The four things that ended the '08 ceasefire and set off the '08-'09 Gaza war were:

- Islamic Jihad not going along with the ceasefire, because they didn't trust Israel
- Israel not opening up the Gaza blockade enough to make a difference in the local economy, because they didn't trust Hamas
- Hamas digging a(n allegedly defensive) tunnel between Gaza and Israeli territory, because they didn't trust Israel
- Israel raiding Gaza in response to the tunnel (which they believed would be used to attack Israeli officers), because they didn't trust Hamas

This isn't a sibling rivalry. It's a security dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma).

Edited 5/30/2021 05:49:18

beautiful country israel ❤️
https://youtu.be/qeVvuph2WAQ
I just hope I don't get blasted by a hamas rocket when I visit

Because this would be forbidden under apartheid.

You are correct here. Also, let me just post this lel


https://apnews.com/article/afe725af96f4416a85b24c07954c9afa

I know what the security dilemma is. I probably should have noticed this to be an example of it. I suppose there is a peaceful version and a violent version of it.

Just thought I'd post this. While Hamas were sending rockets at Israel and Palestinians were getting caught up in Israel's retaliation, Hamas's leader Ismael Haneyah and his buddies were off spending over a million dollars of the Palestinians' money to party in a luxury hotel in Doha with his buddies.

https://snipboard.io/aBhuyc.jpg

Hamas is a terrorist organizaiton and doesn't care about the Palestinians, they only want the death of Israel and Jews.

Orannis, that's literally fake news: https://www.dohanews.co/saudi-emirati-figures-use-forged-document-to-slander-palestines-haniyeh-visit-to-qatar/

How about Hamas spending the Palestinians' money on the terror tunnel to attack Israel instead of spending it on the wellbeing of Palestinians? You know that Hamas is rich enough to help the Palestinians if they wanted to, but decides to spend it on rockets. Meanwhile Israel spends it own funds to take in Palestinian civilians injured in the conflict.

Tell me you have no understanding of the economy of Gaza without telling me you have no understanding of the economy of Gaza.

Gaza is entirely dependent on international aid. Even with their funding from Iran and others (which is meant to be used to fight Israel and will probably stop if they stop digging those "terror tunnels"), Hamas has nowhere near what it would take to fix Gaza's economy, especially after the collapse in 2020. Gaza doesn't even have an economy to speak of.

Prior to 2005, Gaza was tied to a service sector. Once Sharon unilaterally withdrew Israel and blockaded Gaza, that entire sector- the backbone of Gaza's economy- disappeared. They've had some glimmers of hope since then but it's essentially impossible to build a functioning economy when you are dependent on Israel for all your essentials (water, utilities), under indirect occupation (no control of airspace, sea, trade, etc. - so no economic or trade policy), and blocked by Israel and Egypt. You just can't do anything. What do you sell? To whom? Only aid from the EU and US and others keeps Gaza afloat. I mean, most of their GDP is literally international aid iirc. Even if you threw a whole Bezos at that (which US and EU aid kind of does in the long run), it wouldn't fix things.

I don't want to blame Israel for the Gaza economy, since like I said above this is a security dilemma and both sides are behaving rationally (with catastrophic human consequences). But there is no way to fix Gaza's economy without the lifting of the Israeli blockade.

Maybe Bennett and Lapid will reimagine Israeli foreign policy toward Gaza and break this cycle- if the coalition materializes before the deadline today. Rethinking how to deal with Hamas is on the board since it's one of the main reasons this coalition government even happened.

---

On a meta level, I think it's worth commenting on what happened here. You shared trivially verifiably fake news (indicating your media diet must be broken, because you didn't even question this) and when you learned that, instead of rethinking your media diet or realizing that maybe your model of things must be broken if you're this susceptible to fake news, you decided you would double down on your overall point by making a new throwaway handwavy argument, hellbent on painting this as a black and white issue where one side must just have bad intentions even against incentives (your model of the situation doesn't make sense; intentions tend to match incentives, and people just being bad for no reason even when it hurts everyone is a fairy tale cliche, not how geopolitics works- this tendency to see evil and corruption everywhere and default to it as your explanation for why things aren't working is why we keep electing idiot populists).

This isn't a debate club. You're not here to look good and defend some assigned point at all costs, throwing whatever you can at your opponent. If you are at all interested in learning anything from this- if not, why are you here- consider reading things and asking questions ("Hey, why is Gaza's economy so shit?" "How much money does Hamas actually have?" "What could Hamas do to Gaza's economy if they focused on development?" "What even is Hamas' viewpoint?" "Why do so many people support Hamas?") and looking them up (you have access to far more information in a far more convenient way than was even thinkable before ~1990) before making assertions you do not have the sources or expertise to back up.

Have a little curiosity, is all I'm saying, instead of being hellbent on proving your point on issues you barely grasp.

Edited 6/2/2021 03:35:00

Lol, Orranis, I like your off topic posts, but your opinion on this issue is severely flawed. Also, it should have been obvious that invoice was fake.

I see a lot of waffle and diverting the subject. I understand that I am no expert in the situation, but desn't that mean this is an opportunity for you to educate me? I know that I have my biases but at the end of the day I'm no more biased than noob or you.

Hamas has nowhere near what it would take to fix Gaza's economy, especially after the collapse in 2020.

Then explain to me how they managed to fund more than 4000 rockets? I am genuinely curious btw, not a rhetorical question. Hamas always seem to have enough funding for weapons to attack Israel, but when it comes to protecting the people they are supposedly trying to help, they are unfortunate and poor victims.

True georg, I sometimes look back at some of my posts here and cringe (especially that one :P), but then I read some of your responses and they are no better. For example, your whole “right to conquest” argument is completely invalid because the right to conquest is illegal by international law.

I usually avoid politics like the plague but something about noob’s arrogance to reiterate the same nonsense about Israel being an apartheid and Hamas not being a terrorist organization baited me in and now I wish I just let this convo be. In Canada, these ideas have been foreign to me my whole life and I have never really encountered someone thinks as radically as he does.

desn't that mean this is an opportunity for you to educate me?

To be blunt, that's pretty fucking hard when you don't have even the baseline curiosity to Google search things or read Wikipedia articles. Lead a horse to water and so on. I've been trying to get you to do that first. That's more valuable than anything I have to say about Israel and Palestine.

It baffles me that in this day and age people just don't bother to ask questions on a search engine or read things. Your primary means of learning about things shouldn't be arguing with strangers on the internet and expecting them to correct you when you make random self-serving assertions. If you don't bother to look things up on your own, a discussion like this gets nowhere because we spend so much time trying to establish a basic understanding (all the while having to do this in an adversarial manner where you are much less receptive because you're committed to proving one side right even if it requires willful ignorance) that we don't get anywhere near analyzing the situation.

On a broader note, for issues like this, we waste so much time picking sides and pointing fingers instead of actually doing anything that helps or even thinking about how to. This is just an internet debate to us, but to people in that region it's got massive human cost. Entire people are living out their lives (short ones often) bereft of opportunity because of the way the Israel/Palestine conflict has shaken up. Instead of picking #TeamIsrael or #TeamPalestine like we're fangirling over the new Twilight movie, I'm hoping we start thinking in the direction of how this problem could actually be solved and the catastrophic human cost minimized.

Edited 6/2/2021 04:11:57

I did actually read the Wikipedia articles you sent knyte. And the point is that ofc I could go do my own research (and have a long way in my understanding of the conflict since the beginning of this thread). But instead of waffling history (Hamas is the reason why Gaza is blockaded, and the cause of their own problems, so I don’t see why that point is relevant) and then telling me off, why not give relevant facts and make a decent argument.

Edit: you edited your post after I sent this so I didn’t see it. Yep I totally agree. Gonna stop posting to this thread cuz it’s making me look like a bigger and bigger douche. Lesson learned, don’t get baited into a politics thread at 2am when you don’t give two shits about the situation and are only gonna end up digging yourself deeper into a hole based on limited knowledge of the situation:D

Edited 6/2/2021 04:19:35

Your understanding of what a "decent" argument is, is skewed by your own lack of understanding. And I'm glad you read the wiki articles I linked, but that's not curiosity. That's just doing homework you're given, like the average C student. I'm talking more along the lines of asking yourself those questions instead of making assertions built on shaky assumptions.

In this case, maybe you could've looked up how much 4000 Hamas-quality rockets cost and reason about it yourself how Hamas could go about patching up Gaza.

Btw, Hamas didn't gain control of Gaza until 2007. The service sector in Gaza disappearing overnight happened in 2005. Just another thing you would've known if you were interested in learning about the issue instead of making blind assumptions for the sake of a "decent argument."

It's okay to ask stupid questions, like the Hamas rocket one (although I must admit I chuckled... how far do you think you can get by saving $800 per Qassam rocket? We're talking about an order of magnitude difference, like when people complain about the US sending foreign aid to Israel instead of fixing healthcare.). But try asking them on a search engine first, is all I'm saying.

I'm sorry my arguments are not decent enough for you. But I'm not here to tell you which team to side with. I'm just disappointed as always that we live in such an amazing world where information is everywhere, and yet most people wind up being incurious simpletons anyway. You got played by actual fake news and yet even that realization doesn't seem to have hit you.

Enjoy your debate. I hope you have fun dismantling TheNoob's ideology and securing a win for your team, while thanks to the lazy attitudes of great debaters like you the world gets nowhere on the Palestine issue and we just get to watch people suffer and die and disappear in slow motion. But hey, at least we know it all happened because Hamas is evil!

Edited 6/2/2021 04:29:06

Should I make a China thread?

That would be an entertaining subject. I could shill you all on the TPP and DARPA.

Should I make a China thread?

Only if you can somehow make it more inflammatory than Israeli politics.

Depends on how many Communists are still on these forums

Plus Netanyahu is now in the process of getting ousted by a coalition that's built on Israeli's dissatisfaction with his Hamas policy, so there's some juicy and spicy material still left here!

It is not happening and never was going to happen