No one is allowed to attack other users like that, regardless of how right they are or feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> Hamas started terror attacks during the Oslo process IIRC, and intensified terror attacks before the elections after Rabin's assassination,
Portraying Hamas as a unilateral spoiler is completely disingenuous.
[1]
> In early January 1996 Peres faced another difficult decision. The Israeli General Security Service--Shabak--asked him for permission to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, the so-called "Engineer," who had personally masterminded several Hamas suicide atacks, which killed 50 and wounded 340 Israelis. The Israeli media presented him as public enemy number one, greatly exaggerating his status within Hamas and omitting to mention that the attacks he organized came as a response to the massacre perpetrated by Dr. Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in February 1994. In mid-1995 Ayyash went into hiding in Gaza, and the Palestinian preventive security service told the Shabak that he would not organize any more attacks on Israelis. But the head of the Shabak, who was about to be removed from his post for his failure to protect Rabin, badly wanted to be remembered for one last spectacular success. Peres gave the green light, thinking that apart from dealing out rough justice, the operation would boost the morale of the nation and of the security services. On 5 January, Ayyash was killed in Gaza by means of a booby-trapped cellular phone. The decision to kill Ayyash turned out to be the greatest mistake of Peres's political career.
This is what spurred Hamas attacks prior to Netanyahu's election, not opposition to Oslo.
> If they couldn't stop the settlements, there was no self-governance.
Forgot absolute terms for a minute. The Oslo accords gave Palestinians more self governance than they had before. It was a step in the right direction.
The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state, and I hope that we reach an agreement in which the Palestinians do get statehood, but we're not gong to get there by insisting that steps in the right direction are meaningless, and certainly not by increasing the amount of terror attacks to prevent the peace process.
> Whereas Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir were just peace loving dudes right?
No, of course not. They were terrible terrorists. In the case of Yigal Amir, he's sitting in jail where he belongs (Baruch Goldstein was beaten to death in the place he was attacking). Luckily Goldstein didn't derail the peace process, though Amir probably did.
> The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state
Yes, it is, and it is recognized by much of the world as such (its a state that has spent its entire existence at war with and partially occupied by Israel, but saying it isn't a full state is like saying Ukraine isn't because of the war and Russian occupation.)
> The Israeli leader was killed by local far right terrorists.
Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
[1]
> On October 5, the day the Knesset had endorsed Oslo II by a majority of one, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem. The leaders of the opposition were on the grandstand while the demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in an SS uniform. Netanyahu set the tone with an inflammatory speech. "Today the surrender agreement called Oslo II was placed before the Knesset," he said. "The Jewish majority of the State of Israel did not approve this agreement. We shall fight it and we shall bring down the government."
Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
> after Palestine stepped out of the talks they launched the 2nd intifada
Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
> The political will in Israel has always been peace.
When have hey ever accepted a two state solution? They have denied everyone since 1947, in Oslo they agreed that resolution 338 (the 1967 borders) should be the basis for negotiation but Arafat walked out of Camp David despite what many Palestinians considered favorable terms and what most Israeli's considered an over generous offer.
> Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
His rise to power happened 2 years after though, after an entire year of Hamas suicide bombings. He was not ahead in the polls until the security situation went completely tits up.
If a crazy person kills the president (like in Japan 2 years ago, or in America with JFK) there is no sudden far right take over. If a country is attacked by its neighbour, people who promise security tend to do well in the polls.
> Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
The settlements are a complicated subject. There are some legitimate reasons for some of them, and the reality of the two state solution is that land swaps will happen.
The 1967 war ended in 6 days and ended with incredibly awkward borders. It is not unnatural that Israel and Palestine wrestle for borders that make more sense geographically. (Belgium and Germany did this post ww2 and now most of their border is forest or rivers, mountains. The usual suspects for national borders).
There are however also religious settlements, formed by crazy people based on ridiculous readings of the torah. All of those should be burned to the ground with every person on them jailed, and the leader of the movement who I shall not named probably put in a cross due to her devotion to religious literature.
Talking about settlements as a whole makes the conversation too broad and unfocused, and I doubt all military outposts that exist will be dismantled when peace is achieved.
> Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
Its pretty cool how people have no agency. Lets ignore that the temple mount is more holy to the jews than to muslims. And lets act like a far right agitator is purposefully going to somewhere holy.
Imagine Trump goes to the vaticam. Do you think that the pope would use a loud speaker to tell people to attack him Abu Qteish did?
Or that Italians would suicide bomb around american civilians for the next 3 years?
Like even if we take Ariel visit as provacation, even if we hold him repsonsible for the horrible mismanagement of the police during his interior minister time, we hold him responsible for every death occured in every over trigger happy incident. Why fall for the bait? Why kill innocent people who are not responsible for his actions?
Also if we are gonna use the word fascist, I think its important to note the different countries and structures between Israel and lets say Gaza. Fascism purges "the other", there are no minorities in Gaza. Israel has 20% arab population and 7% other (mostly chrristians). Fascism promotes youth and violence as means of authority. Gaza has the youngest population in the world, and a military dictatorship as a goverment. A big part of fascism is social hierarchy, in the case of Gaza a strong men over women duplicity is seen across all civilian and political life. And finally an important aspect of fascism is the idea of forming an empire. This tracks with two biggest groups in Gaza having ideas about a pan arabic caliphate.
> Liar. [1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall
To begin with "the political will" usually refers to the people
here is some of the data from 03 - 12 during a series of escalations of violence the Israeli opinion was still very much in favour of a two state solution. This has been the case since 1947.
Now in response to the book. I will say that I love the work the new Historians are doing but Shlaim is with Benny Morris one of the modern historians where its very easy to see their ideology through their work.
and here is Benny Morris (who despite being racist towards arabs recently has written and opened most of the secrets about the formation of Israel) talking about the blind spots of the Iron Wall.
Another thing to point out is that Shailm tends to ignore things that are inconvinient. For example in that interview he emphasises the push from Egypt to normalise relationships with Israel in the 50s. He somehow forgets that the Egyptian push for the 1947 was crazy. Azzam Pasha leader of the arab league said " it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades". With the King Farrouk later repeating the sentiment saying "the jews will be expelled from Palestine". So that same state "reaching out" less than 5 years later is pretty throny and it seems irresponsible to call that Israel rejecting peace, when at the time the Suez Crisis was bubbling and Egypt had tons of troops in Gaza.
Anything with the potential to disrupt internal and external American/Western propaganda is a threat.
---
[1]
> With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.
> Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 the first of six such Guantánamo trips which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.
> The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.
> The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.
---
[2]
> Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two U.S. officials said.
> The U.S. officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
It's only a little white lie here and there, just trust us bro!
---
[3]
> Cable television channel Al Jazeera claimed 600 civilians had been killed and filled its broadcasts with images of dead children at the Fallujah hospital and other locations within the city. Al Jazeera’s broadcasts so stung U.S. national leaders that they considered withdrawing all U.S. forces—including CENTCOM’s forward headquarters—from Qatar if its government did not do more to “bring Al Jazeera under control.”
> With little time to prepare for the mission, MNF-W had not embedded Western journalists with I MEF forces, so that the critical ground of information operations was effectively ceded to an insurgency that could distribute a one-sided message. Worse, the haste with which the operation was executed precluded the opportunity to evacuate the city of civilians properly, essentially ensuring that the insurgency had the opportunity to exploit footage of civilian casualties.
Al Jazeera "claimed," but whoops it was also true, and we can't stand the exposure.
They hate citizens, they hate internal reformers [1]/[2], they hate their own families [3], and it's true of every single police department in the country.
Israel actively promotes illegal, violent settlements that kill Palestinians under IDF protection. [1] / [2]
---
Israel has on a number of occasions provoked border disputes and then claimed that IDF soldiers killed in those disputes were civilians.
[2]
> On that very day, however, a high-level decision was taken by the IDF to send a patrol of soldiers dressed up as policemen to al-Hamma at the farthest end of the southern DMZ. The patrol was intended to show the flag in an area that was under complete Syrian domination. The Syrian army responded violently, by shooting and killing seven members of the patrol and hampering the evacuation of the rest.
> [...]
> The cabinet met on 5 April and, in the absence of the foreign minister, accepted the prime minister’s recommendations to destroy three Arab villages inside the DMZ, bomb from the air the Syrian post and police station in al-Hamma, boycott the MAC, and lodge a complaint with the UN Security Council on the murder of the seven “policemen.”
[2]
> To achieve the first aim, Israel purchased land from the Arab villagers, developed Jewish settlements, established new agricultural settlements, built fortifications around them, and introduced soldiers disguised as civilians or policemen. To achieve the second aim, Israel seized an opportunity in March 1951 to move forcibly several hundred Bedouins who refused to accept Israeli identity cards from the central DMZ to Arab villages in northern Israel. In pursuit of the third aim, Israel refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the UN over civilian activities and even placed roadblocks to stop the UN men from entering the DMZs. Both Syria and the UN observers felt deceived and were disturbed by the direction of Israeli policy.
[2]
> Dayan did not like the compromise with the UN and pressed for extending Israel’s control over the DMZ through the introduction of additional soldiers masquerading as farmers. Ben-Gurion was persuaded to ask the cabinet to authorize the construction of two new “civilian” settlements in the DMZ.
---
Israel executed disabled noncombatants inside of a hospital while disguised as civilians. [3]
Yeah, there's plenty of relevant tech angles, whether that's Israelis utilizing AI to pick targets while acknowledging they know exactly how many civilians they're going to kill in the process [1], Israeli spyware being used to hack people everywhere in the world, etc.
https://www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%97%D7%...