well that escalated quickly! Business as usual or the tip of the iceberg?

Sure there is. It just hasn’t gone up for you yet.

Yeah, totally symmetrical and analogous. 9/11 didn't also involve the hostile takeover of civilian airliners and the murder of every passenger thereon or anything in addition to the destruction of the several buildings.

Could have fooled me with your posting in this thread.

Glad to see you finally acknowledge that. And Israel has retaliated and upped the anti.

It's bad. Both sides are doing bad things. That's what happens in war. But this latest round of fighting was started by Hamas. Do you acknowledge that?

Absolutely not. But of course, one can go back thousands of years with that game if one wishes, so what's the point?

And "bad" is weasel words. These strikes are fundamentally wrong, and the IDF should desist.

Really? Hamas firing rockets into Israel didn't start this latest escalation? How was it started then?

That's a dodge on your part. No one was asking that.

Bad , wrong, horrible,....whatever word works for you. There was no justification for Hamas to fire its rockets into Israel. If you think there was, then explain. If you don't, then why are you arguing?

Read this

Proportional response is a thing. Thanks to the Iron Dome, there have been just 7 fatalities from the Hamas rockets. Seven is too many, yes. But Israel's response has been completely disproportionate. It always is.

You might THINK the "Chicago Way" line from The Untouchables is cool, but when it involves civilians it most certainly is not.

This is the warfare equivalent of one BLM protestor throwing a rock at a cop and the cops opening fire on the whole crowd with live ammo and artillery.

Of course, from your posts here you might just be totally fine with that, too.

To be fair it's not from the Palestinian's lack of trying that Israel has only had seven casualties. Should they get rid of their Iron Dome so that more die? What sense would that make? Palestine has fired HUNDREDS of rockets so far.

Of course not. But if you're Superman, you don't bust out the heat vision on the sucker who tried to punch you.

You also probably don't say "it's OK, keep hitting me, I'll usually be able to stop you from hurting me too much."

And if you're Israel and your neighbors want you to no longer exist, you don't say "well, because of our shield your rockets only killed seven people instead of 100, so you can just keep on firing them."

You do if you're looking for justification to continue the genocide of the people whose land you've been "annexing" for 70 years.

Israel's like "why are all of these Palestinians squatting on our land?"
"And now they just attack us for no good reason! They must hate us for our freedom."

So what should Israel do? Focus on defense only and just hunker down, cozied up under the Iron Dome and wait until Palestine/Hamas runs out of rockets? They can get more from Iran you know, who would be more than willing to help.

one drastic but possibly feasible solution: relocate all the Palestinians to Iran or some other nation(s) that shares the common goal of wanting to destroy Israel. Surely they would help their Muslim brothers. Israel gets a little more elbow room, and Palestine won't have a Jewish neighbor to deal with. Iran has more bodies to help them carry out terrorism - good help is hard to get you know!
The U.S.A. has one less thing to deal with or be blamed for on their plate. Bottom line everybody wins!

Stop. Stealing. Land.

That's what underlies all of these issues, and it's what led directly to the latest round of violence, something of which @T.R claims to be unaware.

Except, it wouldn't work that way. The Holy Land is as sacred to Muslims as it is to Jews and Christians. If the US offered to give every Christian living in that part of the world a nice home in the US if the Christians would agree to move to the US and give up every claim to the Holy Land, how many of them do you think would do it? Probably not a lot, and the Muslims would be no different. So long as people think that god gave them title to the land, they're going to be more than willing to spill blood to keep it.

Perhaps, if that offer was made to people of all religions living in that area, you'd get enough folks from every religion willing to bail that it'd slacken the violence a bit. I don't know.

That might work. Not everyone (especially the younger folks) are all that hard-core religious/traditional these days.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that much of Israel's territorial expansion came about as a result of wars that they won but didn't start ... what are you pointing to as the correct map here? The one with tiny Jewish settlements dotted here and there surrounded by people who hate them with no good way to defend themselves?

And it's not like the hatred of Jews happened only because of recent events. In both 1937 and 1947, Jewish leaders were completely on board with a two-state solution, and even back then, Palestinian leaders said "fuck no, we don't want any Jews here at all."

I like how your whole question is based around the acceptance of a third party forcing two peoples together into land they both claim for themselves, though the Palestinians were already living there, and then being like "it's not Israel's fault Palestine wouldn't agree to having half their home divided up."

That's a true colonizer mentality. Might makes right, I guess.

That sure as hell is the American way. Well, the US way. Move in, claim the territory as your own, and murder the shit out of the natives who might be mad at you for claiming their home. Then call the aggrieved party the aggressors.

Considering the jews left this precious land it just seems to have been not that important when they chose other areas to go to.

However, I am willing to concede it is actually god's will for them to have the land when they bring out that ark of the covenant and do a repeat of the past by using the power of Yaweh to destroy the palestinians like they supposedly did in the Torah. It would seem to me the power that they use is money and weapons from the US, and I am quite sure the US is not god, nor is it right with the jewish god, then this is more the will of the humans than any god. The Jews have a weapon of god's will according to their beliefs. If you are not using the weapon of god's will that you were given, then you cannot claim it is God's will.

This is the problem of basing your war on the will of god when you make up bullshit about an ark that can destroy all of your enemies with the power of god. either abide by cannon or give up the ghost. Just like I am not going to believe in the force unless you can stand on one hand and levitate a green guy and your belongings, I am not believing in Yaweh's will of destroying your enemies unless you use the ark. If I am wrong, may Yaweh strike me down.

Well, it's the same reason the US defends Israel, regardless of what they do, because Israel is the chosen land, and the US is God Blessed™. Between the two, it's the holiest imperialism around. We said Manifest Destiny, Israel says God's Chosen People. Same sentiment, different areas on the map. It's why we give them billions in money and aid, while millions of our own people go hungry every night. There is nothing more important than asserting the Will of God™, and the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans on this one, as we saw when Biden gave full throated endorsement of what Israel is doing.

So what should the map look like? Should Israel exist or not?

You ask the wrong question. The question is does Israel have the right to take what land they want, killing the people who live there, in order to create the nation they want?
Call it the colonization that it is, because Palestine didn't get to choose, they were forced into it by the UN.

Tensions were high due to looming evictions in East Jeruselam and then the Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa during ramadan, injuring around 300 people with rubber bullets and stun grenades. The reasons for this have not really been explained but it was likely to intentionally stir up conflict for the Bibi to hold his shit together. This pissed off palestinians and rockets were launched from Gaza in retaliation and then Israel started levelling apartment complexes with 500kg bombs.

In a decades old conflict you can keep taking a step back further to show that either side started things.

I'm of the belief the UN fucked things up when they decided to get involved. It would be like if Canada decided to give half of the US to white people when it was still indigenous land, because white people said God told them it was theirs. By doing so, it escalated tensions well past the breaking point, and over decades, Israel has taken more and more land from the Palestinians, justifying it as annexations. Palestinians are now refugees in the land that was once theirs not two generations ago, and they further live in an apartheid state, as I indicated some posts back with what Palestinians have to do just to live in what little space they have left. It's horrid. It makes Jim Crow look like dress rehearsal.

That sounds an awful lot like a "no."

Get your hearing checked.
Well, your eyesight. Get your eyesight checked.

Israel can have a nation, if the people currently living in that nation say "sure, build your nation here." The fact that they're here now is because the UN stepped in and meddled, just like Britain meddles, just like the US meddles, and the end result is always blood.

You uphold apartheid and cloak it as concern for Israel. Believe me, Israel's doing fine. Better than fine. They've killed a lot of Palestinians this year, and Joe Biden's sending them more weapons and money. They're happy as shit.

"We've murdered a million native Americans and annexed their land."
"Well, yeah, but don't we deserve to exist in the US, too?"

Think about what you're saying.

So, Israel can't have a nation.

Didn't say that at all. What you seem to want is for Israel to have its nation at the cost of the people already living in the place where Israel wants itself. Don't worry, once Israel murders the rest of the Palestinians, save for a handful they'll herd into a reservation and allow to die from poverty and neglect, they can just claim to be land of the free, home of God's Chosen People. You know, like what the US did when it murdered the native Americans and herded the remaining survivors into reservations where they die in poverty and neglect.

You're definitely not a #landback supporter, I can tell that much.

See, you're trying to make this about "Israel can't have a nation," when what it is about is Israel putting their nation where people were living and just started murdering them and taking their land.

You're in favor of Israel existing regardless of what they do to the Palestinians, because you've watched them murder Palestinians, and breaking international laws without stopping, and your question is still "but what about Israel?"