Germany would probably never have been defeated in WWII without massive air strikes

I didn't realize Gaza was about Jihad or Sharia Law...

 

Another great post Deji. I've said this before many times but the people, both Israeli and Palestinian, are held hostage by extremists on both sides and as long as that continues the situation will never get better.

 

Gaza elected Hamas. Hamas is about Jihad.

sheesh

 

The problem though is looking at this as only a matter that what is driving the Palestinians is Jihad and Sharia. It is the fear of the extremists of the other side that empowers the extremists on one side.

I agree Israel has a right to exist and a right to self-defense but one also has to consider how do actions like continuing to build settlements on land that never was recognized as part of Israel or blockading and crippling Palestinian economic development contribute to the situation? My own impression is that most Westerners support Israel because they see them like us. They are modern, well educated and a democracy while ignoring the fact that extremism plays an outsized role in their politics and society.

 

And Israel elected Likud which is about cracking down on the Palestinians and continuing to build settlements.

Both people have been ill served by their leadership.

 

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Videos of such stuff are meaningless. The fact that the most right wing groups in any country teach hatred and murder to their children is a given. This is true regardless of the tone of background music in the video, the words used to sugar coat it, or the dramatic editing involved.

We are talking about two countries who are currently led by far right elements from their society. This is the worse scenario.

First of all, Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem elected Hamas (population roughly 4.4m). There are roughly 10m Palestinians in the world. At the time of the elections, the only party in existence significantly capable of providing employment, shelter and sustenance to Gazans was Hamas. It used to be the case that there were other parties capable of doing this, but the blockade of Gaza put Hamas in monopolistic control of the Gaza strip. You can't run away, they have all the weapons and control all the incoming/outgoing trade. This is not an election anymore than that of Iran.

To put it in simple terms, Hamas won a free and fair election where the options were limited to Hamas and Fatah. While this may seem sufficient to most most voters in Western democracies, it is in reality of course a sham. Nevertheless, Fatah's Barghouti continued to campaign for Fatah from his jail cell while still in complete dispute with his own party leaders.

Further, in the lead up to the elections Israeli authorities arbitrarily detained several Hamas party leaders essentially rendering them heroes. They also banned election campaigning in Jerusalem, which was expected to be largely non-Hamas votes. This campaign of terrorizing voters continued as Israel announced a campaign to ban voting in Jerusalem. When this issue was raised with the honorable George W Bush, he said that there should be no delay in the elections despite the Israeli intrusion into voting. Mind you, George Bush is from a country where an insane number of voters are uncomfortable with United Nations monitors being present near polling stations. Finally, a "limited" number of voters and campaigners would be allowed to participate if they receive permission from Israeli police. Obviously, Hamas campaigners were not allowed to campaign and this of course furthered their "street cred" among Palestinians. If the country which occupies them doesn't want it, then it must be good for Palestinians. Ultimately, Israeli authorities transferred ballot boxes to Palestinian authorities - an egregious violation of sovereignty.

Given that all public opinion polls before mass Israeli intrusion pointed to Fatah winning the elections, one has to wonder if Israel's actions unintentionally swung the election in favor of Hamas. What really did them in IMO is when Fatah announced they would honor all past agreements with Israel, in direct opposition to the Palestinian population in the occupied territories.

What ensued of course was comical, as Fatah basically proved that it's no less autocratic than Hamas by attempting to use violence to oust Hamas. Israelis further strengthened the belief of many Palestinians that Mahmoud Abbas is out of touch with Palestinians by supporting him with an intensified blockage of Gaza. When the enemy state and a political party in your country are fighting the same fight, it says a lot to the people. For example, if Democrats go to war with Republicans, and simultaneously North Korea specifically institutes measures to go to war with Republicans, then something is up.

The rest is history of course. The Palestinians chose between a party that is more hostile to them (Fatah) versus a party that is more hostile to their oppressors (Hamas). As far as morality goes, it's a wash. As far as self interest goes, there is only one choice of course. Now, Hamas are rich and powerful and insurmountable. No one bothers to look at the Fatah charter to see that their stated goals are equally hostile towards Israel.

This is the story of Palestinian leadership, if you care to know it. It's not the situation where Palestinians were choose between peace and war and they chose war - as most of your news channels and the resident xenophobes here purport. The reality is that roughly 25% of eligible Palestinians in the world chose between two hostile parties: Hamas (hostile to Israel, dominant in 50% of Pal territories) and Fatah (hostile to Palestinians, dominant in the other 50% of territories).

It would actually be startling if a population of humans geographically surrounded and blockaded by a country whose government is rapidly being infested by extremist right wing politics and in possession of exponentially more sophisticated weapons which they acquire at a magical discount from the strongest military force in history, incidentally the same country which insists on being the "mediator" in peace negotiations, while bribing or assaulting without exception all possible neighbouring supporters of Palestine... well, if those guys elected a peaceful yet toothless government in the wake of this whole thing, it would be contrary to what every neurologist and psychologist today knows to be logical. Regardless of their religion or their race. You and I would never elect Hamas to govern our countries in our situations. But you and I will never know what it means to be a Gazan, just like we will never know what it means to be a Native American just before Manifest Destiny or a Jew before the holocaust. What we do know, and your media outlets have mastered, is that injecting large amounts of fear into a population makes them malleable and gullible.

So let's stop the fear and the hate so that Israelis and Palestinians can stop voting for those monkeys.

 

No I'm saying both have taken actions and policies that have made the situation worse.

I'm going to make a nuanced argument but it will probably be lost on you but for everyone else.

Hamas isn't all of the Palestinians or even all of Gaza. They won a close election against a very corrupt and ineffectual Fatah and likely for reasons that have little to do with Jihad or Sharia. Likud isn't all of Israel either. That said these arguments frequently get boiled down to justifying actions of collective punishment by pointing to the leadership.

The same argument has been brought up by those on the Pro-Palestinian side in terms of justifying rocket attacks.

As I keep on saying both people are held hostage by extremists who find it fairly easy to derail any chance of peace. The Palestinians are held hostage by Hamas and other radicals who do things like shoot rockets into Israel and kidnap Israelis. The Israelis are held hostage by extremists who make policies that make it difficult for the Palestinians to develop or have self-determination while also building settlements, many times in violation of Israel's own law.

For anyone that doesn't think that there aren't Israeli extremists who don't want peace just remember that Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremists not a Muslim one.

 

So the Gazan citizens are held hostage by Hamas or Fatah and are unable to do anything about it because they live in fear of them?

Hate begets hate. Palestine needs a political party that is hostile to Hamas and Fatah and hate in general. Israel is going nowhere and until Palestinians learn to live with that fact and become a part of the nation they live in, they will continue to see their children die.

South Africa didn't start healing until they started listening to somebody that wasn't preaching hate.

 

lol! Thanks for the laugh.

1) They are in a siege and Fatah and Hamas have all the power. Call it a hostage situation if you like. They don't see it that way. What they see is that the realistic outcome of any power in their land will go to Fatah or Hamas, both of which are terrible in their own way, both of which state in their constitutions that they want to replace Israel, and both of which have on various occasions agreed to peace deals where recognition of Israel is necessary.

2) No one asks you to elect a government which is hostile to Republicans and Democrats. The expectation is that you will elect whoever you feel works in the best interest of Americans. In the case of Palestinians, a political party hostile to Hamas and Fatah can't and should not be a central tenet of their choice. What they need is a party which represents them - and that's maybe neither Fatah nor Hamas, nor is it necessarily a party which hates those two.

3) Palestinians that you are referring to don't live in Israel. If they did they would be protected by Israeli law, which they are not. Even those who do live in Israel interact rarely with Israelis - except as domestic labor sometimes. If these people actually were allowed to live together, there would be far less hatred, and far less susceptibility to hate-filled rhetoric from media and politicians.

4) Nelson Mandela was listed as a terrorist by the United States, and the African National Congress to which he belonged was listed as a terrorist organization by the United States. Specifically Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher supported the Apartheid government and labelled Mandela a terrorist and his organization a terrorist organization. Nelson Mandela and members of the ANC were removed from a terrorist watchlist in 2008. Apartheid ended in the early 90's. Had the people of South Africa waited to listen to someone who the oppressor considered "peaceful", then the Apartheid would not have ended and the US government and radical members of Apartheid government would still be friends and oppressors today, as they were every single day until the dissolution of the apartheid government became inevitable. This is why it was so funny but sad for American officials to act like they were such big Mandela fans at this funeral. Obviously, you and many Americans didn't realize how foolish this looked to everyone else who knew the history.

 

This equivocation does no one good and doesn't make you seem like a balanced, reasonable individual as you may have intended it to. Do not remove this issue from its occupier-occupied context, doing do would remove it from reality.

 

Desperate times for Zionazi trolls

 

No Palestinian government that states in its constitution that it wants to replace Israel acts in any way in the best interest of Palestinians. Such a government will only lead to death and destruction of their own people..... obviously we have plenty of evidence to support that.

For the people to support such a government in any way is to invite destruction.

 

It's certainly true Nazi Germany would not have been unilaterally defeated without a massive aerial bombardment. Germany wouldn't have won, but complete occupation would have been hard. The two sides would ultimately have had to negotiate some peace compromise with perhaps a government transition to something more palatable to the Allies.

Of course, Gaza is already conquered and occupied. And this fighting broke out because of the failure of negotiations on a peace settlement. If we're looking for a WWII corrollary, the French Resistance might be a better one. They also engaged in guerilla warfare tactics and sabotage and hid among the citizenry, while their occupiers tried to root them out, though I don't think they ever did so by bombing them. Incidentally, the PLO fits roughly in the role of Vichy France, with both trying to blunt the damage of occupation by offering a little collaboration (both were also ultimately pushed to the side by their respective occupiers, fueling more radical elements). I also see potential comparisons with the Warsaw Ghetto, but I'll leave that for some other time.

 

US elected GWB, therefore Americans are _____
US elected Obama, therefore Americans are ______

U see how that logic fails?

 

That article doesn't really say anything about WWII to justify the OP title. There's like one sentence about the German/England analogy.

And besides, the title is completely inaccurate. Most all WWII historians say Germans lost the war in spreading themselves to thin by attacking Russia and losing the oil battle in North Africa...way back in 1942. The rest was just the Allies clinching their submission hold more and more. The bombings were not a major strategical factor.

But back on topic:

Mad Max also did not accept a cease fire despite the hostages being used as shields

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Who run Bartertown?

 

Russians won the war with boots and blood on the ground. It would've taken longer and made Germany nite hellish, but Russian momentum gained after the infusion of western supplies.

To exploit the US/Britain angle reeks more of targeted jingoism to propagandize than a rallying point of reason (it rarely is) rooted with historical authenticity. It's a myth to think exclusive use of air strikes win wars anyways.