Palestine v Israel.

[pErvinalia]

Netanyahu was never interested in the hostages. His motivation has been the destruction of Hamas, hostages be damned.

[aufbahrung]

Netanyahu was never interested in the hostages. His motivation has been the destruction of Hamas, hostages be damned.

He's leader, has to consider the greater picture in all this, not for just today but for future generations in Israel.

[Brian Peacock]

How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war

A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve.

That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October. But little has gone according to plan.

Many of the families of people killed or taken hostage on that day have come out forcefully against the state-sponsored event, saying pageantry can wait until after the government secures a hostage deal and faces an independent investigation of its own failures before, after and on that day. Some parents have forbidden the government of Benjamin Netanyahu from using their children’s names and images.

Several of the kibbutzim that suffered the greatest losses have said they will boycott. Instead, they will gather in their communities to collectively grieve their loved ones, and remember their hostages, in “intimate, sensitive” rituals. In response, the minister responsible for the ceremony has nixed the live audience while seeming to dismiss the families’ objections as “background noise”. This has led to even fiercer denunciations on social media, with some of Israel’s top celebrities pledging their support to a rival commemoration...

[rainbow]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvrsn6uO5e8

[JimC]

Netanyahu was never interested in the hostages. His motivation has been the destruction of Hamas, hostages be damned.

But, for his political survival, he must at least seem to be concerned about the hostages...

[aufbahrung]

Only America can bring the firepower to bare that will decapitate the Iranian regime and its nuclear facilities. Biden doesn't want to leave office without at least one significant victory in the military sphere. A war bounce to nudge the democrats back into office.

[Sean Hayden]

Most Americans aren’t interested.

[Tero]

“Every time he came close to it, Netanyahu somehow found a reason not to comply, so the main reason for the failure of this diplomacy was the consistent opposition of Netanyahu,” says Olmert.

Olmert says a stumbling block for a ceasefire deal has been Netanyahu’s reliance on the “messianic” ultranationalists in his cabinet who prop up his government. They are agitating for an even stronger military response in Gaza and Lebanon. Two far-right ministers this summer threatened to withdraw support for Netanyahu’s government if he signed a ceasefire deal.

“Ending the war as part of an agreement for the release of hostages means a major threat to Netanyahu and he's not prepared to accept it, so he’s violating it, he’s screwing it all the time,” he says.

The Israeli prime minister has repeatedly rejected claims he blocked the deal, insisting he was in favour of the American-backed plans and sought only “clarifications”, while Hamas continually changed its demands.
“That means, given that this [Israeli] government wants an apparently unending war, because they've set war aims that are unattainable - [including] destroying Hamas - the United States is a cart attached to an Israeli horse,” he says.

He argues Biden’s approach to the current conflict was shaped by an outdated conception of the balance of state forces in the region and neglects the experience of stateless Palestinians.

“I think that Biden is stuck in a much longer-term time warp. He just cannot see things such as… 57 years of occupation, the slaughter in Gaza, except through an Israeli lens,” he says.

Today, says Prof Khalidi, a generation of young Americans has witnessed scenes from Gaza on social media and many have a radically different outlook. “They know what the people putting stuff on Instagram and TikTok in Gaza have shown them,” he says.

Kamala Harris, 59, Biden’s successor as Democratic candidate in next month’s presidential election against Donald Trump, 78, doesn’t come with the same generational baggage.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cew1jkgd7n8o

[Brian Peacock]

The US political establishment are probably not able to process their nation's presence in the world in terms of the brutal settler-colonialism it was founded on. In fact, there's specific institutions, language and media dedicated to avoiding that kind of processing - there's always a different, more heroic, more noble story that manages to take precedence. Palestinian people are to Israel what Native American people are to America. The younger people can see this, but as the article says, Biden is of a generation that just can't help but see Israel as anything but "people like us" - and unfortunately he's probably right, just not in the way he thinks he is.

[Sean Hayden]

Sure they are. But for them that’s the way of the world. Your moralizing is “just another political ploy”.

[Brian Peacock]

If objecting to the violent dispossession of another population's land and the brutal and brutalising horrors that entails, is a 'moralising ploy' then I stand guilty as charged.

Of course I have a particular moral outlook and I have followed a morally reasoned path to arrive at a particular political position on this. All political arguments are moral arguments after all. But is that really 'a political ploy' though, in the sense it's usually deployed? If so, then aren't all moral perspectives merely ploys?

[Sean Hayden]

In a sense, sure. But I imagine your view would be seen as underhanded because it's an attempt to persuade using a morality that simply isn't at play on the world stage between competing powers, especially those openly fighting.

[pErvinalia]

Might makes right.

[Brian Peacock]

In a sense, sure. But I imagine your view would be seen as underhanded because it's an attempt to persuade using a morality that simply isn't at play on the world stage between competing powers, especially those openly fighting.

Sure. But if I attempted to persuade those competing powers within the context of their own moral frameworks then I'd be reduced to something like trying to undermine their ability to object, physically removing the grounds of their objections, or murdering them into agreement, submission or oblivion etc.

[Brian Peacock]

Israeli forces attack UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.