Israel - Hamas War October 2023

[FormerActuary]

So to you, a few thousand Israelis is the same as the whole world?

[FormerActuary]

Polymath, you may get your wish soon. A member of the National Unity Party, Michael Biton, said that the party would be exiting the government in a few months, and would introduce a bill to dissolve the Knesset. I don’t see Netanyahu winning again, unless he does something decisive to win the war.

[The_Polymath]

I think its a mistake (from the point of view of the Govt) to basically ignore those people.

Thats what Bibi & Co have been doing really. Telling them “we are getting the hostages back” and then turning around and behaving in a way that makes it impossible to get the hostages back (and a portion of them have now been killed by the IDF strikes).

Those people are not stupid. They can connect the dots easily enough.

The infrastructure in Gaza has effectively been destroyed. Hamas is simply not a “credible threat” anymore, so the questions these people are asking themselves is: why are we not negotiating for the hostages now?

And the answer to that is that the extremist right-wing (Smotrich, Ben-Gvir) don’t care one iota about the hostages. They want to cause as much destruction in Gaza as possible so they can then absorb some of the land for “security reasons”.

Bibi knows that the current position is not sustainable. (he is not stupid either). If you have ever studied game theory, Bibi is now very much effectively trapped inside a prisoners dilemma scenario.

Prisoner's dilemma

[R_Daneel_Olivaw]

Hamas was never a credible threat to Israel’s existence on its own. Unfortunately its not on its own. It has the support of the entire Iranian ME power structure.

Hamas is also, demonstrably, a credible threat to the lives and peace of Southern Israelis. If the Mexican cartels moved in and destroyed El Paso and murdered half its residents 99% of Americans would be perfectly fine with sending the military to deal with them. The demonstrations in Israel are much more about “get the hostages back any way we can” than they are about don’t destroy Hamas because its hard on Gazan civilians.

[joejam]

A major reason why Israel backed out of the deal was that Hamas changed 2 parts of the deal:

1. They would return 33 bodies, not 33 live hostages
2. Israel would have to agree to a ceasefire, complete withdrawal, dignified exchange, reconstruction, and lifting of the blockade.

[PatientZombie]

There will never be a permanent agreement until it includes all hostages

[funkingded]

And there will never be a permanent agreement until there is a two state solution.

[The_Polymath]

@R_Daneel_Olivaw

The demonstrations in Israel are much more about “get the hostages back any way we can” than they are about don’t destroy Hamas because its hard on Gazan civilians.

But a diplomat briefed on the frantic weekend negotiations said the proposal Hamas had accepted was similar to that previously endorsed by Israel.

One factor was crucial. As Burns shuttled from Cairo to Doha, Hamas had sought US guarantees that the deal would end with a permanent ceasefire — a long-standing demand that Israel has outright rejected.

The mediators sought to allay Hamas’s concerns by reiterating that the reference to the goal of a “sustainable calm” during the second phase of the deal — language Israel had previously accepted — was an assurance intended to create conditions for the end of the conflict.

The Israeli incursion into Rafah immediately changed the calculus in the besieged enclave, said Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University now living in exile in Cairo. With nearly 35,000 Palestinians killed in seven months of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, and their “homes, schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, water lines completely destroyed”, any ceasefire would be acceptable to Palestinians in order to save what was left, he said.

“Hamas does not have the upper hand. But neither does Netanyahu — now that Hamas has accepted some sort of deal, he is in a big dilemma.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s dilemma: save the hostages or his government - https://on.ft.com/3WvWvW7 via @FT

[twig93]

@PatientZombie

There will never be a permanent agreement until it includes all hostages

@funkingded

And there will never be a permanent agreement until there is a two state solution.

There will never be a permanent agreement.

(Unfortunately. At least, it seems very unlikely that I’ll live to see it, but I really hope I’m wrong.)

[PatientZombie]

I’m fine with that, though I doubt that will mean peace.

[joejam]

This is the real problem, Israel usually suggests something based on the west bank and gaza while the Palestinians are weighing any potential solution against the 1948 proposal. This means that what each side thinks the 2 states should look like are vastly different. The NYT had an in depth write-up that is a long read but is interesting.

The Road to 1948, and the Roots of a Perpetual Conflict (Published 2024)

[The_Polymath]

The US should have done this months ago.

One of the reasons why students are protesting is because the US has been feeding the destruction by giving Israel the munitions it uses to destroy the infrastructure. They could not have kept this going for months on end without the help of the US.

That was a mistake on Biden’s part and is likely going to cost him (both in the US for electoral reasons and abroad - US soft power has been damaged there).

Biden admin pauses shipment of thousands of bombs to Israel amid assault on...

[FormerActuary]

And yet, surveys show that the majority of students don’t really care about the conflict in Gaza, and also that 34% blame Hamas for the situation, compared to 19% who blame Netanyahu, and 12% who blame the Israeli people.
Also, 81% of students want the protestors held accountable for what they’re doing, and 90% said it’s not ok to block pro-Israel students from parts of campus.

[The_Polymath]

Feel free to post the source of these “surveys” and their methodology.

[FormerActuary]

https://www.axios.com/2024/05/07/poll-students-israel-hamas-protests

[PatientZombie]

and half the protesting students aren’t actually students

[The_Polymath]

Definitely not representative of the larger schools where the protests are occuring.

Methodology: This study was conducted May 3-6 from a representative sample of n=1,250 students nationwide from 2-year and 4-year schools. The margin of error is +/- 2.7 percentage points. The Generation Lab conducts polling using a demographically representative sample frame of college students at community colleges, technical colleges, trade schools and public and private four-year institutions.

[Vorian_Atreides]

But is totally appropriate when the general narrative is “US (post-secondary) students ______”.

[The_Polymath]

These two are basically the “problem”. Bibi gets the blame as well because is only slow walking the negotiations to remain in power.

Real pieces of work, these two. Negotiations will never work until these two are booted far away from any positions of power.

Ben-Gvir

A settler and lawyer, Ben-Gvir was cleared by Israel’s high court to serve as a cabinet minister despite convictions for incitement to racism and for supporting a terror group – Meir Kahane’s banned Kach party. In 2015, in the immediate aftermath of the murder of members of the Palestinian Dawabshe family in an arson attack on a West Bank village, he was filmed as an attender at a wedding party of a radical settler along with now sanctioned anti-Arab activist Bentzi Gopstein.

In the footage, guests could be seen stabbing a picture of Ali Dawabshe, a toddler who died during the attack, waving guns and firebombs and singing. Netanyahu, who described the images as “shocking”, would later give Ben-Gvir a portfolio with responsibility for Israel’s police.

Smotrich

Smotrich was arrested in 2005, with three others, during the Israeli evacuation of the Gaza settlements by the Shin Bet domestic security agency on suspicion of terrorism, although he was released three weeks later without charge.

He has described himself as a “proud homophobe” and stated that Israel’s judicial system should be based on Torah law.

…

According to reports in the Hebrew media last month, Ben-Gvir demanded of the Israeli chief of staff at a briefing: “Why are there so many arrests [in Gaza]?

“Can’t you kill some? Do you want to tell me they all surrender? What are we to do with so many arrested? It’s dangerous for the soldiers.”

An unnamed Israeli minister quoted by Ynet said Ben-Gvit had not explicitly suggested killing individuals who had surrendered.

This matters because it looks like public opinion in Israel is skewing to “negotiate the release of the hostages” first, rather than “attack Rafah to destroy Hamas (which people do not agree is completely possible anyways)”.

A series of polls in recent days, including for the Israel Democracy Institute, has found that 56% of the Jewish public believe that a deal to secure the release of hostages should take top priority, compared with a third who believe that an offensive against Rafah should be the government’s main focus.

A poll for Israel’s Channel 13 tells a similar story of scepticism in the Israel public, with 52% believing a Rafah operation will not deliver victory against Hamas, compared with 30% who believe it will. Perhaps most striking, however, is a poll by rightwing newspaper Israel Hayom, which found that 28% thought the “preferred victory picture” would represent the hostages’ release, while 17% chose an image representing the destruction of Hamas.

Netanyahu’s political survival in hands of far-right ministers

[FormerActuary]

This letter, written by Jewish students at Columbia, is fantastic. Also, it’s noteworthy that Jewish students have no need to hide their identities - they are proud to put their names out there, unlike the cowardly people supporting Hamas.