Meanwhile on the International front....

Who owns the land, who has the rights to what land in Israel/Palestine has been in contention since 1948. The Israelis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Palestinians, and the U.N. have argued about it for decades. I don't know that it will ever be decided to everyone's satisfaction, or if that is even possible.

I'm thinking of things like aggressive Israeli settlers pushing people off of the land that their family has been on for many decades. I'm thinking of the U.N. passing a mandate twenty years or so back that forbid further settlements being established and Netanyahu openly encouraging settlers to claim land in that area very quickly before the date that it took effect. I think of all the various outrages and attacks against Israel and it's people by any number of groups, countries, and terrorists.

Mostly I need to just keep my mouth shut in this thread, because it's a really touchy subject that people have strong feelings about, and I'm not invested in it.

I strongly believe that both sides have been done wrong, and that both sides have done substantial wrong, and I dare to hope that some sort of fair and humane way to resolve a homeland for both the Palestinians and the Israelis can be found. That said, I've been observing this since 1967, and no one has ever been able to reach a settlement that held no matter how hard they tried. I really don't expect it to happen before I die.

I find it extremely difficult to assign all the blame to one side. In a general sense I think that more blame goes to the Arab/Palestinian groups, but I simply can't hold the Israelis blameless.

 

Exactly. It's not that Hamas has (or doesn't have) explicit day-to-day control of activities. But it certainly does have control when it comes to this conflict and to terrorism being applied to others -- both Gazans and Israelites alike. Hamas took control, explicitly, last Oct. 7, and has shown no signs of being willing to relinquish it if it involves any acknowledgment of or concessions to Israel.

And that is what Gazans, and Israelites, are reacting and responding to, each in their own ways and given their own perspectives.

 

Nobody is blameless in the overall scheme of things. But, currently -- and by that I mean all the current U.S. college protestors -- the problems, particularly here, are being caused by the recent/current response by Israel at the expense of Gaza innocents as a result of Hamas's Oct. 7 attack. The students' history, and their protests, are not about the past. They have decided that they don't like what they're seeing now and I don't think they're thinking too much about what may have occurred over the previous 75 years, or whose fault it was, or the reasons for anything. They just want the killing (and what seems to them as over-killing) of innocents to stop, which is a laudable goal (of course; everyone -- save Hamas -- wants the killing of innocents to stop); but that goal, and the students' stand, is much too simplistic for a situation that is anything but straightforward.

 

Speaking of taking to the streets to protest, looks like some sizeable protests happened in Israel today against their own elected officials.

 

They have been for months against Netanyahu, going back to before the Hamas attack.

 

This post is much more reflective of your humane and decent perspective, IMO, than it is the protesters.

Remember that, on TikTok, roughly 40 days after Oct. 7, you had users reading Osama Bin Laden's "Letter to America" in 2002.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/16/tech/tiktok-osama-bin-laden-letter-to-america/index.html

In another video viewed more than 100,000 times, a TikTok user who regularly posts criticisms of the American government said of the letter, “If we’re going to call Osama bin Laden a terrorist, so is the American government.”

I wish I felt confident the main purpose of the protests were humanitarian. I do not. I think it's more anarchic, more chaotic in spirit.

 

“I found something outrageous on the internet,” is the Mediterranean Avenue of investigative journalism.

 

It's worth noting that at last count, Gaza was 2.3 million people living in a space smaller than the city limits of Philadelphia. Hamas doesn't need to quarter fighters in people's houses to get in the way. Both sides know that but I'm not sure that either of them particularly care.

 

Netanyahu airlifted to airport as ‘day of resistance’ protesters block roads

My daughter went to Israel last year, well before Oct. 7, through the Birthright program. The protests over Netanyahu's policies got bad enough early in 2023 that I called someone with the program to ask about their plans to handle potential shutdowns of outgoing flights. She went very close to Gaza as part of her trip, not far at all from where the Oct. 7 attacks happened. I try not to let my mind go to dark thoughts of what might have happened if the timing of her trip had been different, but before her trip, one of my primary concerns was the unrest within Israel.

 

bad anniversary

https://ipi.media/two-years-on-ipi-...-for-killing-of-journalist-shireen-abu-akleh/

 

It was viewed 14 million times.

 

So more of a Ventnor Avenue of investigative journalism?