'I’m calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours'
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c47230a8-134c-4dc9-89e8-75c6ea875d36.png)
!['I’m calling from Israeli intelligence. We have the order to bomb. You have two hours'](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/955d1349-c67f-4b3e-8760-b8221e94c9f1.png?format=jpg&thumbnail=256)
bbc.com
By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem
The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.
It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.
He'd been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.
He'd heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. "You need to escape," somebody in the street shouted, "because they will bomb the towers".
You are viewing a single comment
No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.
The question of 'Why doesn't Israel integrate the Palestinians?' is a good one. The answer is numbers.
Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.
If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.
I don't agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.
... But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.
Worse than that, it's become a Palestinian vs. Jewish ethnostate competition:
Israel has integrated what, 1.6 million Palestinians I to it's society?
Something like that, yes.