Sloppy emotional clap trap!

Palestinians should be lined up against a wall and shot; 40k is not enough!

"40k is not enough dead women and children!"
- Don't be too disappointed I think it's a rather low ball conservative estimate.

Just out of curiosity, what number would actually please you?
Let me guess - 7.2 million right?

I wonder if Hitler were alive whether he'd be angry or proud...

Oh my goodness, no.

Hezbollah pledges ‘open-ended battle of reckoning’ with Israel, steps up attacks
http://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/hezbollah-pledges-open-ended-battle-of-reckoning-with-israel-as-attacks-step-up-20240923-p5kclf.html

I just read here quote: "The Israeli military said rockets had been fired 'toward civilian areas', pointing to a possible escalation."

Can anyone just imagine what the Israelis are dealing with right now?
A significant escalation, rockets fired 'towards' their homes.
I'm in shock, my heart just bleeds out right now for those poor people in their homes under attack.
I'm so grateful they're lucky enough to have air-raid sirens and bomb shelters.
We wouldn't want to have any UNNECESSARY LOSS OF LIFE, would we?

[Netanyahu laughing hysterically in glee]

AC, the Islamic terrorists sucker for a story.

The IDF booting out Aljazeera broadcaster in Ramallah Sunday: Hamas’s predictable response quote:
“ Hamas stands in solidarity with Al Jazeera.”

http://x.com/shlomo_karhi/status/1837717325199319041?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1837717325199319041%7Ctwgr%5Eeea207681cb035deaca522da5158ef19d4cfbd5d%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jns.org%2Fidf-serves-al-jazeeras-samaria-bureau-with-closure-order%2F

Quoting SMH as your source today, does nothing to your credibility.

I am disappointed at this shallow article.

Assuming only two homogenic parties to this complex multi-party conflict; falsely assuming that there is just one kind of Zionism and just one kind of Islam; labelling as "religious" what has little to do with religion; and selectively quoting a Biblical verse out of context.

I have seen better from this author.
Really, Alon, if you have a fever you should stay in bed, you don't HAVE TO write an article here every week come what may - I wish you well.

There is no possibility of a solution. The Koran would have to be
modified to achieve that.
The Jews lived there for some thousands of years and except for the
trepidations of Nebuchadnezzar, the Egyptians. the Romans and finally
the Arabs in the 7th century it has been Israel all that time.
The towns in the West Bank still have old testament names.
The only solution acceptable to the moslem Arabs is the removal by
death of the Jews inside and outside of Israel.

Dear Yuyutsu

This is not Alon’s best piece, but I think you are being a bit harsh. Summarizing all aspects of such a longstanding and complex conflict in a few hundred words is impossible. It’s not a bad effort, and does at least reflect that there are deep and legitimate grievances across all parties. Too often commentary fails to recognise this.

Mostly, I agree with his concluding paragraph, especially “neither side will be able to uproot the other, not now and not ever”, and “both sides must come to their senses and begin a reconciliation process to mitigate these impediments and move toward peaceful coexistence”.

Hi diver dan,

Credibility.
That depends on who you're trying to be credible to, right?
Half the country put minorities and immigrants first;
The other half puts loyalty to Israel first; with their finger up to the ICC.
- And that's the platforms of the 2 main parties.
And the Greens, well...

You think I should seek credibility from these people - my fellow Australian voters?

As for your X tweet.
I think it's kind of curious, it feels like the 'script' is back to front now.
- Usually when the US conduct overthrows, and they cause civil unrest and protests, and then the governments goons crack down on the protesters and they violently harm the protesters, and then the pro-western media in that country films that violence and shows the government heavily handedly cracking down on protesters and they call them an 'illegitimate regime' and the leader a 'dictator' and then that leader goes after the media station, and then they say 'The leader of the illegitimate regime is a dictator and violently beating protesters and is attempting to shut down on free speech' yada yada yada...

And here you are boastng about taking down a media station,
- But I'm not even sure you know what you're saying.
Are they not attacking free speech?
I don't understand this world sometimes its so confusing.

Credibility.

UN General Assembly overwhelmingly calls for end of Israeli occupation
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/un-general-assembly-overwhelmingly-calls-for-end-of-israeli-occupation
[Oh no, Al Jazeera again]
'International body demands an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Palestinian territories within 12 months.'
>>The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling on Israel to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories within a year, a move that Palestine hailed as “historic”.<<

The nonbinding measure passed a 124-14 vote on Wednesday, with 43 countries abstaining.

124 to 14.

You see what I mean now, 'depends on who you're trying to be credible to'?

I guess this will be what the 66th UN resolution Israel has ignored?
Or is it the 67th? I don't know.

"40k is not enough dead women and children!"
Armchair Critic,
Awful from that point of view. Looking at them as future terrorists puts a drastically different slant on things.
It is automatically assumed that everyone is born innocent & that may be so but children grow into adults & before they do indoctrination has destroyed all innocence ! As the saying goes about the sins of the fathers.

The problems go back to the Balfour Declaration after the end of the second world war. At that time only about three percent of the Palestine population were Jews. The Zionists moved in and took the land from the Arab inhabitants, who by the way, were not all Moslems. Since then, the Jewish population has steadily increased and the non Jews have been treated as second class citizens with their property still being stolen by Jewish settlers.

It is no wonder that organisations such as Hamas and Hizballah are rebelling.

VK3AUU

Let’s unpick this a bit.

The Balfour Declaration was in 1917, before the end of WW1.

The Jewish population at the time was about 10% of the total, not 3%. There has been a continuing Jewish presence in Palestine for at least 3,000 years.

Between WW1 and WW2, the Jewish population did rise steadily, but they did not “take the land from the Arabs.” Their private land and property was purchased. Until partition, most territory was state land. The rest was privately owned and split roughly equally between resident Jewish owners, resident Arab owners and absentee landowners. At partition, state land devolved to the control of the relevant governments.

The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine proposed to split the former British Mandate of Palestine into two geopolitical entities – a Jewish State and an Arab State. The borders were drawn so that the Jewish State would have a majority Jewish population, and vice versa. This resulted in a dog’s breakfast as boundaries were drawn on the basis of whether towns and areas were majority Jewish or Arab areas, rather than geographical coherence. There was also to be an international zone containing Jerusalem and the surrounding area.

After the UN endorsed the partition plan in 1947, there was a period of civil war followed by all-out war when Israel was invaded by Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. The extent to which Palestinians chose to leave Israel or were forced to leave at this time is fiercely debated, but about 750,000 did leave Israel in 1947-48 while about 150,000 remained.

Arab Israelis were subject to military rule until 1966, but since then they have had the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis, though they tend on average to be poorer, more disadvantaged and less well educated – perhaps as a result of structural racism.

Israeli settlers had no presence in the West Bank until after the six-day war in 1967. Most of the world – including the Australian Government – considers Israeli settlements there to be illegal, though Israel disputes this

The argument over land ownership could be taken back to the Stone Age for resolution, but still unhappiness festers.

No, in reality, this is a war of ideology little disguised overland ownership.

It’s unarguably a problem created by Iran, which is not Arab; so it’s not an argument about Arabs and their wish for land.

That leaves one cause, Islam and its conquest of the world!

Sounds dramatic, and surely it is!

Dear Rhian,

«Mostly, I agree with his concluding paragraph, especially “neither side will be able to uproot the other, not now and not ever”, and “both sides must come to their senses and begin a reconciliation process to mitigate these impediments and move toward peaceful coexistence”.»

I was disappointed when the author spoke of only two sides, each with fixed beliefs and goals, as if this was a black-and-white, zero-sum chess game. It is not. There are many more than just "two sides".

I do hope that no group is uprooted, but I cannot be as sure about it like the author and yourself - I think that anything can happen.

Already one side is being uprooted - they are the liberal Israelis who despair and emigrate from Israel in an ever increasing stream, leaving behind the fanatic Messianic Jews to gain a stable majority and uproot the rest.

Most onlookers think of the war in Lebanon as a Jewish-Arab conflict, but I believe it to rather be the result of the Israeli internal conflict, along with the cooperation of Nasrallah who must prove that he is still politically relevant in Lebanon.

How can you conceive of "peaceful coexistence" when the "two sides" cannot even have peace within their own "camp"?

Dear Yuyustu

My hope for lasting peace comes from my – perhaps idiosyncratic – view that there are many parallels between recent history in Gaza, and Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, especially between Hamas and the Nazis.

At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law:

Like the Nazis, Hamas’ ideology is violent, totalitarian, misogynist, anti-Semitic, and contemptuous of liberal democratic values. Like Nazism, it is grounded in a deep (and not totally unfounded) sense of historical grievance, amplified by economic chaos and virulent propaganda. Like the Nazis, Hamas enjoys broad popular support. Hitler won an election in 1933 and Hamas in 2006. In neither case, of course, was a subsequent election held – the fascists/Islamofascists entered the door to power opened by democracy and closed it firmly behind them. But Hitler enjoyed broad popular support in Germany up to and through most of WW2, as Hamas does even now in Gaza according to pollsters. When Germany was finally defeated, the loss of life and destruction of homes, business and infrastructure and economic collapse looks similar to what will be left in Gaza when his conflict ends.

So far, so bad. But when Hitler lost, the Allies realised that to prevent something similar happening again they had to address the root causes of Nazism. There were no reparations forcing Germany to compensate for war damages as had happened after WW1 – quite the reverse. The Marshall Plan poured billions into rebuilding devastated Europe. Millions of ethnic German residents expelled from Eastern Europe were accepted into Germany as full citizens (no perpetual “refugees” with a “right of return” there). Reconstruction was not just economic but social and political.

There’s a good summary here:
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/germany-1945-1949-a-case-study-in-post-conflict-reconstruction

From the ashes, West Germany went on to become perhaps the most prosperous, free, and successful country in Europe. Something similar happened in Japan.
http://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/japan-reconstruction

I hope that when this conflict ends the world will come together with a new Marshall Plan for Palestine. History cannot be rewritten – which I think is Alon’s point – but maybe the good as well as the bad bits can repeat.

You're all a bit twisted.
It's a been a U.S policy of a number of presidents going back to way back when to help rid the land of Arabs.
I remember this one video with FDR (I think it was him) was openly stating we can't get rid of them all at once, had a big map and everything.

In literally 2 minutes, I find this.
http://x.com/themarcksplan/status/1789159420653383724/photo/1

AC

So a transcript of the recollections of a fairly random conversation between a government official and FDR in the early stages of WW2 is proof of an enduring conspiracy involving every US president since to “rid the land of Arabs?” That does seem a rather long bow.

Do you also think the USA is secretly committed to resettling Jews in Columbia, as the transcript also suggests?