I do not understand why all of this is being reported now internationally because it was widely reported within Israel in the days after the Hamas invasion:
Obvio-0bvio said:Though I sincerely hope that Hamas is engaging in this hostage exchange out of genuine compassion and a desire for political diplomacy..
Jailed without charge: How Israel holds thousands of Palestinian prisonersIsrael has called Palestinians released under a truce with Hamas violent ‘terrorists.’ But most haven’t been charged.As Palestinian prisoners were being released last week, Israel imposed a ban on celebrations by their family members. “Expressions of joy”, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said, “are equivalent to backing terrorism”. Israel has presented imprisoned Palestinians as “terrorists” and has subjected many of the detainees to abuse. But of the 300 Palestinian women and children whom Israel has identified for potential release as part of the humanitarian pause between Israel and Hamas, nearly 80 percent were not even formally charged. An overwhelming majority of Palestinian prisoners were arrested under a quasi-judicial process known as administrative detention, under which Palestinians are initially jailed for six months. Their detentions can then be repeatedly extended for an indefinite period without charge or trial. Most Palestinians, including children, are tried in military courts and handed lengthy sentences in what critics call sham military trials because in many cases Palestinians are deprived of defence lawyers and due process. In comparison, Israeli citizens are tried in civil courts, highlighting the two-tier justice system that discriminates against Palestinians. Who is on the list?The vast majority of the Palestinians – 233 prisoners out of the 300 – on Israel’s release list have not been formally charged and were held as administrative detainees. An overwhelming majority of them are children. The youngest is 14. Almost three-quarters of them are from the occupied West Bank, which has seen a surge of arrests since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza on October 7. The West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem had already seen a spike in Israeli raids this year even before the war. The longest serving prisoner among the 300 has been held for 102 months, or eight-and-a-half years. The most recent prisoner was arrested two months ago. Nearly half of the prisoners have no affiliation with any Palestinian political or armed group. Others are believed to be affiliated with Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. ... Prisoners may be held under administrative detention indefinitely. During that time, which could span years, the prisoners, their families and their lawyers may remain in the dark as to what the prisoner has been charged with and what evidence there is against them. Israel has arrested an estimated one million Palestinians since occupying East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1967, according to a United Nations report released last year. A considerable number of them are believed to be administrative detainees. ... When charges are filed, they regularly include “terrorist” activities, which could include acts against Israeli soldiers or settlers, and “incitement”, which includes influencing public opinion. Traffic violations or being in Israel illegally for work also bring Palestinians into the military judicial system, which has a conviction rate of 99 percent. In contrast to Palestinians, Israeli settlers arrested in the West Bank are tried in civilian courts inside Israel. This practice has in effect created two legal systems, which human rights groups have called discriminatory and a form of “apartheid”. How are Palestinians treated in prison?Some of the Palestinian prisoners who have been released as part of the truce have said they were beaten and humiliated by Israeli soldiers before being freed. Beatings grew more intense and frequent after the start of the war, but testimonies of prisoners over the decades have pointed to a longstanding pattern of beatings, torture and abuse of prisoners. Since the start of the war, rights groups have reported that the Israeli Prison Service has also considerably restricted water, food, medical care and communal items for prisoners and has restricted or altogether halted family and lawyer visits. This means that Palestinian prisoners have effectively lost some of the limited privileges that they had earned through years of campaigning and hunger strikes in prisons that are now severely overcrowded as well. How does Israel treat its child inmates?Hundreds of children, some as young as nine years old, have been detained by Israeli forces in what many have said represents a violation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Children fare no better than adults in Israeli prisons, and an array of abuses against them has been documented. The rights group Save the Children said in a report in July that 86 percent of children are beaten in Israeli detention, 69 percent are strip-searched and 42 percent are injured during their arrests. They have suffered gunshot wounds and broken bones among other injuries. Some children have reported violence of a sexual nature, and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages, the London-based child rights organisation said. Palestinian children are “the only children in the world who are systematically prosecuted in military courts” and an estimated 10,000 have been held in the Israeli military detention system over the past 20 years, according to the group. |
The University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League School which has condoned and permitted protests by pro-Palestinians calling for the genocide of Jews, has been crushed financially since then and has just lost a $100 million donation, which is on top of many other losses of donations:
It is one thing to post stupidities on the Internet anonymously where there are no repercussions. It is quite another to allow this type of thing to play out in the public forum, and deeply insult many Jewish donors to many Ivy League schools. These Universities have now been crushed in their wallets, where it counts. Take their money away and you WILL change their behavior.Elizabeth Magill: UPenn loses $100m donation after House antisemitism testimony
A major University of Pennsylvania donor withdraws grant after Congress hearing about antisemitism on campus.www.bbc.com
This video provides an excellent summary of the Israeli perspective on the war against Hamas. Obviously, I agree with it, because I embrace the same civilized values of freedom, democracy, tolerance, progress, and peace that the Palestinians have continually rejected since the formation of Israel in 1948. As the narrator says: "The people of Gaza are not choosing terror because they are poor; they are poor because they choose terror."
...and continue analogy with WWII, anyone who is troubled by civilian casualties has to pray for a swift Israeli victory as there is no other way to minimize them... but it had no choice but to go to war with Japan and defeat it in a war that would take almost 4 years.
MMX, great point. Hamas and its many supporters in Gaza made a huge miscalculation in plotting their barbarous terror attack on Israel. I don't think they anticipated getting into a full scale war with the IDF as a result of the attack....and continue analogy with WWII, anyone who is troubled by civilian casualties has to pray for a swift Israeli victory as there is no other way to minimize them
Totally false. You are the only person gaslighting here and revising history.You guys are gas-lighting, pushing fallacies and propagandas yet are totally failing at acknowledging the deep core of this issue; the zionist entity is illegitimately occupying a territory who does not belong to it since 1948.
Completely false. Were you on the battlefields in the 1948 and 1967 conflicts? I have spoken to people who were. It is a huge fiction that Israel won those wars because of the "support of the major Western countries." Israel defeated a number of different Arab countries armed to the teeth by the USSR in those conflicts, not just Palestine which has no army. Here is why they lost if you actually lived the history or paid a whiff of attention to what actually happened:who is in fact nothing without the support of the major Western countries.
From your posts it is clear that “stop the occupation” means elimination of Israel as the Jewish state. It would never happen. Most Arab states have already realized that existence of Israel is the permanent political reality. With the same logic you can ask for the elimination of USA and Canada and many other countries. So good luck in wasting your life.the zionist entity is illegitimately occupying a territory who does not belong to it since 1948.
You could apply the same logic to most countries in the world. Most nations didn't spontaneously come into existence or become nations in any way that was fair. We are being asked to rewrite history and start from scratch and it's not going to happen. I personally believe in a 2 state solution along the lines of the UN Resolution in 1947, but it's not going to happen so long as the Palestinian leadership's Mantra is death to Israel.With the same logic you can ask for the elimination of USA and Canada and many other countries. So good luck in wasting your life.
...The problem in 1929 [the year of riots against Jews in Palestine] was not “the occupation,” but a refusal to accept any Jewish state in Palestine. This refusal stands in contrast to repeated (if not always full-hearted) Jewish acceptance of a two-state solution, including the Jews’ acceptance of the Peel Commission in 1937 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947. The Arab rejection of partition then and the Hamas rejection of a Jewish state now are both rooted in the same claim that the Jewish state is a settler-colonial enterprise. But this characterization is simply false.
First, Israel is not a colony of any country, nor was it established as one. It is not like the British colonies in America and Australia, nor the Belgian or German colonies in what were the Congo and South West Africa. Jews were not sent by anyone, nor did they migrate from a single country or even a single region. In other words, they had no metropole. Moreover, they have ancestral ties to the land. It is the place from which they came, and from which they were exiled. This is not to deny that Palestinians have ties to the same land, but it is not colonization when those who are driven out of their land return to it. Those Palestinian exiles who deny this, might ask themselves whether their own claims to some part of Palestine will evaporate in time, and if so, when?
Second, a very large proportion of the Jewish Israeli population is descended from refugees. These include not only refugees from pogroms and the Shoah in Europe, but also around 650,000 Jews who fled persecution in Arab countries and Iran. Other Jewish Israelis are migrants who have moved to Israel because, for any number of reasons, that is where they prefer to be. Refugees and migrants are not colonialists. Those who reject this distinction will be forced to acknowledge that there is now a substantial Muslim colonization of Europe, America, and other Western countries. That is not a reasonable characterization, nor is it one that Palestinians’ Western supporters will be eager to defend.
So what about “the occupation” in 2023? The Gaza Strip is not occupied, and hasn’t been since Israel unilaterally withdrew from the territory in 2005. It is true that Israel—along with Egypt—controls Gaza’s borders, but that is not the same as occupation. It is also true that the partial blockade (converted to a full siege following the October 7th massacre) has brought hardship to Gazans, but it is not a gratuitous infliction. The blockade was imposed in an attempt to control the flow of arms into Gaza, which Israelis knew Hamas would then use to attack Israel.
Israel does continue to occupy the West Bank, but responsibility for that conundrum cannot be laid solely at Israel’s door either. It takes two sides to make peace. Anybody who suggests that Israel could resolve the conflict by simply withdrawing from the West Bank should try to understand that the results of the Gaza disengagement demonstrate this to be impossible. That experience has provided a painful lesson in the dangers of vacating disputed land in the absence of (and possibly even with) a peace agreement. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, that area has regularly been used as a launching ground for thousands of rockets into Israel (despite the blockade), and now for the worst massacre of Jews since the Nazis....
...But those who lay all (or almost all) of the blame for the ongoing conflict and the consequent statelessness of the Palestinians on Israel display either bad faith or naiveté. Lifting the blockade on Gaza and unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank would amount to suicide for Israel’s Jews. The same is true of the suggestion that there could be a unified state of Jewish and Arab citizens from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Those who propose such a state need to explain which country in the region this state would most resemble. Not a single state in the Middle East rates even remotely as well as Israel still does in terms of liberal and democratic freedoms. What reason do we have for thinking that a unified Palestine would be any different, especially with antisemitic rejectionists like Hamas in the polity.
When we ask what each side of the Hamas-Israel conflict could do differently, it is much easier to say what Hamas could do. It could stop attacking Israel. If it stopped behaving like the fundamentalist, repressive, terroristic regime that it is, and used its resources for building a nascent Palestinian state, it would bring greater prosperity to its citizens, gradually ease restrictions on its borders, and demonstrate that Palestine could exist peacefully alongside Israel. But that, of course, is not what Hamas wants.