they are. But I wonder if you were a palestinian being a human shield of a piece of rubbish or were an Israelian that wants to take kids to school and you see how they launch missiles from the Gaza side as a routine from schools and hospitals, what would you do? It is a very desperate thing for a civil person.
I prefer to not make criminals out of whom are not criminals. So Hamas and probably Netanyahu are both criminals. But the poor people from Palestine are basically kidnapped by their own governors to an extent that is hardly bearable IMHO. Israel people are also people like you and I and they have a reasonable fear of being smashed. It is not for fun that Israel has spent a huge amount of its GDP in military stuff. They do not do it for fun, whatever people try to convince me of.
It is a really complex situation, that's all. No innocent deserves to die in either side. I just try to make reasonable descriptions of what I see. I am mostly neutral, even with my bias.
I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint. And I should clarify that when I say "Israel" I'm referring to the state and its military, not individual Israeli citizens who probably have nothing to do with the killings.
> It is a really complex situation, that's all. No innocent deserves to die in either side.
Absolutely no innocent deserves to die on either side, 100% agreed. I still don't think the killing children part is complicated at all - there's zero justification for it. But the overall situation is definitely very complicated due to a long history of conflict on all fronts.
> They usually falsify the data also. So I am not sure how that data is but I acknowledge this is wild.
The death toll numbers I used are from a peer-reviewed UK publication that more or less corroborates the numbers reported by Gaza itself.
> The death toll numbers I used are from a peer-reviewed UK publication that more or less corroborates the numbers reported by Gaza itself.
I am quite skeptical of that data to be totally honest. What I found over the years is falsification after falsification. It is a fact that this has happened. We all know. But it is also the common thing that those numbers are inflated.
> I still don't think the killing children part is complicated at all - there's zero justification for it.
So if hamas has a child hostage in every arm warehouse (which is more or less what happens) and with every terrorist squad the only justified action for Israelis is... to die?
How does anyone not see that condemnation is not nearly enough? Hamas need eliminating, not merely "condemned".
Anyone arguing against the need to defeat Hamas in the place they launch attacks from and hold hostages in, is peddling a woefully broken, illogical argument. A war is happening. In war, you have enemies. "We should condemn our enemies" sounds like some kind of captain obvious baby talk.
I'd say the people that are historically and actively actually being disappeared are the Palestinians, the premise is that Israel since inception wants (edit: is) to eradicate Palestinians
Germany also felt guilty about the invasion of Russia. I understand this to be one of the reasons why Germany was keen to buy Russian guess, to make amends.
On the flip side Germany did a huge amount to bring solar power into large scale usage.
Remember there are are radical nationalist / racist / xenophobic groups in germany / anywhere.
Such groups are so strong in Germany that Hitler used them to strenghten the power of his discourse.
Recognizing Israel / the Jews are the ones now doing Genocide would *in the sight of the extremist groups* prove their belief that Hitler was right / the Jews are the devil. (I repeat, in their regard, not mine)
Therefore, my opinion is that the official stance in Germany must be "historical responsability" mainly not for the sake of the Jews, but for the stability of the society.
Yes, they are alreading sharpening their forks and oiling their torches. I think officially recognizing it ("Jews are bad") will drive normal people to don't consider them (the extremists / nazi) conspiracy nuts anymore, because of a "they / we were right all the time" discourse.
I apologize for basically repeating myself. I just wanted to refer to the conspiracy theories you mentioned because calling them that is, ironically, constructive.
You'd think those suffering genocide would do the one thing to stop it, namely releasing the hostages and ceasing their own officially chartered genocidal ambitions.
1. Strictly speaking, we’re not naming a table, we’re naming a relation.
And a relation is a set, hence plural.
2. It reads well everywhere else in the SQL query:
SELECT Employee.Name
, Manager.Name
FROM Users AS Employee
, Users AS Manager
WHERE Employee.ManagerID = Manager.ID
AND Employee.DateOfBirth IS NULL;
3. The name of the class you’ll store the data into is singular (User). You therefore have a mismatch, and in ORMs (e.g., Rails) they often automatically pluralize, with the predictable result of seeing tables with names like addresss.
The class User represents a single row, not the entire table, hence singular. If the O/R mapper or some other tooling has issues with singular and plural, then I agree, it might not be worth fighting the tools.
4. Some relations are already plural. Say you have a class called UserFacts that store miscellaneous information about a user, like age and favorite color. What will you call the database table?
I think having the table and the class name both in plural would be fine. That also seems rare enough in practice that I would not let this dictate the decision. In the given example I would also tend to record the user facts as a list of them. A user fact is a key value pair associated with an user, the keys living in their own table. Having the keys implicit as column names will also make some queries unnecessarily complicated and as the number of facts grows, the table will become increasingly wide.
Also sometimes we have singular names for collections of things, then it is fine to have a singular table name, you can name your Trees table Forrest if that makes sense in the domain.
I think that is the correct way to do it, you iterate over all the cats picking one cat at a time and it becomes quite obvious when you join a table to itself forcing you to do this. I am not writing that many SQL queries and I am certainly too lazy to always do that, especially if I am writing not too complicated ad hoc queries, but if I want the code to be as good as I can make it, then I always do this. Sure, it makes things a bit more verbose but you can also make the query more readable by picking a descriptive alias, FROM Users AS Manager, FROM Users AS NewEmployee, and so on.
Whether you alias your plural tables to singular nouns would probably be one of the very last things I would check out if I would need to assess your code.
And you should not but I think it is still useful. You will probably not even become consciously aware of the difference but Cat.Name will be ever so slightly easier to read than Cats.Name and maybe that difference in cognitive load is what makes you spot some issue that you would have missed if your brain got repeatedly slightly tripped up by incorrect grammatical numbers.
But if they think the bubble is the idea that "Modern AI will significantly transform business and the global economy, and that it'll lead to massive unemployment for knowledge workers", then—in my opinion—they're just wrong.
AI will one day transform the world but I do not believe modern AI will make that happen, that will have to wait for futuristic AI. I guess that makes AI not a bubble but I can still label modern, i.e. current, AI a bubble, right?
Then it's not maths fault it tries to find an answer that matches your persistence, especially since I'm sure somewhere in its training set alabamer exists.
It is not supposed to find an answer that matches my persistence, its supposed to tell the truth or admit that it does not know. And even if there is an alabamer in the training set, that is either something else, not a US state, or a misspelling, in neither case should it end up on the list.
No, it is supposed to find an answer that matches your persistence. That's what it does, and understanding that is the key to understanding its strengths and weaknesses. Otherwise you may just keep drinking the investors' kool-aid and pretend that it's a tool that's supposed to tell the truth. That's not what it does, that's not how it works and it's a safe bet that's not how it's gonna work in foreseeable future.
No, it is supposed to tell the truth and that is what is advertised, matching your persistence is what it sometimes actually does. But people are using it because it sometimes tells the truth, not because it sometimes matches your persistence.
In case of the river puzzle there is a huge difference between repeating an answer that you read somewhere and figuring it out on your own, one requires reasoning the other does not. If you swap out the animals involved, then you need some reasoning to recognize the identical structure of the puzzles and map between the two sets of animals. But you are still very far from the amount of reasoning required to solve the puzzle without already knowing the answer.
You can do it brute force, that requires again more reasoning than mapping between structurally identical puzzles. And finally you can solve it systematically, that requires the largest amount of reasoning. And in all those cases there is a crucial difference between blindly repeating the steps of a solution that you have seen before and coming up with that solution on your own even if you can not tell the two cases apart by looking at the output which would be identical.
But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.
They are already paying, it is the way they are paying that causes the mess. When you buy a product, some fraction of the price is the ad budget that gets then distributed to websites showing ads. Therefore there is also nothing wrong with blocking ads, they have already been paid for, whether you look at them or not. The ad budget will end up somewhere as long as not everyone is blocking all ads, only the distribution will get skewed. Which admittedly might be a problem for websites that have a user base that is disproportionally likely to use ad blockers.
Paying for content directly has the problem that you can only pay for a selected few websites before the amount you have to pay becomes unreasonable. If you read one article on a hundred different websites, you can not realistically pay for a hundred subscriptions that are all priced as if you spent all your time on a single website. Nobody has yet succeeded in creating a web wide payment method that only charges you for the content that you actually consume and is frictionless enough to actually work, i.e. does not force you to make a conscious payment decisions for a few cents or maybe even only fractions of a cent for every link you click and is not a privacy nightmare collecting all the links you click for billing purposes.
Also if you directly pay for content, you will pay twice - you will pay for the subscription and you will still pay into the ad budget with all the stuff you buy.
Publishers don't get paid a dime if you block the ad unless they are doing a direct ad transaction. Adtech has largely made that transaction a rarity for like 30 years.
It's not like newspapers where advertising is paid in full before publishers put stories online. It has not been that way for a long time.
Your reasoning for not accessing advertising reminds me of that scene in Arrested Development where, to hide the money they've taken out of the till, they throw away the bananas. It doesn't hide the transaction, it compounds the problem.
If publishers were getting paid before any ads ran the publishing business would be a hell of a lot stronger.
Of course, they will not get paid for me visiting the website if I block the ads, but that was not my point. People have already bought stuff and with that paid for the ad budget. And that money will be spent somewhere. Maybe someone else will see the ad that I blocked, someone who would otherwise not have seen it because the ad budget would have been exhausted. Or maybe the prices for ads go up because there are less impressions to sell. Only if companies would lower their ad budgets in response to ad blocking would there be less money to distribute. If that would be the case, then my argument would fail.
Your point is illogical. It’s like you’ve invented a theory as to how companies advertise that has zero tethering to reality.
It’s especially stupid because it doesn’t include publishers in the equation at all. It’s just you looping over yourself attempting to validate your choice for running an ad blocker.
Admit you’re doing it because you want to callously screw over publishers. You certainly haven’t put their thoughts into consideration here.
To be clear: Run an ad blocker if you want, but stop acting as if you bought those ads. The chicken dinner I ate the other night has no say how I live my life after our transaction has ended.
If I buy an iPhone, does some fraction of the price contribute to Apple's ad budget? If so, where does that money end up? What would change if I did not block Apple ads?
It’s up to them how they spend their money, not you. You can complain if they somehow damaged your product, they got your money unfairly, or were somehow doing something bad with your data, but at some point it is their money to spend how they see fit. They earned it, and they might spend it on advertising.
If I buy stuff at a grocery store, I can’t get a random bagger fired just because I feel like it. At some point the transaction ends and they ultimately continue to operate with or without your input.
I am neither complaining nor trying them what to do with their money, that looks like a complete deflection to me.
If I am buying Apple products, am I contributing to their ad budget? If so, where does that money end up? Is it likely that some of it will end up as ad revenue on some website? What difference does it make whether or not I block ads? Or the other way around, if I am visiting websites and look at Apple ads but do not buy Apple products, am I contributing to the ad revenue of the websites?
Maybe in the cosmic sense you are, in that they have a giant pile of money, and you contributed a few pennies to it, but this is not how accounting works. Your transaction and their ad budget are separate things.
Also, advertising does other things than tell you to buy something, and it doesn’t always take the form of banner ads. Apple, for example, does a ton of brand awareness advertising. Affiliate marketing often targets direct transactions. Maybe your goal is to simply start a relationship that might someday lead to a really big purchase.
Often, in the era of SaaS, people advertise to existing customers. Apple does this—they have a TV service and a music service and a cloud service.
There are plenty of reasons for them to advertise after you bought the original product.
But your original point was that customers bought the ads. Maybe they didn’t! Maybe they were given funding by a VC firm and the company decided it wanted to build an audience. Maybe they want to advocate for a political issue.
I think the biggest problem with your argument is that it has tunnel vision and sees advertising as this one dimensional thing, when in reality it takes many forms. Plenty of those forms are bad, but it is not as simple as “I bought a product, now I never want to see an Apple ad ever again.” Many businesses (Amazon, eBay) make most of their money off of customers they’ve already advertised to that they advertise to again and again.
Well, I don't give a shit about the advertising goals of Apple or anyone else, that is why I block ads. And that is also completely irrelevant, the question was whether I am screwing over websites when I am using an ad blocker. I argue not, because as a consumer I still contribute to the ad budgets that become the ad revenue of the websites. What I am not doing when I block ads is influencing how the money gets distributed among all the websites, I can live with that. And if the money is not consumer money, so what? What do I have to do with companies distributing VC money among websites?
LOL, you don’t. You really don’t. As I told you like four hours ago, ads are impression-based. Just because you bought something that helped them buy an ad doesn’t mean you did shit for my website.
I know that ads are based on impressions as I told you before, but my money still has to end up somewhere even if I am using an ad blocker. So where does it end up if not as ad revenue on some websites? You must not confuse the people paying for the ads and in turn for the ad revenue of websites by buying stuff with the people deciding how that money gets distributed among all the websites by looking at ads.
We can even go one step further, if anyone is screwing over websites, then that is the ad industry by not paying for blocked ads. I buy an iPhone and Apple takes some additional money from me to spend on advertising. I did not ask for that but I am fine with it. Now I expect Apple to spend the money they took from me on ads in order to support websites. But if the guy that Apple wants to show the ad that I paid for does not want to see it and blocks it, then I want Apple to respect that and still pay the website. I know, not going to happen, but do not put the blame on people blocking ads.
You’re describing socialism (wealth redistribution to be exact). At this point, just make that money a tax and give it to the publishers directly. Cut out the middlemen.
Well, what is the difference, the ad budget fraction of the price is like a tax. I think given a choice most people would prefer to get their stuff a bit cheaper and not contribute to the ad budget. But we pay it and then the companies hand the money out to various parties to display ads creating the possibility of running a business on ad revenue. And in many cases I can ignore ads, I can not look at billboards, I can switch to a different channel during the commercial break, I can flip over the ad pages in newspapers and magazines but they still get paid. Only on the internet have we decided to only pay for ads when somebody actually looks at them. I just asked for the same thing on the internet, pay for the inclusion on the website, whether someone actually sees it or not. Not sure how that is socialism and wealth redistribute.
I feel like this could work if the payment was handled by your ISP. Content provider tells the ISP how much their content costs that there subscribers pay, and the ISP pays them. I already pay my ISP. The real problem is that it's kinda too late for this kind of change. And also the ISP would need to prevent their users from running up a bill that the ISP would be responsible for and without tracking them that's not possible.
»If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?«
David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel
Come to your senses and end this tragedy, give the Palestinians their own sovereign state, and then hope that they can forgive what you have done to them!
This is simply not true, there was never any offer with acceptable terms. I am not going to repeat this here, this has been discussed countless times and you can easily find this if you want to.
All of the offers seem acceptable to me. In the first offer, the Jewish state was quite small. None of the offers were acceptable to Palestinians because they include a Jewish state.
Virtually all Arabs want to fight a war against Israel and destroy it. They view that land as theirs. The only reason there haven't been more wars is due to repressive Arab governments that have been willing to compromise.
This is nonsense, the Palestinians and Palestinian organizations - even including Hamas - have to varying degrees accepted or shown willingness to accept a Palestinian state that does not encompass all of Mandatory Palestine. Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution, they always desired all of Mandatory Palestine and saw any division plan only as stepping stone for further expansion in the future.
> This is nonsense, the Palestinians and Palestinian organizations - even including Hamas - have to varying degrees accepted or shown willingness to accept a Palestinian state that does not encompass all of Mandatory Palestine.
This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea". (Wikipedia claims that the slogan is used by both sides of the conflict, citing a JSTOR article I can't access; but I have only ever seen it used by Hamas and their supporters.)
Per Wikipedia, Hamas does not recognize Israel as of their most recent 2017 charter, and "called for a Palestinian state on all of Mandatory Palestine" in 1988.
While I'm sure that many Palestinians do not support Hamas and desire to co-exist with Israel, I see no good reason to suppose that this is any more common than the other way around.
> Israel is unwilling to have a two state solution, they always desired all of Mandatory Palestine
There is ample evidence to contradict this — enough that I can look it up on the fly. Were it true, for example, the Knesset would have had no need to pass a resolution declaring this to be their current position, barely a year ago. Netanyahu also claimed in 2015 to want a two-state solution, and of course there are other Israeli political parties with warmer attitudes towards Palestine.
> This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea". (Wikipedia claims that the slogan is used by both sides of the conflict, citing a JSTOR article I can't access; but I have only ever seen it used by Hamas and their supporters.)
It was literally Likud's electioneering slogan throughout the 70s. It's not just that it's been used by both sides - it was actually created by Israelis.
»Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in only part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country? My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.... This is because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole. The establishment of a state, even if only on a portion of the land, is the maximal reinforcement of our strength at the present time and a powerful boost to our historical endeavors to liberate the entire country.«
> ... the Palestinians and Palestinian organizations - even including Hamas - have to varying degrees accepted or shown willingness to accept a Palestinian state that does not encompass all of Mandatory Palestine.
you say
> This cannot be reconciled with the meaning of the slogan "from the river to the sea".
To which I quote
> "You can draw a straight line through two points, but that doesn't mean the line is actually there."
"The coalition agreements state that “the Jewish people have an exclusive right on all the land” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It doesn’t mention the Palestinians."
> they could do this unilaterally and just withdraw
Which they tried in 2005 in Gaza. They evicted the remaining settlers in Gaza and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.
Hamas won the first and only election thereafter and ruled in Gaza from that point on.
In the years during and after the pandemic, Hamas deceived Israel in the way it presented itself. An IDF report assessing the massive intelligence failure on Oct 7 reported [0], "Israel saw Hamas as a pragmatic movement with whom it could do business." That was a tragic mistake.
The opinion of the Israeli public towards the desirability (and feasibility) of a two-state solution has tended to vary over the decades depending on the actions of external Palestinian and Arab actors. After the wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of buses and restaurants starting around the year 2000 it went down. Two years after the Gaza withdrawal it was back up, with 70% support for the two-state solution in 2007, when there were peace talks. [1]
The mass killings and kidnappings that Hamas did in 2023 pretty much eliminated any enthusiasm for two states at present. A recent poll put Israeli opinion at 70% opposition to a Palestinian state.
That could change again. Israel is a democracy, and people vote depending on what they see. The idea that a Palestinian nation will ever encompass "the river to the sea," is a complete delusion. The idea that Israel will ever see peace and security by annexing the entire area of the former British Mandate is likewise a complete delusion. If Hamas can be defeated, if the Palestinian Authority can get more effective, less corrupt leadership, if Israel can get a parliamentary majority that is no longer dependent on right-wing parties, if ordinary Israelis can get a hint that Oct 7 is not something that will happen again, then there might be hope for peace.
It seems telling that you were downvoted without any responses. I can't see anything objectionable in your position, and it appears appropriately argued and evidenced. I guess people just disagree with your worldview.
I did not downvote the comment - I never downvote anything - but the argument that Israel gave some kind of sovereignty to the Gaza strip in 2005 just does not match reality. Israel removed its troops from the Gaza strip but still maintained heavy control over it - control of border traffic, maritime blockade, airspace control, control over water, electricity, and fuel supply. You do not need boots on the ground if you have that much control over everything that go in or comes out of some region.
Also the sentiment of the population does not matter if the government does not want a two state solution or only on conditions unacceptable to the Palestinians. Read up on the details of the proposals.
»On 2 May 2017, Khaled Mashal, chief of the Hamas Political Bureau, presented a new Charter, in which Hamas accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state "on the basis of June 4, 1967" (West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).«
You mean the part where it says they did still not recognize the state of Israel or relinquish claims to all of Palestine? You overlooked the part in my comment where I said to varying degrees. Also to me that seems not too different from the position Israeli politicians had and some still have, we accept the partition plan but still desire to expand into all of Mandatory Palestine eventually.
The UN General Assembly does not make legally binding decisions, they express majority opinions. Only the Security Council can make legally binding decisions. There is also the question whether the UN General Assembly even has the legitimation to suggest the partitioning of some land against the will of its population. There was an attempt to decide on this but that did not get the necessary votes. And even the partition plan was only accepted because several countries where pressured or incentivized to vote for it.
That cannot be. Hamas isn’t interested in a Palestinian state, they are interested in the destruction of Israel. Iran and all its proxies think this way. It is their raison d’etre. Giving them a state would not end the war.
Do you mean what non-viable positions? First and foremost the unrestricted right to return as this has the potential to end the state of Israel as a Jewish state if Palestinians become the majority population.
As a humanist, I consider the right of return to be undeniable. Given your logic, this would make the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state the unviable option. I've been of that opinion for some time now. Nothing to do with antisemitism as some might try to suggest - just the logical conclusion of a humanist position.
I'm heartened to see that more people are coming to this same conclusion. Talk of a 'two state solution' has always been a convenient excuse for more of the same as far as I am concerned.
In response to the dead response... (not sure why it is dead)
> Israel will not agree to a right to return
This government will not.
My view is that the Israeli state is failing through its own actions and at some point will experience regime change (i.e. a drastic change in government - possibly, or possibly not as a result of a democratic election). I expect that a new regime may not be Zionist (at least not in the exclusionary sense we are familiar with) and could well introduce something similar to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission.
That type of government could very possibly recognise the right of return - possibly in some compromised form such as a willingness to pay compensation as has happened following other colonialist endeavours.
It is not just the government. The overwhelming majority of Israelis are opposed to what you're suggesting and there's no way to force them to accept it (they have nuclear weapons).
A global coordinated sanctions regime might work, like it did on South Africa, but that is pretty unlikely to ever happen because outside of Arab states, almost no country is opposed to Israel’s existence within its recognized borders. If Israel stopped actively oppressing/colonizing Gaza and the West Bank, opposition against them would evaporate, even if they remain an explicitly Jewish state and never grant right of return for the descendants of Nakba refugees.
Israel gave Arabs land larger than its entire current size in the quest for peaceful coexistence (Gaza, Sinai and you could count in West Bank in terms of PLO governance).
If I move into your house without your permission, and let you sleep on the floor in the crawlspace, would that be called 'giving you a place to live'? What if that were coupled with regular beatings, and/or starving you?
1) Jews were always a part of historical Palestine. Sometimes more and sometimes less but were always present. Around 1900, 50 years before the formation of Israel, there were about 50k Jews (about 10% of the population). You can see it especially in cities like Safed, Tiberias and Jerusalem which were Jewish centers.
2) Jews that came later largely bought their way in, rather than forced Arabs out. There were violent clashes but usually it was friction between the populations, and not outright conquest.
3) The forceful expulsion of population came as the result of the 1948 war which was opened by Arabs and not by Israel.
So to correct your analogy, the Arabs here are like a violent HOA which doesn't like the new group of residents who bought their way in. They fight and they lose. Tough luck, right?
There's a difference between people moving into an area and a nation state moving into an area.
If you think think 1948 was started by the Arabs, you're obviously missing some vital context. Vital context, like 'A nation state started colonizing them without their permission'.
The colonization continued, with more land grabs at gunpoint for the next 80 years.
Let's talk about colonization. The land of Israel, backwards through time:
21. Modern state of Israel
20. British mandate
19. Ottoman empire
18. Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt
17. Ayyubid dynasty
16. Christian kingdom of Jerusalem <-- this is around 1099
15. Fatimid caliphate
14. Abbasid caliphate
13. Umayyad caliphate
12. Rashidun Caliphate <-- right after Muhammad dies
11. Byzantine empire
10. Roman empire <-- founding of Christianity
9. Hasmonean dynasty <-- BC flips to AD
8. Seleucid empire
7. Empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon
6. Persian empire
5. Babylonian empire
4. Kingdoms of Israel and Judea
3. Kingdom of Israel
2. Theocracy of the 12 tribes of Israel <-- first Jews
1. Individual state of Canaan <-- earliest archeological evidence of people in what is today called Israel
> Around 1900, 50 years before the formation of Israel, there were about 50k Jews (about 10% of the population).
That's a funny starting point to pick, since 1900 was about ten years after the beginning of mass Zionist migration to Palestine. How many were there in 1880?
Israel will not agree to a right to return that might result in the destruction of its status quo. So even if you think that this would be the morally desirable outcome, it is not going to happen. How many of the people displaced during the Nakba are even still alive? We are not talking about letting people displaced a couple of years ago return, we are talking about people and their descendants that have been displaced generations ago, most of them have never lived in the place you want to let them return to. Make them a good enough offer to forfeit their right to return.
Israel is a Jewish state, but it's also a safe harbor for minorities. It is the only place in the Middle East where you can be openly gay or trans and not be killed for it (or Druze, as it turns out).
Even for Israelis that are against the current government and want to see equal rights for all peoples in the Middle East, there is an abundance of evidence to show that you don't get that without Israel.
Totally irrelevant deflection. How Israel treats Israelis inside the borders of Israel is really not what anyone's complaining about.
Yes, the fact that many Middle Eastern countries are backwards on gay rights is bad! This doesn't remotely address the question of whether Israel bombing cities to dust and starving their population is also bad.
Not irrelevant at all. There have been two periods of right to return, and they've both been causal in the current Israeli Muslim and Israeli Arab populations in Israel. If right to return includes voting rights, then it's likely that the voting population would ultimately legislate Israel to not be a Jewish state, and fundamentally shift the laws away from democracy and away from equal rights of Israelis. There are 50 Muslim majority countries and countless data points to reach such a conclusion, and this is fundamentally why an unconditional right to return will never happen.
tmnvix was advocating for the collapse of the only democracy in the region--tantamount to advocating for worse outcomes for more people (and likely to an actual genocide of the Jewish people, who evacuated predominately Muslim countries and populated Israel at its re-formation). There are still 50 hostages in Gaza that have been held for 514 days and counting.
In Yemen 39.5% of the population is undernourished and 48.5% of children under five are stunted. Nearby, in East Africa, the South Sudan death toll and starvation numbers also dwarf this conflict. Mysteriously, and predictably, the world is silent. But, an opportunity to put down Israel, it seems is unfortunately very popular.
> Ai'nt no other minority people have the guts to tell them where their ancestral homeland is or isn't.
That's just... not true. The Celts originated in Central Europe. If a bunch of people who identify as Celts (from Scotland, Ireland, etc.) moved to Czechia and tried to take it over from the people currently living there, a lot of people would oppose that.
I do not particularly think the Muslim conquest of half the world was a good thing, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up.
History is not merely an epic struggle between Muslims and Israelis where one of those are the good guys and the other are the bad guys. It is possible that Muslims were in the wrong at some point in history, and that Israel is in the wrong now.
Ancient Hebrews, who Jews traditionally identify as the originators of their culture, lived in what is now Palestine during the Roman Empire, correct. However this is unrelated to the point that was being made.
The head of the BDS supports the expulsion and/or murder of all Jews in Israel.
Quote:
Omar Barghouti, the founder of the BDS movement, made that perspective clear: “Good riddance! The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally dead. But someone has to issue an official death certificate before the rotting corpse is given a proper burial and we can all move on and explore the more just, moral and therefore enduring alternative for peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine: the one-state solution.”
Barghouti also opposed a bi-national Arab and Jewish state:
“I am completely and categorically against binationalism … because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and, therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that.”
He wants a unitary democratic state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs and the right of return for Palestinian refugees abroad and their descendants. Is that too idealistic to ever happen? Yes, probably. But it’s nowhere near what you’re claiming he says.
That's the "sanitized" version of what he wants. He actually wants the Jews gone, it's pretty obvious from the other words he has said, and especially from his outright refusal to condemn attacks.
He does not say this. He says he wants the end of the two-state solution; that is, he wants the entire area to be one state (in which people coexist peacefully).
> he claims the Jews will have zero rights
No he doesn't. He says they will have no national right; that is, they will not have the right to claim the land as the exclusive home of the Jewish Nation. They will still have civil rights as normal citizens like everyone else. In fact, let me paste the full quote, since you left off the clarifying explanation that immediately follows it:
> I am completely and categorically against binationalism because it assumes that there are two nations with equal moral claims to the land and therefore, we have to accommodate both national rights. I am completely opposed to that, but it would take me too long to explain why, so I will stick to the model I support, which is a secular, democratic state: one person, one vote — regardless of ethnicity, religion, nationality, gender, and so on and so forth … Full equality under the law with the inclusion of the refugees — this must be based on the right of return for Palestinian refugees. In other words, a secular, democratic state that accommodates our inalienable rights as Palestinians with the acquired rights of Israeli Jews as settlers.
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