Hamas is the political party and civic organization that controls the government of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Unlike the now defunct Palestinian Liberation Front, it is expressly Islamist, rather than being nationalist and embracing the Christian minority. It has made the Palestinian territories into a de facto one party state. It has not been permitted by Israel to have a military, but has covertly organized irregular military forces, somewhat more organized and better equipped than a mere terrorist organization.
Hamas was stupid to start a war with a country that controls its access to electricity, water, food, medicine, and fuel, has vastly superior military capabilities, and has stronger international allies.
Israel has now resolved to eliminate Hamas entirely, although whether this is a practical possibility is another matter. If Israel doesn't want to allow Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to have some measure of self-government, it would have to directly govern these territories, which is a task it has thus far refrained from taking on.
This is the sixth day of the conflict, which Israel has declared to be a war.
Israeli jets continued to pound the densely populated Gaza Strip on Thursday in response to Hamas’ brutal terror attacks Saturday that left at least 1,200 people dead and thousands of others injured.It has implemented a "complete siege," of the Hamas-run enclave, cutting off food, electricity, fuel and water. . . .Hamas is holding as many as 150 people hostage, according to Israeli authorities. Israel is cutting off any electricity, water or fuel to Gaza until the hostages are returned home, Energy Minister Israel Katz said. Hamas . . . is warning that it will start executing hostages if Israel targets people in Gaza without warning. Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesperson for the IDF, said "reason dictates" that the hostages are being kept underground. . . .Israel is continuing airstrikes and withholding essential supplies from Gaza. Food and water are limited and "quickly running out" on the enclave, the deputy head of emergencies of the UN World Food Programme said. Gaza’s only power station stopped working on Wednesday after running out of fuel, the head of the Gaza power authority said. So far, more than 330,000 people have been displaced there, according to a statement by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. . . .At least 27 Americans have been killed and 14 are unaccounted for. . . .
Officials around the world are working to evacuate their citizens from Israel following the attacks by Hamas, organizing repatriation flights . . . .There are no plans to put US troops on the ground in Israel . . . pointing instead to a wide array of intelligence sharing, and weapons and munitions contributions to Israel. The United Kingdom has also sent warships and surveillance aircraft to the eastern Mediterranean to support Israel[.]
From CNN. Another CNN story in the same feed reports that:
At least 1,537 people — including 500 children and 267 women — have been killed since Israel started strikes on Gaza following the deadly Hamas attack last Saturday, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. An additional 6,612 people have sustained injuries, the ministry added.
About 18% of the people in the Gaza Strip have been displaced in the last six days.
No countries in the Middle East have taken any meaningful military measures to support Hamas, in the face of imminent U.S. and British military support for Israel, which is itself militarily strong.
There have been rocket attacks on Israel in connection with the Hamas attack from Syria, to which Israel has responded militarily. Russia has protested the counterattacks on Syria but has not taken military action to respond to them. Iran is suspected of having provided arms and intelligence to support Hamas possibly, in part, via crypto currency funding.
The Israeli Parliament has formed a unity coalition government for the duration of the war.
For reference, there are about 9.79 million people in Israel (apart from the West Bank and Gaza strip but including about 57,000 Israelis in Israeli settlements in the West Bank) of whom about 7.62 million are Israelis and not Palestinians or Arabs or foreigners, about 2.31 million people outside Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and about 1.82 million people in the Gaza Strip. The total population controlled by Israel in all of these areas combined is 13.92 million. This doesn't include about 0.22 million foreigners at any one time for a grand total of 14.14 million.
The area of the Gaza Strip is about 139 square miles. This includes a significant amount of farmland and desert open space.
For comparison purposes, Denver has an area of 155 square miles and a population of 711,463 people.
Militarily, Israel has complete control of the airspace, controls the sea adjacent to the Gaza Strip coast, and has surrounded the Gaza Strip with a wall that has only two official gates, one in the North to Israel and one in the south to Egypt, which are both currently closed. Israel has a missile defense system called the Iron Dome, although it isn't perfect. Israel has a large and advanced conventional military including about 300,000 well trained and drilled reservists who have all been mobilized, as well as a modern air force, navy, and ground forces.
Hamas has no heavy military systems like tanks or aircraft or naval ships or infantry fighting vehicles or howitzers, and no anti-air defenses, but does have some rockets, missiles, and small arms. Hamas probably has some drones although Israel has more drones and more advanced drones and intelligence supplemented by U.S. and British allies.
Israel is home to about 45% of the world's Jews. The U.S. is home to another 45% of so. The remainder are scattered around the world with small numbers of Jews in almost every country. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been a major source of international tension since the first efforts to establish Israel began (mostly with British sponsorship) in the late 1800s and early 1900s with statehood announced in 1947.
For historical and political reasons that aren't clear to me, the option of ceding the Gaza Strip to Egypt, and ceding the West Bank to Jordan, is not one that has been taken, or even seriously considered in recent years. The Kingdom of Jordan does serve as a surrogate for Palestinians in some international affairs.
10 comments:
do you agree with your fellowship leftist commentary on Israel is an oppressor or are you pro-Zion ?
Israel should just absorb Gaza and make every person there an Israeli citizen.
Clearly, Egypt does not want Gaza, a snake-pit of militant Islamists. No other Arab or Middle Eastern country wants that land or people either.
It's a dilemma. Suppose the Israelis were to accede to the left-wing anti-colonialist's demands and agree to leave Palestine and go elsewhere. What country would take them in? Those same anti-colonialist thinkers would be appalled at the thought of that many Jews moving to their home countries. I used to work in Japan, and occasionally the topic of Israel would come up with Japanese. I was quite surprised to find the Japanese I spoke with uniformly strongly anti-Israel and also anti-Jew. When one person suggested the Jews leave Israel, I asked to go where? I suggested they all be allowed to move to Japan. This did not go over well, to say the least.
So neither side has any option to go elsewhere. Individuals might leave, but not the mass. Personally, I'd be happy to have all the Israelis move to the US.
@neo
Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has fallen below standards of human rights on multiple occasions. The victims of this mistreatment should be compensated for this and Israel should treat Palestinians better prospectively.
But that isn't a justification of massacring particular individuals or holding them hostage or starting a war with Israel or trying to make it cease to exist as a sovereign state. Israel has had to use military and police force to protect itself from hostile neighbors and a hostile Palestinian population to exist. On the whole, the necessity has justified its acts even though it has stepped to far on multiple occasions.
Israel's status as a sovereign state is a fait accompli that Arab countries and Palestinians are wrong to try to undo.
It is hard to know how to secure a stable long term solution.
Ceding the West Bank to the Kingdom of Jordan would, in my view, a better solution for the Palestinians in the West Bank than the status quo (and would evict the 57,000 or so settlers there now). This approach would prevent further settlements, prevent abuses from Israeli IDF/police/vigilante forces, and would probably provide more credible security guarantees for Israel than Hamas ruling there does.
The Arab world ought to do for Gazans what Israel did for Jews, and welcome them to any other their countries of their choice. Israel should let any Gazan who wants to leave do so. An Egyptian annexation of Gaza (perhaps as an autonomous Egyptian territory) would make sense, although Egypt might need financial or diplomatic incentives to take on that burden. Israel doesn't benefit from trying to rule Gaza directly. The reality that Gaza is dependent upon Israel for electricity, food, water, fuel, and so on, however, makes that resolution somewhat problematic. But, Egypt would probably be better positioned than Hamas as the local self-government of Gaza to provide security guarantees to Israel so that Gazans wouldn't attack it missiles.
I'm not convinced that a two state solution with the West Bank and Gaza being an autonomous Palestinian country could every work. I'm also not convinced that the one state solution suggest by Dave Barnes would be a viable one.
Israel's status as a sovereign state is a fait accompli that Arab countries and Palestinians are wrong to try to undo.
what about Taiwan and Tibetan Independence from China
Joe biden authorizes sending military aid to Israel and is planning a visit and fully supports Israel.
He's a democrat.
Do you agree with the democrats full support of Israel?
One solution I've never seen proposed elsewhere: integrate Arabs through positive incentives to convert. Amongst the objections I have to the notion of a jewish state, the most salient is that its authors are the least ethnically jewish of the diaspora. Why is it that a de-facto ashkenazi state, dominated by people whom are on average only half-Canaanite by ancestry, is allowed to tacitly insist on the maintenance of the putative purity of its demographics? Why is such a farce tolerated? Most Palestinians are likely equally, if not more indigenous. If it was really about blood and soil, as the israelis advertise and as many jewish acquaintances tell me, they should develop a program of outreach for proselytizing to their long lost brothers. This would change the balance of power sufficiently to ensure a longstanding peace under a single state solution, as Arabs could be reduced to a tiny minority given time. I don't think that one can claim any rational right to the land based on israeli narrative myths, without simultaneously validating Palestinian residency as the culturally-altered remnants of the original jews.
"One solution I've never seen proposed elsewhere: integrate Arabs through positive incentives to convert."
Excellent idea.
Taiwan is independent of China, even though Taiwan and the People's Republic of China delusionally claim that there is only one China. There, as in Israel, people should acknowledge the reality on the ground.
Tibet may indeed be a fait accompli. So far as I know, there is no meaningful Tibetan independence movement in Tibet. This was unfortunate but it is the reality on the ground.
"One solution I've never seen proposed elsewhere: integrate Arabs through positive incentives to convert."
This is an idiotic idea. There is no chance of it working even minimally no matter how hard anyone promoted the idea.
Also, even if there is a claim that "it was really about blood and soil", the historical claim or the motivation for Zionism is really irrelevant. What is relevant is that Israel has been a mostly Jewish country for a lifetime and that is the fait accompli reality on the ground, regardless of the motives that caused it to get that way.
"Do you agree with the democrats full support of Israel?"
First of all, the fact that Biden, who is a Democrat, supports something does not mean that all Democrats support it.
Is Biden correct to support Israel rather than Hamas in an incident where Hamas tried to slaughter as many innocent Israeli civilians as it could for the purpose of trying to massacre all Israelis?
Yes.
The U.S. has been sending military aid to Israel for decades and there is no reason to stop doing so now. As a practical matter the U.S. is a guarantor of Israel's security in the international community. This is a responsibility that is appropriate given that the U.S. is home to about 45% of the world's Jews, roughly the same number of Jews who live in Israel. If the U.S. didn't do it, no one else would, and a state with 45% of world's Jews should not be slaughtered in genocidal Arab attacks.
Does that mean that the U.S. should refrain from any criticism of Israel or from making constructive suggestions about how Israel should respond to this outrageous war crime by Hamas?
No. And, Biden has offered constructive suggestions to Israel on how to respond.
For what it is worth, Democrats are less uniformly supportive of Israel than Republicans. https://fullymyelinated.wordpress.com/2023/10/17/why-has-democratic-opinion-on-israel-changes-so-much/
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