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The Israeli cabinet has approved a hostage deal - https://www.timesofisrael.com/cabinet-approves-deal-for-return-of-50-hostages-in-exchange-for-multi-day-ceasefire/ Headline seems to be 50 live Israeli hostages for some number of Palestinian prisoners (exact number unclear, I've seen other sources say 150 but a PA official is apparently saying more) during a 4-day ceasefire potentially beginning on Thursday. Letting the aid agencies actually get in and help people without being bombed will save a huge number of lives. Obviously not a long-term fix though since as it stands Israel is picking up where they left off after 4 days. Irony Be My Shield fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 02:31
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yeah I'm slightly annoyed about the literally fake news side here it's bad enough he was high up in any capacity, no need to blatantly lie about it
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Nov 22, 2023 02:31
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I can't get a complete picture, but it looks like the NSC doesn't have an overarching "director", and that the confusion comes from the fact that most staff working for the NSC have the "director" title...and that the hiring announcement from Gotham referred to him as "former Director of the National Security Council." edit: some more googling reveals a probably insubstantial conflict between Seldowitz and the OIG over cost reimbursements that went up to certiorari level; I say "irrelevant" because it's from the early 2000s. From other old press releases, etc, it appears Seldowitz had a full several-decade career at State (which did include at least a stint as a diplomat to Israel) and wasn't meaningfully connected to any particular administration. edit 2: His primary role as a staffer was some sort of senior involvement in the 1995 Dayton Agreement in Bosnia/Serbia. He was deputy chief of mission to Latvia in ~ 2008. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 02:35
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Kalit posted:That was under Bush. And not the Director of the NSC. I was unaware that Bush was in office 2009-11. Per his cached linkedin: 
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Nov 22, 2023 02:37
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Discendo Vox posted:I can't get a complete picture, but it looks like the NSC doesn't have an overarching "director", and that the confusion comes from the fact that most staff working for the NSC have the "director" title...and that the hiring announcement from Gotham referred to him as "former Director of the National Security Council." Maybe I'm mistaking my terms, I guess I interpreted the National Security Advisor as the director of the NSC. According to the org chart, they are in charge of the NSC. Sorry if it's not officially the "director" title. Corambis posted:I was unaware that Bush was in office 2009-11. Per his cached linkedin: Hmm...well early 2000s definitely isn't 2009. But, as your screenshot notes, he was at the NSC while Obama was in office (at least in 2009). However, it appeared he was the acting director for South Asia at that time, which is a much different title than what Binder was trying to claim. Kalit fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 02:45
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Corambis posted:I was unaware that Bush was in office 2009-11. Per his cached linkedin: "Financhial representative" Irony Be My Shield posted:The Israeli cabinet has approved a hostage deal - It appears they have offered to extend the ceasefire by an additional day for the release of more hostages. 10 hostages = 1 more day. https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7033147 MSF reported that today two of their doctors were killed by Israeli strikes while working in a hospital in northern Gaza. I'm guessing that might amp up international pressure even further. Goosed it. fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 02:47
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Does the deal involve Israel retreating from the Strip, or at least the hospitals? From a military standpoint it seems unwise to accept a temporary ceasefire that lets the invading army fortify the hospitals & schools they're occupying. That said, releasing Palestinian hostages is ostensibly what Hamas' goal was in taking the Israeli hostages (alongside publicly beating the border wall & retribution for the Aqsa raid), and they've put out three variants of hostage deal offers throughout the siege, so maybe they'll accept it. The gradual release of hostages makes Israel less likely to break the ceasefire. As an aside: https://twitter.com/politico/status/1727072321255424288 You know, personally, if I didnt want noncombatants getting targeted by an army bombing noncombatants, I wouldn't send the army bombing noncombatants details & coordinates for noncombatants. State department's just built different I guess. This is a sentence you'd get from a very blunt satire: quote:The Biden administration has been providing Israel with the location of humanitarian groups in Gaza for weeks to prevent strikes against their facilities. But Israel has continued to hit such sites. Neurolimal fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 03:06
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I believe Hamas has already agreed to this deal and was waiting on Israel to approve it. It definitely doesn't seem like Israel will be withdrawing its troops, although the Sky news tracker thinks there's some possibility that they agreed to stop surveillance flights for 6 hours a day. It's true that releasing hostages without revealing positions may prove to be a challenge under those circumstances. The prisoner release is the one thing Hamas could point to as a victory, although it's doubtful if the women and children who lived in non-Gaza parts of Palestine are likely to help them in any material way (a cynic might suggest that Israel wrongfully arrested at least some of them just to have fodder for future negotiations). It's certainly a lot worse for them than the previous deal they were pushing for which would've seen Israel release all of its prisoners, which would've included people actually useful to Hamas.
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Nov 22, 2023 03:22
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Irony Be My Shield posted:I believe Hamas has already agreed to this deal and was waiting on Israel to approve it. It definitely doesn't seem like Israel will be withdrawing its troops, although the Sky news tracker thinks there's some possibility that they agreed to stop surveillance flights for 6 hours a day. It's true that releasing hostages without revealing positions may prove to be a challenge under those circumstances. Are you serious?
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Nov 22, 2023 03:40
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Yes, I am serious when I say that the women and children who lived in the West Bank and East Jerusalem before being arrested (which seems to be the subset of prisoners Israel is releasing) were very unlikely to have been Hamas agents. And that some of the other prisoners who could've been released under previous iterations of the deal most likely were (keeping in mind that the current chief of Hamas in Gaza was released in a similar deal in 2011).
Irony Be My Shield fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 03:56
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quote:Hamas Movement: We announce, with God Almighty’s help and success, that we have reached a humanitarian truce agreement (temporary ceasefire) for a period of four days, with persistent and appreciated Qatari and Egyptian efforts, according to which: Seems to mostly be upsides for Hamas; grateful Palestinians, no bombing of South Gaza, 6 hours without aerial surveillance (I'm skeptical Israel holds to this, probably the first thing to break), Gaza gets an opportunity for the aid trucks to reinforce the strip from starvation tactics, and it only involves a quarter of their hostages. My biggest worry is on international momentum; 4 days is plenty in these shambolic times for the public to lose interest, especially if their news sources are complicit in working towards that goal.
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Nov 22, 2023 04:05
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So maybe a dumb question, but why are we referring to the people Hamas captured as hostages instead of prisoners? Have they threatened to kill the people? Are the Palestinians taken by the IDF hostages?
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Nov 22, 2023 04:08
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Irony Be My Shield posted:Yes, I am serious when I say that the women and children who lived in the West Bank and East Jerusalem before being arrested (which seems to be the subset of prisoners Israel is releasing) were very unlikely to have been Hamas agents. And that some of the other prisoners who could've been released under previous iterations of the deal most likely were (keeping in mind that the current chief of Hamas in Gaza was released in a similar deal in 2011). Then you weren't serious when you said that women aren't useful to the resistance.
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Nov 22, 2023 04:09
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:So maybe a dumb question, but why are we referring to the people Hamas captured as hostages instead of prisoners? Have they threatened to kill the people? Are the Palestinians taken by the IDF hostages? They were kidnapped and are being detained in order to demand concessions; you don't have to threaten to kill someone in order for them to be a hostage. The Palestinians detained in Israel are also hostages, but since Israel is a recognized state actor, they get to indefinitely detain people without charges and have them reported as prisoners.
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Nov 22, 2023 04:17
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The other issue I see with the deal from Hamas's perspective is like... what's to stop the IDF from just arresting the prisoners again once the ceasefire is over? Or any other random Palestinians in the occupied territories they feel like using as leverage? Kindof feels like a weird reversal where Hamas is potentially encouraging hostage-taking by Israel
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Nov 22, 2023 04:19
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:So maybe a dumb question, but why are we referring to the people Hamas captured as hostages instead of prisoners? Have they threatened to kill the people? Are the Palestinians taken by the IDF hostages? They're being held captive for the purpose of securing a deal, that makes them hostages regardless of whether there's a threat to kill them. I think the IDF takes some prisoners to make deals, so those are hostages, and others to interrogate/disable from fighting, and those aren't hostages.
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Nov 22, 2023 04:24
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Civilized Fishbot posted:They're being held captive for the purpose of securing a deal, that makes them hostages regardless of whether there's a threat to kill them. This makes sense, thanks!
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Nov 22, 2023 04:40
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Irony Be My Shield posted:The other issue I see with the deal from Hamas's perspective is like... what's to stop the IDF from just arresting the prisoners again once the ceasefire is over? Or any other random Palestinians in the occupied territories they feel like using as leverage? Kindof feels like a weird reversal where Hamas is potentially encouraging hostage-taking by Israel Hamas doesn't have a lot of leverage right now. Israel has blown past all the exit ramps and there's not much left to bargain over.
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Nov 22, 2023 04:50
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After a big meeting with a bunch of Arab foreign ministers in Beijing, China appears to be placing itself in Palestine's corner. It's possible that this may have influenced the declaration of a ceasefire, and might lead to more substantial protection for Palestine/Gaza in the medium-to-long term. Remember that they also played a key role in ending the Saudi genocide in Yemen, so this could potentially be a really big deal. https://x.com/ranaayyub/status/1727109957554786483?s=46&t=ARI_L-v32Oind1-d9B3a3Q
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Nov 22, 2023 05:02
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:So maybe a dumb question, but why are we referring to the people Hamas captured as hostages instead of prisoners? Have they threatened to kill the people? Are the Palestinians taken by the IDF hostages? In the first couple of days after Oct 7th, Hamas did in fact threaten to kill the hostages if Israel didn't stop their airstrikes, though they never actually carried out that threat. Palestinians taken by the IDF are mostly at least nominally suspected of crimes or of working for anti-Israel factions. A lot of the hostages taken by Hamas were just random civilians the militants happened to run across on Oct 7th.
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Nov 22, 2023 05:20
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Neurolimal posted:Seems to mostly be upsides for Hamas; grateful Palestinians, no bombing of South Gaza, 6 hours without aerial surveillance (I'm skeptical Israel holds to this, probably the first thing to break), Gaza gets an opportunity for the aid trucks to reinforce the strip from starvation tactics, and it only involves a quarter of their hostages. We have to pray that this holds and that the coming days see successful work to extend the ceasefire. I'm not very hopeful about that, but at the very least this will bring some scant relief to Gaza, and that's a lot better than the siege and bombing continuing unabated instead. Huge credit due to Qatar and Egypt, clearly, I wouldn't have taken the job of trying to make Israel drink some calm the gently caress down juice for any money.
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Nov 22, 2023 09:28
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Ms Adequate posted:We have to pray that this holds and that the coming days see successful work to extend the ceasefire. I'm not very hopeful about that, but at the very least this will bring some scant relief to Gaza, and that's a lot better than the siege and bombing continuing unabated instead. Huge credit due to Qatar and Egypt, clearly, I wouldn't have taken the job of trying to make Israel drink some calm the gently caress down juice for any money. Momentum's been a big part of this too, Netanyahu riding the wave of popular rage among Israelis both to punish the Palestinians and to keep it from being directed at him instead. It's unlikely the Israeli right loses its appetite for bombing Palestinians while Palestinians continue to exist, but the "we can't stop now!" of the last month and a half of killing fades the moment it does stop. Doesn't guarantee that it won't continue or keep its intensity later, but that depends whether the anti-war people maintain enough pressure and take advantage of the time.
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Nov 22, 2023 10:28
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Neurolimal posted:Seems to mostly be upsides for Hamas; grateful Palestinians, no bombing of South Gaza, 6 hours without aerial surveillance (I'm skeptical Israel holds to this, probably the first thing to break), Gaza gets an opportunity for the aid trucks to reinforce the strip from starvation tactics, and it only involves a quarter of their hostages. Would it matter how complicit news sources are when so many people get their news from social media anyway? Serious question.
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Nov 22, 2023 11:32
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Main Paineframe posted:In the first couple of days after Oct 7th, Hamas did in fact threaten to kill the hostages if Israel didn't stop their airstrikes, though they never actually carried out that threat. The IDF frequently arrests people (sorry, "detains" them) in the West Bank on spurious charges and keeps them jailed for months/years without trial or letting them speak to a lawyer. I'm not sure if any of the people being exchanged are in this category, but I'm sure you know how frequent it is so I wouldn't put it past the IDF to just arrest some randoms to trade.
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Nov 22, 2023 11:37
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Miftan posted:The IDF frequently arrests people (sorry, "detains" them) in the West Bank on spurious charges and keeps them jailed for months/years without trial or letting them speak to a lawyer. I'm not sure if any of the people being exchanged are in this category, but I'm sure you know how frequent it is so I wouldn't put it past the IDF to just arrest some randoms to trade. I'd wager money that the vast majority they release will be this category.
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Nov 22, 2023 12:30
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Darth Walrus posted:After a big meeting with a bunch of Arab foreign ministers in Beijing, China appears to be placing itself in Palestine's corner. It's possible that this may have influenced the declaration of a ceasefire, and might lead to more substantial protection for Palestine/Gaza in the medium-to-long term. Remember that they also played a key role in ending the Saudi genocide in Yemen, so this could potentially be a really big deal. But that’s exactly what can happen when you give a client state a total blank check and also an unlimited supply of bombs
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Nov 22, 2023 13:17
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FlamingLiberal posted:Can’t tell you how stupid it is that we are losing the moral battle to China The US has literally never been in a winning or even favourable position in any 'moral battle' against China.
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Nov 22, 2023 13:25
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Neuroliminal made that good longish post about how popular sentiment was looking in Israel (with most supporting a ceasefire to free hostages and such). What do people think the domestic Israeli reaction is going to look like? I seem to remember maybe a week or two back people posting polling indicating that Likud had tanked in voting intention, so I'm sort of wondering if the ceasefire will be the moment the knives come out. The hardest of hardliners have been pushing "no rest until Gaza is completely destroyed", and those are folks Bibi needs to keep a majority as I understand it. If Likud is really as down as those polls have indicated, it seems quite possible that every other party could gain vote share from an election. Maybe that's all wishful thinking though. As an American I have no particular insight beyond what people post here, so I'm curious if any of the folks who actually live there have more insight Edit: helpfully, it seems Wikipedia has a handy chart of the polling. Based on that, it seems that Gantz's party is really the only party majorly shifted in the polls, with only one party in the actual coalition polling above their earlier numbers. Given that, maybe it is less likely that elections would be called, especially given how little time has passed since the last ones and how many in a row had to happen before that. Still, I am curious to see how the hostage negotiations get reported on in the news, what the families of the hostages say, and how that impacts protests and polling. I'm sure Netanyahu wants to milk the crisis for legitimacy as long as possible to avoid the consequences of his court bullshit and the popularity drop from Oct 7, but there are still other actors that can mess that up for him BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 14:52
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WhiskeyWhiskers posted:The US has literally never been in a winning or even favourable position in any 'moral battle' ftfy
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Nov 22, 2023 15:05
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The hostage deal is believed to have been passed by the government 35-3, with only the far-right party Otzma Yehudit voting against. Even Religious Zionism (also far-right) apparently voted in favour, persuaded that the war to eliminate Hamas would proceed as planned after the ceasefire. There'll definitely be some pressure from the far-right but the overwhelming political consensus seems to be that this is a good deal. It should be said that the fall of Netanyahu (completely possible even while the war is ongoing, he is despised) should not be seen as something that will lead to the war ending - his likely replacements will be as or even more hardline on Gaza.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:07
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Miftan posted:The IDF frequently arrests people (sorry, "detains" them) in the West Bank on spurious charges and keeps them jailed for months/years without trial or letting them speak to a lawyer. I'm not sure if any of the people being exchanged are in this category, but I'm sure you know how frequent it is so I wouldn't put it past the IDF to just arrest some randoms to trade. While they're not always given due process or knowledge of the charges against them, Israel mostly doesn't arrest Palestinians for literally no reason whatsoever. The reason is often something stupidly authoritarian, like "being too pro-Palestine on social media", "being related to a suspected militant", or "showing up at anti-Israel protests too many times", but it's not like Israel is just raiding random neighborhoods and arresting everyone they catch for the hell of it. Unlike Hamas, they don't have any particular need to have prisoners just for the sake of having prisoners.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:13
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FlamingLiberal posted:Can’t tell you how stupid it is that we are losing the moral battle to China They want to keep the heat off while they ethnically cleans their own Muslim population.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:41
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:So maybe a dumb question, but why are we referring to the people Hamas captured as hostages instead of prisoners? Have they threatened to kill the people? Are the Palestinians taken by the IDF hostages? Most have been convicted by military courts w/o legal jurisdiction, often without being informed of the charges against them. These courts have a 99% conviction rate. Or else they're just detained indefinitely for no reason because some IDF freak didn't like the way they looked. People are there for throwing stones (20 year sentence) or social media posts or secret evidence of secret connections to terrorism. They're hostages of the Israeli state to ensure the compliance of the Palestinian people, at least in the West Bank.
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Nov 22, 2023 15:48
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It saddens me to think there are people in the west that think China is winning morally when China is just as much an apartheid state as Israel.
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Nov 22, 2023 16:08
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Family Values posted:It saddens me to think there are people in the west that think China is winning morally when China is just as much an apartheid state as Israel. But now they get to look like the ‘reasonable’ power because they are opposed to a very public genocide
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Nov 22, 2023 16:11
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Miftan posted:ftfy False narrative, imo. The Civil War and WWII, the US was plainly less evil than the states it was fighting. I'd also say the Revolutionary War had proto-USA acting as a revolutionary agent in an admirable way (both the Marxist sense that it moved history forward and set the stage for workers' revolutions, and the Eugene Devs/Langston Hughes sense that the ideals of the revolution were themselves liberatory). And when the US chose to stand up to South Africa, as infrequently as it happened, those were "moral battles" where the US was clearly in the right. I think just like how cops sometimes arrest or kill people who really do pose a threat to public safety, the American empire sometimes confronts states which really are committing repugnant crimes. Family Values posted:It saddens me to think there are people in the west that think China is winning morally when China is just as much an apartheid state as Israel. Can you elaborate on this?
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Nov 22, 2023 16:21
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China has been doing a quiet ethnic cleansing in the western part of the country where there have been traditionally been a lot of Muslim people. This has been going on for probably a decade now.
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Nov 22, 2023 16:23
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FlamingLiberal posted:China has been doing a quiet ethnic cleansing in the western part of the country where there have been traditionally been a lot of Muslim people. This has been going on for probably a decade now. I'm pretty sure not even the state department asserts that China is continuing to carry out ethnic cleansing in xinjiang
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Nov 22, 2023 16:40
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FlamingLiberal posted:China has been doing a quiet ethnic cleansing in the western part of the country where there have been traditionally been a lot of Muslim people. This has been going on for probably a decade now. Not just Xinjiang but Tibet as well. It's not really ethnic cleansing in the sense of forced removal, but China seems to want their ethnic minorities to abandon certain traditional practices and to instead conform to their mainstream standards. It's sort of like what Canada did with its Indian residential schools to try to force natives to assimilate.
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Nov 22, 2023 16:42
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forgot my pants posted:Not just Xinjiang but Tibet as well. It's not really ethnic cleansing in the sense of forced removal, but China seems to want their ethnic minorities to abandon certain traditional practices and to instead conform to their mainstream standards. It's sort of like what Canada did with its Indian residential schools to try to force natives to assimilate.
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Nov 22, 2023 16:45
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