Palestine-Israel Crisis Megathread
Due to the severity of the situation and the fast flowing news cycle, we have decided to create a general megathread for discussion regarding the conflict.
Informal/Satirical news sources are not allowed on the main feed of the community but you are free to post them in this thread.
Please remember that all community and instance rules apply to this thread hence keep is civil.
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Some facts about the Gaza Strip:
Gaza is very densely populated. In Gaza live as many people as in Houston. But Houston has an area of 1658.6 km² (640.4 sq mi). Thus Gaza has nearly five times the population density of Houston. New York City is the only city in the US with a population of more than a million and a higher population density than Gaza. 2 The tallest building in Palestine stands at 76.1 m (255 ft). 3
A little less than half of the population of Gaza is made up of children. 4
There are only three ("legal") ways in and out of Gaza:
Gaza has a very small port. It can only be used by small fisher boats. 5
Israel built a wall and fences around Gaza. 6
The likelihood Israel didn't know of the attack shrinks by the day.
Mind sharing a source for the "I heard" -part?
This is US claiming that Egypt told Israel: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67082047
This is the Times of Israel reporting that an Egyptian official warned Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/egypt-intelligence-official-says-israel-ignored-repeated-warnings-of-something-big/
Netanyahu denied it happened, but even if it didn't the fact that they were able to get so many missiles into Gaza undetected isn't good for Netanyahu.
There are a few Canadian citizens stuck in Gaza and very much in danger. I’m hoping that some solution can be found to help these people out.
Are you trying to say that the Canadian citizens stuck in Gaza are somehow more special than the other citizens?
Yes! At least they are to me as a Canadian citizen. Not more important in human terms, but definitely more of interest to me to see how Canadians in a war zone are dealt with by our government.
As an American, I am also concerned about the Canadians in danger. I think of Canada as Americas brother that just happens to have its shit a bit more together.
Canada is americas nicest hat, we gotta take care of it
Is this what you're referring to?
Thank you! Sorry ignorant American and I wanted to learn more! I'm not sure why you were down voted so much by the little bit I read.
A friend of mine is volunteering for this organization. We're trying to help as IT guys but if you know anyone stranded in Israel or Gaza, or want to aid them indirectly, I thought I'd pass the link.
https://saveourallies.org/
(They've helped in other crisis scenarios as well)
Can you elaborate on the helping as IT guys part?
Can you elaborate on how you’re helping as “IT guys” ?
I too am an “IT guy” and would be interested in learning how my skills could assist those in need.
apologies for the off topic, but this thread shows as 11 hours old and I only see 7 top level comments. for a major event mega thread I expected much more and I'm wondering if I'm doing Lemmy wrong somehow?
A number of top level comments are from hexbear and lemmygrad so maybe your instance has those blocked? That will affect how many comments you see.
It's being extremely heavily moderated. (Not just the defederation.) You can gather the political stance by what comments remain.
Lemmy.ml/modlog
Yeah, it's not the easiest to read because most of the censorship is "user was banned from community". Which seems to remove the comments as well.
The only comment text listed in the modlog are the truly vile ones.
Is there anywhere on Lemmy that is allowing open discussion of this? Or is the censorship high enough up that it's not possible on Lemmy?
That's what I've been looking for too, I think maybe I need to make an account somewhere that doesn't defederste from anyone with differing opinions?
It seems 'People who disagree with me are ontological evil and should be silenced' isn't the best place to get news and accurate information from.
Sometimes you remove comment and then ban the user and the comment removal hasn't had time to propagate. But yeah, the vileness you see is the ballpark for what we remove.
Can you look at this one by @Pipoca 2 hours ago? I won't paste the full text here for obvious reasons, but it seems pretty reasonable, mostly facts, and not vile at all. It just looks like a bad case of overmoderation.
mod Removed Comment - There's a few things going on.
...
reason: Bothsidesing a genocide
If I recall correctly it described a genocide primarily through the lense of a two sided religious conflict. We remove that stuff as genocide apologia.
Oh. I thought that's exactly what this was.
Why do Palestinians and Israelites hate each other?
Tl;dr Israel showed up and kicked Palestinians out, Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications
Also Israel has two means of aquiring citizenship. First is having Jewish ancestry. The second and more problematic is that anyone who converts to Judaism can apply in a slower process that grants them citizenship. People who aquire citizenship can then live there and gain govt benefits that subsidize living cost, in other words, govt sanctioned stealing of Palestinian homes/land. Thats why Palestinians say they often hear settlers with Brooklyn accents. People who live in places like NYC with high costs of living are basically given the option to have much cheaper housing if they convert and forget their morals about theft.
So basically Israel recruits citizens from groups of people who have financial incentives to move there and lack a sense of humanity to turn down "free stuff stolen from destitute opressed people" and thus you build a citizenry who is totally comfortable with this Apartheid/Genocidal bullshit.
There's more than 2 ways to get Israeli citizenship.
Both of those fall under the "right of return" for Jews.
Non-Jews with permanent residency can become citizens after 3 years if they give up their previous citizenship. Meanwhile, Jews are allowed to be dual citizens. For example, some Druze in the Golan Heights became Israeli citizens that way, particularly due to the Syrian Civil War.
Also, in 1952, Israel passed a citizenship law that gave citizenship to anyone who had been a national of the British mandate in 1948, had registered as an Israeli resident in 1949, and hadn't left Israel before claiming citizenship. So about 170k Arabs were granted citizenship, while the ~720k who fled or were expelled during the war were excluded, although they expanded eligibility a bit in 1980 to include Arabs who had returned to Israel after the war.
Technically it wasn't so much Israel as Europe (and the US) but the Zionists definitely made their mark.
Europe (Britain mostly) and the US pushed the newly formed UN to pass a resolution calling for the creation of Israel in 56% of the territory, but the zionist militias actually took almost 75% of the land while destroying entire villages and murdering the existing population. The West continued to support them after that and have been tacitly approving of them taking even more of the land as the decades have gone by. The West is not blameless, but it was very much Israel that did it.
And there wasn't a place called the United States of America until 1776?
Because Israel took over more land that was fully inhabited by the Palestinians (for the second time)
Assuming you're arguing in good faith, which is a huge assumption, the answer comes down to negotiating power. Egypt was able to get the entire Sinai peninsula back during these negotiations. Israel never fully gave up the Gaza strip, hence the second part of my tl;dr above: "Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications"
Hey fella: they "showed up" from where, and why?
Have any other questions?
Why should the people in the Middle East suffer because of what nazi Germany did?
It's not just the Nazis - it's the entire west.
There were always Jewish people in the area who were often treated as second class citizens by a Muslim majority, btw.
When the west promised Israel to the Jewish people around the globe and the population already living there, many other Arab/Muslim countries were also already gladly exiling their Jewish population as well.
It wasn't "just the west".
With the promise of a state and Zionism as a religious driver they stomped the people already living there, although these people were simultaneously promised their own state called Palestine.
thank you for the info, will check those links for more information
Most normal people don’t. But the political situation of “we were here first” vs. “This is now the land of Israel” causes whatever you see happening nowadays.
Usually it's oil. But this time it's airable land and water.
*arable
It's an option. An outpost in the Middle East that serves as a vanguard to easily start proxy wars with the oil countries. Then deploy boots on the ground while hiding behind plausible deniability. "We just supported our allies."
It's like War on Terror, an excuse for the corporations to get more dollaroos. The problem is not that they are running out, the problem is that others still have some.
Hmm, why would Palestinians hate European settlers that stole their land via the imperial edict of Britain? 🙄
"European settlers" in the sense that they hadn't been in Israel since the Romans kicked them out in '65 for causing too much trouble with all their messiahs and religious zealotry.
2000 years!
They hadn't ever been in Israel, they were born and raised in Europe by parents that were born and raised in Europe by grandparents that were born and raise in Europe etc. etc. They were Europeans, complete with white skin and European culture and European language.
This wasn't refugees returning to their home. It was settlers invading nonwhite people's land and stealing it for themselves.
Yeah, if we stretch this logic even further down, we all get to claim our ancestral land in Africa from 200 millennia ago.
The Netherlands had better watch out... my ancestors came from there about 300 years ago, and that automatically gives me the right to rape, torture and murder my way through Antwerp!
Anrwerp is Belgium, though ;)
Pshhh... there's a difference?
A third of Israelis are (family of) refugees/emigrants from the middle-east or north Africa.
It's not a 'white european' country, which you'd know just looking at them.
Imposing simplistic American notions of race on a complicated conflict is stupid and embarrassing.
Yeah, now. That's because they imported Jews from everywhere they could to become Israeli. It started as a European settler project.
But if you look at the positions of power, the government and businesses and celebrities, you'll see mostly white faces. Israel definitely has a white supremacist bent to it - you don't think an Ethiopian Jew will ever be the prime minister do you?
America's white majority is going to disappear too, but you don't think that will actually end American white supremacy right?
Out of interest, would you describe Romani people (pejorative 'gypsy') as being white?
If they were given their own settler colony and started being treated as an equal by all the other white countries? Yes.
I wouldn't consider a European Jew before the formation of Israel to be white, but they're sure as fuck white now.
Zionist colonisers from Europe forced Palestinians from their land 75 year ago and have continued to inflict death and misery on those that remain.
It goes back a bit further than that, right?
The Jaffa riots, for example, were back in 1921. Palestinians rioted and killed about 50 Jews, and British police killed about 50 Palestinians while trying to restore order.
Jews started buying land and moving to Palestine in the late 1800s.
It then got worse. Protocols of Zion results like Ukrainian pogroms.
I mean there was never an okay level of judaism to Palestinians.
You mean the world finally allowed the Jewish people to establish a country in their ancestral homeland (which has maintained a Jewish presence in that land for the last 4000 years) and the Arab world continually rejects a partition plan that would allow 2 states for 2 people, instead resorting to terrorism and a repeated call for the extermination of the Jewish people, resulting in Israel having to do what it must to protect its interests and the interests of the Jewish people everywhere.
Let’s not forget - the people referring to themselves as Palestinians could have had a state any number of times in the last century, but it’s not really about that, it’s about killing Jews. If a state is what they wanted, they could have had it by now:
San Remo conference decisions, 1920 League of Nations decisions, 1922 Peel Commission proposal, 1937 UN General Assembly proposal, 1947 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1948 Israel’s offer of fixed official borders, 1949 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1967 Begin/Saadat peace proposal, 1978 Rabin’s contour-for-peace, 1995 Barak/Clinton peace offer, 2000 Sharon’s peace gesture, 2005 Olmert/Bush peace offer, 2008 Netanyahu’s invitation for peace, talks, 2009 Obama/Kerry contour-for peace, 2014
Oh look... a genocide apologist has shown up.
What do you mean, "the world," apologist? Antisemitism is purely a western invention - don't blame the entire world for that which white people did.
Also, don't pretend that Zionism is (somehow) a Jewish idea - the idea originated in Christian countries that wanted to dump Jewish people in Palestine due to... drumroll, please... the west's antisemitism.
Do tell, Clyde... which part of the world's murderous antisemitism is the root cause of the idea of a modern-day Israel even making sense to many Jewish people, eh?
Stop pretending that Christian Zionism doesn't predate Jewish Zionism - that cat is out of the bag, Clyde.
Oh, look... the genocide apologist is pretending the side that has been engaging in genocide somehow isn't and that it's the people experiencing genocide that is the cause of the fucking genocide.
They don’t it’s a bit to keep the west from crowding their tourist spots.
Yeah, these attacks and bombings are just an elaborate stage play to keep out the tourists.... 🤦♂️
What's the matter with you?
Civilian meat grinder.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/gaza-airstrikes-israel-1.6998419
So they're airstriking the south after telling everybody in the north to head south.
It’s worth noting that the article relates a claim by Hamas that an Israeli airstrike hit the hospital, while Israel claims it was a misfired rocket from the Islamic Jihad. Both sides of the conflict would have good incentive to lie about this one.
UK Tory MP accuses politicians of being complicit in Israeli war crimes
Sorry for the Reddit link but I couldn't find an alternative source.
Archbishop says Israel warned Gaza hospital three days in a row.
In a press conference, Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem, Hosam Naoum, said the al-Ahli al-Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza was warned on Saturday, Sunday and Monday by the Israeli army to evacuate. It was then bombed on Tuesday.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Archbishop says Israel warned Gaza hospital three days in a row.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Oh wow. They're really trying to shove words in his mouth. He confirmed the facts he knew to be true, then whoever is asking the questions is trying to put together a narrative.
An Israeli family of five whose bodies were discovered in each other’s arms after being killed by Hamas militants were buried side by side in a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners
Abu Obeida: These are the Prisoners Currently with the Resistance
Egyptian here
Based
Israeli think tank lays out a blueprint for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza
An Israeli think tank with ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a report on October 17 promoting the "unique and rare opportunity" for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
https://twitter.com/alextomo/status/1714670858914894046?t=4WP3_stVEo27r23eEc2Exg&s=19
https://twitter.com/GrantSmithEllis/status/1714399186295111815?t=wxkjKFCi8k2oZ0FTiwxV1g&s=19
10-minute video captured by AJArabic around the time the al-Ahli hospital was hit.
As per @Ted55643099:
Water runs out at United Nations shelters in Gaza
Hmm! Why would the US spread Israeli misinformation? It's a mystery! 🙃
Settlers are sick.
I'm curious what disinformation you're talking about given what you quoted? And you implied that it is known, but why do you think said disinformation would be spread?
Also, there are no settlers in Gaza. Haven't been for around 18 years.
The misinformation is the Zionist lie that they turned the water back on, when actual people on the ground in Gaza are telling us they don't have water.
Also, everyone living on stolen Palestinian land and benefiting from land theft and apartheid is a settler. From the river to the sea.
https://streamable.com/hchxwx
Israeli jets confirmed operating in the area based on flares. Hamas rockets confirmed to be firing from an entirely different section of Gaza.
Massacre in Nuseirat Mosque.💔 Many Palestinian dead bodies recovered from beneath the rubbles of Nuseirat main mosque, after the Israeli military bombed it. There were families who fled from North Gaza sheltering inside.
Bombing on a residential tower near Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza city.
How Israeli PR attempts to control the narrative after an attack.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
How Israeli PR attempts to control the narrative after an attack.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I am going to use this thread to share a plethora of related links that should share insight on the nature of this conflict.
Articles
Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew
Perspectives
Dr. Gabor Maté (Holocaust Survivor)
Norman Finklestein
^At 1:43:50, Finklestein asserts that Israel would bomb a residential area, wait for people to come out and call an ambulance, and then bomb the ambulance.
Testimonials
Israeli Soldier's Explosive Tell-All: "Palestinians are right to resist" - Former IDF soldier talks about how he realized that his actions were perpetuating apartheid, and that Palestinians were right to resist through any means.
Breaking the Silence - Israeli NGO where IDF veterans testify their experiences. Some examples:
This is it for the list for now. If you find any other notable background information, feel free to share.
Vox video about Nakba: Link
Settlements in the West Bank: Link
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Link
Link
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Dr. Gabor Maté (Holocaust Survivor)
Norman Finklestein
Former IDF soldier talks about how he realized that his actions were perpetuating apartheid, and that Palestinians were right to resist through any means.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sexual Violence
Events:
'I Saw Fit to Remove Her From the World'
Using an Attack Dog, Israeli Women Soldiers Forced Palestinian Women to Undress | The untold story of the abuse of Palestinian women in Hebron
Opinion pieces:
How colonizers weaponize rape: reflections from the Palestinian case
Nakba74: Rethinking Zionism as a gendered colonial enterprise