Israel is Coming Apart at the Seams, It Seems

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/...plan-to-create-buffer-zone-in-gaza-as-a-crime

It looks like Israel is planning to build a one kilometer buffer zone between Gaza and Israel, basically a tiny DMZ.

Since it's being built on Gazan territory, the usual suspects are calling it illegal, immoral, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and every other endlessly recycled complaint imaginable.

https://x.com/QudsNen/status/1751130327060246599?s=20

Jordan already forced it to rename or shutdown. The owner claimed that it was a reference to his niece's birthday. Turns out, he doesn't have a niece with that day as her birthday. He then proceeded to praise Hamas in multiple videos uploaded to X.

When's the last time a western ally was being indicted for genocide?

I mean, they didn't bother with the South African presentation and then they covered the Israeli rebuttal. It's almost like there's a concerted effort to keep the whole thing quiet and to ensure those people just die quietly without much fuss being raised.

You're very, very confused indeed.

The case of Ukraine v Russia in the ICJ (contrary to what you're implying, dishonestly or out of ignorance) had nothing to do with the accusation that Russia was committing genocide. In fact, it was a case brought by Ukraine attempting to refute the opposite allegation. That is, Russia had alleged that Ukraine was committing genocide and used it as a basis for their "special military operation". (The court obviously found in favour of Ukraine and Russia ignored the finding.)

The appropriate comparison here is the case of the Rohingya genocide (Gambia v Myanmar). In that, Myanmar was accused of genocide. The case is ongoing but back in 2019, the court found in favour of Gambia and instructed of Myanmar exactly the same provisional measures that it has now instructed of Israel.

These include an instruction to refrain from killing members of the group [Palestinians], among others. So while there isn't an explicit determination in favour of a ceasefire, there is an instruction that cannot be realised without one. Not to mention that the term "ceasefire" itself carries with it implications in law that might legitimise Israel's campaign. Because in law they are not actually engaged in combat against an external enemy, as they claim. They are acting against the population of a territory that they occupy.

The court also made findings of fact, including that there was a plausible case of genocide. They called out and quoted specific genocidal statements by Israeli leaders. They specifically rejected Israel's jurisdictional quibble. They ignored Israel's "self defense" argument entirely. And they said that the provisional measures were being ordered to mitigate the "clear risk" to the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention.

You can read the whole thing here.

A couple of weeks back, American and Israeli leaders condemned the South African case as "without merit", "outrageous" and so forth. You and they are living in bizarro-world if you think that the court finding in favour of South Africa on all of these points is a vindication of that position.

The tortured attempts at justifying this would be hilarious were the matter not so serious.

The court didn't find that Israel comitted genocide! No shit - they haven't had the trial yet!
The court told Israel to prevent genocide - that means attacking Hamas some more!

Seriously, given the supposed weakness of the SA case, if I were the Israelis right now, I'd be furious that these highly-paid lawyers had botched things so badly!

But of course, it can be supposed that the attempts to spin it as a win are a positive - maybe this way there is more chance that there will be some level of compliance.

It must be added that the decision by major donors to defund UNRWA was a calculated effort to distract from the ICJ case, a middle-finger to the court from the west and the moment that they crossed the line from complicity into active participation in genocide.

UNRWA employs 30,000 people. That 7 of them (all now suspended) having been accused of involvement with Hamas, based largely on evidence obtained through Shin Bet torture can be used to just off cutting off funding for the only body distributing food to 2 million people is perhaps the most despicable thing I've ever seen.

Not what I said - you assert that the response by Israel to the massacre of it's citizens is genocide. The ICC actually ordered Russia to cease combat operations and leave the borders of Ukraine in 2020, due to Ukraine's original requests in 2014 and 2015 to investigate the Russian crimes against humanity and war crimes that the ICC found the Russians responsible for BEFORE their current invasion launched in 2022. There was already a cease fire order by the ICC that was 2 years old at the time of the Russian mass invasion that included the attempt to capture Kyiv.

The ICC could have ordered a ceasefire in it's preliminary investigation in Israel, but it chose not to.

Here's the big difference - Israel launched a war to respond to a mass terrorist attack on it's soil by the recognized government of the Gaza territory. Russia launched a war of aggression in it's neighbor for the express purpose of conquering it and incorporating it into it's own territory. There was no cassus belli for Russia to attack, as Ukraine was a peaceful neighbor only trying to defend it's own territory. The same can not be said for Hamas.

And your bullshit knows no bounds - South Africa and multiple Arab nations expressed their distress that no cease fire was ordered. They expected a cease fire to be ordered, like one was for Russia in Ukraine.

Your assertion that you can't be at war with another country that attacked you without violating genocide conventions is laughable. If so, then the ICC and UN have declared their complete irrelevancy to all future discussions. But that is not their interpretation, it's your spin. There always have been civilian casualties in war - per the UN itself the percentage of civilian casualties to military casualties for all conflicts over the last 100 years is 90% civilian, 10% military. The fact that number is significantly lower in this conflict somehow gets ignored, let alone the fact that this is a war in a densely populated area where the militants intentionally try to blend in with the civilians and use them as human shields, and they themselves have stated openly on multiple occasions that they aren't concerned with casualties among their own people.

And your assertion that Israel controlled Gaza prior to the Oct 7th attack is just as unreasonable. Where did the 13300 rocket and artillery attacks from Palestine come from then in the last 20 years? How was there an election that put Hamas in power? There was a blockade to try to stop the importation of terrorist weapons. That's not the same thing as accepting control of the region. For that matter, they clearly don't occupy all of Gaza even now.

12 of them, 7 of them being teachers. And fired not suspended, and now one of them has been found to have personally taken a hostage while accompanying Hamas terrorists on Oct 7th.

Is being an active participant in hostage taking of innocent civilians an issue or not?

Israeli intelligence just submitted a list of 190 UNRWA staff, who played roles in the Oct 7th massacre. Evidently this is the dossier that caused the US and nine other western nations to suspend aid to UNRWA. What's more, about 1200 UNRWA officials are believed to have ties to Hamas or Islamic Jihad.

https://www.reuters.com/world/middl...n-staff-hamas-islamic-jihad-roles-2024-01-29/
https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-784128

And the complaints against UNRWA have been ongoing for years, including the fact that they run schools that indoctrinate children into hatred of Jews and deny the existence of the state of Israel.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/0...s-united-states-funding-corruption-education/

UNRWA became a job's program for Palestinians - and as Hamas took over Gaza, they clearly infiltrated and corrupted the mission of UNRWA.

I share their distress. I'd prefer that the court had gone further.

I made no such assertion.

That's not a fact.

And seeing as you apparently are now unclear of the difference between the ICC and ICJ, and unaware of the legal status of the Gaza Strip according to the entire world outside of Israel, I'm not going to bother with the rest.

Uh huh.

https://press.un.org/en/2022/sc14904.doc.htm

As to Hamas' casualty figures, we know they don't count militants at all, every person there is a civilian, even the hostage takers, mass murderers, and the ones firing the rockets.

Two studies put the number of known civilian casualties between 62-68%. It's difficult to know what percentage of adult males are fighters.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)02640-5/fulltext
https://goodauthority.org/news/gaza-casualty-data/

And oh no, I said ICC when I meant ICJ. Clearly that discredits every other thing I said, coming from the World Socialist Propagandist.

No, you can't refute what I said because you can't refute fact. The Russian war of aggression against Ukraine is not the same thing as Israel's response against a massive terrorist attack against it's civilians by the government that controls Gaza.

An excellent article on the "rules-based international order", why it's different from "international law" and why the two are increasingly in conflict. The ICJ case and the events surrounding it are at the focal point of this, and pivotal in what system will prevail in the world in the future.

Link

What impact has the pause in funding UNRWA as investigations into their usage by Hamas terrorists caused? Here's an updated budget until the aid is resumed. Those horrible Western genocidal countries have been feeding Palestine for decades. The ten countries that ceased aid for the moment are almost 80% of it's budget.

Yes, they will stop operating that the end of February if this stands. What do you imagine will happen then?

If the Muslim nations actually cared about Palestinians, they'd start funding UNRWA at the levels that western countries have since it's inception.

What do you think are the odds that that happens?

Wasn't the question. Your glee at the imminent starvation of very large numbers of people is palpable. They're already eating animal feed in northern Gaza and a generation of children are likely to be stunted, at the least.

But this is "exactly what they deserve", isn't it?

Ah, so if the West stops funding free food for Palestine, then it's the West's fault? But if the 50 Muslim nations in the world don't step up.... it's still the West's fault?

And no, I don't have 'glee.' But going on 85 years of constant attacks aren't done in a vaccuum. We are going to murder you, please give us water is a uniquely stupid take, and it's passively endorsed by people like you. The refugee agency in question clearly has members helping in their genocide attempts. That needs to be addressed.

Of course there will be consequences - why do you think Israel has been dominated by it's right wing politically? Because their neighbors have made no bones about their genocidal intent.

It's unsustainable over the long term, and yeah, completely foreseeable as to it's outcome.

Yes, the consequences are the deaths of a large part of the population. You know that, you're fine with that, you're fine with the actions that lead to that and you know those actions lead to that.

But it's not genocide because reasons. It's all their own fault that we have to do this to them.

Really disturbing that that's where we're at.

I know that a great many of those actions were actions taken by Palestinians. Egypt's border wall is there for a reason. Kuwait expelled 85% of Palestinians due to their support of Iraq's invasion. Jordan's 40 years of martial law after Palestinian refugees assassinated their heads of state and tried to overthrow their nation in Black September.

Now we have URNWA employees committing terrorist attacks on Israel.

But hey, if their cause is so moral and just, other countries will pick up the slack. The West has predominately been responsible for feeding the Gazans for 75 years now.

If other countries don't, then surely the blame isn't on the governments who did feed them.

You'd think the US would have cut off aid when a Palestinian murdered Bobby Kennedy.

This is all very sad. But the saddest part is how much of this is self-inflicted. Gaza is not going to destroy Israel.

They may very well destroy themselves if they continue to refuse to reject the genocide of their neighbors.

Hamas broke the ceasefire with their massacre that started this current conflict. Hamas refuses to surrender or release the hostages they took that day. Hamas is still fighting and killing IDF soldiers as of today. Hamas is the governing entity in Gaza. Hamas openly takes a portion of all humanitarian aid sent into Gaza to support their military campaign. A majority of Gazans apparently still support Hamas.

But no, nothing is ever their fault.


Y'know, Amaris loves comparing the situation in Gaza to the Black Lives Matter movement in America, but even Black Lives Matter tends to acknowledge that some people killed or injured by the police brought it on themselves because they were engaging in violent behavior and wouldn't surrender when the alternative was getting subdued with violent force.

If this were WWII, some of these posters would have been fully in favor of Japanese Americans being put in internment camps, that they deserved it, and that calling them out on it is "racism."
You can't fight bigotry with reason. They want to hate people, and so they hate them. It doesn't matter how many die. These guys are more in line with Lindsay "Bomb Iran Now" Graham than any Democrat. They're deeply conservative, right wingers, neo-fascists. They just don't realize it yet.

As far as I'm concerned, they're @Dinner, but they're grasping at their last vestiges of respectability which protect them from being seen as such.

Anyway, did you see Nancy Pelosi's recent comments to people protesting the Palestinian genocide? She told them to go back to China where the protester's headquarters were. Racist ass piece of shit presiding over other racist ass pieces of shit.

Interesting you should try to invoke WWII-era Japan here, since the government of Japan plotted a monstrous surprise attack that killed a bunch of people, then got their asses kicked harder and harder by the country they attacked until they finally surrendered.

I bet 1945 Amaris would have been sending letters to the editor every day crying that the Pacific front was an exercise in white supremacy, that Japan didn't do anything wrong, and that fighting Japan at all constituted genocide. And why aren't we sending crates of cheeseburgers to the Emperor, that's ethnic cleansing! Japan just wants to be free!

And then 1945 Ricky would say it's genocide that the Allies weren't doing more to protect the lives of Japanese kamikaze pilots.

Did you just compare a million children to kamikaze pilots?

And actually 1945 Ricky would have been demanding that the allies bomb the infrastructure - rail lines and so forth - being used to carry out the holocaust. Because you know, they decided not to do that given the lack of military utility.

It's for this reason and others that we have the Genocide Convention, obliging all states to prevent such crimes as they are occurring.

I severely doubt you would, since that same infrastructure was almost certainly also used for civilian purposes, and you'd have have labelled such attacks "collective punishment" and claimed it was a form of genocide against the German people. Not to mention the concentration camps themselves were also producing bricks, why do the cruel immoral allied forces want innocent German civilians to be deprived of bricks with which to build or repair their homes? Churchill wants German children freezing to death in the streets over Christmas!

Nonsense. I'm getting me some of that Putin, Xi Jinping, and GOP protest money. Who knew you could get paid big money for protesting the genocide of a people? Here I've been against it for free, like an idiot!

So, if a substantial portion of the Israeli government attended a conference discussing new Israeli settlements in Gaza and said of its current inhabitants things like "voluntary' emigration is at times a situation you impose until they give their consent", that would be a problem, wouldn't it?

Yes, we are well aware you would prefer other countries to do your fighting for you. And for some reason you think you get a say as to what that should entail.

Remember, Rick lives in a nation with virtually no military now, and relies on other countries to protect it's coast. So there contribution to the defense of the innocent will always be nothing more than a strongly worded letter.

Ireland was famously neutral during WWII, and took no action to stop the genocide going on at all.

Oh right, they DID gave a statement... that they could do nothing.

… small nations like Ireland do not and cannot assume a role as defenders of just causes except [their] own ... Existence of our own people comes before all other considerations … no government has the right to court certain destruction for its people; they have to take the only chance of survival and stay out.

Secretary of External Affairs Joe Walsh, 1941.

Oh, and they did send brigades to fight in the Spanish civil war - one for the fascists, one for the communists.

And one of the foremost leaders of the IRA Sean Russell went to Berlin in WWII for extensive demolitions and sabotage training to use against the British. Documents recovered from the Abewehr post war show he was given explicit instructions on what sites to bomb at the behest of German intelligence. Luckily he died on the way back on a Nazi sub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Russell

But at least they welcomed in the Jewish refugee.... uh, no. They took almost no one.

From the Irish Department of Justice in 24 Sept 1945:
It is the policy of the Department of Justice to restrict the immigration
of Jews. The wealth and influence of the Jewish community in this
country, and the murmurs against Jewish wealth and influence are
frequently heard. As Jews do not become assimilated with the native
population, like other immigrants, there is a danger that any big
increase in their numbers might create a social problem.4

Another document, from 28 February 1953, argued that Justice's 'policy'
of excluding Jews had been supported by other government departments:
'In the administration of the alien laws it has always been recognised in the
Departments of Justice, Industry and Commerce and External Affairs that
the question of the admission of aliens of Jewish blood presents a special
problem and the alien laws have been administered less liberally in their
case'.5 Efforts by Irish Jews to rescue co-religionists from the Third Reich
were opposed in particular by two prominent officials. One of these was Peter
Berry, the senior civil servant in the Department of Justice who wrote the
above-cited memoranda and others like it between 1938 and 1953. The other
was Charles Bewley, Ireland's envoy to Berlin from 1933 to 1939. Bewley
was both openly anti-Semitic and an enthusiastic admirer of the Nazis.6

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24871406

Wow, you're able to selectively quote stuff from Wikipedia!

But apparently unable to distinguish between the Irish state and the IRA. And apparently hold the view that I'm either bound to agree with all of that or am somehow responsible for it.

13,000 dead Palestinian children. This is just a game, some hypothetical moralism on a message board, and as long as it doesn't affect them personally, there's no reason for them to change.

85 pages of this. It could be 850 pages, the end result would be the same.

The best answer for everyone involved would be the Palestinians to be relocated. 75 years they've had to make peace with the existence of Israel. They refuse to do so.

But no one will take them in, because they tend to kill those who do, and try to overthrow their governments. And even when other governments took responsibility for them in Gaza and the West Bank they continued to be hyper-violent against anyone that didn't back their attacks against Israel.

So we are left with this morass. Egypt doesn't want them, Syria doesn't want them, Jordan doesn't want them, Lebanon doesn't want them. They've brought unrest and death to all of those countries, as well as assassinating a US presidential candidate and allying with Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait.

This is objective reality.

The best we can hope for is that the Palestinian Authority which is considerably less crazy than Hamas is given control.

Which a conference in Jordan occurred recently with all of those regional powers in attendance and that was profferred as a solution.

Hamas wasn't invited.