It's quite spectactular. I think the politcs on both sides are awful, and I really feel for the civillians who are just trying to live their lives under this bullshit. Both sides need to step up and take responsibility for their major, horrific fuckups and problems; and the west in general needs to take responsibility for kicking people out of their homes to make homes for others... but also both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other for a minute in order to progress.
So Israel needs to stop colonizing Palestine, as that is the primary cause of death and conflict.
Saying both sides just need to stop when one is constantly the aggressor and the other is responding to that aggression is zero tolerance logic. Blaming the victim is why things have escalated to the point we are at now.
They're not colonizing Palestine. They're eradicating it.
And this has been going on for almost 80 years. Anything anyone does, is always, in response to some shitty thing someone did before. But fact of the matter is, Israel benefits more than Palistine to have a conflict. So much that the time when it actually looked like someone could talk both sides to a peaceful conclusion. Israel had him assassinated.
Annexing implies bringing an area under the control of a government; colonization implies mass movement of people into undeveloped land. If it's occupied land (necessitating the eviction of the occupants), then it's ethnic cleansing. Any or all are correct depending on which specific part of Israeli policy one is discussing.
Russia circa 2024 disagrees because they wanted it to sound voluntary. News went with it because annex is technically correct in the close by/far away context, but not the whole colonialism is always by force context.
The Day Israel became a country they were attacked. They've been on defense since day 1.
They're too heavy handed that's clear but they are not the aggressor or instigator in this fight. They've offered dozens of peace deals, brokered by a variety of 3rd parties, only to be rejected because Hamas wants Jews dead. It's in their founding Charter, just to be clear about who's intent is what over there in terms of aggression.
I don't understand how you could see that in any other context? They're obviously developing settlements to maintain a front in the region. You can see from this week's events that having settlements adjacent to the border prevent the incursion from penetrating deeper into the country where the larger population centers are.
20, or 30 years ago you were seeing bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I was in Jerusalem for a bus bombing and just missed it.... Those have died down and been replaced with border skirmishes.
Whether that's a reasonable or effective strategy is a different question.
You really are. You're directly responding to someone saying 'both sides need to stop,' and your response is sharply negative. You explicitly call it blaming the victim.
A blanket statement like 'both sides need to stop' by itself as some simple solution ignoring the fact that one side with more power is continuously provoking the other. When a bully constantly picks on someone until they respond with too much violence both sides are wrong AND one of them is still a victim and the other the aggressor. The same thing is true when we are talking about nation states.
Palestine is still the victim, even if their actions were completely unreasonable, because Israel has far more military and diplomatic power in comparison in addition to being the ones who are constantly invading the land of Palestine. Plus, the most recent peace accords did not require Israel to give the land back, just to stop taking more. It is a one sided situation with a victim that is being dismissed as an equal conflict where both sides just need to get along.
Blow up the radical zionists and hamas, maybe blood eagle the prime minister of Israel (I am not even gonna try to spell his name) threaten to bomb Tel Aviv if Israel tries anything again. Best idea I have.
"both sides just need to stop fucking hurting each other"
Just apply that one to the other invasion we've been talking about of late, that of Russia in Ukraine, and see how well that "both sides" "argument" sounds to you.
If one puts on hold any feelings that lead to one favoring one side over the other (say, because one side is culturally quite close and familiar whilst the other is filled with people who will shout "god is great" whenever shit happens), it's pretty clear that you can't apply a "both sides" demand to a situation were one side is the invading one and has overwhelming force, whilst the other side is a far weaker resistance movement living in a tiny slice under siege of a much vaster occupied land.
Your point would make absolute sense if the Palestinians had all of their land (or at least to the Oslo Agreement borders) and still kept sending rockets to and attacking Israel, but that's not at all the situation that we have now.
In Ukraine, the Western powers actually helped the weaker side with weaponry, whilst in Palestine they helped the stronger side.
More than half a century has passed in Palestine since the invasion started. The situation in Palestine now is like if all Ukraine had been conquered with 80% of the Ukranian population living abroad and 2 small Ukranian enclaves were left surrounded by occupied Ukraine - one in Kyiv and one in Odessa - containing the remaining 20% of the Ukranian population in 1/100th of the territory previously occupied by the entire population.
Last but not least, as maybe the most shocking, is that the Russians are nowhere as racist towards the Ukranians as the Israelis are towards the Palestinians: Russia actually wants the Ukranians to stay in the occupied territories as long as they become Russians and obbey the Russian Government (to the point of activelly trying to force them to become Russians), whilst the Israelis want the Palestinians to either leave or die and are activelly against them becoming Israelian Citiziens. Israeli racism is so widespread, entrenched and endorsed at the highest level that the nation of Israel split their citizenship into Israeli Arab Citizenship and Israeli Jewish Citizienship and gave fewer rights to the former than to the latter: Israeli Law makes the fewer Palestinians who got Israeli Nationality (back when it was still possible) second class citizens, whilst Russian Law does no such thing for Ukranians in Russian occupied territories in Ukraine who become Russian Nationals.
Two sides going 'I'm gonna wipe you off the map!' 'No I'm gonna wipe you off the map!' is not comparable to one side going 'get back on your side the line' while the other goes 'half your country is our side, actually all your country, also we're not here, also it's a special police double-secret operation, also nice kids you got there.'