U.S. intel agencies believe hospital blast caused by Palestinian rocket that broke apart after engine failure, officials say
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-intel-agencies-believe-hospital-014522065.html
Tag: war
Blaming Hamas Shouldn’t Mean Ignoring the Palestinians’ Plight
“A 2021 poll, conducted after a smaller Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, found a slim majority of Palestinians, 53 percent, believed Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people.” This was a crisis-prompted lurch toward Hamas, pollster Khalil Shikaki told the Associated Press, likely to prove short-lived as Hamas failed to materially improve Palestinians’ lives. Still, that number is not a wild outlier. Another poll by Shikaki’s organization, conducted this past summer, found 52 percent Palestinian support for armed resistance to Israel.”
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“A Reuters report published Thursday told the story of a 31-year-old Palestinian man named Ala al-Kafarneh. He fled his home “with his pregnant wife, his father, brothers, cousins, and in-laws,” first to a coastal refugee camp, then elsewhere, after Israeli airstrikes hit around the camp. “On Tuesday night, an airstrike hit the building where Kafarneh and his family were sheltering, killing all of them except him.”
Kafarneh’s position is unfathomable—a pregnant wife and unborn child, dead and recorded, nameless, in the list of family casualties. Would it surprise anyone if he turns to violence now?
That is not to say he would be justified in seeking a violent revenge. To say that is to take a step toward moral madness, toward a cycle of escalation and chaos, not justice, mercy, or any other good. But it is to say that violence, by its nature, tends to spread. Once loose, it overruns moral boundaries and bends our souls into grotesque shapes. We are each responsible for the violence we commit, each to blame for the wrong we do, each apt to respond to evil with evil. Blood is on the hands that shed it, but it tends to spill all over.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/16/blaming-hamas-shouldnt-mean-ignoring-the-palestinians-plight/
Jews, Like Palestinians, Are ‘Indigenous’ to the Middle East
“According to a 2016 summary by genetic researchers Ariella Gladstein and Michael F. Hammer, however, “Ashkenazi Jews are not closely related to modern populations that best represent the Khazars.” Rather, they “appear equally close to both Middle Eastern and European populations,” and they “likely arose from a genetically diverse population in the Middle East.”
Notably, Abbas did not address Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who account for about 45 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 32 percent for Ashkenazim. Overall, a 2000 study found, “a substantial portion” of Jewish and Arab Y chromosomes (70 percent and 82 percent, respectively) belonged to the same chromosome pool, results that were consistent with “previous studies that suggested a common origin for Jewish and non-Jewish populations living in the Middle East.””
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“While genetic research belies the notion that Jews are newcomers to the Middle East, it gets you only so far. In particular, it does not address conflicting land claims based on much more recent developments.”
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“Israel’s founding in 1948, which most Jews celebrate but most Palestinians remember as the Nakba (catastrophe), involved a mixture of prior land purchases, arbitrary line drawing by the United Nations, and a war in which the nascent state was attacked by the combined armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Some of the 700,000 or so Palestinians who fled their homes planned to return after the anticipated Arab victory, while others were forcibly expelled.
Israel’s defenders have long argued that it could rightly claim land won in defensive wars—in 1967 as well as 1948. They have noted that Israel absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab states and wondered why Arab states could not likewise absorb Palestinian refugees.”
https://reason.com/2023/10/18/jews-like-palestinians-are-indigenous-to-the-middle-east/
Israeli MIT students ‘terrified’ after anti-Israel rally chant calls for ‘one solution, intifada’
“Israeli students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they are “terrified” to be on campus after participants at a campus protest chanted “one solution, intifada, revolution” at a rally supporting the devastating Hamas terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis in Israel.
MIT students Liyam Chitayat and Lior Alon told Fox News Digital in interviews that after they contacted MIT’s administration to report the calls to violence being chanted from the protest and for concern for their own safety, they’ve yet to receive a substantial response.
Chitayat, a 19-year-old pursuing a Ph.D. on a prestigious scholarship and who previously served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), describes the rally cry as a call for the murder of Jews and the demolition of Israel.
“Intifada is not a call for resistance. Intifada is the name of acts of bombing and killing civilians in Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s the name of taking civilian lives in terrorist attacks in Israel. That is what intifada means. That is how it’s defined,” she said.”
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“Alon argued that maybe 99% of the students calling for terrorism are just “stupid kids” who don’t know the weight that the phrase carries or what it means.
“But we only need one stupid person with a gun,” he said.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israeli-mit-students-terrified-anti-080029984.html
Israel’s Subterranean Battle
The Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict | Palestine Mandate Part 1
Thoughts on Israel and Gaza
“after the systematic massacre of Israeli citizens, a massacre that evokes some of the darkest memories of persecution against the Jewish people, it’s understandable that many Israelis have demanded that their government do whatever it takes to root out Hamas and make sure such attacks never happen again. Moreover, Hamas’ military operations are deeply embedded within Gaza — and its leadership seems to intentionally hide among civilians, thereby endangering the very people they claim to represent.
Still, the world is watching closely as events in the region unfold, and any Israeli military strategy that ignores the human costs could ultimately backfire.”
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-statement-on-israel-and-gaza-a6c397f09a30