Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Israel War in the News

The basic history is that the Ottomans lost WWI, and the UK and France split up the Ottoman Empire in Asia as colonies, with the British Mandate saying all of Palestine and Transjordan were for UK Jews. Hitler wanted to deport German Jews, not kill them, but the UK said that Palestine was only for UK Jews, not for European Jews, leaving Hitler to The Final Solution.

But the British Jews were only about 30% of the population before WWII. They didn't live peacefully, they kept trying to kill the British colonial officers and liberate Palestine. The Jews figured dealing with the Palestinians was for after they had full control.

After WWII, the US shipped all the Western European Jews to Palestine in 1948, and got the UN to vote to create Israel. The Western European Jews went to war with the Palestinians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and others, and the UN voted to divide things along the front lines of the battle on the date of the vote. Jordan got the West Bank and Egypt got Gaza. And everyone managed to live with that.

When Egypt claimed the Suez Canal, Eisenhower was president. Israel, the UK, and France were joining forces to return the Suez to UK/Israeli control, but Eisenhower said it belonged to Egypt, and that was that.

Peace continued until 1967 when Israel attacked the Egyptian and Jordanian forces before announcing war, and managed first, to destroy the Egyptian and Jordanian Air Forces completely, then with complete air domination, easily defeated Jordan, Syria, and Egypt and took over the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights and a bit of Southern Lebanon as part of Israel.

Israel gave citizenship to about 2 million Palestinians, and said all other Palestinians are illegal aliens with no rights, and all must leave.

Israel 'mows the lawn' from time to time, bombing and killing Palestinians to teach them never to think about challenging Israel's right to all of Israel. They can be imprisoned without charges, other than being in Israel illegally (sort of). They can be shot for no particular reason, and nothing happens to the Israeli police or settler who shoots them.

Those 2 million Palestinian citizens mean it is not Apartheid, since Apartheid meant that no one with even one drop of non-European blood could ever be a citizen of South Africa.

But then, on 7 October 2023, Hamas managed to blow up part of the wall surrounding Gaza and thousands of Hamas soldiers attacked Israel.

There were usually three battalions of Israeli soldiers guarding Gaza, but all were withdrawn for a Jewish Festival.

What, exactly, happened, no one has a clue. Israel say they have many photographs proving Hamas beheaded many Israeli babies, and cooked many in the oven and made their parents listen to them scream as they died. But we must take Israel's word for this, they say the proof is too gruesome to let anyone see any of it. Hamas say they attacked and mostly killed Israeli soldiers caught sleeping in unguarded and unlocked military fortresses, but in shooting, they accidentally killed some civilians, including a few babies, but mostly they killed soldiers and people who were shooting at them.

The Western news say that Israeli statement is irrefutable proof that Hamas beheaded and roasted as many babies as they could find, raped all the women they could catch, then took 240 hostages and murdered every other Israeli they could find. Plus, Hamas fired a lot of rockets, more than Iron Dome could handle, and it is fairly certain that about 1,400 Israelis died in the Hamas attack and about 240 were taken hostage.

Israel say the shelling on Gaza will be non-stop until all hostages are released, but it is not so easy to release hostages while being shelled (but somehow, Hamas managed to release two hostages).

Reliable witnesses say that mosques, schools, hospitals, churches, and ambulances have been bombed.

The Western media say that all were bombed by Hamas, or were not really schools, hospitals, churches, or ambulances, they were Hamas headquarters, so Israel has behaved perfectly, they have done absolutely nothing that could possibly be considered a violation of the Laws of War.

But that's the Western media.

The non-Western media mostly say that Hamas may have committed a war crime on 7 October, but that they were provoked by Israel and one must understand they had no other way to address the way Israel could keep killing Palestinians without ever risking a single Israeli life.

But since October 7, Israel have been bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, and ambulances in Gaza, and these are all war crimes according to the non-Western media.

There is absolutely no agreement on whether the Western Media is the unvarnished TRVTH and the non-Western media a pack of lies, or the opposite.

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