75
Israel has encroached on 32% of Gaza
(www.aljazeera.com)
Breaking news from around the world.
News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
For US News, see the US News community.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
Because that sort of "justice" is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don't have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
I think the problem is that they've been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there's a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I'm against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I'll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn't need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it's Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn't, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don't even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they've held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn't currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it's still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because "our God is not theirs".