Israel has likely also created multiple generations of anger and hate against themselves. They may have reduced the likelihood of another Oct 7 in the near term, but 50 years is not something I would count on
Probably the most efficient way of creating multiple generations of anger and hate is letting a radical terrorist movement control 2 million people, which can completely mold the education curriculum and free to draft anyone to their quasi-army
So whatever it has done, it cannot possibly be worse than pre-war
> letting a radical terrorist movement control 2 million people, which can completely mold the education curriculum and free to draft anyone to their quasi-army
“Terrorist” groups Irgun, Haganah, Lehi all became part of Israeli government and army post 1948. Israel has mandatory military service for its citizens.
Haganah was a paramilitary organization formed after a few rather violent massacres of the Jewish population in the 1920s, climaxing with the Hebron massacre in 1929 which included horrors similar to October 7, hence why it's name in Hebrew is "Defense". Except for a short stint of a few months of something in between guerilla warfare and terror attacks against the British, it was mainly a military organization foremost, tasked with defense of the Jewish population from Palestinian attacks until the 1948 war
Irgun and Lehi were both offshoots which can be categorized as terror organizations, however they were very small, with a few hundred members and never reached the size or level of support of any Palestinian organization
While the Haganah formed most of the IDF leadership, the new country civilian leadership was based on the Jewish Agency which predated the Haganah and had completely civilian leadership.
There are many other differences between Hamas and these organizations, but in general this is an invalid comparison
I believe the comparison is valid - I put "terrorist" in quotes for a reason.
All three groups at times participated in violent activities targeting the British, Arabs, and even at times other Jews.
Haganah was proscribed by the British mandate and was an unlawful, underground militia. Lehi had 100s of members but Irgun had 4000-8000.
You yourself admit that Lehi and Irgun could be categorized as "terrorist" and Haganah engaged in what you describe as "something in between guerilla warfare and terror attacks".
Hamas would also not describe themselves as "terrorist", they also describe themselves as a "resistance" movement.
Haganah both planned and executed the "Plan Dalet", which killed and forcibly expelled the vast majority of non-Jews from their lands - they actually did what people accuse Hamas of wanting to do.
The relations with the British was more complex than you think, including many years of cooperation, including British training of Haganah forces in the SNS and fighting together during the arab revolt. As common in this conflict I think your original comment was superficial in its resorting to labels rather than content.
Regarding Plan Dalet, saying that most of the non-jews were killed or forcibly expelled is simply not true, not chronologically or factually.
Fact is that most of the Palestinians in 1948 fled on their own accords, while forced expulsions happened they were rare and were done for military reasons, mostly preparing for the imminent attack of five regular armies, as happened by the other side as well (e.g. kfar etzion)
While Israel proper has a sizable Palestinian population that is larger than the population of the Gaza strip
As i alluded to in my comment, I put “terrorist” in quotes precisely because I recognize the nuance. I agree that it is not productive to resort to lazily labeling militant groups as “terrorist”. That was the entire point of my original comment, which seems to be lost on you.
> Regarding Plan Dalet, saying that most of the non-jews were killed or forcibly expelled is simply not true, not chronologically or factually.
Right wing Israeli historian Benny Morris writes:
> the bulk of the Palestinian refugees—some 250,000 to 300,000- went into exile during those weeks between early April and mid-June 1948, with the major precipitant being Jewish (Haganah/1ZL/IDF) military attacks or the fear of such attacks
> In conformity with Tochnit Dalet (Plan D), the Haganah master plan, formulated in early March 1948, for securing the Jewish state areas in preparation for the expected declaration of statehood and the prospective Arab invasion, the Haganah cleared various areas completely of Arab villages
In his paper “A new historiography”.
His estimates of expulsions are on the low end compared to other Israeli New Historians. And of course much lower than Arab historians are estimates as well, but I have a sinking feeling that citing Arab historians wouldn’t be productive in this particular exchange.
Benny Morris is not a right wing historian, but was actually very much in the deep Israeli left when this was written, very far from the Israeli history consensus. You'd might want to read about the New Historians for some perspective on that.
Reading his seminal work 1948 puts your quote as somewhat out of context:
Plan D has given rise over the decades to a minor historiographic controversy, with Palestinian and pro-Palestinian historians charging that it was
the Haganah’s master plan for the expulsion of the country’s Arabs. But a
cursory examination of the actual text leads to a different conclusion
If you are interested in Benny Morris, you will probably be interested to read in the same book about the Palestinian and Arab armies expulsion of Jewish settlements as early as 1929, and in multiple places in the war (Etzion Bloc, Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, Masada, etc), where they cleansed the Jewish population from the future Arab state. This followed multiple declarations of intent by the Grand Mufti and other Arab leaders of cleansing the Jewish state.
Furthermore, you might be interested in the forced expulsion of around 700,000 Jews from Arab countries following the war, a similar number to the number of Palestinian refugees created by the war. These were settled in Israel, while the Palestinians were kept in city-sized refugee camps as non-civilians in Arab states for 70+ years.
Generally, based on some information you have omitted or seemed to misunderstand, I have the feeling that most of your knowledge on this subject is based on reading post-digested sources in Wikipedia, which is nowadays an extremely biased source on this subject, and very much deviates from even basic facts.
I see that one show cited a lot - What in particular about that television show was problematic and “worse” than what Gazans have endured over the past 15 months?
Also, how does that compare with Israeli schoolchildren singing about destroying Gaza?
> Nahoul lectures to the audience that "we will liberate Al-Aqsa from the filth of the criminal Jews." [...] Later, Izz Al-Din from Ramallah calls in and Nahoul suggests that "we will go on Jihad when we grow up
> Nassur and Saraa have a disagreement about what the "expulsion" of the "Jews or Zionists" means. Saraa adopts the argument that they should be "chased away" and that "we don't want to do anything to them, just expel them from our land." Nassur, on the other hand, endorses the view that they should be "erased" and that "we want to slaughter them so they will be expelled from our land." Saraa eventually concedes, and the two compromised that "we will expel them from our land using all means, and if they don't want to go peacefully, by words or talking, we'll have to do it by slaughter."
You know that thousands of children have been killed now right? I'm counting the Israeli children along with the Gazan children. There is no basis for this kind of comparison now that the leadership of both countries have revealed themselves as murderers. Let's have a sense of proportion here...
Having a puppet on television say that someone died in a missile attack is not as bad as having an actual friend or relative die in a missile attack. This is what I mean by a, "sense of proportion."
I don't think you understand the original argument of this thread or my questions. Would Gazans be more moved to hate Israeli's by the problematic show you quoted, or the fact that 90% of them have been made homeless and many have lost their friends and family?
And what of similar problematic propaganda on the Israeli side?
Somehow it’s considered monstrous to brutally slaughter 1000 Israelis by hand, but OK to murder and starve an order of magnitude (or two) more Gazan civilians using industrialized warfare.
I guess if you’re a drone operator with no strong feelings about the murder you’re committing, then it’s totally ethical to do whatever you want as long as some Hamas get hit. What a fantastic cheat code!
Yep, and even then, the IDF likely killed many of those killed on Oct 7th. We'll never know exactly how many, since Israel wouldn't allow an investigation.
Intentions matter. Bombing a hospital with terrorists operating out of it is a very different act to deliberately and directly targeting civilians for murder and hostage taking.
True... but where were the terrorists? Where was the evidence? Apart from the ludicrous 3D animation that was created before Israel destroyed the first hospital, I haven't seen so much as a shred of credible evidence. Oh, apart from the Arabic calendar that was totally a list of hostages.
Nobody seriously believes that every single hospital in Gaza was a hotbed of terrorist activity, especially without evidence. What we have seen, is the IDF illegally setup bases of operation in Gazan hospitals though!
>something that would cause civilians on oct 7 join en masse a fest of rape
there is 0 evidence for "mass rape" on oct7, this has been debunked.
Every one of your accusations is a confession: "Israel: UN experts appalled by reported human rights violations against Palestinian women and girls."
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the experts said. They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online."
Right but the truth is that they were just standing in the wrong building or couldn't go without food for long enough, they're going to find out something that simple no matter who runs the schools.
I'm not trying to say if it is better or worse. Perhaps a better phrasing is "Israel has solidified another 2 generations of hatred by how they prosecuted the war." Leveling a country, killing and maiming as many as they did, the indiscriminate nature and war crimes, these things worked against their stated goals in the long-term
This is the narrative that the extremists want to push, but it’s hardly the truth. Hamas was not some grassroots movement of frustrated Palestinians. It was an Iranian proxy force masterminded, funded, supplied, trained, and instructed by Iran.
There are certainly many angry Palestinians before and after but this is foreign meddling through and through. Hamas would not exist in this form and have done the things that it did otherwise.
They already hated Israel. So much that they attacked them and started this war in the first place. I doubt Israel is any worse off in terms of being hated than they were before the war.
Hamas is not a rational actor. Their stated goal is to destroy Israel and kill every Jew. That's it. There is no scenario in which they are going to stop hating Israel. They don't care if every Palestinian also gets killed, if they get to destroy Israel it's worth it to them.
There are multiple generations of hate in the West Bank as well. Israel isn't threaten by them as much as they have much more difficulty accumulating weapons.
Are the Palestinians in the West Bank supposed to love their armed illegal settler neighbors?
It feels like almost ever day that I see a video of a Palestinian's home in the West Bank being demolished or a Palestinian family being harassed by armed settlers
I think you might have misinterpreted the comment above you. I took it to mean that there are a set of circumstances unique to Gaza that cause greater conflict between it and Israel than between the West Bank and Israel, which is not sufficiently explained by generational trauma alone.
> Israel has likely also created multiple generations of anger and hate against themselves
Israel would have created multiple generations of emboldened anger and hate against themselves if they failed to respond to the massacre and mass kidnapping.
I don't understand how is this different to all wars? back then when the Nazis started the war and we had to declare war against them. Or when we nuked 2 cities of Japan, were we also afraid that we will create multiple generations of anger and hate? how is this different?
I'm not comparing Israel or Palestine to Nazi, it's just a bitter fact that war always create anger and hate. Something had to be done though?
If you take the analogy further, Germany also completely surrendered after WWII and came up with a new, democratic government. In the meantime, 12-16 millions of Germans were driven out of their homes in East Prussia never to return. It wasn't until 1990 that the (now reunited) Germany finally renounced all claims to their lost territory.
OK, but it's not exactly like the population there had any choice, or even any way before the war to improve their circumstances of living.
Also, reminder that Smotrich, Ben Gvir and friends were already hard at work taking over the west bank before Hamas did Oct. 7.
Israel could have sidelined Hamas, boosted the PA and gave Gazans an actual alternative to the fundamentalist vision of Hamas. They did the exact opposite.
'The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' (Article 7)
'The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.'
(Article 11)
'Palestine is an Islamic land... Since this is the case, the
Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Moslem wherever he may be.' (Article 13)
- - -
Hamas are genocidal religious supremacists. Just because they haven’t succeeded in destroying the Jewish state doesn’t mean that they’re the peaceful victims in all of this. If they had access to weapons of mass destruction they would use them without a second thought. Read the Charter
That happens with worst possible out of context translations.
There's a lot written about that charter, the original and translations, and various reasons why Hamas feel that Palestinians must defend themselves from Israelis.
As I understand it that feeling is mirrored, both sides having more in common than they might admit.
The great thing about a charter is that it’s there in black and white, a first-class source of information on the actual intent, as opposed to later subjective analysis of things like “context”
If a group tells you who they are in official written terms, believe them.
Al Jazeera is far from unbiased. _Some_ of these so-called "Journalists" were terrorists and/or Hamas propagandists. That fact seems to escape the western press. All reporting I have seen puts the same level of credibility between Israeli and Hamas statements - one being from an elected democracy with rules based order and the other a literal genocidal terrorist organisation. I don't see the retractions given the same exposure as the claims when it turns out Hamas have lied. I don't see the atrocities Hamas commits get air time.
This is just my experience over the last 16 months. I thought it was absolutely crazy that within hours of Oct 7th I was seeing in the news how Israel should be blamed or are responsible. This weird rewriting of history in real time doesn't seem to have been let up since. It feels like I am taking crazy pills with the amount of vehement anti-Israeli diatribe that comes out of what I thought were sensible people or unbiased institutions.
People are pointing to a very long history of misbehavior on the part of Israel when they say that. Something along the lines of “hamas and their attack was to be expected given the circumstances israel, the party with all the decisionmaking power, deliberately cultivated over decades.”
And yet there is the speech by Jordan's foreign minister who makes clear that the Arab states are interested in relations with Israel - as a normal state and as part of a two-state solution with mutual sovereignty, but not with a state that behaves as if they had some divine right to dominate the entire region.
Good question. I think there was a quote by some Saudi official that the government doesn't care a lot about the issue and would prefer the normalization agreement to go through, but the population does - and sidelining the Palestinian issue would risk domestic stability.
I could imagine this is the sentiment in many of the countries there.
You've got your history mixed up. It was the Christians who persecuted Jews throughout history, culminating in the holocaust by, guess who, Christians. Jews thrived under Muslim rule during the middle ages.
That's ancient history. The reality today is widespread anti-Semitism among Muslims and it's backed by Mohammed. Up till the holocaust, basically everyone hated the Jews. After that, Christians changed their mind and Muslims doubled down. The Palestinians collaborated with Hitler because he promised to help them get rid of their Jews too.
