There are between 300 to 450 miles of tunnels, from Hamas’s own mouth, built up over fifty years, in an area only 25 miles wide. To build them they used billions in funding, from such beacons of humanity and civil rights as Iran, Qatar, and North Korea. Hamas turned the very foundation of the most populated areas of Gaza into Swiss cheese that isn’t fit to hold up a paper hat. And to achieve what? A mass shooting of 1,300 people? That’s why millions of Gazans had to live and die in a constant state of malnourishment and dependence on foreign charity with zero hope for prosperity for decadesnas Hamas diverted all public resources toward war crimes?
I get it, extremists sincerely don’t like the idea of a Jewish state in the Levant. That doesn’t mean they get to have patent and willful disregard for all international laws to try and blow it up. Arabs think it was their land first because the Ottoman empire had been murdering and taking as slaves the indigenous Hebrew-speaking Israelites, Semitic people, for so long, that they held all the deeds and Jews became foreigners on their own land. But the archeological record, recorded history, remembers, and Hamas surely knows this, too, what with all that digging. Regardless, I don’t think that’s really what motivates people to live and die for such spiteful resentment.
The truth of the matter is that religious tyrants run the middle-east, and the idea that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the people over whom is governs and to whom it is subservient–to the exclusion of religious “law”–is an existential threat to the established power dynamic, which, again, is based on mysticism and superstition. Law that can be changed on the whim or fantasy of one or two church muckity mucks is not a system that is capable of granting, let alone protecting human or civil rights.
The West Bank is somehow more complicated than Gaza, IMO. Expansion should stop indefinitely and sectarian violence should be dealt with harshly by Israel and by the West, via sanctions, carrots and sticks. I have hope Israel and America will deal with its own tyrants peacefully at the ballot box; we will know soon enough. I’m not opposed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if its got its shit together. Could start by denouncing Hamas for what it is and demanding its surrender, calling for release of hostages, etc.
There are between 300 to 450 miles of tunnels, from Hamas’s own mouth, built up over fifty years, in an area only 25 miles wide. To build them they used billions in funding, from such beacons of humanity and civil rights as Iran, Qatar, and North Korea. Hamas turned the very foundation of the most populated areas of Gaza into Swiss cheese that isn’t fit to hold up a paper hat. And to achieve what? A mass shooting of 1,300 people? That’s why millions of Gazans had to live and die in a constant state of malnourishment and dependence on foreign charity with zero hope for prosperity for decadesnas Hamas diverted all public resources toward war crimes?
I get it, extremists sincerely don’t like the idea of a Jewish state in the Levant. That doesn’t mean they get to have patent and willful disregard for all international laws to try and blow it up. Arabs think it was their land first because the Ottoman empire had been murdering and taking as slaves the indigenous Hebrew-speaking Israelites, Semitic people, for so long, that they held all the deeds and Jews became foreigners on their own land. But the archeological record, recorded history, remembers, and Hamas surely knows this, too, what with all that digging. Regardless, I don’t think that’s really what motivates people to live and die for such spiteful resentment.
The truth of the matter is that religious tyrants run the middle-east, and the idea that government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the people over whom is governs and to whom it is subservient–to the exclusion of religious “law”–is an existential threat to the established power dynamic, which, again, is based on mysticism and superstition. Law that can be changed on the whim or fantasy of one or two church muckity mucks is not a system that is capable of granting, let alone protecting human or civil rights.
The West Bank is somehow more complicated than Gaza, IMO. Expansion should stop indefinitely and sectarian violence should be dealt with harshly by Israel and by the West, via sanctions, carrots and sticks. I have hope Israel and America will deal with its own tyrants peacefully at the ballot box; we will know soon enough. I’m not opposed to a Palestinian state in the West Bank if its got its shit together. Could start by denouncing Hamas for what it is and demanding its surrender, calling for release of hostages, etc.