“The Israeli prime minister came here today and said that Israel is surrounded by those who want to destroy it,” Safadi said at a Friday press conference shortly after Netanyahu finished his speech at the UN General Assembly.
“We’re here — members of the Muslim-Arab committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries — and I can tell you very unequivocally, all of us are willing to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state,” Safadi passionately argued.
Netanyahu “is creating that danger because he simply does not want the two-state solution. If he does not want the two-state solution, can you ask Israeli officials what is their end-game — other than just wars and wars and wars?”
Also, video of the statement.
I mean Netanyahu keeps crying about people wanting to destroy Israel but… uh… Israel is bordered by two allies and one enemy.
Not even one enemy, Lebanon just wants to be left alone. Israel is using conventional tactics in an asymmetric fight which they know doesn’t work. They know it only increases membership in terrorist groups. Israel is destabilizing their region on purpose.
I meant Hezbollah, not Lebanon.
Hezbollah isn’t a country. They are, at best, a political party.
Armed with lots of missiles and soldiers
Yup. I’m not saying they’re nice cuddly people. But Lebanon contains other people too.
They’re a paramilitary organization with a small country’s worth of military power (no air force though). Not trying to defend Israel, or course, but they are an Israeli enemy next to their borders.
Okay so 2 allies, 1 neutral, and 2 enemies. I’m purely just trying to head off the whole, “everyone is Hezbollah” argument I fully expect to see when Israel escalates this.
Hamas doesn’t really count in this conversation, I think. Their scale is too small.
Israel obviously doesn’t think so
Hezbollah is hostile because Israel keeps massacring, jailing, blockading and depriving of rights their ally. Actually now they’re committing a genocide against it.
I don’t think israel sees any allies. It is enemies and usefull enemies.
I mean that’s kind of their problem then.
Uhh…Israel was attacked by every single neighbor in both the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and others with expeditionary forces too. What neighbors do you think are Israel’s allies exactly?
Egypt and Jordan have both normalized relations with Israel. They are absolutely not threats.
Syria and Lebanon are failed states. The threats to Israel come from non state actors within them. Such actors can only be truly neutralized by (a) capturing and trying the leadership -rather than making them martyrs by extra judicial killings, and (b) by removing their legitimacy, i.e., by ending Israel’s illegal occupation and colonization of the West Bank, and by letting Gaza breathe. Basically, these non state actors can only be defeated politically at this point.
That said, it is clear that Israel has gone rabid. The rest of the world at this point is more worried about the safety of its neighbours from it. There is no credible actual threat to Israel any more. But there is a credible genocide and ethnic cleansing going on under/by Israeli arms. The Israeli far right (that is part of the government) contains powerful elements that are already planning the colonization of Gaza and Southern Lebanon. Internally, even dissenting Jewish Israelis are facing repercussions for not towing the extreme nationalist line. The settlers are the strongest political force in the country. Etc etc. Israel needs to be deradicalized. There need to be limits placed and there need to be consequences
Ultimately we need nothing less than the complete and blind application of international law. If that is too radical for Americans or Israelis, too bad.
The only “failed state” is the apartheid colony currently committing genocide and terrorism.
You might be thinking “morally failed” instead?
Are there even serious threats to Israel in Syria?
“failed state” is a funny way to call a geography that has been at the center of Xian conflict for 1500 years.
Easy to say, but what was being done about this? Hezbollah and Hamas have been launching regular rockets into Isreal for decades. Iron dome was developed to stop them (and patriot before that), but those rockets shouldn’t have been launched in the first place. If the world (both Arab and the rest) was serious they could have been doing something about those rockets before this all started. For that matter I don’t see anyone other than Isreal responding to the October kidnapping in any way that might have helped.
Don’t read the above as excusing Isreal. They have blood on their hands, but it looks to me like the rest of the world has more.
First off, like @[email protected] points out, Israel’s actions have been far from helpful to begin with.
Second, let’s be completely honest here, the rockets from Hamas and to an extent the rockets from Hezbollah: they are Israel’s problem. I don’t see why my Greek-Canadian ass needs to be solving the problems created by Israel when it completely killed off the Oslo accords. Israel has all the power here. It’s Israel that has been colonizing and besieging the Palestinians. It’s Israel that has been building illegal settlements on illegally occupied land. It’s Israel that was occupying Souther Lebanon for 20 years, etc. In the last decades, unequivocally, they are the aggressors. When Hamas did the October 7th atrocities, I really don’t get why the Israelis were surprised. Gazans have lived in a city-wide concentration camp for 20 years. Any young adult participating in the October 7th atrocities has never experienced anything else in their whole lives. Is it really surprising that some significant percentage of such a people would resort to this kind of utter atrocity? Norman Finkelstein has made a great parallel with the Nat Turner rebellion in the US, when slaves rebelled and did unspeakable crimes to whites, and the abolitionists at the time were right to just say “well, what the fuck did you expect?”.
Third, fuck yes, it’s easy to say. Israel itself in its own history has shown what it is capable. If instead of prepping terrorist attacks with pagers they had been spending their time doing to Haniyeh what they did to Eichmann, kidnap him, then bring him in Israel and give him a fair trial, I would be applauding them, I would be saluting them. When I say that Israel has gone rabid and needs to be deradicalized, I draw exactly this parallel. The generation of Israelis that were the perpetrators of the 1948 Nakba (so, not a bunch of boy scouts) had the moral spine to put Eichmann on the stand, give him an Israeli lawyer who defended him in good faith, and to give him a fair trial. Those bastards, they did that noble act. These petty criminals of today? Bah!
And fourth, if there is any good journalist out there, they should ask the Jordanian minister what he means by “guarantee”. Would an pan-Arab peacekeeping force be deployed in the hot spots to maintain the terms of the deal? It is almost certain that an independent Palestine would immediately fall into some kind of civil war, just like the newly independent Ireland. Is the minister saying for example that they would be willing to fight that war on behalf of the moderate Palestinians? Don’t ask me, ask him.
Are you saying that Israel’s response in the last year has been helpful?
More helpful than anything else. They have - for now - eliminated Hamas as a threat. If they have the guts to occupy the Gaza strip for the next 50 years - and do this well they can change the attitude of the people there. I don’t know if they have the political will for that - and the world is clearly against it. (I also don’t know if it will work, but it is just as good a plan as anything else)
I don’t know how to solve the situation there. However what everyone seems to be saying is “despite no evidence I’m going to assert this is the best course of action”. All seem to be built on hopes and dreams that people will get along even though evidence is people don’t get along that well.
Big win huh? So why haven’t zionists stopped committing genocide in gaza, west bank, lebanon, etc?
How so? Aren’t Israelis still evacuating the border?
My man if occupying Gaza helped there wouldn’t be a Hamas to begin with. Hamas was created in occupied Gaza, remember?
Who’s been launching rockets? Check any graph. It’s no mystery when genocidal invaders are murdering people with billions of funding from their racist daddy.
Fucking 70 years ago. Is Germany still the enemy of the UK and US too?
This is insanely myopic. By your logic, we’d better be on the lookout for Kamikazes.
Why is your idea of Israeli-Arab relations stuck in the 70s?
You might want to exchange your zio history books for the real thing.