46
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UN says Israel wants 1.1 million Gazans moved south in the next twenty-four hours
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- Authors
- Henriette Chacar, Nidal Al-Mughrabi, Humeyra Pamuk
- Published
- Oct 13 2023
- Word count
- 1373 words
in any situation, anywhere in the world, moving 1.1 million people in 24 hours is an impossible task. even in the best of circumstances - somewhere with good electricity and communications infrastructure, rather than an active warzone slash open-air prison.
this smells like it's manufacturing an excuse for Israel to carpet-bomb Gaza, and then handwave away collateral damage by saying "oh but we warned them".
Many of the people who have followed this advice and fled south have been shelled on the roads and killed.
There is plenty of video evidence of this.
Israel dropped 6,000 bombs in less than a week. There is no military on earth capable of acquiring 6,000 targets in an urban environment in that timeframe. This is just them wildly throwing out their best guesses at best (and being alright with killing hundreds/thousands of civilians), or just indiscriminate revenge bombing at worst.
In my opinion if you think what Russia did in Mariupol is a war crime, (and it was), you're morally obliged to take the same position here.
War crimes are never justified. War crimes do not justify war crimes.
Edit: For context, there exists lots of recent experience in how to conduct an air campaign against an insurgency in densely populated areas and it doesn't look anything like this.
Again, we have very recent examples of how to accomplish exactly this. Hamas can't just conjure another attack like that out of thin air, there is no reason Israel can't expend some time to do due diligence with their target acquisition and spend some time planning an operation that isn't likely to end up as one of the worst massacres of civilians in recent memory. That's, strategically speaking, probably their best option as well given that they rely on international support which could certainly dry up if this goes how I think it might go.
I accept there will be civilian casualties, I think that's inevitable. But Israel has the responsibility to minimize them if they want to maintain a country in good standing with the rest of the world. Dropping 6,000 bombs in 6 days isn't dropping bombs on 6,000 military targets that happen to be interspersed with civilians. There just isn't the targeting capacity for 6,000 urban targets to be acquired and verified in 6 days -- it's literally impossible for the best military on earth to do that.
This is far too broad a brush. Even if you go by recent polling, which I have no idea about re: accuracy, support for Hamas in Gaza is in the mid 50s. That's a lot of people that don't support Hamas that are wrapped up in this. And who knows how much of that is soft support in the same way some Westerners subscribe in thought but not practice to violent abhorrent ideologies. Additionally, there are something like a million children in Gaza.
Ultimately, the people of Gaza can't largely be considered combatants and it is a war crime to deliberately or indiscriminately harm them.
Throughout your posts you've managed to completely ignore the part Israel has played over the last few decades, so I don't expect you to have solutions about what they should do about it today.
You're cheering on carpet-bombing a densely-populated population where half of them are under 18, and half the others DON'T SUPPORT HAMAS, while also ignoring any role Israel may have played in the conditions that radicalise people in that direction. It's staggering.
nb I wish I didn't have to say this, but no, I'm not suggesting Israel should wait at the border with flowers and hope everything is ok.
It's important to remember that while Israel was definitely assisted by colonialism, it wasn't a pure fabrication of it. Jews already lived in the region and continued to migrate to the region before the Ottoman empire fell. Yes, more Jews immigrated when the British promised them protection but it's not like the west just picked up a bunch of people and dumped them in a random spot. The largest problem the British caused was creating an unworkable border for the Israeli and Palestine people.
And remember, the Jews were already there on their own. The Arabs attacked the Jews to try and genocide them and the Jews fought them off. So it's more of a story of civil war than colonialism. Yes the Israeli were supplied by the West but so to were the Palestinians supplied by the Arabic nations. Pretty much every civil war has outsider influence.
No, there is literally an irrevocable movement in history when intelligence agencies supported the Zionist movement because it was more convenient for the Jews to be dumped en masse in one region out of White Guilt over WWII but also stemming from WWI.
Furthermore, it is also not just about the Western Powers "dumping" Jews into an Arab nation, but that they carved out said Arab nation into their own arbitrary line markers and said, "this is now land of Jews weh weh."
That's an ultra-privileged position to take. You don't go "the Jews declare this part of Germany as our safe haven" because fuck that they don't have the power to do that. But they did have the backing of superpowers to go "the Jews declare this Arab territory as ours" because it's easy for the Western Powers to fuck Arabs over not only because of religious differences but also because of ethnic and racial differences (aside from sheer military might).
Historically, it was Jewish territory before the Romans came in and said "this part of the world is our safe haven". As to closer history, the Jewish were the ones that started the Zionist movement. They sought their own homeland and self chose to return to Palestine. But note that there were already many Jews that had never left the region, already there. Yes there were several antisimetic nations that supported the Jews moving to Palestine as a solution to getting rid of them, and yes the British did assist in creating an armistice in the region, but the state of Isreal wasn't a western invention.
Additionally, immigrants overwhelming a region and making it their own happens all the time. There are several places all over the world that have high immigrant populations which are very distinct from the nation they occupy. In America we have chinatowns as a light example, and many cities that are predominantly Spanish as a major example. The main difference is that the US isn't actively driving them out in armed combat so they live relatively peacefully. Palestine actively tried to drive out the immigrating Jews and they in turn defended themselves successfully.
uhhh...
I think you're skipping over the part where 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes in Palestine, in the 1948 Nakba.
framing that as the Israeli Jews "defended themselves" is an interesting choice.
this is one of the defining features of settler colonialism - you invade and occupy lands that are already lived on, and when the current occupants put up a fight, you "defend" yourselves.
I'm sure British settlers in what would become the US would have said the same thing. the Native Americans attacked them, and they were simply defending themselves.
the US-Israel relationship is obviously multifaceted and complex but I think an important part of it is that both nations were founded on projects of settler colonialism. the US did it relatively slowly, Israel did a speedrun.
Not skipping over. The Jews were there, an agreement on living terms was attempted to be reached. The Arabs rejected and attacked and subsequently lost a civil war. And yes, while there were settler Jews, there were also native Jews, so it's a civil war.
As to fairness, the Arabs had a lot of assistance from neighborhood Arab nations and the Jews didn't really have allies during the conflict as the British fled. So it's not like the colonialism of America or India where an overwhelming force invaded and beat up the anemic local resistance. The Jews were already there and as far as I can tell, fought by themselves.
right. so just to be clear, your claim is that the Jewish people (who were moving from elsewhere in the world based on the belief that they were entitled to the land because people of the same religion and ethnicity as them also lived in that area) made some sort of peaceful "hey, is it cool if we move in next door" offer, which was violently rejected? and that started the civil war?
it seems to me like invading the foreign territory and attempting to claim it as your own is what would have started the war.
and then, if you won that war and expelled the original inhabitants, the smart move from a "history is written by the winners" perspective would be to shape the narrative that your side was peaceful and tried to coexist, and it was the others who rejected it and violently attacked.
like I said, 700,000 Palestinians were expelled after what you're calling a "civil" war. is it your position that they all deserved it as a consequence of losing the war? including the non-combatants?
I'm not going to claim there was peace. This region has been rife with turmoil for centuries. I'm not going to claim that any civil war is right or wrong, they are what they are.
History is nothing but stories of "to the victor go the spoils". All areas and people have a bloody history of displacing those that came before. There is no way to repay for the worlds past transgressions, so at some point you just have to accept what has happened. So I'm not taking any moral stance on who should or should not have won.
All I've been trying to say is that the event wasn't the same level of colonialism as the Americas experienced since so many try to say this whole mess is only the West's fault. There's simply way more factors at play here than basic "England bad".
Sounds like ghettoization to me. I'm slightly worried it's a "Move or 'we know who you are'" tactic.
I mostly don't trust Israel to handle this in a proper way because I know the US definitely didn't after 9/11, and Israel just got one of their own. I would wager the entire country is as close to unanimously supporting the annexation of these regions as they'll ever be.
"Proper" being not converting Gaza to glass trying to get Hamas.
I honestly think the international community should be evacuating Gaza. If Hamas slips out, fine, but expatriation is better than a war.
Evacuating to where, though? No particular country wants to be host to millions of Palestinian refugees. History has, uh, not been kind to those who do.
That burden would rest on the countries that decided Israel should exist as it does. To a significant degree we created the situation and have a responsibility to aid in the least violent resolution.
History hasn't been kind to countries that take on large numbers of Arab refugees, but many of these same countries also have contributed over millennia to the situations that led to these large-scale migrations. They'll be fine, and even in the worst situations in Europe we don't have mass deaths because of groups firing rockets at each other.
In all honesty, for the countries, it would be the major European players of WWII that we could get to collaborate. Russia's out, obviously, the rest of the Allied Powers and the Axis Powers have a responsibility for the mess we created as a warring global community.
Even the evacuation wouldn't be neat and orderly, and it would leave the West Bank, which would likely need to be cut loose/integrated into another country or forced as a second party by the rest of the international community. But if getting Gaza cleared is going to be tough, getting the West Bank would be about as likely as giving Israel back to the Arabs/post-Ottoman inhabitants Britain took it from.
I mean that's a nice thought, but unfortunately or not the UK and co are democracies, and absolutely none of those populaces want any more refugees, as can be seen from political reaction in Europe to the refugee crisis that would be dwarfed by this. Democracies do what democracies do, even if it's not "right".
Specifically I mean Jordan, for which the Palestinian refugees returned its kindness by staging a failed coup and trying to assassinate their prime minister and royalty at the time, Lebanon, for which the Palestinian refugees caused a civil war, and the same in Kuwait. In Egypt, there was a series of suicide bombings linked to Hamas that led to Egypt participating closing their side of the border.
I'm not talking about "arab refugees", but specifically Palestinians, particularly from Gaza, have caused all of their host countries to be wary of them, which only makes this even less feasible. There's a reason Egypt, which has a land border with Gaza, that Israel can do nothing about, still has it closed down.
If there isn't a viable host country, which needs to actually have the political will to do this then this isn't so much a plan as wishful thinking. Yelling shame at a sovereign nation state from the internet does not count as political will.
Exactly. It was a fucking cop out. They used the UN as a vessel to carve up what is essentially a modern colonial rule imposed onto a land. This is literally modern displacement of a whole ethnic group from a land that they've been on for hundreds of years, just because of Zionism or the very recent belief (just 1960s) that Jews "needed their own land" rather than just assimilate into various territories around the world, which wouldn't have caused this problem. Fucking hell, there is no more turning back. Palestinians are fucked.
Perhaps they remembered how well previous attempts at assimilation went. It's not as though it hadn't been tried before.
I reject this contrived narrative. They were doing fine until Nazis came into the picture (or even before WW1 errupted because of feuds, which fucked everyone over anyway). Like I said, it's a cop out. Much like any other people ostracised by unfair hegemonic societies, the onus should be on the hegemonic powers. The privileged position is neither with the Jews nor with the Arabs or Palestinians. It's with the Western powers that can actually dictate for whole lands to be carved up into whatever delineation they want. That's a super privilege. They essentially shipped the problem elsewhere rather than change their own attitudes so they don't discriminate fuck all.
Have you ever heard of the Dreyfus Affair? How about the Pale of Settlement? Are you aware that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was likely written by the Tsar's secret police? Going back further, there's the expulsion of Jews from Iberia in the late 15th century, the expulsion of Jews from England in the 13th–shit, here's a list of most of the expulsions and exoduses of Jews known to history. YHWH only knows how many weren't recorded.
I also would like to point out that an insistence on any ethnic group's assimilation into another culture is itself an advocacy of cultural genocide. Many shades of residential/boarding schools and Uighur reeducation camps there.
Mind you, none of that excuses the colonialism and expansionism of Israel, any more than historic parallels excuse the indiscriminate murder of civilians by Palestinian terrorists.
Willful ignorance of history is part of how we get to these passes though, and your opinion reeks of it.
First, yes I'm aware of mass exoduses of ethnic groups. The Indigenous Populations did it, the Islamists/Arabs did it, the Southern and Northern Chinese did it, and so on. This is by no means denying or diminishing the Jewish exodus.
Which is why I reject this wayward and out-of-the-left-field claim:
This is a misdirection. When I say assimilate, I do not mean they should lose their cultural identity, but that they should be allowed to practice them without the insistence of taking away land (by hegemonic powers by the way) of another ethnic group (subjugated by hegemonic powers again by the way). Furthermore, you then panned to the extreme by comparing assimilation with Uyghurs, which, by the way, were rightfully on the land they were on. Your reference to them is actually the opposite. A hegemonic power (CCP) installed a different ethnic group (Hui Han) onto the land of the Uyghurs (not only Uyghurs but also Kazakhs and Uzbeks). So no, I still stand by what I said despite your linking of the recorded exodus of the Jews.
This is also why I keep saying it is an ultra-privileged position that allows the Western World to carve up territories in developing nations to their whims simply due to "washing of the hands." There are plenty of Jews around the world right now in 2023 that feel a million times safer than in Israel. If Israel was meant to be the "only safe place on Earth" for Jews, then what's up with that? I am also bewildered by this claim that an ethnic group can "only be safe at a particular location." The fuck?
Also, Zionism, which is the specific belief that Jews needed their own HOLY LAND is unrelated to the mass exodus of Jews. It is a very recent belief based on already-acknowledged extremism and fundamentalism not grounded in reality but is supported by interest groups like intelligence agencies that fucked Arab Springs.
Sorry to reply to an old topic but I feel that you are unintentionally spitting a bunch of antisemitic tropes.
This is just patently false – political Zionism is traditionally considered to have been conceived in the 1890s by Theodor Herzl. There were several world Zionist congresses. Jewish immigration really began following Pogroms in eastern Europe in the early 1900s – the first kibbutz was established in 1910.
Please read Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (less the chapter about colonialism). It's a good book and has an interesting analysis of antisemitism. She points out that
I'm not suggesting relocating these folks to their neighbors. I wasn't familiar with the history of Hamas in these countries, either, but it wouldn't make sense to make them bear the burden of what a coalition of countries unrelated to them created.
I've sorta realized I have the opinion because it "feels true," in a sense, not necessarily because it's the best idea. I do believe it's one of the best possible outcomes, even if the charge of it being a form of ethnic cleansing holds more water than I'm comfortable with. (I'll be unpacking that when I respond to @Jordan117's comment).
I suppose the thing is that saying, "I wish Europe's voting populace would voluntarily accept 2.2 million Palestinian refugees out of a sense of duty for their historical sins" is as useful as saying "I wish Israel and Palestine got along well and no longer tried to violently attack each other". The latter would be an even "better" "solution", after all, but both are in the realm of dreams. If we're staying in "wishes", you may as well just wish the conflict wasn't there. If you move to pragmatism, then as currently described it's just not going to happen.
But also, why is it that the Palestinians have to leave?
Several European powers are already teetering on the brink of far-right populist takeover due to anti-refugee backlash, zero chance they open the door to literally millions more. Especially when even the civilian population of Gaza actively supports Hamas in their attacks. Plus, mounting a coerced evacuation of that magnitude is literally a form of ethnic cleansing.
It's an extremely tough situation, but my hope is that the IDF pulls back from the brink, the far-right Netanyahu government takes the fall for letting the situation get so bad, and Hamas shies away from another confrontation (perhaps with humanitarian aid and a hostage release), paving the way for less bloodthirsty leadership on both sides of the conflict. But I see very little chance of anything like that happening, either.
I can't argue against that and won't even try, that's not to say I like the idea, either.
Honestly, what you describe, basically the status quo, is the best option in terms of immediate lives saved, in a sense. I seriously hope Israel isn't going to plow through Gaza, but that feels like saying "I hope the US doesn't level Iraq" in late 2001.
They haven’t behead babies. Any killing of children is indefensible, but I don’t think we should continue to spread this idea that they’ve beheaded babies unless someone credible makes that claim.
https://www.reuters.com/world/nato-ministers-shown-horrific-video-hamas-attack-2023-10-12/
Yeah...as you've already explored this in detail below, I really think the very obvious outcome of this is going to be one hell of a bombing and invasion/scorched earth campaign by Israel.
There is 0 way gaza can fight that barring-
They have somehow obtained a nuclear weapon. Which would be EXTREMELY bad for all involved (and really only up the ante on a losing battle).
An external country gets involved. I think the only options on the table would be Iran or Russia, and neither of those end well either nor are they likely.
The "best" outcome that I think is remotely possible is as surgical a strike as Israel can do? There's no way they walk this back, there's no way the international community wades in, there's no way they aren't going to target hamas, especially as last I heard they're still firing rockets at civilian targets (please note I have NOT had the time to verify this so it could be wrong).
Extremely targeted bombings with roof knocking followed by, again, one hell of a ground campaign with a serious push to use all hamas gathered intel to just wreck their leadership/infrastructure. This is still probably going to have an insane death toll for anyone caught in the middle, and even a high toll for the Israel troops.
Every other likely outcome just feels like worse permutations of that one.
Israel isn’t the US. 86% of Israelis polled hold Netanyahu and his administration responsible for this situation and want him to resign as soon as it’s over. They are furious with their government for letting this happen.
The election polling seems to have shifted decisively in favor of the NUP, which is a centrist/liberal party. And this is based on fieldwork over Oct 11-13.
The discourse I've been seeing seems to blame Netanyahu largely for worsening the security situation by inflaming tensions instead of tamping them down and for redirecting security forces and intelligence resources away from Gaza, where the threat is, to support settlements in the West Bank.
All in all they seem to be engaging in a much more productive post-mortem than the US did after 9/11.
But could those 86% be composed of those who think he was too harsh and provoked the attack, and those who think hw was too lenient and didn't apply enough force to prevent it?
I suppose Israel plans to take over Gaza city, dismantle the war machine, and then somehow control the flow of the population back in to catch returning militants? Or maybe they don't have any plan other than fuck shit up? While this is a sudden response, I have to believe that Israel had action plans drawn up for scenarios like this.
Given the current admin I’m guessing it’s mostly just fuck shit up.
I would not be surprised if the plan is basically just “we are now going to do whatever we feel we need to and it’s their problem not ours”
Note that the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely-populated areas on Earth, and this proposal would involve moving half of the population into the southern half, in one day, in the middle of an active war. Unworkable to the point that rolling in the tanks without an evacuation might actually result in fewer casualties.
UPDATE: Israeli military spokesman pulling back on this demand, marginally:
a very predictable, but still pretty savvy negotiating tactic.
say the deadline is 24 hours, then when there's a outcry you can "relax" the deadline to a few days. you appear reasonable and flexible, and anyone who doesn't comply with the "extended" deadline for evacuation can be painted as even more unreasonable.
the reality is, suppose the deadline had been a month. that would still be an absurd and unrealistic demand.
some people would refuse to leave their homes out of pure ordinary stubbornness.
other people would refuse to leave, based on a very justified fear that Israel would deny them the right to return to their homes (assuming those homes hadn't been leveled by a bombing campaign)
and still others might be open to leaving, but believe they're safer staying where they are. is there going to be a refugee camp constructed in southern Gaza, for a million people, on 24 hours notice? seems unlikely.
ultimately, all of this is going to be in pursuit of the Israeli military conducting "look what you made me do" bombings and airstrikes against Gaza.
I hope everyone who a few days ago was so eager to talk about how violence is never the answer and attacks on civilians are always unjustified remembers those principles.
if this same thing had happened in Kosovo in the 1990s, it would correctly have been identified as a form of ethnic cleansing.
You know what the dumbest part about all this is? It's that the United Nations was the one that voted what led to this mess. Although led by Britain, the world, by majority vote, decided to splinter a whole ethnic region into the most untenable and divisive places in the entire world - despite all these nations' supposed and so-called intelligence networks that should've told them otherwise. Yet again I am reminded why I'm super jaded about the world.
This situation is a result of the Sykes-Picot agreement following WWI. Jewish immigration to area was already well underway before the UN was created.
It goes back further than that. Biblically this dispute is thousands of years old, between two sons of Abraham, Ishmael (Islam) and Isaac (Judaism). And according to the prophetic words of the Bible, will continue and lead to the ultimate worldwide conflict as Israel is attacked by "Magog" from the north, which many believe to be Russia which is possible given Russia's shifting allegiance away from Israel toward Iran.
Part of the reason that the US and other largely Judeo-Christian countries so rabidly support Israel is this prophecy and their profound belief that Israelis are God's chosen people.
I really think this is overstated. Yes, it may be the belief of some fringe hyper-Christians, but primarily support for Israel has been one of cold logic and geopolitics. There are not many natural allies in the Middle East, and Israel is a clear standout there - not only strong cultural and familial ties to the US, and other European countries as many Jewish citizens from these countries immigrated to the area, but also a democracy (even if faltering in recent years - still a far cry from Saudi Arabia, or the UAE, or Kuwait, or literally any other country in the area).
In the words of Biden from 1983, "If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one."
Apart from Israel, you have uneasy allies like Saudi Arabia, who sometimes murders journalists on your territory with saws.
The geopolitical advantages >>>>>>>>>> fringe Christian beliefs about the Doomsday when it comes to the actual foreign policy of the US, and its European allies. Even if there were zero people that thought about the Biblical apocalypse, the West would still support Israel.
You think the beliefs of millions of Christians in the US have little bearing on US foreign policy? Judging by how powerful the evangelical Christian lobby is there, whatever they believe the Bible states is VERY relevant to how they shape their foreign policy and in particular which country they support. If the Bible states that Israelis are God's chosen people, the US is never going to back anyone but Israel:
“For you [Israel] are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession” (Deuteronomy 7:6).
100 million evangelicals in the US is not a 'fringe' group.
To be honest, yeah, I think they have little bearing. There's plenty of US foreign policy moves that are in complete contradiction with traditional Christian beliefs. I mean, we're a somewhat strong ally of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - because they were willing, somewhat stable, opposed Iran, and supplied us with oil.
Agreed. I think it goes even further than that. Its incomprehensible to a lot of Christians, how American Christians have equated the military might of the US with Christianity. That is a faith that centers on Jesus who was most definitely non militant and against violence. He wasn't even white, as portrayed in many pictures, he was dark skinned, like the people the US typically equates with 'the bad guys'. There's a fair bit of western myth mixed in with the actual life and teachings of Jesus.
But they are still a strong voting force, as evidenced by the fact that someone like Trump remains a force to be reckoned with. Dont ask me why, but he's backed by a strong evangelical lobby.
Have you talked to many of these Evangelicals personally? Whenever a political position is to their perceived advantage but conflicting with some part of the Bible, they find an interpretation that works for them pretty quickly. Their whole thing about the inerrency of scripture is just a way to avoid engaging in good faith discourse once they've chosen a position.
If the situation in Israel were reversed - a friendly Muslim regime massacring a militant Jewish minority - Evangelicals could easily line up behind the idea that this was God's righteous punishment for abandoning his covenant and killing Christ.
I agree with your first paragraph - that could happen over time as societal influence does sometimes morph their theology. But its more likely that instead of changing a theological viewpoint, instead some doctrines are de-emphasized and others are given a unusually strong spotlight. eg. Christ's teaching was strongly anti-violent, with a strong emphasis on love and care for all, even our enemies. That seems to get little airplay when war is afoot.
But no, your example isn't a good one. Any evangelical worth his salt wouldn't be supporting a Muslim massacre of anyone, especially a Jewish group.
As an outsider I have no way to tell which ones are "worth their salt." Maybe the ones I've dealt with aren't representative. All I know is that the self-proclaimed Evangelicals I've encountered would at least tacitly support the massacre of anyone by anyone if they thought it would lead to more people being born again.
I feel like there is no way this isn't going to be a disaster.
Before the US went into Fallujah, they dropped leaflets for weeks telling people to evacuate and they were actually allowed to leave through American checkpoints. And that still produced almost 1000 civilian casualties.
This appears to signal that the IDF is going to be conducting heavy artillery and aerial bombardment of Gaza City prior to the (anticipated) ground invasion into Gaza. This would likely be to soften Hamas’ positions beforehand, and suggests a short timetable for invading.
While I do believe this will likely be used an excuse of "we warned them" before beginning their larger assaults, I think this has the primary purpose of causing so much internal traffic and turmoil to stifle the combatants of Gaza. Having even a fraction of 1M people begin, in a non-planned, hurried, event travel and transition across the entire area to another side is very obviously a way to overwhelm them from within.