I had some sympathy for the Palestinians, but if Maggie Chapman is on their side, all sympathy has evaporated.
Hard to remember that someone who was once the COO of a rape crisis centre now thinks that one should "understand" the "context" for brutal rapes of young girls. She is the current Deputy Convenor of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee..
The Scottish Greens have been unhinged for a while. Now we know some of their number are lacking in all moral sense.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
Scaled to the Uk population, this attack is the equivalent of +5k Brits being murdered by terrorists on the same day. Scaled to the US population it’s more like 30k. And seemingly it was sponsored or coordinated by Iran.
The same Iran that’s been funnelling arms to Russia to murder Ukrainian civilians without consequence. The same Iran that European analysts said in March were under a year away from The Bomb. The same Iran that Biden unlocked $6bn of frozen funds to only last week.
This is a betting site. Do we really think Biden can survive this to renter the White House in Jan 2025?
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
If you think the fellow travellers in the UK are bad.....
“And as you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters” [crowd cheers and whoops]
Speeches held at the ‘All Out For Palestine’ protest outside the Israeli Consulate in New York"
I briefly had a Labour councillor who turned out to be an admirer of Hitler. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-36009544. She had previously been Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick Students Union. Strange as it may seem, there are people who think they are anti-racist, at the same time that they hate Jews.
A friend of mine has recently bought a small house in Provence. He is getting to know his French neighbours, including a sweet older lady; she told him of the best places to find truffles, in the nearby woods. Then she told him he was very lucky to have such information, and she laughingly added
"We have a saying, you can tell the German where to find the Jew, but you never tell him where to find the truffle"
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.
I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.
Remember that?
He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
In the 2010 election, UKIP plus BNP were only on 5%. Lib Dems ended up on 23% (and were higher at points in the campaign).
So Cameron could make overtures to the 5% by droning on about the Lisbon Treaty, or make overtures to the 23% by droning on about the Big Society.
I'm not sure he made the wrong call there.
Besides, 2010-15 were, with hindsight, his golden era as he had a very decent majority with a broadly like-minded Lib Dem leadership and no need to pander to the hard right. His Premiership survived five years of coalition with great ease... and was over barely a year after he had won his majority.
He misread the tea leaves.
There was a latent 40%+ pool of voters ready to vote Conservative, as polling throughout 2009 showed.
When he changed his pitch a broader pool did move to the LDs but that was a plague on both your houses basis.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
How is that so very different from Russia's attitude to Ukraine ?
I can see why Russia attacked Ukraine; I can see why Hamas attacked Israel.
Russia attacked Ukraine because it believes Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russia (or some of it anyway); Hamas attacked Israel because it believes Israel is an inalienable part of the Arab world.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
There are a disturbing number of Irish accounts willing to draw a positive parallel between the Easter Rising and the attack by Hamas on a music festival. Sometimes it's best if people don't let you know what they're thinking.
I had some sympathy for the Palestinians, but if Maggie Chapman is on their side, all sympathy has evaporated.
Hard to remember that someone who was once the COO of a rape crisis centre now thinks that one should "understand" the "context" for brutal rapes of young girls. She is the current Deputy Convenor of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee..
The Scottish Greens have been unhinged for a while. Now we know some of their number are lacking in all moral sense.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
Hamas apologists are trying to persuade everyone that rapes didn't happen, even as they admit everything else: the mass executions, the kidnaps of kids, the beheadings
So let's work through what they are saying vis a vis that poor German girl
They are asking us to believe that sex starved young Gazan men got hold of a beautiful young woman, at that party, they stripped her basically naked, they beat and tortured her so badly they broke both her legs, and both her arms, then they shot her in the head, and then they drove her half naked, broken body all around Gaza as they spat on her corpse and shouted God is Great with cheering whoops
.... and yet, during this horrific ordeal, not one of the young Gazan men looked at the beautiful naked women they were about to torture and kill and thought, hey, why don't we rape her first, have a bit of fun?
No, they didn't do that, because it would be unIslamic and "wrong", tho everything else is whoopy-do
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
We fought a war in Malaysia from 1948 to 1960 and forgot to mention it to Parliament at all. And we won. Both parties didn’t see an upside in talking about it.
No sooner had I submitted the posting I espy a Mail on Line article this afternoon quoting alleged " Labour insider" that they are very annoyed and frustrated that Lib Dems have no chance , have no credible leader etc etc.they are not in it but will not recognise that and that Labour will not stand by in other seats again". If this is genuine reporting this does indicate some panic or is it The Mail trying to SCARE Conservative voters into thinking Labour are doing so well they could win. Big question why would Peter Kyle or his minion go to the Mail with its Tory readership. It is all very fascinating but his latest incident has hardened me into betting on the Lib Dem.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.
I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.
Remember that?
He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
In the 2010 election, UKIP plus BNP were only on 5%. Lib Dems ended up on 23% (and were higher at points in the campaign).
So Cameron could make overtures to the 5% by droning on about the Lisbon Treaty, or make overtures to the 23% by droning on about the Big Society.
I'm not sure he made the wrong call there.
Besides, 2010-15 were, with hindsight, his golden era as he had a very decent majority with a broadly like-minded Lib Dem leadership and no need to pander to the hard right. His Premiership survived five years of coalition with great ease... and was over barely a year after he had won his majority.
He misread the tea leaves.
There was a latent 40%+ pool of voters ready to vote Conservative, as polling throughout 2009 showed.
When he changed his pitch a broader pool did move to the LDs but that was a plague on both your houses basis.
Plenty of them were quite right wing.
See also the boost to his popularity when he (sort of) used the veto.
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
I'm fine with making it less civil. To be honest "half-wit" is very mild for someone who names himself after an historical figure with pretty close associations with Eden, but who obviously doesn't know jack about Suez.
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
No sooner had I submitted the posting I espy a Mail on Line article this afternoon quoting alleged " Labour insider" that they are very annoyed and frustrated that Lib Dems have no chance , have no credible leader etc etc.they are not in it but will not recognise that and that Labour will not stand by in other seats again". If this is genuine reporting this does indicate some panic or is it The Mail trying to SCARE Conservative voters into thinking Labour are doing so well they could win. Big question why would Peter Kyle or his minion go to the Mail with its Tory readership. It is all very fascinating but his latest incident has hardened me into betting on the Lib Dem.
Labour see the Conservatives as the Opposition, the Lib Dems are the enemy.
Conservatives see Labour as the Opposition, the Lib Dems are the enemy.
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
That's the difference right there. Blair wasn't forced to resign in shame. He carried on for four more years and his lying was implicitly endorsed/forgiven by the electorate at a general election.
Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works
Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins
BLEAK
I'm trying to avoid these videos by just listening to the news on the radio.
They need to be seen, just as the vids of the Israelis being slain need to be seen
You have to go out and seek the balance for yourself
Weirdly, I think the narrative will be better for Israel once their soldiers go in. Because then it will become soldier v soldier, army v army, and it will feel "fair". The Israelis might even appear heroic
Right now we are getting the usual appalling scenes of Israeli bombing, and shattered Gaza and shattered Gazan bodies. Ugh
I have no desire or stomach to look at photos or videos for mutilated corpses, Israeli or Palestinian. I just wish the whole sorry saga could be stopped. If there was enough willpower in the West, maybe a solution could be imposed: Israel back to 1967 borders; Palestinians give up right of return; big fuck-off wall between them manned by international armed guards; money for both sides contingent on good behaviour.
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
I'm fine with making it less civil. To be honest "half-wit" is very mild for someone who names himself after an historical figure with pretty close associations with Eden, but who obviously doesn't know jack about Suez.
my avatar comes from the name of the street I grew up in. but beat your chest if it keeps you happy
Horrific vids now coming out of Gaza. Dead babies, the works
Expect the narrative to shift again, especially as this is just the begining, and it will only get worse when the ground invasion begins
BLEAK
I'm trying to avoid these videos by just listening to the news on the radio.
They need to be seen, just as the vids of the Israelis being slain need to be seen
You have to go out and seek the balance for yourself
Weirdly, I think the narrative will be better for Israel once their soldiers go in. Because then it will become soldier v soldier, army v army, and it will feel "fair". The Israelis might even appear heroic
Right now we are getting the usual appalling scenes of Israeli bombing, and shattered Gaza and shattered Gazan bodies. Ugh
I have no desire or stomach to look at photos or videos for mutilated corpses, Israeli or Palestinian. I just wish the whole sorry saga could be stopped. If there was enough willpower in the West, maybe a solution could be imposed: Israel back to 1967 borders; Palestinians give up right of return; big fuck-off wall between them manned by international armed guards; money for both sides contingent on good behaviour.
I've seen so many vids of dead people I almost shrug now. ALMOST
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
Unfortunately they were going to kill the hostages whatever happened. The only way for Israel to get them back would be to capitulate which would have even worse consequences for them.
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
(1) Yes, Israel is beyond caring. The security of the state comes first. And every video Hamas makes will give them further ammunition.
(2) Having said that, my understanding is that the telecoms infrastructure in Gaza has almost been completely destroyed. I am sure they can get their videos out other ways but, how practically given the intensity of the bombing, will they even be able to do this (answer: they may have some pre-pared videos)
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
This is pretty straight forward. The IDF are going to steamroller their way through Gaza. Hamas posting videos of hostages being brutally murdered as lunatics shout Allahu Akbar will only accelerate the push.
Hamas may be banking on international outrage putting pressure on Israel to stop their response. But that doesn't work if they go raping and beheading.
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
(1) Yes, Israel is beyond caring. The security of the state comes first. And every video Hamas makes will give them further ammunition.
(2) Having said that, my understanding is that the telecoms infrastructure in Gaza has almost been completely destroyed. I am sure they can get their videos out other ways but, how practically given the intensity of the bombing, will they even be able to do this (answer: they may have some pre-pared videos)
I have been to the far south of Israel where it meets Egypt. On the Egyptian border you can connect with Egyptian mobile telecoms - so they can communicate it that way. They will have power supplies to charge phones. It will be done, if they really want to do it, unfortunately
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
There are a disturbing number of Irish accounts willing to draw a positive parallel between the Easter Rising and the attack by Hamas on a music festival. Sometimes it's best if people don't let you know what they're thinking.
Actually, I rather prefer to know what people really are thinking.
There is a strong strain of antisemitism in the brand of Irish Republicanism that Sinn Fein represents, as shown by a lot of replies to Adams' twitter feed.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
But Palestinian people could use that exact argument about the attack made by Hamas over the weekend - in your world view why shouldn't Hamas be able to look at the crimes committed by the state of Israel and say "we do not care about the distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Israeli and the Israeli's who, in their hundreds of thousands, march through our business districts and destroy our businesses or steal our houses or destroy our olive trees or kill our children"?
Your logic is the logic of the Montagues and Capulets, and the Prince of Cats himself - "peace; I hate the word".
I am very clear about what arguments the Palestinian people used to justify the attack. They want to terrorise Israel so as to make them leave (the West Bank presumably for starters, and the Middle East as an endgame).
I perfectly well understand the reasons for their actions. I assume also they will have anticipated potential responses and we shall see which one of them Israel decides upon.
So is your position that the anti Israeli views of Palestinians have nothing to do with the acts of the Israeli state, and are only out of a hatred of Jewish people? Because that seems to be the only distinct difference between what you and I attribute these acts to.
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
This is pretty straight forward. The IDF are going to steamroller their way through Gaza. Hamas posting videos of hostages being brutally murdered as lunatics shout Allahu Akbar will only accelerate the push.
Hamas may be banking on international outrage putting pressure on Israel to stop their response. But that doesn't work if they go raping and beheading.
Yeah, the one way for Hamas to guarantee they get zero international sympathy is for them to continue their barbarism, and post videos of women and children being ritually murdered, live, on air, every hour
And of course that is what they are doing. Coz it's what ISIS would have wanted
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
This is pretty straight forward. The IDF are going to steamroller their way through Gaza. Hamas posting videos of hostages being brutally murdered as lunatics shout Allahu Akbar will only accelerate the push.
Hamas may be banking on international outrage putting pressure on Israel to stop their response. But that doesn't work if they go raping and beheading.
They have utterly miscalculated. The US isn’t going to tell them to stop if they are more or less just taking Gaza street by street after THAT attack; and frankly nor will we or the Europeans.
All Israel has to do is stay within the Laws of Armed Conflict. And they do.
Al-Qassam spokesman: “Every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of a civilian hostage, and we will broadcast this with audio and video,
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
This is pretty straight forward. The IDF are going to steamroller their way through Gaza. Hamas posting videos of hostages being brutally murdered as lunatics shout Allahu Akbar will only accelerate the push.
Hamas may be banking on international outrage putting pressure on Israel to stop their response. But that doesn't work if they go raping and beheading.
They have utterly miscalculated. The US isn’t going to tell them to stop if they are more or less just taking Gaza street by street after THAT attack; and frankly nor will we or the Europeans.
All Israel has to do is stay within the Laws of Armed Conflict. And they do.
Which is why they went through the formal declaration of war.
I had some sympathy for the Palestinians, but if Maggie Chapman is on their side, all sympathy has evaporated.
Hard to remember that someone who was once the COO of a rape crisis centre now thinks that one should "understand" the "context" for brutal rapes of young girls. She is the current Deputy Convenor of the Equalities, Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee..
The Scottish Greens have been unhinged for a while. Now we know some of their number are lacking in all moral sense.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
Hamas apologists are trying to persuade everyone that rapes didn't happen, even as they admit everything else: the mass executions, the kidnaps of kids, the beheadings
So let's work through what they are saying vis a vis that poor German girl
They are asking us to believe that sex starved young Gazan men got hold of a beautiful young woman, at that party, they stripped her basically naked, they beat and tortured her so badly they broke both her legs, and both her arms, then they shot her in the head, and then they drove her half naked, broken body all around Gaza as they spat on her corpse and shouted God is Great with cheering whoops
.... and yet, during this horrific ordeal, not one of the young Gazan men looked at the beautiful naked women they were about to torture and kill and thought, hey, why don't we rape her first, have a bit of fun?
No, they didn't do that, because it would be unIslamic and "wrong", tho everything else is whoopy-do
Just as there are "anti-racists" for Hitler, so there are "feminists" for rape. So long as the victims are people that they hate.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
On the other hand if Israel has called up 300k reservists, thats quite an economic hit, how long can they keep at war ?
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
I'm a big fan of the south west sub sample - LD 32%, Labour 31%, Conservative 22%, Reform 10%, Green 5%.
There's regional subsamples that don't strain the grounds of credulity and really implausible wacky regional subsamples that you wouldn't accept could be remotely correct in a month of Sundays.
R&W always seem to have far more of the latter, it is a clear feature of their polling.
I think it may have something to do with their sampling methods. R&W always churn out a nice round 2,000 total sample. It's as though a switch turns off as soon as they hit that number. Other polling companies have totals which are not a round number, eg. 2,062 in the latest YouGov.
I have a theory as to why that might be happening. What I suspect is that, after hitting their basic total quota, other companies programmes may be looking at what groups are unrepresented and keep the poll going a bit longer only for groups where the response rate has been unduly poor. So R&W's sample is more random whereas others' are structured a bit more.
For example, if YouGov found they were way short of the expected proportion of say 2019 Nats in their Scottish sub-sample, they would contact a few extra of those so that the proportion became a bit less extreme. Both would still have to do reweighting, but R&W would be a bit more reliant on reweighting.
Never let it be said that a ghastly situation should be an obstacle to trot out somewhat unconnected prejudices so long held that they need to be carbon dated. PB never lets you down.
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Hamas official live on Sky denies any civilians have been killed
Why give them airtime
For the same reason that the BNP were given air time and led to their downfall - to call them out on their bullshit.
If they're being given air time unchallenged to spout propaganda without being called on it, that's a different matter.
When is the much, much greater airtime given to Farage and his ilk going to lead to their bullshit being called out and their downfall? Getting a bit impatient.
Gerry Adams has never had any problem with the murder of young people out enjoying themselves.
There are a disturbing number of Irish accounts willing to draw a positive parallel between the Easter Rising and the attack by Hamas on a music festival. Sometimes it's best if people don't let you know what they're thinking.
Actually, I rather prefer to know what people really are thinking.
There is a strong strain of antisemitism in the brand of Irish Republicanism that Sinn Fein represents, as shown by a lot of replies to Adams' twitter feed.
"Two people, one struggle" being a familiar refrain.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
Yes, in the end the Gazans will have no choice but to push across the Egyptian border, out of thirst - as @DavidL says
And that could happen really quickly - a few days?
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
This is spot on:
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
We fought a war in Malaysia from 1948 to 1960 and forgot to mention it to Parliament at all. And we won. Both parties didn’t see an upside in talking about it.
Wasn't a war - just an "emergency" [edit] in the term of the time, of course. (It, or something like it, did break out again a few years later. But let's call that a separate un-war.).
Hamas official live on Sky denies any civilians have been killed
Why give them airtime
For the same reason that the BNP were given air time and led to their downfall - to call them out on their bullshit.
If they're being given air time unchallenged to spout propaganda without being called on it, that's a different matter.
When is the much, much greater airtime given to Farage and his ilk going to lead to their bullshit being called out and their downfall? Getting a bit impatient.
Stay in there. We got there eventually with Sturgeon.
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
This is spot on:
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
Of course Labour won Tamworth in 1997 but not Mid Bedfordshire.
Labour also won most seats in Tamworth in the seats up in the local elections in May.
So I would expect Labour to win Tamworth but the Conservatives may hold Mid Beds as the opposition is divided between Labour and the LDs
Labour won most seats in Tamworth in the local elections but their popular vote lead was just 1,200 votes, and the Tories can probably rely on an advantage of around 2,000 votes from the other section of the constituency which is basically millionaries row for Birmingham. (Little Aston, Shenstone, Stonnall).
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.
I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.
Remember that?
He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
In the 2010 election, UKIP plus BNP were only on 5%. Lib Dems ended up on 23% (and were higher at points in the campaign).
So Cameron could make overtures to the 5% by droning on about the Lisbon Treaty, or make overtures to the 23% by droning on about the Big Society.
I'm not sure he made the wrong call there.
Besides, 2010-15 were, with hindsight, his golden era as he had a very decent majority with a broadly like-minded Lib Dem leadership and no need to pander to the hard right. His Premiership survived five years of coalition with great ease... and was over barely a year after he had won his majority.
He misread the tea leaves.
There was a latent 40%+ pool of voters ready to vote Conservative, as polling throughout 2009 showed.
When he changed his pitch a broader pool did move to the LDs but that was a plague on both your houses basis.
Plenty of them were quite right wing.
I'm not sure that's how I remember it. Cameron's worry was his support was a mile wide and an inch deep. There was some truth to this as the party's support did fall during the brief Cleggmania period in mid to late April.
There was a degree of philosophical convergence at higher levels between the Cameron "liberal conservatives" and the LD "Orange Bookers". That convergence didn't necessarily exist among either party's membership or supporters who wanted the traditional adversarial relationship.
A little moment of light relief, courtesy of visegrad24:
"Former porn star Mia Khalifa is taking a real pounding on social media after she spoke out in support of Hamas’s violent attack against Israeli civilians."
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
This is spot on:
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
You are right his views are more in line with Trump than Biden but then he is consistently scoring mid-teens in the Democrat primary polls. There is a risk he eats into those parts of the Democrat vote that will never vote Trump / the GOP but also hate Biden.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
On the other hand if Israel has called up 300k reservists, thats quite an economic hit, how long can they keep at war ?
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
Counterfactual alert: If Britain and France hadn't given in to US pressure over Suez, would Israel have ended up annexing the Sinai peninsula?
Between 1967 and 1979 Sinai was part of the Israeli occupied territories, with a number of Israeli settlements.
Yes I know, but that was later after a subsequent war. My scenario is where the earlier occupation had been sustained with Anglo-French backing.
It wasn't just US pressure. There was also the Arab oil embargo to contend with - indeed outside of Germany, the Anglo French adventure had virtually no support.
Your counter factual doesn't really add up, as without US backing, possibly even with it, it would have been unsustainable.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
The next 20 years seem like they are going to be just great.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Yes. It is pure out and out revolting racism.
It is the same attitude that led to the Holocaust.
It is a "Hitler never succeeded, lets finish the job" attitude that has persisted over 70 years.
70 years when Israel has been remarkably restrained in response. Any other country would have ethnically cleansed the area to remove the threat many, many decades ago.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Hope you are enjoying your red & nuts. To you and @148grss it seems that you have difficulty believing that there is anti-semitism amongst the Arabs. And that Israel has committed some (original - we'll come on to that later) sin which has brought this behaviour upon them.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Of course Labour won Tamworth in 1997 but not Mid Bedfordshire.
Labour also won most seats in Tamworth in the seats up in the local elections in May.
So I would expect Labour to win Tamworth but the Conservatives may hold Mid Beds as the opposition is divided between Labour and the LDs
Labour won most seats in Tamworth in the local elections but their popular vote lead was just 1,200 votes, and the Tories can probably rely on an advantage of around 2,000 votes from the other section of the constituency which is basically millionaries row for Birmingham. (Little Aston, Shenstone, Stonnall).
Don't rely too much on what the local elections tell you.
Omnisis and Survation both conducted polls for the 2023 English local elections.
At the same time they asked about general election voting intention.
The Labour lead in voting intention was overall about 9% higher in the general election.
Data via the links under "Opinion Polling" here, if you care to look:
Which is why all high-minded plans to help ease, or solve, the issue from the west will fail. Having Palestinians and Israelis in the current impasse is good for malign major players.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
The next 20 years seem like they are going to be just great.
The next half century can be nothing other than totally shit. I think that’s the logic of climate change plus this new social-media modulated atomisation.
The problems have got bigger than states or blocs. The only, only conceivable solution to a world entering conflagration is a single global unitary state and world government which enables people to move from areas with population to areas with economic opportunity, but I know very very few people have any appetite for that. Even though let’s be honest it would grow global GDP more than any other system.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
Yes, in the end the Gazans will have no choice but to push across the Egyptian border, out of thirst - as @DavidL says
And that could happen really quickly - a few days?
There was a very articulate doctor from a Gaza hospital on R4 this morning. No electricity. Limited fuel for emergency generators. Health system overwhelmed by casualties already. Going to collapse. All of it.
There will be mass movements out of Gaza by the weekend. Possibly onto Israeli guns.
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
This is spot on:
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
You are right his views are more in line with Trump than Biden but then he is consistently scoring mid-teens in the Democrat primary polls. There is a risk he eats into those parts of the Democrat vote that will never vote Trump / the GOP but also hate Biden.
I think that's just name recognition from the lowest information voters.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
How is that so very different from Russia's attitude to Ukraine ?
I can see why Russia attacked Ukraine; I can see why Hamas attacked Israel.
Russia attacked Ukraine because it believes Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russia (or some of it anyway); Hamas attacked Israel because it believes Israel is an inalienable part of the Arab world.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
I can’t find your direct reply, @Topping, so I’ll reply to you here.
Do you think that Israel’s neighbours didn’t want Israel to exist because of a) antisemitism, b) geopolitical concerns and / or c) a view that the people who had previously lived on that land should not be displaced? I can see a position for all 3, with 1 of them being a concern not to take seriously and 2 & 3 to be, if not legitimate causes of wars, causes of wars that the imperial powers use all the time. I ask this partly because you use the refrain “wipe Israel of the map” - which I understand is a translation of some expressed sentiments about Israel that are now used in sloganeering (from both Zionist and pro Palestinian activists, to different effect), but “should never have existed” is a similar meaning (if not connotation). L
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
I'm fine with making it less civil. To be honest "half-wit" is very mild for someone who names himself after an historical figure with pretty close associations with Eden, but who obviously doesn't know jack about Suez.
my avatar comes from the name of the street I grew up in. but beat your chest if it keeps you happy
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
I can’t find your direct reply, @Topping, so I’ll reply to you here.
Do you think that Israel’s neighbours didn’t want Israel to exist because of a) antisemitism, b) geopolitical concerns and / or c) a view that the people who had previously lived on that land should not be displaced? I can see a position for all 3, with 1 of them being a concern not to take seriously and 2 & 3 to be, if not legitimate causes of wars, causes of wars that the imperial powers use all the time. I ask this partly because you use the refrain “wipe Israel of the map” - which I understand is a translation of some expressed sentiments about Israel that are now used in sloganeering (from both Zionist and pro Palestinian activists, to different effect), but “should never have existed” is a similar meaning (if not connotation). L
Given the history of the Middle East, and least of all for Jews in the Middle East, I think you're being stupidly charitable with your c).
Russia is looking to open up the fight in any way they can.
America distrated and the Trumpists looking to use it as a reason to divert aid and attention from Ukraine to Israel? They won't have believed their luck if that can be pulled off.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Hope you are enjoying your red & nuts. To you and @148grss it seems that you have difficulty believing that there is anti-semitism amongst the Arabs. And that Israel has committed some (original - we'll come on to that later) sin which has brought this behaviour upon them.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Red & nuts could be his username.
The idea that Israel are somehow uniquely evil, despite how tolerant of the Palestinians they've been, is widespread within the far left, and far right racists.
Russia, China etc see any dissent and simply frogmarch anyone who disagrees with them out of the land, or shoots them in the back of their head. The Arab world did that to anyone who's Jewish.
Israel meanwhile has hosted for decades people in land they control who literally call for Israel's annihilation and the death of all Jews - but Israel's the problem ... 🤦♂️
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
I can’t find your direct reply, @Topping, so I’ll reply to you here.
Do you think that Israel’s neighbours didn’t want Israel to exist because of a) antisemitism, b) geopolitical concerns and / or c) a view that the people who had previously lived on that land should not be displaced? I can see a position for all 3, with 1 of them being a concern not to take seriously and 2 & 3 to be, if not legitimate causes of wars, causes of wars that the imperial powers use all the time. I ask this partly because you use the refrain “wipe Israel of the map” - which I understand is a translation of some expressed sentiments about Israel that are now used in sloganeering (from both Zionist and pro Palestinian activists, to different effect), but “should never have existed” is a similar meaning (if not connotation). L
Kerry Kennedy @KerryKennedyRFK · 23m Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country. @roryekennedy
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
This is spot on:
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
You are right his views are more in line with Trump than Biden but then he is consistently scoring mid-teens in the Democrat primary polls. There is a risk he eats into those parts of the Democrat vote that will never vote Trump / the GOP but also hate Biden.
I think that's just name recognition from the lowest information voters.
Ah, the true deciders in any American election.
Edit(That's just recognition of how close the elections have been - at least in the states that are critical - in America, not that there's something special about Americans).
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Hope you are enjoying your red & nuts. To you and @148grss it seems that you have difficulty believing that there is anti-semitism amongst the Arabs. And that Israel has committed some (original - we'll come on to that later) sin which has brought this behaviour upon them.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Red & nuts could be his username.
The idea that Israel are somehow uniquely evil, despite how tolerant of the Palestinians they've been, is widespread within the far left, and far right racists.
Russia, China etc see any dissent and simply frogmarch anyone who disagrees with them out of the land, or shoots them in the back of their head. The Arab world did that to anyone who's Jewish.
Israel meanwhile has hosted for decades people in land they control who literally call for Israel's annihilation and the death of all Jews - but Israel's the problem ... 🤦♂️
It comes back to that (original) sin. As has been documented on here today there was anti-semitism in Roman times. But more recently/contemporaneously to that the Jews after all killed Jesus and hence have not been forgiven from that time to this.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
Sovereignty only matters to people like us then eh. Matters so much to us that we can't even tolerate being in the EU. But those Palestinians, hmm, different strokes. Lower level types.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Hope you are enjoying your red & nuts. To you and @148grss it seems that you have difficulty believing that there is anti-semitism amongst the Arabs. And that Israel has committed some (original - we'll come on to that later) sin which has brought this behaviour upon them.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Is there a history of anti Semitism amongst Arabic peoples? Of course. But I do not think it is the driving force behind the issue of Israel, especially not to begin with. Indeed, if the finger of anti Semitism should point anywhere it should be at the hegemonic western powers who refused fleeing Jewish people to their shores prior to WW2 - whereas at that point multicultural communities built on common understanding between Palestinian and Jewish exiles were commonplace. The land that is Israel and Palestine were also relatively free of faith based conflict under Ottoman control - all faiths had the freedom to access Jerusalem, for instance. The issue, I would argue, hinges on the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their land. This creates long lasting conflict - it has done with India and Pakistan, it has done in Africa, and it is the case with Israel and Palestine. People want to return to their homes, to farm their olives, to live and die in the house they were born in. At least with Indian partition people on both Hindu/secular and the Muslim sides held both positions - with Israel it is clear that one side was being forced out by the other.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
I can’t find your direct reply, @Topping, so I’ll reply to you here.
Do you think that Israel’s neighbours didn’t want Israel to exist because of a) antisemitism, b) geopolitical concerns and / or c) a view that the people who had previously lived on that land should not be displaced? I can see a position for all 3, with 1 of them being a concern not to take seriously and 2 & 3 to be, if not legitimate causes of wars, causes of wars that the imperial powers use all the time. I ask this partly because you use the refrain “wipe Israel of the map” - which I understand is a translation of some expressed sentiments about Israel that are now used in sloganeering (from both Zionist and pro Palestinian activists, to different effect), but “should never have existed” is a similar meaning (if not connotation). L
Given the history of the Middle East, and least of all for Jews in the Middle East, I think you're being stupidly charitable with your c).
You can give a cynical reason for c (as in they didn’t want them displaced because then they become those countries’ problems).
Regardless of where you stand on the guy - and I 100% understand how he’s done some stuff that is wrong - David Baddiel’s ‘Jews Don’t Count’ makes for very relevant reading at the moment.
John Rentoul @JohnRentoul · 11m Proper rhetoric from Reeves. Well written, well delivered. More or less content-free
The real takeaway from both party conferences is that the leadership of both parties recognise there is no money. And the tightening could get even worse.
Geopolitical, economic and demographic headwinds aren't great. HMG won't be able to splurge again for some time.
Indeed. As I've said before, Election 24 is 1974, not 1997.
It reminds me more of 2010 when we had all the righties on the board were gobsmacked when Cameron didnt win a majority.
Partly because a seven point lead feels like it ought to win a majority. But the second order effects of FPTP means that it doesn't if the other parties are all lined up against you. See also 1992.
Talking of which, more Conference Splat news,
Labour 43% (–) Conservative 27% (-2) Liberal Democrat 13% (+1) Reform UK 8% (+1) Green 6% (+2) Scottish National Party 1% (-2) Other 2% (+1)
Cameron didnt have enough active support to make people vote for him. I find Starmer the same.
Completely agree. We’ve all forgotten how much Brown clawed back vs. Cameron in the polls. That’s why I don’t write off Labour falling short.
I await Lord Osborne in the Lord Mandelson role for the analogy to be complete.
Cameron lost it in January by shitting the bed on Lisbon, and then droning on and on about The Big Society.
Remember that?
He'd have probably got his majority if he'd stuck to a referendum on Lisbon. He didn't want to, though, nor pander to the sorts of voters who might be interested in that, and so he didn't win.
What would a referendum on Lisbon have achieved *once it was signed*
It would have been a great thing 1 the voters would likely have said “no” and there would have been a renegotiation without a messy Brexit
But once it had been signed it was a treaty - it was done and the only way to renegotiate would have been article 50
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
The next 20 years seem like they are going to be just great.
The next half century can be nothing other than totally shit. I think that’s the logic of climate change plus this new social-media modulated atomisation.
The problems have got bigger than states or blocs. The only, only conceivable solution to a world entering conflagration is a single global unitary state and world government which enables people to move from areas with population to areas with economic opportunity, but I know very very few people have any appetite for that. Even though let’s be honest it would grow global GDP more than any other system.
It wouldn't work. The places they move to would just become like the places they'd left through force of numbers.
The fact that Israel has the ability to cut off power , water and food supplies to Gaza highlights one of the issues that have bred hatred .
Hamas lives off the hatred . Children are brought up with the hatred and it’s just a repeating cycle.
There are still those on both sides who wanted a peaceful resolution , sadly that’s been consigned to the bin for yet more years .
Israel can raze Gaza to the ground but the hatred will remain .
But if the Israelis can somehow shift the Gazans into Egypt, then the hatred will be further away, and the chances of Hamas repeating their spectacular incursion will be greatly minimised
I do wonder if that is what the Israelis are planning. I don't see any other point in wading into Gaza at the cost of many thousands of lives, quite a few of them Israeli
Will Egypt accept them ? The whole situation is just awful. There are no good outcomes here .
Absolutely. No good outcomes
If Egypt seals the border (and they have tightened control this morning) then Israel will be left with a cornered population unable to go anywhere. What then?
I may be wrong and this isn't the Israeli plan, but then I am bewildered as to what Israel thinks it can achieve with ANOTHER invasion that does nothing but stir up evermore enmity. It simply ensures further attacks down the line
As I said last night, they might possibly be planning a renewed Occupation of Gaza, with Israel in control, and the reintroduction of Israeli settlers, who will act as a de facto spy network and military police, so October 7 is not repeated. But that's damnably tricky and could so easily go wrong
The final possibility is that Israel doesn't have a plan. It is acting in a spirit of pure revenge
With whom would they negotiate? Hamas is the *government* of Gaza. Israel has declared war on Gaza amd it shouldn't be a surprise - its *government* has launched these attacks.
So the Israeli goal will I believe be simple - remove Hamas as a threat. How they achieve that is tricky, but they won't just be pushing the cross-border terrorists back into their prison.
Removal of Hamas - and the Hamas state - has to be the goal. And that will largely mean the killing of anyone who is Hamas, supports Hamas, lives near Hamas. It is going to be awful - war usually is. Especially when the aggressor is pledged to the extermination of the other side.
That may be Israel’s strategy. That (“killing of anyone who […] lives near Hamas”) would clearly be a war crime and we, as in the UK, should do everything we can to stop war crimes. We cannot criticise Russia for war crimes in Ukraine and wave through Israel, or Hamas, committing war crimes.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: war crimes are bad. Don’t carry out war crimes. Don’t respond to say crimes with more war crimes. Why is that a proposition that some on PB struggle with?
"war crimes" is a fantasy. There is/are no such thing. They only exist for the winners in war.
The fact that they are typically enforced against the vanquished rather than the victors doesn't mean they aren't a "thing".
They are reasonably clearly defined by international convention, and provide at least some incentive to moderate the conduct of war in terms of impact on non-combatants. The incentive not to commit them is that if you turn out to be the vanquished, you'd probably rather slip away into exile and obscurity rather than ending up in The Hague or as a fugitive.
Should Israel deliberately target civilians? No. Do civilians have some responsibility to flee a war zone? Yes. Again Hamas are not just embedded in the civilian population, they are the government. So eradicating them is going to involve blowing a great many buildings up.
If your neighbour fires his AK47 at prayers 5 times a day, it is time to leave. Because in wartime it is always legitimate to go after CCC targets regardless of where the enemy has put them.
How exactly do 3 million people flee a war zone when they are not allowed to leave by any of the surrounding countries?
They should decide not to have Hamas as their leadership.
Even coming from you that is genuinely one of the stupidest comments any one has made on this topic.
I suppose the Catholics in Northern Ireland deserved to be bombed out and killed because they had Sinn Féin councillors.
There is huge support in Gaza for the Hamas leadership. They can send thousands of "militants" to Israel on near suicide missions. They have mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the streets protesting against Israel and the Great Satan. They show pictures of six-yr old girls wielding AKs and crying with happiness at the onslaught happening in Israel.
But they are all harmless civilians who only want to find a way out of danger.
It must be very strange living inside your head where everything in the world is so black and white.
It is dangerously close to exactly the sort of attitude that led to Rwanda, Bosnia and indeed the Holocaust. Regarding people as a mass (and indeed to use the words of your friend Netenyahu as animals) rather than individuals is an easy road to 'untermensch'.
You seem pretty conflicted about it all.
Those poor Gazans who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to celebrate actions against Israel are now to be pitied. Of course it's best that civilians leave and they can do so via Egypt or indeed the coast if they wanted to. I have heard nothing about a port blockade perhaps you know different.
I don't for one moment think that every German in 1939 was complicit in the German war aims but I have read nowhere of a safe passage being discussed for them to escape the country before we bombed it.
This is the notion of collective guilt. It is explicitly a war crime.
Then it's one that every country including our own is guilty of. As noted above, it only matters if you lose. But actually of all the Nuremburg trials was one ever held for the bombing of Coventry?
See, I think this is where you and I differ @TOPPING - you see this as an argument for why we shouldn't worry about the plight of the Palestinian people. I see this as an argument for why we should have had a Nuremburg trial not only for the bombing of Coventry, but also the bombing of Dresden. And Hiroshima. Humanity got to a place where it almost said "only following orders" was not a good enough reason for individuals committing crimes against humanity. Much since has been trying to roll that back - we need only look at the indifference to history our Home Secretary displays when discussing the refugee convention, or our own history of "defending our troops" from the consequences of the crimes they committed during the Troubles.
And I find your view wholly admirable. And I do care about the plight of the Palestinian people. I think they have been dreadfully lead although bear not a small amount of responsibility for their leadership.
This is another Brexit issue. Because I was a Remainer it doesn't mean that I thought that everything the EU did was fantastic and beyond reproach; while Brexiters probably didn't think everything the EU did was dreadful, but internet forums, including if you can believe it PB, often force people to adopt those positions.
In this case Israel is not without fault in its behaviour over the past but after the events of the weekend I am giving them quite a lot of leeway to progress the war in whatever way they want and wanted only to point out that at some point a distinction between the sweet, good-natured, wouldn't harm a fly Palestinian people who only want peace with their beloved neighbours Israel, and the Palestinians who, in their hundreds of thousands march in support of the destruction of Israel needs to be drawn.
We didn't single out the nice Germans from the beastly ones and Israel can be forgiven for not doing the same in this instance wrt the Palestinians.
You're an odd fruit sometimes.
On the 'Putin attacking Ukraine' topic you've been at pains to explore the context, discuss the things that might have pushed him into the action (eg did the Iraq War set a precedent? I recall you posing that question quite doggedly), lots of that from you on that one.
Yet on this one, this 'Hamas attacking Israel' topic, any attempt by people to do similar, to mention the context, to discuss reasons why this attack might have happened (eg could the maltreatment of the Palestinians by Israel have anything to do with it?) seems to give you an attack of the vapors.
I'm not slagging you off, I'm genuinely interested in the different way you approach the 2 topics. Putin Ukraine, very up for context and the whys and wherefores. Hamas Israel, not so much. Why is this, do we think?
I am extremely clear on why Hamas attacked Israel. I am extremely clear on why Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked them in 1948. And in 1967. And 1973. And 2023.
They attacked them because they wanted to wipe Israel off the map. In each instance they failed and in trying they got themselves into quite a pickle.
Has Israel behaved as you or indeed I would have wished them to over the past 70 years? I'm sure not. But it's useful idiots like you who think that if Israel had only been a bit nicer over the period everyone would be holding hands and making daisy chains together.
You think that I am excusing Israel's behaviour to the Palestinians on the one hand and ignoring the fact that this might be a root cause of this weekend's actions. Just like I seek to understand the reasons for Putin's actions.
I am here to educate you that for centuries and most recently decades the Arab world (and of course others) has been antipathetic to the Jews and hence this weekend's actions are a symptom of that hatred.
Thanks for non flip reply. Doesn't happen too often. I treasure it.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
Hope you are enjoying your red & nuts. To you and @148grss it seems that you have difficulty believing that there is anti-semitism amongst the Arabs. And that Israel has committed some (original - we'll come on to that later) sin which has brought this behaviour upon them.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Is there a history of anti Semitism amongst Arabic peoples? Of course. But I do not think it is the driving force behind the issue of Israel, especially not to begin with. Indeed, if the finger of anti Semitism should point anywhere it should be at the hegemonic western powers who refused fleeing Jewish people to their shores prior to WW2 - whereas at that point multicultural communities built on common understanding between Palestinian and Jewish exiles were commonplace. The land that is Israel and Palestine were also relatively free of faith based conflict under Ottoman control - all faiths had the freedom to access Jerusalem, for instance. The issue, I would argue, hinges on the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their land. This creates long lasting conflict - it has done with India and Pakistan, it has done in Africa, and it is the case with Israel and Palestine. People want to return to their homes, to farm their olives, to live and die in the house they were born in. At least with Indian partition people on both Hindu/secular and the Muslim sides held both positions - with Israel it is clear that one side was being forced out by the other.
I wondered how long it would be before we got to: "It's all out fault!"
You really should look at the history of Jews in the region, e.g. Iraq, to see why your pretend high-minded ideal of allowing people to return is utterly bogus. Why are the Palestinians the only ones who have this right to return?
For decades, UK governments from all 3 parties have had a foreign policy supporting a rules-based international order, and a domestic law forbidding war crimes. Yet multiple people here have, in recent days, advocated that Israel should commit war crimes. (And they're not defending Israel's actions. They're calling for Israel to go further than they currently are.)
Can I ask these people: why didn't you speak out against the UK's policy in favour of a rules-based International order and against war crimes? If war crimes don't exist or they're fine in some circumstances, shouldn't we have said that decades ago?
It was customary for UK govts not to lie to Parliament about going to war.
Then New Labour gave us Iraq, all HMGs lost their credibility at that point
Eden basically had to resign over lying repeatedly to Parliament about Suez, you half-wit.
Blair didnt and I can do without the insult unless you want to make it less civil.
We fought a war in Malaysia from 1948 to 1960 and forgot to mention it to Parliament at all. And we won. Both parties didn’t see an upside in talking about it.
Wasn't a war - just an "emergency" [edit] in the term of the time, of course. (It, or something like it, did break out again a few years later. But let's call that a separate un-war.).
My daughter borrowed my late father’s medals for her wedding. They included a service medal for Malaysia. I don’t remember him ever mentioning it. Really no idea what he did. He had good stories about Cyprus. But of Malaysia, nothing. I’m reasonably sure they were told not to talk of it.
I think that I am right in saying a very high proportion of Gaza’s water and electricity comes from Israel. People are going to be driven out by thirst.
Oh, close to 100% of Gaza's water and electricity comes from Israel.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
And they will exploit that to make Gaza uninhabitable. This is not going to end well for anyone.
There are two lots of losers here:
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
This mess is never getting any better for years and is only getting worse.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
Sovereignty only matters to people like us then eh. Matters so much to us that we can't even tolerate being in the EU. But those Palestinians, hmm, different strokes. Lower level types.
Yes.
Sovereign democracy only exists for people in peaceful democracies who aren't at war, that doesn't apply here.
People living in disputed land in times of war, when the war ends then there can be sovereignty, not until then.
As it stands, this land is owned by Israel, not the "Palestinian" Gazans who were Egyptians when the land was taken from Egypt when Egypt tried to wipe Israel off the map yet again.
In a world where Pelion shit is piled incessantly on Ossa shit, one of the few unambiguously good achievements of the Conservative administration (not Sunak's bit, obviously) has been the steady stream of new train stations. Headbolt Lane opened on the 5th. Geoff Marshall went to visit.
Comments
The same Iran that’s been funnelling arms to Russia to murder Ukrainian civilians without consequence. The same Iran that European analysts said in March were under a year away from The Bomb. The same Iran that Biden unlocked $6bn of frozen funds to only last week.
This is a betting site. Do we really think Biden can survive this to renter the White House in Jan 2025?
So no civilians are true civilians.
It's how they rationalise murder.
* There's a recent quote somewhere of them explaining this, but I can't for now find it.
There was a latent 40%+ pool of voters ready to vote Conservative, as polling throughout 2009 showed.
When he changed his pitch a broader pool did move to the LDs but that was a plague on both your houses basis.
Plenty of them were quite right wing.
Russia attacked Ukraine because it believes Ukraine is an inalienable part of Russia (or some of it anyway); Hamas attacked Israel because it believes Israel is an inalienable part of the Arab world.
I don't think that is revelatory.
So let's work through what they are saying vis a vis that poor German girl
They are asking us to believe that sex starved young Gazan men got hold of a beautiful young woman, at that party, they stripped her basically naked, they beat and tortured her so badly they broke both her legs, and both her arms, then they shot her in the head, and then they drove her half naked, broken body all around Gaza as they spat on her corpse and shouted God is Great with cheering whoops
.... and yet, during this horrific ordeal, not one of the young Gazan men looked at the beautiful naked women they were about to torture and kill and thought, hey, why don't we rape her first, have a bit of fun?
No, they didn't do that, because it would be unIslamic and "wrong", tho everything else is whoopy-do
at all. And we won. Both parties didn’t see an upside in talking about it.
If this is genuine reporting this does indicate some panic or is it The Mail trying to SCARE Conservative voters into thinking Labour are doing so well they could win. Big question why would Peter Kyle or his minion go to the Mail with its Tory readership.
It is all very fascinating but his latest incident has hardened me into betting on the Lib Dem.
@KerryKennedyRFK
·
23m
Bobby might share the same name as our father, but he does not share the same values, vision or judgment. Today's announcement is deeply saddening for us. We denounce his candidacy and believe it to be perilous for our country.
@roryekennedy
@joekennedy
@KKT_Kennedy
https://twitter.com/KerryKennedyRFK/status/1711419719683559659
Conservatives see Labour as the Opposition, the Lib Dems are the enemy.
The enemy does not understand the language of humanity and morals, and we will address him in the language he knows"
Trouble is, Israel is beyond caring. But my God this is gonna be horrific. A chunk of humanity is spiralling into the abyss
(2) Having said that, my understanding is that the telecoms infrastructure in Gaza has almost been completely destroyed. I am sure they can get their videos out other ways but, how practically given the intensity of the bombing, will they even be able to do this (answer: they may have some pre-pared videos)
Hamas may be banking on international outrage putting pressure on Israel to stop their response. But that doesn't work if they go raping and beheading.
Personally, I think Tories nailed on to lose 50 seats and be uncoalitionable, so would put the prospect of a further Tory government as quite remote.
This may keep both sides motivated to play to the whistle.
There is a strong strain of antisemitism in the brand of Irish Republicanism that Sinn Fein represents, as shown by a lot of replies to Adams' twitter feed.
And of course that is what they are doing. Coz it's what ISIS would have wanted
All Israel has to do is stay within the Laws of Armed Conflict. And they do.
If they're being given air time unchallenged to spout propaganda without being called on it, that's a different matter.
Gaza has no airport, and Israel has blockaded its port, so there is no ability for Gaza to import coal or gas from anywhere else, to allow them to make power. (And without power, they can't make clean water.)
There is some diesel that comes across in trucks from Egypt, and which is used to power backup generators. And there is some rooftop solar. But - basically - Gaza is 100% dependent on Israel.
Labour also won most seats in Tamworth in the seats up in the local elections in May.
So I would expect Labour to win Tamworth but the Conservatives may hold Mid Beds as the opposition is divided between Labour and the LDs
https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1711405575211282769?s=46&t=16Vx1hkPdKeRguANzrOtZQ
US may need to put its hands in it pocket
R&W always seem to have far more of the latter, it is a clear feature of their polling.
I think it may have something to do with their sampling methods. R&W always churn out a nice round 2,000 total sample. It's as though a switch turns off as soon as they hit that number. Other polling companies have totals which are not a round number, eg. 2,062 in the latest YouGov.
I have a theory as to why that might be happening. What I suspect is that, after hitting their basic total quota, other companies programmes may be looking at what groups are unrepresented and keep the poll going a bit longer only for groups where the response rate has been unduly poor. So R&W's sample is more random whereas others' are structured a bit more.
For example, if YouGov found they were way short of the expected proportion of say 2019 Nats in their Scottish sub-sample, they would contact a few extra of those so that the proportion became a bit less extreme. Both would still have to do reweighting, but R&W would be a bit more reliant on reweighting.
Most of RFK's policies are more likely to appeal to Trump than Biden voters, especially if Trump does not end up GOP nominee
And that could happen really quickly - a few days?
All the evidence is that RFK has much higher favourables with GOP voters than Democratic ones. It would be amusing if Biden were to snatch a victory on the back of a (Republican mega-donor funded) RFK campaign.
There was a degree of philosophical convergence at higher levels between the Cameron "liberal conservatives" and the LD "Orange Bookers". That convergence didn't necessarily exist among either party's membership or supporters who wanted the traditional adversarial relationship.
As I said, it's how they rationalise murder; it remains murder.
Nobody would ever do them any more
Fag packets are dark brown; one would need to write them in tippex
"Former porn star Mia Khalifa is taking a real pounding on social media after she spoke out in support of Hamas’s violent attack against Israeli civilians."
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1711155189061664811
This is war.
The people of Southern Israel, who saw their land invaded, and who were tortured, raped and kidnapped. (And by the way, for what? It's not like there was any possibility that motorcycle riding Hamas fighters were going to militarily defeat Izsrael.)
And the ordinary people of Gaza.
Life was already miserable there. It is going to get worse.
So iyo the antipathy towards Israel in Gaza has little to do with the maltreatment of its Palestinian population. It's down to the inherent appetite of Palestinians for antisemitism.
Ok. I think that's incredibly jaundiced (and arguably racist) but given that is your view of course you won't (as you say) be shedding too many tears if Israel does end up engaging in large scale collective punishment of 'innocent' Palestinians. Inverted commas since they won't be innocent, will they?
Makes sense now. Quality exchange. Thanks again. Chilean red and nuts time.
The rich world (including the UK) should pay a fortune to Egypt and Gazans to relocate Gazans to Sinai and provide humongous levels of aid and development. Stuff their mouths with money to ensure they're developed in a way that frankly is never going to happen in Gaza.
Your counter factual doesn't really add up, as without US backing, possibly even with it, it would have been unsustainable.
Iran and Russia see Gaza as a challenge to the West
BY DAVID PATRIKARAKOS"
https://unherd.com/2023/10/israel-and-the-rise-of-a-new-world-order/
It is the same attitude that led to the Holocaust.
It is a "Hitler never succeeded, lets finish the job" attitude that has persisted over 70 years.
70 years when Israel has been remarkably restrained in response. Any other country would have ethnically cleansed the area to remove the threat many, many decades ago.
I think it doesn't take a google genius to determine quickly that there has been a long and well-documented history of anti-semitism amongst everyone including the Arabs.
For the Arabs it takes on a more "traditional" angle because there is a land angle there also. But a cursory reading of any text or oratory of many of today's Arab leaders now or indeed from history will show that there is deep antipathy towards the Jews. I think this is pervasive hence while someone somewhere in Hamas might see this as a homeland issue, to deny the rampant anti-semitism of much of the Arab world is imo to misunderstimate the dynamic of the Middle East both now and throughout history.
Russia is looking to open up the fight in any way they can.
Omnisis and Survation both conducted polls for the 2023 English local elections.
At the same time they asked about general election voting intention.
The Labour lead in voting intention was overall about 9% higher in the general election.
Data via the links under "Opinion Polling" here, if you care to look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Kingdom_local_elections
The problems have got bigger than states or blocs. The only, only conceivable solution to a world entering conflagration is a single global unitary state and world government which enables people to move from areas with population to areas with economic opportunity, but I know very very few people have any appetite for that. Even though let’s be honest it would grow global GDP more than any other system.
There will be mass movements out of Gaza by the weekend. Possibly onto Israeli guns.
Do you think that Israel’s neighbours didn’t want Israel to exist because of a) antisemitism, b) geopolitical concerns and / or c) a view that the people who had previously lived on that land should not be displaced? I can see a position for all 3, with 1 of them being a concern not to take seriously and 2 & 3 to be, if not legitimate causes of wars, causes of wars that the imperial powers use all the time. I ask this partly because you use the refrain “wipe Israel of the map” - which I understand is a translation of some expressed sentiments about Israel that are now used in sloganeering (from both Zionist and pro Palestinian activists, to different effect), but “should never have existed” is a similar meaning (if not connotation).
L
diverted. The US has another major problem and no operating Congress.
The idea that Israel are somehow uniquely evil, despite how tolerant of the Palestinians they've been, is widespread within the far left, and far right racists.
Russia, China etc see any dissent and simply frogmarch anyone who disagrees with them out of the land, or shoots them in the back of their head.
The Arab world did that to anyone who's Jewish.
Israel meanwhile has hosted for decades people in land they control who literally call for Israel's annihilation and the death of all Jews - but Israel's the problem ... 🤦♂️
Edit: no offence Kini but that was bloody funny.
Edit(That's just recognition of how close the elections have been - at least in the states that are critical - in America, not that there's something special about Americans).
It would have been a great thing 1 the voters would likely have said “no” and there would have been a renegotiation without a messy Brexit
But once it had been signed it was a treaty - it was done and the only way to renegotiate would have been article 50
You really should look at the history of Jews in the region, e.g. Iraq, to see why your pretend high-minded ideal of allowing people to return is utterly bogus. Why are the Palestinians the only ones who have this right to return?
You may want to start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud
Sovereign democracy only exists for people in peaceful democracies who aren't at war, that doesn't apply here.
People living in disputed land in times of war, when the war ends then there can be sovereignty, not until then.
As it stands, this land is owned by Israel, not the "Palestinian" Gazans who were Egyptians when the land was taken from Egypt when Egypt tried to wipe Israel off the map yet again.
If they get returned to Egypt, then so be it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIVFRZDQTjs