Israeli–Palestinian conflict

[David]

<Off-topic threads moved to new thread: https://magpies.net/viewtopic.php?t=93647. Thanks, David for BBMods.>

[Magpietothemax]

^
Self restraint works both ways. If Israel badly wanted war with Iran, all they had to do was pick targets that would provoke them (like Oil or Nuclear sites). Instead they picked "soft" targets like the Missile Fuel places.

It's all posturing and face. Israel has retailiated, set back Iran's missile capability, they're happy.
Iran knew Israel would retaliate, taking out some soft military targets is a minor setback, they can claim little to no damage, they're happy. Both sides get a "win", now normal programming resumes.

"Normal programming"...ongoing genocide in Gaza, the obliteration of Southern Lebanon...yeah life goes on in the Middle East as normal.

[David]

Suffering isn't just counted in deaths and injuries, but also stories like this. Think of the layers of sadness in the photos in this article: the hopelessness, lack of dignity, and inhospitable, almost alien landscape of ruined buildings behind them.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/29/midd ... index.html

“Some individuals were selected for detention while others were released. Most of us ended up in Gaza City. The situation was terrifying and deeply saddening as we witnessed elderly men and injured individuals in distress, with no one showing them compassion or mercy.”

The little girl seen in the photograph is Jouri Abu Ward. The three-and-a-half-year-old was riding her bike, trying to get to Gaza City, when she and her father were detained at the checkpoint.

Jouri’s father Mohamad Abu Ward told CNN he was forced to strip to his underwear and was held for eight hours alongside Jouri. He said the girl was not required to remove her clothes but was unable to leave the area because she was alone with him. No food or water available to them. His wife and other children left the area earlier in the morning and were able to make it to Gaza City, he said.

[David]

Here's an informative (prior-to-being-sinbinned) article on Zionism and its evolution over the past century from Guy Rundle:

https://arena.org.au/editorial-black-milk-of-daybreak/

The final stage of this process has been the transformation of the character of Zionist society, and the absolute divergence of Zionist and Palestinian lifeworlds. In 1948, Zionism was an agrarian, religious-national socialist movement which placed strong emphasis on material equality, and on the power of social rebirth in simpler communities as a curative to decadent habits and personalities, an argument made by Herzl as an essential part of the Zionist project. Zionist and Palestinian confronted each other as two forms of agrarian life.

Israel’s subsequent development as first an urban and modernised, and now hypermodern, high-tech society has created a total separation between the two peoples, and changed the form of domination utterly. As Israel took the urbanised, high-tech route, abstract community replaced the real connection of collective life. Neoliberalism replaced socialism. Inequality among Jewish Israelis widened. As real solidarity dissolved, symbolic solidarity had to be injected, in the form of loyalty oaths and ‘Jewish state’ political kitsch. The tie-up of military tech development, start-ups and exports turned the now wholly dominated Palestinians into, as Antony Loewenstein has documented, a human test-bed for commodified systems of human population control.

Zionism now not only has no internal restraint in its everyday conduct, it is addicted to the heady rush of violent political will to remain intact as a movement. Its leaders would once have taken October 7 as a strategic atrocity—an attack in dinghies and Toyotas on a nuclear power, designed for maximum spectral force—to project what the Palestinian resistance no longer was and might never be again. Instead. Netanyahu committed his final act of conspiracy with Hamas in a shared regard for this very bloody symbolic act as a real one. This was a sort of ‘deployed hysteria’, convenient to both sides.

With this as its irrationale, Israel has justified mass civilian killing, the use of starvation as a weapon of conflict, the targeting of children, the mass killing of journalists and witnesses, and cultural and infrastructure destruction on a total scale. Its national service soldiers trash and loot homes and upload videos of such to TikTok. Ministers in its government speak of total extermination on a regular basis, and Western governments excuse this—the exception becoming the rule—while government inquiries are held into the use of the phrase ‘From the River to the Sea’.

[think positive]

Suffering isn't just counted in deaths and injuries, but also stories like this. Think of the layers of sadness in the photos in this article: the hopelessness, lack of dignity, and inhospitable, almost alien landscape of ruined buildings behind them.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/29/midd ... index.html

“Some individuals were selected for detention while others were released. Most of us ended up in Gaza City. The situation was terrifying and deeply saddening as we witnessed elderly men and injured individuals in distress, with no one showing them compassion or mercy.”

The little girl seen in the photograph is Jouri Abu Ward. The three-and-a-half-year-old was riding her bike, trying to get to Gaza City, when she and her father were detained at the checkpoint.

Jouri’s father Mohamad Abu Ward told CNN he was forced to strip to his underwear and was held for eight hours alongside Jouri. He said the girl was not required to remove her clothes but was unable to leave the area because she was alone with him. No food or water available to them. His wife and other children left the area earlier in the morning and were able to make it to Gaza City, he said.

Such a hard read. I just don’t get it, I really don’t. How man is still doing this in this day and age, it’s barbaric, it’s murder, it’s not war.