Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib refused to apologize Wednesday for saying on Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza, an accusation that sparked political backlash against her from Republicans as Israel denies fault.
Tlaib joined thousands of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during a solidarity rally hosted by the left-leaning group Jewish Voice for Peace at the National Mall. She was visibly emotional, at times pausing her speech to openly weep and criticizing lawmakers who have not backed a ceasefire resolution.
Here’s the story of the last hostage negotiation between Israel and Hamas. Note that Israel released about half the prisoners from its side of the exchange after Shalit’s release.
Hamas, is, in fact, a cause. Those Israeli civilians were not murdered by some kind of bad-faith negotiation, they were murdered by people who decided to murder them. They were raped by people who decided to rape them. They were kidnapped by people who decided to kidnap them. We absolutely must blame the actual perpetrators of these atrocities, and not hand-wave them away as just a symptom.
The thing is: The atrocities themselves are symptoms. A free Palestine wouldn’t foster the conditions necessary for this kind of bullshit to happen at a large scale.
Note: I condemn any and all murder of civilians.
Humanity wouldn’t foster the conditions necessary for these things to happen. If the people in Hamas had any humanity left in them, they could not have done it. Is it not a symptom of their decisions, as people? Is it not a symptom of their sheer depravity?
A “Free Palestine” is entirely hypothetical, but back in Mandatory Palestine, the Muftis broke bread with Hitler and talked plenty about ridding the world of Jews. They launched pogroms against the Jews. They refused any kind of deal for Jews to even have a small piece of territory, even 20%—look up the Peel commission. They killed Jewish civilians, they made Britain ban Jews from purchasing land… The very prospect that Jews might want to peacefully buy unsettled land in their indigenous homeland was met with violence.
Today, while Israel is not at peace with the West Bank, nothing nearly so atrocious has happened there. The debate is not over civilian deaths, it’s over settlements and rocks and territory.
But Hamas reacted to to Israel’s unilaterally ending the occupation in Gaza by dramatically ramping up rocket fire. Hamas explicitly wants to kill Jews all over the world.
They’re human actors who decide to shed their humanity and brutalize civilians. When humans decide to do that, they’re not symptoms, they’re morally culpable agents.
The thing is: You normally can’t gather large numbers of those people and convince them to attack random civilians, especially when it involves a very good chance of dying. There’s a very specific combination of desperation and hopelessness that makes things like these
That’s just so wrong I can’t… Every year innocent people die in the West bank at the hands of the IDF and settlers. Also the “rocks and territory” are people’s homes. People are getting chased out of their homes for the sin of being born on land Israelis wanna settle. The West bank is definitely preferable to Gaza, but 7000 civilians died there since the Israeli occupation. The current state of the West bank is not a good argument against Hamas.
There was the whole blockade mess. That’s the cause of the rocket fire. Hamas has been pretty explicit about that, and signed two ceasefires before that had them stop launching rockets in exchange for Israel lifting the blockade (the blockade wasn’t lifted, so the rocket attacks came back).
They’ve been indoctrinating children for decades. They’ve done it in UN-run schoolbuildings. They get caught with textbooks telling them to kill Jews, UN says stop it, they keep doing it.
They make little schoolchildren put on plays about the joy of killing Jews.
Blockade started in 2007. Israel left Gaza in 2005. Rocket fire started in 2001.
I don’t know which ceasefires you’re talking about offhand, feel free to help me out.
Rocket fire started in 2001 when, well, the specific trigger isn’t very clear, but let’s say it’s the breakdown of negotiations at the camp David summit. So the thing is, in 2005 when Israel disengaged from Gaza, they started periodically blockading it, and in 2006 (Hamas hadn’t even won the elections yet so they don’t even have that excuse) closed the final legal passage between Gaza and Israel. They also withheld Palestinian tax money from the PA (just to clarify, at the time the PA was Gaza and the West Bank, not only the West Bank like it is now) for more than a year, but that’s beside the point. Anyway they “lifted” the blockade in February, only the amount of exports they allowed was miniscule and could barely keep up with Gazan imports. This caused food shortages, prevented workers from crossing the border, y’know, classic blockade things.
What started in 2007 was the modern blockade, whereby Israel basically allows nothing other than some international aid to go to and from Gaza, but Gaza has been blockaded in some form since 2005. Only 13% of pre-blockade agricultural exports were allowed in the February 2006 blockade, for example. This is bad for an economy like Gaza that relies on agricultural exports.
Well there was one in 2008 and another 2012. In both basically the same thing happened: Israel and Hamas sign a blockade, Hamas stops rocket attacks, and polices other groups to make sure they follow suit (they weren’t 100% successful, but the effects were obvious; Hamas was following the ceasefire in good faith). Then they wait. The agreed upon time passes, even more time passes (the 2012 ceasefire lasted over a year) and the blockade still remains (hell, in the latter half of 2013 Israeli attacks against Gaza increased, even though they were against the terms of the ceasefire).
This is all about the ceasefires, the next paragraph is about the Palestinian unity government, which is sort of but not really related except also being a post-Intifada peace effort.
In 2013 the PA and Hamas came together and formed a unified government. There, both factions wanted peace and they both came together; if Israel had wanted peace there was no better opportunity than this. Well Netenyahu repeatedly opposed the unity government, didn’t lift the blockade and didn’t budge an inch from his stance on Palestine during peace negotiations with the PA. This meant, of course, repeatedly announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank, which made a breakthrough all but impossible. This isn’t my opinion, this is the American special envoy sent for the negotiations. So… Yeah.