Bel Shazar posted:

So... Egypt should not be in a position to demand antiquities looted in the 1800s back from other nations?

Cat Mattress posted:

They are, and they have.

Cat Mattress posted:

They are in that position, and they have.


Though I think the Museums in London, Paris, Berlin, etc. probably aren't very keen to send antiquities back to the Middle East currently.

Bear Retrieval Unit posted:

The amount of tears over this is amazing.

Disinterested posted:

Well they don't want to give them back to Greece either, so it's not entirely about how safe people think they will be.

Cat Mattress posted:

You know Greece would just immediately auction them off for cash instead of putting them in museums.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

That's actually a brilliant way to solve the Greek solvency crisis: demand that every museum holding Greek artifacts pay either a bulk or rental fee!

quote:

Since the beginning of 2014, representatives from Israel and Saudi Arabia have had five secret meetings to discuss a common foe, Iran. On Thursday, the two countries came out of the closet by revealing this covert diplomacy at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Kim Jong Il posted:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-04/israelis-and-saudis-reveal-secret-talks-to-thwart-iran


Spoiler: most Sunni countries have varying levels of support for Israel, tacit or not.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Most Palestinians are Sunni, though, right?

Kim Jong Il posted:

The PA is among the more complicit governments with Israel.

Miltank posted:

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood- a powerful democratically inclined and specifically anti-autocratic Sunni movement.

Cat Mattress posted:

Also I'm pretty sure that Israel is in favor of Daesh-linked organizations taking root in Palestine. After all, what they want the most is to keep the status quo forever, and that means never running out of pretexts to occupy and bomb Palestinians. Daesh being the greatest bugaboo in the West since the fall of the Soviet Union, equating Palestinians to them is perfect. They may also want to do with Daesh and Hamas the same play they did before with respectively, Hamas and Fatah.

Xandu posted:

So amazing how the first reaction is it's antisemitism. It was kind of a weird statement to make, though. "Hey Arabs, we'd really stop doing business with Israel if we could, but you know, lawsuits." It is the fist example of a large company adding a bit of support to the BDS movement, though.

RandomPauI posted:

So...a pro-isis group launched rocket attacks against Israel in the hopes of hurting Israel and getting them to attack Hamas. Israel decided to attack Hamas anyways instead of the pro-isis group. The logic is so...I think, I think this is what finally broke me down to tears about I/P. I now don't see any hopes in my lifetime for any sort of peaceful reconciliation.

Main Paineframe posted:

The thing that gets me, though, is that both Israel and the Omar Brigades are saying it with a straight face and not really getting called on it.

Main Paineframe posted:

The thing that gets me, though, is that both Israel and the Omar Brigades are saying it with a straight face and not really getting called on it. In the first place, where did the Omar Brigades even get the idea to strike against Israel to hurt Hamas? After all, it's one hell of a risk to take since they don't have any assurances that Israel won't bomb them instead, especially when they're openly stating their intention to have Israel bomb Hamas - and also declaring jihad against Israel at the same time.

RandomPauI posted:

So...a pro-isis group launched rocket attacks against Israel in the hopes of hurting Israel and getting them to attack Hamas. Israel decided to attack Hamas anyways instead of the pro-isis group. The logic is so...I think, I think this is what finally broke me down to tears about I/P. I now don't see any hopes in my lifetime for any sort of peaceful reconciliation.

Svartvit posted:

There is an agreement between Israel and Hamas that basically says that Hamas is responsible for their internal security, including various other militant factions. Whenever anyone attacks Israel from within Gaza, Israel makes sure Hamas is policing their own, which they do in exchange for the political leverage that comes with it.

The Insect Court posted:

Yes, a "democratically inclined" and "specifically anti-autocratic" groups that also happens to be fascistic and theocratic and calls for an end to multi-party democracy. Next up, noted activists for social justice and equality: the NSDAP.

Svartvit posted:

There is an agreement between Israel and Hamas that basically says that Hamas is responsible for their internal security, including various other militant factions. Whenever anyone attacks Israel from within Gaza, Israel makes sure Hamas is policing their own, which they do in exchange for the political leverage that comes with it.

Disinterested posted:

Hamas has actually been historically quite good at it in peacetime moments, but the expectation that you can perfectly stop every attack is nonsensical, and there is a clear pattern of trying to use more radical groups against the dominant one - Hamas previously benefited from this.

Main Paineframe posted:

Israel's goal isn't to stomp out radicalism in Gaza and prevent attacks against Israel, it's to destabilize the Gazan government and destroy Hamas.

quote:

The Israeli-Hamas dialogue is said to be infuriating the Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank, which sees Israel helping to entrench Hamas in Gaza as a rival Palestinian leadership. That, in turn, angers Washington and Cairo, which want to see Mahmoud Abbas’s P.A. regain control in Gaza at some point in order to become a credible partner in a two-state peace agreement. Weekly talks in Gaza between the P.A. and Hamas appear to be going nowhere.

Accounts of the feuding between the two wings of Hamas appeared April 29 in nearly identical reports in an array of Israeli news outlets, all without attribution, typically an indication of a background press briefing from IDF military intelligence.

The reports all led with the news that the commander of the military wing, Mohammed Deif, who had been reported killed by Israel during last summer’s Gaza war, is now confirmed to be alive and fully in command of the terror group. They went on to describe Deif’s overseeing of the new tunnel excavations.

Tensions between Hamas’s political and military wings were described in most of the reports, including the centrist Walla News and Ynet , the leftist Haaretz , the right-wing NRG and the Orthodox Kikar Shabbat .

quote:

The motives of Israel’s political and military echelons appear to be somewhat at cross-purposes, though hardly matching the venom of the feuding Hamas leaders. The army sees the dialogue with Hamas as a way to prevent the outbreak of new hostilities, which appeared to be inevitable if no progress were made by summer to ease the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Moreover, there were intelligence reports that Hamas was preparing to expand its zone of confrontation with Israel from Gaza to the northern borders, where Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria are seething in the wake of the brutal ISIS assaults on the Yarmouk camp south of Damascus.

Israel’s army doesn’t have the authority to negotiate without the government’s approval for the sort of long-term agreement that Hamas reportedly seeks, but it can increase the flow of goods into Gaza to calm the waters. Since the start of 2015, according to Fishman, the number of trucks carrying material into Gaza has doubled from the 255 daily average last year to 523 per day in April. The number of entry permits into Israel has also increased, half of them for merchants seeking to market goods in Israel and the West Bank, the other half mostly civil and humanitarian.

As for the government, it’s divided between those who back the army’s goal of keeping the peace and those who’d like to retake Gaza and destroy Hamas. There’s also a division between those who want to see the P.A. restored to power in Gaza and those who prefer keeping the West Bank and Gaza feuding in order to render Palestinian statehood moot.

quote:

THREE WEEKS ago was Naqba Day – the day on which Palestinians inside and outside Israel commemorate their "catastrophe" - the exodus of more than half of the Palestinian people from the territories occupied by Israel in the 1948 war.
Each side has its own version of this momentous event.

According to the Arab version, the Jews came from nowhere, attacked a peace-loving people and drove them out of their country.

According to the Zionist version, the Jews had accepted the United Nations compromise plan, but the Arabs had rejected it and started a bloody war, during which they were convinced by the Arab states to leave their homes in order to return with the victorious Arab armies.
Both these versions are utter nonsense - a mixture of propaganda, legend and hidden guilt feelings.

Irony Be My Shield posted:

The Insect Court posted:

Yes, a "democratically inclined" and "specifically anti-autocratic" groups that also happens to be fascistic and theocratic and calls for an end to multi-party democracy. Next up, noted activists for social justice and equality: the NSDAP.

The Insect Court posted:

I agree with you computer parts, Nazi analogies are not real attempts at argumentation

The Insect Court posted:

If your reaction to being told you can't just call the people you hate Nazis is to pitch a fit and whine that you if you can't express your beliefs in the form of Nazi analogies then you might as well not post anything then you don't have anything worthwhile to say in the first place.

Darth Walrus posted:

What's with Palestine's population growth rate, anyway? It's one of the largest in the Arab world, let alone anywhere else, despite the country being... well... what it is. I mean, Gaza has a higher rate than the West Bank, which doesn't seem to make sense.

Darth Walrus posted:

What's with Palestine's population growth rate, anyway? It's one of the largest in the Arab world, let alone anywhere else, despite the country being... well... what it is. I mean, Gaza has a higher rate than the West Bank, which doesn't seem to make sense.

Ultramega posted:

Al-Jazeera and the guardian are being evasive about palestinian casualties sustained from this last bombing. Does anyone have any sources with anything more definite other than "reports of casualties" from gaza?

quote:

On 7 April 2015, during Passover holidays, a group of hundreds of settlers accompanied by Israeli security forces came to Birkat al-Karmil – a natural pool close to the village of al-Karmil, which lies in the southern Hebron Hills within Area A. In 2011, Yatta Municipality renovated the site, creating a park there and restoring an ancient pool at its center.

B'Tselem’s investigation found that at about 2:00 P.M., hundreds of settlers arrived at the pool accompanied by dozens of soldiers, Border Police, and representatives of the Civil Administration (CA). The security forces ordered the Palestinian bathers to leave the pool and remain on the edge of the park. They allowed the settlers, however, free and exclusive use of the rest of the park. At about 5:30 P.M., the settlers and the security forces left the area.

Disinterested posted:

It would be a positive development if Israel and Palestine conducted a virtual war of launching rockets in to empty spaces and pretending they had killed people to their native populations.