President Joe Biden said Tuesday Israel’s prime minister needs to change his hardline government and support for the country’s military campaign is waning amid heavy bombardment of Gaza. … “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” Biden said, adding that the Israeli government “doesn’t want a two-state solution.”
It’s mind-blowing how thoroughly Netanyahu has bungled this. They had damn near the entire world in full support after Hamas’ horrific attack on Israeli civilians, and they’ve managed to lose it.
Hamas got exactly what they wanted out of the October 7th attacks, a horrifying display of callous violence and aggression against innocent people. A terrorist attack does not justify a genocide.
A large number of people think that Netanyahu got exactly what he wanted out of that attack too and I’m not convinced that those people are wrong.
There’s lot of stories bubbling about seriously shady actions from his Government in regards to Hamas, from creating them to funding them and the timing of their attack was near perfect if their intent was to quell the IDF uprising and strengthen his Governing coalition.
There’s also questions about just how one of the most feared and clued in intelligence services in existence, the Mossad, somehow missed the planning, funding, training, and gathering of forces that Hamas did for at least a YEAR prior to the attack. They also shrugged off warnings from both Egypt and the United States about it too! It nearly beggars belief.
I’m not claiming it was orchestrated but taken together it sure is a bad look.
Quite true. Given the reality on the ground, it’s a guaranteed clusterfuck no matter what policy the United States adopts.
They knew they would get this response, too. How could they not?
Israel can’t ignore the hostages and rest on its laurels. There’s no option to not respond when your citizens have been violently seized, held captive, tortured, maimed, raped. And Hamas knows their own defensive strategy relies heavily on using Palestinians as human shields, which will cause that inevitable response to be absolutely horrific. Hamas was relying on these horrors – though I think perhaps the response has been a LOT sharper than any anticipated.
I think a lot of critics of the war, oddly, focus too much on what has happened after October 7th. When really we should be looking at what led up to it. And that’s not to say that Hamas was justified because that level of depraved violence never is. But it IS to say that the Bibi administration was utterly complicit and that the fuse on this powder keg was lit long ago and no one with the power to do so seems to have made an effort to extinguish it. On October 6th, the whole world knew that the Bibi administration was made up of a corrupt, lunatic fringe of far-right religious fundamentalists bent on the total destruction of Palestine and a total takeover of Israel. On October 8th, the protests against Netanyahu for doing things like sending suitcases of money to Hamas or deleting the oversight of their Supreme Court were replaced with a completely different narrative.
I think both Hamas and Bibi’s team thought they would politically benefit from this kind of violence. I think both are finding out they terribly misjudged things, though I am sure none will admit it. And the people – mostly Palestinians, but also no doubt some Israelis – are suffering terribly as a result of these two intractable right-wing theocratic organizations going about their religious war.
I mean it looks like the Hamas leaders are flying around in private jets being hosted by other insane dictators, so I don’t see that they find anything wrong with the situation. I doubt they give a fuck about all the civilians that are dying.
You know when you have such a prevalent military superiority over a militant group, it doesn’t look very well when you start bombing civilian areas and flatten whole neighbourhoods.
Not to forget that Israel did very little to alleviate the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and only after being subject to an international pressure. And mind you they still do very little, no humanitarian corridors, no humanitarian pauses, no field hospitals. That doesn’t portray them in a very good light.
Yes, I too rescue hostages with 2,000 pound bombs and by flooding the tunnels I’m telling everyone the hostages are in.
If the IDF cared at all they’d be using precision, low yield, bombs. We know they have them because we gave them to Israel.
Then there’s the forced evacuation into smaller and smaller areas. It’s not Hamas using them as shields if you’re the one locking them in there.