[spwa4]

If that is a good start, then how do you explain hamas' immediate reaction to Israel respecting Gaza borders in 2006, which they then respected until about a month after Oct 7, 2023.

You see, hamas' reaction was to immediately commit a massacre on Palestinian civilians, and then to start building a rocket arsenal and attacking Israeli civilians with them. So recent history teaches: if Israel were to take your advice, the conflict would become worse. A LOT worse. Immediately.

I'd ask you why this won't just occur again? But hamas has already publicly declared (shouted, in fact) they will go on another massacre and rebuild rockets "the second" this conflict ends. So I feel like that clears up the question.

The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionaire "leaders" get a LOT of money, but only if this conflict continues. Until you change that, best of luck. Oh and changing that has a slight problem: neither Gaza nor WB have the slightest chance of making it economically on their own. Despite hamas and PA stealing over 90% of aid, the average income in Gaza and WB is a LOT higher than in Jordan or (especially) Egypt. This is because of aid. Unemployment benefits in Gaza are higher than hospital director wages in Egypt. War pays well for Palestinians, and for "Palestinians" (both hamas and PA give Palestinian passports to whoever asks, in fact, regularly to people who never asked. Last year, suddenly, everyone with an address in the old city in Jerusalem got a Palestinian passport in the mail. And even the muslims (who are pre-civil-war Syrians, whose families got massacred by Palestinians) didn't want them). In fact it pays orders of magnitude more than what they'd make otherwise. And before you say "but people die". Yes, people die. But if you go and actually look at even the claimed hamas-sourced numbers, you'll quickly conclude that less people die in this conflict than in traffic accidents, on average.

To make matters worse, Palestine, both Gaza and WB, are a gateway to immigrating to Europe. You live in, say, Jordan or you're poor in Saudi Arabia. That's a terrible life. So you "immigrate" to WB (Gaza if you're Egyptian). Once you're physically there you get a (bad) apartment and a passport, and in Gaza a job offer to work for Hamas (as cannon fodder, of course, but still). Once you have that passport even the Israeli government will help you get into Europe, assuming you don't go too far in your hamas job. That's how they constantly replenish their population (same way Russia does it: attract immigrants from even worse places, send them to die fighting their "enemy").

[tpm]

> The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionnaire "leaders" get a LOT of money

That is quite simply complete bullshit. What is worse is that you are arguing in bad faith.

The facts are as follows:

1) There is an ongoing long-term occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel.

2) Occupation is an act of war. Israel is waging war on Palestine. It is breaking agreements it is a part of.

3) Of course the aim of Israel is to absorb more-or-less all Palestinian territory into Israel proper.

I don't really care about your deflections to Hamas or corruption or whatever, not only because those are the usual talking points of Israeli propaganda and I have seen them repeated about million times, but also because if Israel respected the territorial integrity of Palestine, these would be matters of internal Palestinian politics, and any aggression out of Palestine towards Israel would correctly mean Israel is the victim and Palestine is the aggressor.

But when Israel is occupying most of the Palestinian territory, with the intent to keep it and settle their population there, and all of this are acts of violence, you can't in good faith argue the Palestinians don't have the right to retaliate with force. Note that I don't support Hamas or any form of violence against civilians in any way (I have to mentions this because otherwise I will be wrongly accused of being a Hamas supporter), but until you face the fact that Israel is mass murdering and displacing civilians and taking their real estate and occupying it, we can't really move on.

[spwa4]

This sounds like an argument, but it's in bad faith. People keep making these arguments about how Israel does this and that and that means we should attack Israel, including Israeli civilians ... but of course, pretty much the entire muslim world is guilty of exactly these "acts of war", but of course you're saying that doesn't justify any reaction, especially not against civilians of those countries. It only justifies a reaction against Jews, not actually based on these arguments.

But let's examine your conditions, because they are SO badly chosen that EVEN Palestine satisfies all 3 of your conditions:

> 1) There is an ongoing long-term occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel.

Yep, Gaza is militarily occupied by hamas. They supposedly "won" an election, but then massacred everyone in the state. Even today hamas makes no attempt, other than with guns, to justify their position in Gaza. That's occupation.

> 2) Occupation is an act of war. Israel is waging war on Palestine. It is breaking agreements it is a part of.

Well, I don't think any sane person will argue hamas' purpose is anything other than self-enrichment through war.

> 3) Of course the aim of Israel is to absorb more-or-less all Palestinian territory into Israel proper.

Actually, it still isn't. Or at least, they haven't publicly declared this, and even the most right-wing members of parliament haven't gone there. So I don't even think this is actually true. Again, however, hamas has not only declared they intend to conquer all of Israel, they've publicly declared they will hunt down and kill every last Israeli (they of course used a certain religious word), anywhere on the planet. So they go quite a bit further than merely this.

I would like to remind you that these arguments are supposedly what you use to justify isolating Israeli civilians, even outside of Israel, even non-Israeli Jewish organizations are getting attacked by these demonstrations (e.g. a WW2 memorial in the Netherlands). So let's now see you agree to boycott Palestinians. After all, you're not a racist, and these reasons really are why you're suggesting a boycott, right? Since the very same facts certainly apply to Palestinians boycotting them is justified, right?

In fact they trivially apply to Turkey, Azerbaijan, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and even Morocco (to name one conflict zone: Western Sahara), and let's just be honest: it applies to essentially all muslim countries. All are militarily occupying territory.

So let's just boycott all muslims! After all, reasons 1, 2 AND 3 justify it!

Frankly, if you know any amount of history you must know that the Ottoman empire is not called an empire because of the favorite headdress of the caliph. It was a central group, in a single central city that militarily occupied anything they possibly could, like the Romans did. They even "exported" slaves from all their conquered territories, which was a ridiculous 80%-90% of their economy. That territory is what makes up muslim countries today, so of course everything is still mostly militarily occupied.

This is what I find so baffling about the whole Palestinian conflict. You are complaining "in the name of freedom" that a region in an empire revolted ... and that it won! Because in reality it is of course Israel that freed itself from muslim occupation (islam, the country, "not" the religion, between quotes because every muslim insists there's no difference) , not any kind of conquest. And you are doing this in the name of freedom? Seriously?

This really reminds me of the arguments everyone kept making defending Soviet Union behavior during the cold war. There were supposed rules and moral principles and "rational arguments" and ... proving the Soviet Union was good and an unfair victim ... and then their tanks rolled into Vienna (and 100 other places), DESPITE things like gulags and the holodomor and ... being well known to the people making these arguments.

[tpm]

I'm sorry but completely ignoring what I wrote is no way to conduct a discussion. In fact the only reason you wrote any of this is to escape the real topic of this conversation (and not only in the interaction with me, but with every other participant). By not showing effort to engage you are instead showing your disrespect towards us.

[spwa4]

Your GP post says 3 conditions justify reacting against civilians of that country and even group. I point out that Palestinians satisfy all 3 conditions, as do all muslims, and that you're a racist. That for you those 3 conditions only justify anything if used against Jews, that you'd come up with some excuse to not apply them to anyone else.

And here we are. Some excuse, with accusation, to do exactly what I predicted.

[tpm]

Again you completely failed to engage with the main point - that a foreign country is occupying most of Palestine and that it is mass murdering Palestinians.

> Your GP post says 3 conditions justify reacting against civilians

You also seem to either misunderstand or disregard what I wrote. That is plainly rude. Go back and read it again.

[spwa4]

So? You can say the same about every muslim country. So let's boycott them. Iran is doing that. Turkey is doing that. Morocco is doing that. Iraq is doing that. Azerbejan is doing that. And so on.

So clearly we should boycott just all muslims, since your claim is that that justifies boycotting civilians from those countries.

The whole of "islam" was not a religion until at least 1930, but an empire, which is another name for an organization that ONLY occupies other countries and populations and mass murders and exploits them. The hadith state that all of islam, country and people are the personal property of the caliph (who is allowed to, for example, kill anyone, muslim, dhimmi or slave, for any reason, making islam even more inhumane than the Romans were. This explains what current muslims pretend not to comprehend: that their grandparents were overwhelmingly very happy to see islam, the empire, end). Muslim empires have always done this exploiting through slavery, until at least 1970. There are regular accusations to middle eastern muslims that they still do so. So this is not exactly a surprise. So that's a further justification to boycott all muslims, no?

In fact Israel is an example of a region and a local population that WAS occupied by the Ottoman empire and fought itself free. In that view the conflict is entirely the reverse of what you claim it is.

But you're a racist, so none of this matters. What I'm misunderstanding is that arguments can only be used against Jews, and how much the same arguments apply to anyone else doesn't matter.

[bjoli]

Israel did not respect Gaza borders. The occupation just continued in another form. This might not be your view, but it has never been a controversial view.

Comparing the economies of Egypt and the west bank is pointless and you know it. The Egypt pound has been devalued to hell and back. It has lost something like 6x in value to the US dollar in 20 years.

The WTO has consistently highlighted the Israeli control over the west bank as the main roadblock to Palestinian economic development and independence.

Regarding the Gazan health ministry, those numbers are confirmed deaths from armed conflict. It does NOT include starved children, or cancer patients who died from the lack of care. Nor does it include people under rubble. It should be considered as the lower bound of deaths.

What we will have to look at afterwards is excess deaths.