Israel - A Rant

[Scooby Dudek]

On 06/03/2024 at 12:19, Nelly-Szoboszlai said:

This should help to draw a line under the ludicrous accusations regarding cuddly toy octopi. 
 

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/06/tory-peer-jacqueline-foster-pays-damages-university-challenge

Yes it should, but it won't. 

[Gnasher]

43 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

I assume you mean innocent Palestinians and not Hamas when you say good guys 

 

I mean the people she described in the interview.. Look who voted against an immediate ceasefire at the UN. Three countries, we are one. What the lady described is not "Israel defending itself". That's the excuse we were/are given for giving Israel the green light to this slaughter. Our politicans are going against the will of the British people in putting our name to the horrific events described in that ladys account. 

[Bjornebye]

Just now, Gnasher said:

 

Obviously. Look who voted against an immediate ceasefire at the UN. Three countries, we are one. What the lady described is not "Israel defending itself". That's the excuse we were/are given for given Israel the green light to this slaughter. Our politicans are going against the will of the British people in putting our name to the horrific events described in that ladys account. 

I agree fella. Just wanted clarity for people like Howie for you. 

[Gnasher]

34 minutes ago, Scooby Dudek said:

Yes it should, but it won't. 

 

It won't because if you read her apology she doesn't apologise for the misreading of the toy she apologised for it being misdirected in this instance. 

[TheHowieLama]

50 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

I agree fella. Just wanted clarity for people like Howie for you. 

 

You didn't clarify the right part. Easy mistake. It's why I bolded it.

 

Proud to be a part of a nation that's stood steadfastly behind the good guys.

[Bjornebye]

19 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

 

You didn't clarify the right part. Easy mistake. It's why I bolded it.

 

Proud to be a part of a nation that's stood steadfastly behind the good guys.

What? 

[Jurgen Knows]

[Carradona]

[Gnasher]

"confirmed children had begun to die of starvation" 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jurgen Knows]

 

 

 

[Gnasher]

BBC headline. 

 

 

 

 

Its plainly rubbish. Here's the fella quoted. 

 

 

 

 

[Bjornebye]

He looks like a bewildered Otter 

[Gnasher]

[Gnasher]

Luv u Britain. 

 

 

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

 

The plan to establish a temporary port in Gaza is the most significant U.S. humanitarian initiative since the Israel-Hamas war began and shows the sense of urgency inside the White House over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

U.S. officials told reporters the temporary port will allow hundreds of trucks of aid to enter Gaza every day, though it will be at least a few weeks before it's operational.

"The president asked us to look into all options for getting more aid to Gaza and not wait for the Israelis," a senior U.S. official said.

 

The U.S. military will establish a temporary pier in the sea off the Gaza coast with a causeway that will allow trucks to bring aid to shore. National Security Council chief of staff Curtis Ried will head up the effort from the U.S. side.

U.S. soldiers will take part in the construction, but from U.S. Navy vessels offshore. "The current plan doesn't include any U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza," a senior U.S. official said.

[TheHowieLama]

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is dire, with innocent Palestinian families and children desperate for basic necessities.  That is why today, the European Commission, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, the Republic of Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States announce our intent to open a maritime corridor to deliver much-needed additional amounts of humanitarian assistance by sea.

Cyprus’ leadership in establishing the Amalthea Initiative—which outlines a mechanism for securely shipping aid from Cyprus to Gaza via sea—was integral to enabling this joint effort to launch a maritime corridor.  Together, our nations intend to build on this model to deliver significant additional aid by sea, working in coordination with UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza Sigrid Kaag — who is charged with facilitating, coordinating, monitoring, and verifying the flow of aid into Gaza under UN Security Council Resolution 2720.  The dedicated efforts of the UAE to mobilize support for the Initiative will result in the initial shipment of food by sea to the people of Gaza. 

[Jurgen Knows]

 

 

 

[Jurgen Knows]

Good question. Who’s in control?

 

 

[Gnasher]

Presents from the sky on international women's day.

 

 

 

 

 

[Gnasher]

Israel has a right to defend itself. 

 

 

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

The Arab League has called for urgent aid to be sent to Gaza as it convened in Cairo for the 161st session of its council on Monday.

"It is urgent and there is no time to wait. The international community is obligated to deal with the famine that has started to ravage elders and children," Hussein Sidi Abdellah Deh, Mauritania's permanent representative to the Arab League and chairman of session told delegates.

Aid groups say it has become nearly impossible to deliver humanitarian assistance in most of Gaza because of the difficulty of coordinating with the Israeli military, ongoing hostilities and the breakdown of public order, with crowds of desperate people overwhelming aid convoys.

The United Nations said last week that at least one quarter of Gaza's population is on the verge of famine and said that virtually all of the area's 2.3 million people desperately need food. 

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

Four months of warfare between Israel and Hamas have generated regional and global dynamics that will shape the Middle East for decades. But the war in Gaza has already clarified two deeply linked central dimensions of the Middle East: Arab states’ low-key, rhetoric-heavy response to the Gaza war and Hamas, and the new reality that those who actually fight and resist Israel and the United States across the region are Arab non-state armed actors (NSAAs) with close ties to Iran. These two symbiotic phenomena indicate how Arab states have become politically and militarily passive in the face of stronger adversaries—and hint at the future Middle East order if prevailing conditions persist.

At the outbreak of the war, Arab governments struggled to respond to the political, human, and geo-strategic dimensions of the Gaza crisis, which often contradicted one another. Governments had to walk a delicate line among at least four important considerations: How to support the Palestinian cause, which resonates deeply across the region (and the world, it turns out); how to do this without strengthening Hamas and other Islamist militant allies that most Arab governments see as radicalizing threats; how to criticize the United States and other western powers for enabling Israel’s destruction of Gaza without leading them to curtail their existential financial and security support to many Arab states; and how to provide humanitarian aid for the 2.3 million defenseless civilians in Gaza whom Israel has killed, wounded, and brutalized in genocidal fashion.

 

The Arab states offered Gazans, Hamas, and the larger Palestinian cause a combination of low-key rhetorical, material, and diplomatic support that seemed almost imperceptible and that ultimately was powerless on the global political stage. The support achieved none of the desired goals of reducing or stopping Israel’s attacks, providing Gazans with sufficient aid, or guaranteeing a full Israeli withdrawal from the Strip.

There have been a few substantive responses from Arab governments. Egypt and Jordan insisted that they would not accept any Gazans expelled by Israel. Jordan and the United Arab emirates (UAE) set up field hospitals to treat the wounded, delivered medical supplies through airdrops, and established satellite links to allow doctors to treat patients in Gaza remotely. Egypt and Qatar continue to mediate among Hamas, Israel, and the United States for brief ceasefires, greater humanitarian aid flows, and exchanges of detainees and hostages.

As Arab governments could neither fight Israel nor remain neutral, they made familiar but mostly symbolic steps—issuing statements, holding summits, lobbying and voting for United Nations resolutions, calling for a ceasefire, withdrawing their ambassadors from Israel (Jordan), demanding humanitarian assistance to Gaza, publicly criticizing Israeli aggression, and supporting Palestinian rights.

 

 

When the Arab states could not confront familiar imperial tormentors in Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, they by default left the heavy lifting to the regional network of NSAAs. Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and half a dozen smaller militant groups in Syria and Iraq are supported by Iran, with whom they form the “Axis of Resistance”

These NSAAs, which have all emerged since the 1980s, are anchored in the nationalist identities and interests of their own states and espouse Islamist ideologies. They enjoy sophisticated military capabilities along with the will to use them as they pursue common interests in resisting Israeli and Western imperial threats. And they all have close relations with, and support from, non-Arab Iran. The current Gaza war saw their network activated for the first time at a coordinated regional level, as their member groups fought against Israel or the United States and United Kingdom on the Israel-Lebanon border and in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.

The passive Arab governments and the NSAAs are both products of the Middle East’s twin calamities over the last century. The first is the modern Arab state system’s legacy of erratic, often corrupt and incompetent, non-democratic governance, which has led to low-quality statecraft and chronic national vulnerability and dependence. The second calamity is Zionism’s non-stop geographical and political expansion since the 1930s, despite repeated costly but unsuccessful pan-Arab attempts to check it.

 

 

Arab governments could not decisively support Gaza because they remain constrained by the consequences of decades of poor policy decisions and inefficient governance. These resulted in the twin forces that constrain them today at home and abroad: domestic populist anger and desperation and dependence on external sources of aid, arms, and protection.

Ironically, a core reason for this is the Palestinian issue (especially Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa Mosque), which has long resonated widely across all Arab societies and has now risen to the top of the Middle East’s agenda—if not the agenda of the international community.

The combination of Arab governments’ docile behavior and the dynamic defiance of the NSAAs suggests that most Arab states are undergoing a process of “de-sovereignization.” That is, most Arab states can only make big sovereign decisions in arenas like defense, national security, trade, or Israeli or Iranian relations with the approval of a foreign power.

Perhaps Arab docility since October 7 is not a choice, but rather the inevitable consequence of the many poor decisions that leaders and their foreign backers have made since World War One. Only better choices in the future can reverse this docility and achieve the necessary change Arab societies deserve.

[Jurgen Knows]

Summary: Israel and Iran have common interests in the region, and benefit from each other’s existence at the expense of the people of the region.

 

Yes. We know this.

 

Zionists, Iran and its NSAAs can all fuck off as far as the people of the region are concerned. 
 

That still doesn’t make Zionists any less accountable for the genocide and ethnic cleansing they are committing in Palestine.

[TheHowieLama]

6 months ago:

Saudi Arabia has offered to resume financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, in a move intended to build support among Palestinian leadership for Riyadh to establish official diplomatic ties with Israel, the WSJ reported, citing Saudi officials.

Saudi Arabia hopes that an offer of fresh financial support - after aid from Riyadh sank to $0 in 2021 - will help them gain the backing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for a normalisation agreement with Israel, thereby silencing critics who could claim Riyadh had abandoned the Palestinian cause, according to the report.

The Palestinian Authority’s leadership is now debating whether to back Saudi Arabia’s bid and is sending a senior delegation to the kingdom next week for talks on advancing the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

The idea to resume aid was first introduced by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in an April meeting with the 87-year-old Abbas, according to the WSJ.

The financial support was not directly tied to the PA backing Saudi-Israel normalisation, but in its ability to re-assert control in areas of the occupied West Bank that have come under the sway of independent Palestinian fighters. Saudi Arabia believes that could cool tensions in the occupied West Bank and help the PA regain legitimacy.

 

Yesterday:

 

Saudi Arabia would be willing to accept a commitment from Israel to create a Palestinian state, rather than more concrete steps toward that end in exchange for normalizing relations with Jerusalem, in a bid to get a defense pact with Washington approved before the US presidential election, sources told Reuters Friday.

Riyadh is increasingly keen to shore up its security and ward off threats from rival Iran so the kingdom can forge ahead with its ambitious plan to transform its economy and attract huge foreign investment, Reuters said, citing two unnamed regional sources.

To create some wiggle room in talks about recognizing Israel and to get the US pact back on track, Saudi officials have told their US counterparts that Riyadh would not insist Israel take concrete steps to create a Palestinian state and would instead accept a political commitment to a two-state solution, two senior regional sources said.

In addition to binding security guarantees from the US, Riyadh is also seeking access to top-notch American military equipment and Washington’s support for a civilian nuclear program, according to US and Arab officials. Analysts say Saudi Arabia is determined to secure the deal before the election because in the event that US President Joe Biden is not re-elected, Democrats will be less likely to ratify a deal inked by a Republican White House.

 

[TheHowieLama]

Explaining Saudi Arabia’s approach to the Palestinian component of the negotiations, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington senior scholar Hussein Ibish said that before October 7, “it would have been good enough for Saudi Arabia for Israel to get involved in some sort of national negotiations with the PLO for the Palestinians, and the propping up of the PA, but without necessarily undertaking to the eventual recognition of a Palestinian state, and accepting the irrevocable principle of Palestinian statehood.”

Since the war’s breakout, though, demands regarding the Palestinian component of the deal have gone up. “Nobody is seriously expecting Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank or to recognize a Palestinian state that does not yet exist. What is required is for Israel to recognize the Palestinian right to a state and the need for a Palestinian state,” Ibish maintained.