Tlaib refuses to apologize for blaming Israel for Gaza hospital blast, attacks Biden
abcnews.go.com
Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib refused to apologize Wednesday for saying on Tuesday that Israel is to blame for the hospital explosion that day in Gaza, an accusation that sparked political backlash against her from Republicans as Israel denies fault.
Tlaib joined thousands of protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza during a solidarity rally hosted by the left-leaning group Jewish Voice for Peace at the National Mall. She was visibly emotional, at times pausing her speech to openly weep and criticizing lawmakers who have not backed a ceasefire resolution.
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If not now, when? They've been at this for decades
I would love to be able to force them to try, as doubtful as such a peace would be. Any ceasefire would be preferable to this.
Israel's objective is that Hamas no longer exists and that Gaza can no longer pose a security threat to Israel. They won't accept a return to the status quo that just results in more rocket attacks and another wave of attacks years from now.
I understand wanting to see an end to violence and calling for a ceasefire based on that, but to do so is to de facto support more intentional attacks on Israeli civilians, which Israel is simply not going to allow. The time to discuss the future of Gaza will only come once Hamas and other militias are conclusively out of the picture.
Hamas's founding charter prohibits them from seeking peace or negotiating at all.
And they still have ~150-200 hostages, mostly civilians.
The problem is that Hamas exists, and has complete political control over Gaza. There is nobody Israel can talk to, while Hamas is in power, and convince them to return the hostages, stop the rocket fire, etc.
This is not a problem that can be solved with words.
The only glimmer of hope, unfortunately, lays on the other side of a complete and total destruction of Hamas in Gaza.
There is. Hamas. It happened before. And Israel didn't follow through with it. Look up the 2008 and 2012 blockades (or I can give a breakdown on them).
Oh yeah, I remember the last time Hamas released a hostage.
I wasn't talking about the hostages, my bad there, though those can be easily demanded as part of a ceasefire agreement.
The thing is that the Islamic Jihad and Hamas don't want to negotiate, since they won't accept a two-state solution, so peace is not possible while any of them has a militarized branch. There are plenty of people in Israel that don't want to negotiate but at least on the Israeli side the only group that needs to stick to the plan is the IDF which will follow the orders they get.
If you see what's going on in the West Bank, Israel is also doing everything it can to make a two state solution impossible
They will. Well at least Hamas well. They changed their charter in 2017 to reflect that.
Yeah, but then Hamas went ahead and murdered 1,400 civilians in Israel. After this, why exactly would Israel want to negotiate with terrorists?
Mostly so this mess doesn't happen again? Hamas and others like it are a symptom, not a cause.
Here's the story of the last hostage negotiation between Israel and Hamas. Note that Israel released about half the prisoners from its side of the exchange after Shalit's release.
Hamas, is, in fact, a cause. Those Israeli civilians were not murdered by some kind of bad-faith negotiation, they were murdered by people who decided to murder them. They were raped by people who decided to rape them. They were kidnapped by people who decided to kidnap them. We absolutely must blame the actual perpetrators of these atrocities, and not hand-wave them away as just a symptom.
The thing is: The atrocities themselves are symptoms. A free Palestine wouldn't foster the conditions necessary for this kind of bullshit to happen at a large scale.
Note: I condemn any and all murder of civilians.
Humanity wouldn't foster the conditions necessary for these things to happen. If the people in Hamas had any humanity left in them, they could not have done it. Is it not a symptom of their decisions, as people? Is it not a symptom of their sheer depravity?
A "Free Palestine" is entirely hypothetical, but back in Mandatory Palestine, the Muftis broke bread with Hitler and talked plenty about ridding the world of Jews. They launched pogroms against the Jews. They refused any kind of deal for Jews to even have a small piece of territory, even 20%—look up the Peel commission. They killed Jewish civilians, they made Britain ban Jews from purchasing land... The very prospect that Jews might want to peacefully buy unsettled land in their indigenous homeland was met with violence.
Today, while Israel is not at peace with the West Bank, nothing nearly so atrocious has happened there. The debate is not over civilian deaths, it's over settlements and rocks and territory.
But Hamas reacted to to Israel's unilaterally ending the occupation in Gaza by dramatically ramping up rocket fire. Hamas explicitly wants to kill Jews all over the world.
They're human actors who decide to shed their humanity and brutalize civilians. When humans decide to do that, they're not symptoms, they're morally culpable agents.
The thing is: You normally can't gather large numbers of those people and convince them to attack random civilians, especially when it involves a very good chance of dying. There's a very specific combination of desperation and hopelessness that makes things like these
That's just so wrong I can't... Every year innocent people die in the West bank at the hands of the IDF and settlers. Also the "rocks and territory" are people's homes. People are getting chased out of their homes for the sin of being born on land Israelis wanna settle. The West bank is definitely preferable to Gaza, but 7000 civilians died there since the Israeli occupation. The current state of the West bank is not a good argument against Hamas.
There was the whole blockade mess. That's the cause of the rocket fire. Hamas has been pretty explicit about that, and signed two ceasefires before that had them stop launching rockets in exchange for Israel lifting the blockade (the blockade wasn't lifted, so the rocket attacks came back).
They've been indoctrinating children for decades. They've done it in UN-run schoolbuildings. They get caught with textbooks telling them to kill Jews, UN says stop it, they keep doing it.
They make little schoolchildren put on plays about the joy of killing Jews.
Blockade started in 2007. Israel left Gaza in 2005. Rocket fire started in 2001.
I don't know which ceasefires you're talking about offhand, feel free to help me out.
Rocket fire started in 2001 when, well, the specific trigger isn't very clear, but let's say it's the breakdown of negotiations at the camp David summit. So the thing is, in 2005 when Israel disengaged from Gaza, they started periodically blockading it, and in 2006 (Hamas hadn't even won the elections yet so they don't even have that excuse) closed the final legal passage between Gaza and Israel. They also withheld Palestinian tax money from the PA (just to clarify, at the time the PA was Gaza and the West Bank, not only the West Bank like it is now) for more than a year, but that's beside the point. Anyway they "lifted" the blockade in February, only the amount of exports they allowed was miniscule and could barely keep up with Gazan imports. This caused food shortages, prevented workers from crossing the border, y'know, classic blockade things.
What started in 2007 was the modern blockade, whereby Israel basically allows nothing other than some international aid to go to and from Gaza, but Gaza has been blockaded in some form since 2005. Only 13% of pre-blockade agricultural exports were allowed in the February 2006 blockade, for example. This is bad for an economy like Gaza that relies on agricultural exports.
Well there was one in 2008 and another 2012. In both basically the same thing happened: Israel and Hamas sign a blockade, Hamas stops rocket attacks, and polices other groups to make sure they follow suit (they weren't 100% successful, but the effects were obvious; Hamas was following the ceasefire in good faith). Then they wait. The agreed upon time passes, even more time passes (the 2012 ceasefire lasted over a year) and the blockade still remains (hell, in the latter half of 2013 Israeli attacks against Gaza increased, even though they were against the terms of the ceasefire).
This is all about the ceasefires, the next paragraph is about the Palestinian unity government, which is sort of but not really related except also being a post-Intifada peace effort.
In 2013 the PA and Hamas came together and formed a unified government. There, both factions wanted peace and they both came together; if Israel had wanted peace there was no better opportunity than this. Well Netenyahu repeatedly opposed the unity government, didn't lift the blockade and didn't budge an inch from his stance on Palestine during peace negotiations with the PA. This meant, of course, repeatedly announcing the construction of new settlements in the West Bank, which made a breakthrough all but impossible. This isn't my opinion, this is the American special envoy sent for the negotiations. So... Yeah.
Israel has negotiated with Hamas before.
Hamas had virtually free reign in Gaza for the past 17 years, despite violently pushing out Fatah and never holding elections again.
That didn't stop Hamas from murdering 1,400 civilians in Israel.
What results should Israel expect if they negotiated with Hamas this time?
And then went back on the results of those negotiations. Two ceasefires were signed before, and in both the blockade being lifted was a condition that Israel didn't fulfill no matter how long Hamas waited.
Also you're being very disingenuous by ignoring the blockade. You can't call the situation in Gaza "free reign".
It's not like the ceasefires were unilaterally observed by Hamas, and only broken by Israel.
I'm not even trying to defend Israel here. My entire point is that there is absolutely no reason to put your entire trust into a terrorist organization that just murdered 1,400 civilians.
At first that was the case. Hamas only broke the ceasefires when it became apparent that the most important part to them, lifting the blockade, wouldn't happen.
We can both condemn the murder of civilians (by both sides) and condemn Israel for not trying to make peace. This isn't trust; this is working off their official position and past examples. Them being a terrorist organization has nothing to do with that.
Hamas won the 2006 election, and Fatah and the rest of the world opposed them taking office. Hamas and Fatah fought it out, and Hamas won in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.
You're right that Hamas hasn't allowed elections since then, but simply saying, 'violently pushing out Fatah ' is much less than accurate.
It should also be noted that Hamas won that election because Fatah's strategy of negotiations was seen as a dead end and Israel is responsible for that. And of course, there might not even BE a Hamas if Israel hadn't funded Hamas as a divide and conquer strategy against the Palestinian secular nationalist movement .
They changed their charter to deflect criticism. They haven't changed their behavior at all. They're still actively pursuing the death of every Jew and Jew-sympathizer the world over. They still say the same shit, but they make sure to only say it in Arabic, and not while the West is paying attention. And they try their best to replace "Jew" with "Zionist," (still around the world), and they still encourage "global Jihad," and they still view a Jew's death anywhere as cause for celebration.