They were young people who were gathered for a music concert.

Israel has compulsory military service for young people, so many of them were enlisted in the military. That doesn’t change the fact that they were young.

the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.

Israel wasn’t created by the UK or the US (or the UN). Israelis declared the state of Israel themselves after seizing territory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The UN did have a plan to create an Israel in 1947, but that didn’t happen, because neither the Jews, the Arabs, nor the UK were on board.

but Israel doesn’t get to say they want to control the entire region?

What do you mean Israel doesn’t “get” to say that?

Israel does say that, and Israel does control the entire region, and almost every Western power allows them to.

I think a Two-State Solution would be a good idea (and I have opinions on exactly where the border should go), but it will have to be imposed on Israel by the international community.

Israel has never been sincere about a Two-State solution, and their “offers” to Palestine have been inadequate and unworkable, and the Palestinians have been right to reject them because there’s no point in accepting a deal that won’t lead to peace. Only a fair and workable deal can lead to peace.

Israel has demonstrated that they are an illegitimate state, because legitimate states do not bomb the stateless people living within their borders. At this point we should be treating Israel like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. The Israeli military should be placed under foreign control, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza returned to the Palestinians.

So far, the only thing stopping this from happening has been the United States’ support for Israel.

Israel needs to realize that the United States is rapidly declining in power, and if Israel doesn’t voluntarily cede the Palestinian territories, Israel might not exist at all in the near future.

Just to be clear, Hamas does not want to eradicate the Jews. That is a myth propagated by Israel.

Hamas wants to eliminate Israel, by which they mean they want Israel replaced by an Arab-majority state in which both Jews and Arabs live. (Hamas want the return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to Israel/Palestine, which would make it an Arab-majority state.)

Furthermore, they have indicated they are open to negotiating a Two-State solution.

I don’t think it makes any sense to portray Hamas as unreasonable for wanting Arabs to control the whole land (from the river to the sea) when Israel want the same thing for Jews.

I wasn’t implying that.

Israel struck first in the Six Days War.

Over a shipping route.

If Hamas were Sunni muslims instead of Shia

Hamas are Sunni.

Hezbollah are Shia.

There’s something else I want to mention.

In 1947, the UN attempted to sort out Britain’s mess by creating a “partition plan” in which the land would be split between a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.

Though adopted as a UN resolution, it was never implemented, and the aforementioned civil war broke out instead.

I just mention this because I find a lot of people are under the misimpression that Israel was created by the UN in 1947 as some kind of compensation for the Holocaust, and that’s not what happened.

Another correction: The attack that killed 1200 Israelis, 33% of which were legitimate military targets and 66% of which were civilians.

I never said they were civilians.

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with

That’s not what happened.

Firstly, the Balfour Declaration was in 1917, during World War I. By 1948, the Jews were already living there, and fighting for the land.

Secondly, Britain never partitioned the land, and never announced any intention to partition the land. (Things might have been very different if they had.) I think you’re getting confused with the UN’s partition plan, which was never implemented.

There are no “good guys” in a conflict between religious people.

Religion does play a role in the conflict, particularly over the question of where the border between an Israeli and Palestian state should go (so that holy sites end up on the appropriate side), but I don’t think it’s very useful to understand this as a religious conflict.

The Jews who moved to Israel in the early 20th century weren’t pilgrims. They were refugees fleeing political persecution. The founder of Zionism wasn’t even religious.

And Israel didn’t happen because religious Jews enthusiastically got behind the idea of Zionism. Israel happened because Britain got behind the idea of Zionism.

Because the Crusdaes of the 11th to 13th centuries still loom large in Western culture (Richard the Lionheart and all that), I think Westerners have a tendency to think that the situation in Israel/Palestine is a continuation of those conflicts. But it’s really not. It’s a 20th century creation.

Up until 1967, the bad guys were Britain.

Britain seized Palestine from the Ottomans during WWI with the help of the local Palestinians, promising the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for their help overthrowing the Ottomans.

At the same time, Britain promised to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine (in the Balfour Declaration), and Jewish refugees from Europe began settling in Palestine. Britain did this because they thought they might gain the support of Jewish financiers for their war efforts.

The Balfour Declaration was deliberately vague about whether Britain was giving all of the land to the Jews or just some of the land. It was vague because Britain wanted to appeal to Jewish Zionists (who wanted all of Palestine) while not alienating the Palestinians.

Britain never did divide the land, resulting in two different populations who felt they legally owned the land, one who had always been there, and one who mostly arrived as refugees.

When Britain left following WWII, a civil war broke out for control of the land. A border was eventually drawn at the line of control (which ran through the middle of Jerusalem), and Israelis declared the new State of Israel, while Palestinian refugees fled to their side of the border or neighbouring states. That was in 1948.

So, up until then, it’s a messy situation created by Britain, but one which eventually resulted in the land being split (albeit violently), with both Israelis and Palestinians having a state, and each having part of Jerusalem. The world accepted this as the new status quo and hoped it would be sustained peacefully.

That changed in 1967 when Israel annexed the Palestinian lands (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) in the Six Days War. Since then, Palestinians have been living under a harsh Israeli occcupation as a stateless people (meaning no citizenship), with their rights and freedoms strictly curtailed. Palestinians have been resisting through a number of resistance movements, usually designated as terrorist groups in the Western media.

There was a political movement towards peace and repartitioning of the land that peaked in the 1990s, but since then it has been held up by a series of right-wing governments in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has been aggressively building Jewish neighbourhoods (called settlements) in the formerly Palestinian lands of the West Bank.

So since 1967, Israel has pretty clearly been the bad guy.

The terrorist attack that killed 1200 young Israelis was horrific, and we should all hope nothing like that ever happens again. But the root cause of the attack was Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The way to prevent future terror attacks is to end the oppression of the Palestinian people.

If you’re saying that you shouldn’t vote unless your candidate has a chance of winning, you might as well tell every Democrat voter in a red state to stay home on election day.

There is no third option.

There is a third option.

doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.

And what if they seem equally likely to escalate the situation?

Trump says he’ll let Israel finish the job. Kamala says she disapproves of what’s happening in Gaza, but will always support Israel and will always provide them with weapons.

Same fuckin’ thing.

I kinda know what you’re saying. I find liberals of both persuasions (Democrat and Republican) quite foolish and intolerable, and when the inevitable collapse of America comes (I’m guessing in the next four years, no matter which one wins), part of me imagines gloating over them with “See what your liberalism has wrought?!”.

But a much more sensible part of myself realizes that a bunch of apolitical, ordinary working Americans are going to suffer in the collapse, including my relatives, and I probably will not feel like gloating.

(Me, I’m fucking off to Thailand as soon as I turn 50 and can qualify for a Thai retirement visa.)

They’ll both be disasters for the USA.

Trump will be a disaster because millions of Americans who are currently on the brink of poverty will sink into poverty under his policies, amplifying all kinds of social problems and civil unrest.

Harris will be a disaster because she will escalate unpopular military conflicts, overextending the military, further lessening the prestige of the US, and encouraging countries to de-dollarize.

The next four years are going to be rough. There’s no avoiding it.

Ghettoes were neighbourhood where Jews were forced to live in Nazi Europe, so I’d say that sounds worse.

I knew a vegan who was a nice guy. He wasn’t obnoxious about his veganism. He was, however, obnoxious about his Christianity.

And to be honest, he looked a bit malnourished.