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Palestine and Israel
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Of course they’re fighting for their existence. As you stated why would they have one of the best equipped armies? They need to be ready.
Im not saying it’s “just” Hamas. You’re twisting words. I said it’s all the terror armies that Iran backs. One sniff of weakness and they’d all be chomping the bit. Terror armies, Syrians, two faced Jordanians the whole lot. How many times have they tried before.
If you miss that point, which I don’t believe you do, you’d have to be the most ignorant person to ever comment of the geopolitical status of the Middle East..
No, I don’t think I was barking at anything but the poor graphic use of your own words mate
It was kicked off in 1948 Willo when the Naqba started. I am tired of your answers I am sorry to say because they don’t make sense, they have no logic.
The world is coming to understand what is really happening and in the end that is a far greater threat to Israel than anything Hamas can throw at them
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Iran won’t attack Israel.
If they were going to do it why wouldn’t they have done it before ? Why not on October 6 or 2022, or in 2014 or whenever?
Hezbollah and Hamas existed way before Iran backed them. Iran’s backing is opportunistic, to provide a counterweight to the US and to Saudi Arabia. Iran is far too smart to start a war which would escalate to war with the US.
Israel’s fight for existence finished at least 30 years ago when the PLO recognised their right to exist. Probably even before that
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yeah, you were barking up the wrong tree Willo. It was you who raised the "fighting for their existence" not me.
To think that Hamas or Hezbollah or even Iran is some threat to Israel's existence ( which is what you said) is just nonsense. Of course they can cause damage but not threaten their existence. The Israelis use two things to maintain their victim status. One is that there is still some existential threat to them, and the other is that anyone who doesn't support them is anti semitic.
Both are wrong
If any ethnic group should feel they are under an existential threat it is the Palestinians
Fine. Your choice
i didn’t say Iran would attack Israel directly. It provides the support terror armies need to do their dirty work for them.
Israel fights for its existence every day. Otherwise why would they even bother to have a defence force. Or keep modernising it if there was no threat for 30 years. That is absolute poppycock.
Do you think if Israel didn’t react Hezbollah, Hamas and even unaffiliated fighters would be inside Israel in a flash. So would every “jihadi” of whatever nationality. Like the ISIS and Islamic Jihadi fighters that came from all over the world in the name of Islam. It would have *smile* all to do with giving it back to Palestinians. Just another failed Islamic state.
I’ll even give you a tip! They wouldn’t be visiting Israel to take in the holy sites.
I really don’t know why you and the other Palestinian boys club just don’t come straight out and say what you really think should happen,
That all the Jews should either up and leave Israel or be wiped out so the Palestinian have their own homeland.
It’s what you all believe but lack the balls to say.
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FMD Sinnerman. Now I'm certain you have unicorns prancing around at the bottom of your garden.
Of course they fighting for their existance. They do so every day. Only someone who has zero knowledge of the Middle East would think otherwise. Or if they’re antisemitic and/or want an end to the state of Israel.
Tell me what other country has been invaded by its neighbours 3 times in 25 years of its founding. Name one.
It’s been a country that is under constant siege. By other countries, by their proxies or by terror armies. What was Yemen firing? Catherine wheels? Jumping jacks. Ahh but it was because of Gaza. 99% of those Yemenis wouldn’t be able to show Gaza, the WB or even Israel on a map. ”If it’s Jewish, it should be killed”
“ Both are wrong” oh mate come on now. Your love of the Palestinian cause is admirable but let’s not rewrite the whole narrative eh.
It’s not cracker night in Israel. But there is no existential threat to Israel. “Just a few rockets” that’s all
Rather than laugh at serious posts Willo I suggest you have a deep think about having your existence threatened as a nation and what that may look like.
When the vast majority of your population is refugees, when your land is taken forcibly from you, when you live in a walled city, when basics like power and water are controlled by your occupier, when your occupier has members of its government actually saying you should not exist as a nation, when people living in that country are already marketing your land to its citizens and when 30,000 of your population is killed and 60% of your buildings are destroyed …then you can talk about fighting for your existence.
When the vast majority of your population is refugees, when your land is taken forcibly from you, when you live in a walled city, when basics like power and water are controlled by your occupier, when your occupier has members of its government actually saying you should not exist as a nation, when people living in that country are already marketing your land to its citizens and when 30,000 of your population is killed and 60% of your buildings are destroyed …then you can talk about fighting for your existence.
Now you are saying I know nothing about the Middle East. You know that’s not true Willo.
Seriously the amount of firepower the Houthi used on ships in the gulf wouldn’t be equal to a half an hour of bombing of Gaza by Israel. By the way it wasn’t Yemen, the Houthi are the Yemeni rebels. The government is supported by Saudi Arabia and the US. Yemen didn’t bomb anyone even with Catherine wheels.
Saying I am anti semitic is beyond the pale Willo. My Jewish friends would be laughing at you now. You have actually proved the point I made in an earlier post.
I’ll take your disagreements but I will not be called anti semitic. I am not and have never been.
Think about what you are saying.
Rockets from Lebanon do not threaten the existence of Israel !!!
You have proved by your posts you are not a serious poster on this subject.
If you think that anything that happens in this conflict now or in the foreseeable future actually threatens the existence of the state of Israel then you are living in a parallel universe.
Apart from anything else they are supported by the biggest military the world has ever seen.
No serious person believes that Israel is under any existential threat anymore or has been for a long time.
That doesn’t mean they won’t get attacked or have wars and conflicts, but that is not a threat to them existing as a nation.
That threat disappeared a long time ago.
There is only one people who's existence is threatened in the current conflict. The people who had their land taken and were thrown into ghettos in 1948. The people who's lives are controlled by an occupying power. The people who are being deliberately starved by the occupying power right now. The Palestinians.
Israel's existence is not threatened by Hamas, Hesbolah or the Palestinian Authority. They are posturing when they claim their existence is threatened. Just look at the body language of the Israeli leadership, they exude an arrogance that comes from being the more powerful in this situation.
I did post a possible solution some pages ago, The solution from the Israeli government was clear at the UN last year, just look a the map Netanyahu was carrying around - Israel from the river to the sea, no Palestine, no occupied territories.
DS
Israel's existence is not threatened by Hamas, Hesbolah or the Palestinian Authority. They are posturing when they claim their existence is threatened. Just look at the body language of the Israeli leadership, they exude an arrogance that comes from being the more powerful in this situation.
I did post a possible solution some pages ago, The solution from the Israeli government was clear at the UN last year, just look a the map Netanyahu was carrying around - Israel from the river to the sea, no Palestine, no occupied territories.
DS
Israel’s Grim Future: Attrition on All Fronts
The Jewish state is facing security threats from groups based in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen—all of them supported by Iran.Benny Morris
16 Dec 2023 · 10 min read
Where is the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza heading? The short—and dismal—answer: an open-ended, multi-front war of attrition, which will sap Israel’s energy and continue to destabilize the Middle East well into 2024 and the years beyond.
In Gaza itself, the prospect is clear. In coming days, Israel will complete its occupation (and, in many areas, destruction) of the northern third of the Gaza Strip, which includes Gaza City, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. They will also fully subdue the refugee camps at the center of the strip—Nuseirat and Bureij— and Khan Yunis, the second largest urban center in Gaza.
(It should be noted that the term “refugee camp,” while commonly used in this context, is a misnomer: These are, in fact, suburban slums populated by the descendants of refugees who were driven out of what is now Israel 75 years ago.)
If given the time to complete their work by the international community—meaning, effectively, U.S. President Joe Biden—the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will push into the southern end of Gaza, where they will take control of Rafah and the 12-kilometer length of the Gaza-Egypt border. Hamas fighters have no anti-aircraft capabilities, and will be crushed by an Israeli military whose combined-arms capabilities include state-of-the art tanks, well-trained assault engineers, and abundant air power. Given enough time, this Israeli military campaign will effectively dismantle Hamas’ control of Gaza, though the associated ideology, and its believers, will remain.
But thanks to the underground network of surviving concrete tunnels and bunkers that lie beneath Gaza’s towns and “refugee camps,” scattered squads of Hamas fighters will still be able to use small arms and explosive devices to attack the IDF units that Israel will leave inside Gaza after the main campaign is over. Eliminating this threat, Israel’s generals have admitted, will take months, and maybe years, of dangerous counter-insurgency operations. Inevitably, Israel will sustain many more casualties, on top of the more than 100 soldiers who’ve already died in Gaza over the last two months.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been vague about who he wants to control Gaza once Israeli forces leave. There are currently no good candidates. The Palestinian Authority (PA)—the more secular political institution that emerged from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its dominant Fatah faction—has only tenuous control over much of the West Bank. And opinion polls show that the majority of Palestinians—in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza alike—support Hamas, the PLO’s bitter rival.
In any case, Netanyahu opposes the PA taking over the Strip; as he says the PA’s ultimate aim is the same as that of Hamas, Israel’s destruction. Moreover, western powers are unlikely to send troops to prop up an unpopular PA regime presiding over Gaza’s ruins. The same is true of Washington’s nominal Arab allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Egypt. Any arriving forces would be seen by Gaza’s 2.3-million residents (and much of the Arab world besides) as Israel’s lackeys. They’d likely face an insurgency soon after arriving, and would return home as soon as they began taking casualties (following the precedent set by the American and European forces that tried keeping the peace in Beirut in the 1980s). And so the most likely scenario is that the IDF, assisted by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, will remain in charge of Gaza for some time.
And yet, Gaza may not even prove to be the greatest of Israel’s problems in the coming months, and, probably, years. Along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, and to a lesser degree along the adjoining Israel-Syria border, the Iranian-backed Shiite Islamist militia known as Hezbollah has been prosecuting a low-intensity war of attrition, firing rockets and mortar shells at Israeli border-hugging villages and IDF units, as well as targeting Israeli forces with effective Russian- and Iranian-made anti-tank missiles. Hezbollah commenced these attacks just hours after the post-10/7 IDF assault on Gaza had begun.
Israel has replied in kind. But these exchanges have been episodic. And so far, the two sides have limited their targeting to a depth of five-to-seven kilometers on both sides of the border, being mutually disinclined to turn this mini-war of attrition into a full-scale war.
But even though this conflict has been much smaller in scale than the war in Gaza, it has still understandably pinned down large IDF forces in the north. Moreover, the constant rocketing, along with the threat of a Hamas-like ground assault by Hezbollah, has forced some 50,000 inhabitants to leave their homes in the border-hugging Israeli villages and towns; and they now remain dispersed in the homes of relatives and in hotels in other parts of the country. The same remains true of a similar (or slightly larger) number of Israelis who’d inhabited communities near the Gaza Strip before Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack.
In both cases, many of these “internal refugees” have made it clear that they will not return to their homes so long as Hamas and Hezbollah rockets, missiles, and suicide squads remain a threat. In the south especially, it seems that residents are done with the pre-10/7 status quo that has existed since 2007, by which the threat of rocket attacks has been part of everyday life. For the Israeli government, the elimination of the threat posed by Hamas and Hezbollah isn’t just a military imperative, but a domestic political imperative as well.
Hezbollah fields a much stronger military force than Hamas. It has an estimated 150,000 Iranian-supplied rockets and missiles that are far more accurate (and generally have longer ranges) than Hamas’ largely homemade variety.
Hezbollah’s own political calculus is complex, however, because—unlike Hamas in Gaza—the group, while politically dominant in Lebanon, isn’t the country’s only powerbroker. And a full-on war between Hezbollah and Israel would result in the destruction of much of Lebanon’s infrastructure throughout the country, not just in the areas that Hezbollah controls.
Israeli and American (and perhaps French) diplomats are now quietly trying to persuade the Lebanese government and Hezbollah to adopt a plan whereby Hezbollah would withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon to areas north of the Litani River, which lies about 25 kilometers from the Israeli border, as originally called for by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 back in 2006.
That resolution also called for the disarming of Lebanon’s militias, including Hezbollah—something that didn’t happen, as the UN peacekeeping force assigned to southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, was neutered by Hezbollah intimidation and threats. Over the last 17 years, Hezbollah has gradually bolstered its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon, including its elite al-Hajj Radwan Force, which Israel treats as a major threat. Prior to October 7, in fact, IDF brass always believed that it was Hezbollah terrorists from Lebanon, not those dispatched by Hamas from Gaza, who were most likely to launch a massive cross-border strike.
Over the past two months, Israeli officials have decided that dealing decisively with Hezbollah, if it is to be done at all, will have to wait until Hamas is adequately subdued—as fighting a two-front war is a bad idea. But if diplomatic efforts to pacify southern Lebanon fail, Israel may be forced to conduct a full-scale invasion.
In a full-scale war, Hezbollah will rain down a fusillade that overwhelms Israel’s multi-layered anti-missile/anti-rocket defenses. If this attack causes large-scale casualties and devastation in Israel’s population centers, as seems likely, Israel’s response would be to devastate Beirut and Lebanon’s infrastructure, followed by an IDF ground invasion that could take Israeli soldiers as far north as Beirut (much as was the case in 1982, when Israel sought to root out an earlier generation of Arab rocket launchers belonging to the PLO).
But winter weather and ground conditions in Lebanon would not be favorable to Israel, especially as its forces would be under constant attack from resilient Hezbollah light infantry who are well-armed with modern anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry.
And even if such a campaign were successful in the short term, IDF soldiers would still find themselves in a hostile country, surrounded by Hezbollah squads hiding amidst southeast Lebanon’s wooded hills, villages, caves, underground bunkers and tunnels. These fighters would harry the occupying Israeli forces for months on end—yielding a second war of attrition.
Israel’s Grim Future: Attrition on All Fronts
The Jewish state is facing security threats from groups based in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen—all of them supported by Iran.
quillette.com
The US has consistently supported Israel and by this vote continues to do so.
A strongly worded call for an immediate ceasefire, coupled with the withdrawal of our diplomatic representation in Israel, is the only reasonable way to protest the behaviour of the Israeli govt.
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