Pro Palestinian supporters destroy painting of Lord Balfour

Cossy

Destroying property to aid your protest is wrong and unacceptable.

What Hamas did kidnapping and killing hostages was wrong and unacceptable.

What the Israeli govt is current doing is also wrong and unacceptable.

Well that's interesting because that is how the state of Israel was established. Not through diplomatic means but by the actions of a violent group called the Irgun
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The Irgun policy was based on what was then called Revisionist Zionism founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky. According to Howard Sachar, "The policy of the new organization was based squarely on Jabotinsky's teachings: every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state"

Two of the operations for which the Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 and the Deir Yassin massacre that killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with Lehi on 9 April 1948

So if you disapprove of violent actions then do you disapprove of states created through them?
Or if a people are oppressed do they have the right to use violence to achieve freedom?

Incidentally the Irgun are considered as directly linked to Likud the political party of Netanyahu

Destroying property to aid your protest is wrong and unacceptable.

What Hamas did kidnapping and killing hostages was wrong and unacceptable.

What the Israeli govt is current doing is also wrong and unacceptable.

Casdon

Wanton vandalism and destruction of buildings or artefacts, whatever the circumstances is never justified. As importantly, it never works in the favour of those who carry it out, I can’t think of a single incidence, anywhere in the world where it has had the effect that the perpetrators desired. .

👏👏👏

Wanton vandalism and destruction of buildings or artefacts, whatever the circumstances is never justified. As importantly, it never works in the favour of those who carry it out, I can’t think of a single incidence, anywhere in the world where it has had the effect that the perpetrators desired. .

Sorry but I have minimised that so called "violence" damaging a painting is nothing compared with the devastation of a country. The painting is not "destroyed" the country is. I don't know who did the damage, but if I was a Palestinian with family still in Gaza I would want to do a lot more than damage paintings.
What should someone do, who has seen their family made refugees, living for generations in exile, and then seen the same country force them from their homes once again, and then slaughter them, supported by the US and the UK?

I haven't seen anyone minimising that violence. Not a single poster has said it was nothing. I condemned it from the beginning, so did every post that I can remember.

It was random.
It was violent.

Killing people tenfold from planes and destroying homes in retaliation is also random.
And also violent.

Continuing to punish those who had no part in the attack is still random.
Continuing once the deaths have passed ten times the original ones is still violent.

Acts of vandalism or violence do NO-ONE'S cause any good at all. The reputations of both sides have suffered from this war, and their international relations will never be the same again. That applies to Israel as well as Palestine.

The damage to the painting, as with other acts of vandalism which people think will further their cause, does in fact have the opposite effect.

Of course not all protestors are vandals and acts of vandalism or violence do their cause no good at all.

Random violence is an assault in the street, a fight in a bar.
What hamas did was medieval barbarity on an epic scale.
Minimising the absolute horror of that day does nobody any favours, just the opposite.

Oreo

The ‘faults’ of hamas! Oh Elegran

Yes, Oreo It is a "fault" to assume that using random violence is a legitimate reply to random violence. Whoever it is who is doing it.

I don’t think it’s me who’s blinkered, but we’re all entitled to our opinions. I’m sorry if my opinions are not in accord with yours.
Have a nice evening.

The ‘faults’ of hamas! Oh Elegran

More Palestinians killed in 5 months than Ukrainians in 2 years

maddyone

eazybee

Trying to raise the faults of Israel is simply an attempt to minimise the crimes of Hamas.

I agree.

Do you really think that I am "trying to raise the faults of Israel" to minimise the crimes of Hamas? Have you actually read the things I have posted ? not just in the last few weeks but right back to the beginning of it, when I stated most clearly that I was NOT excusing the 7th October attack, and that I was most definitely NOT antisemitic.

You are so blinkered that you can't see anything, except that you believe that Israel is somehow born without sin and cannot possibly have made any mistakes, and that anyone who points out anything to the contrary is somehow in league with Hamas. Don't bully me with your accusations!

I see the faults of Hamas - but I also see the faults of the Israeli government. I mean of the Netanyahu regime, whose aim is expansion into Palestinian lands, without considering the prior rights of those already living in those lands - much like Hitler's aim of expanding for "lebesraum". The figures for Palestinian and Israeli fatalities and injuries in the link I gave illustrate the results of that expansion policy, and they pre-date the 7th October attacks. Since then over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in retaliation for those attacks, and many more made homeless. Isn't that enough punishment?

maddyone

eazybee

Trying to raise the faults of Israel is simply an attempt to minimise the crimes of Hamas.

I agree.

Hamas you have all said is a terrorist organisation, are you saying that elected governments should behave in the same manner as terrorist organisation? Because you seem to be setting the same standards for them both. Doesn't civilisation demand that governments act according to certain rules?

maddyone

All deaths in war are horrible and cruel, wherever the war takes place, be it Gaza, Ukraine, Cambodia, Sudan, Syria, or a multitude of other places. But the number that sticks in my mind is six million. Six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. And no one protested.

Sorry maddyone have you never heard of the Battle of Cable Street? Where the Labour Party and working class people protected Jews in the East End from fascists?

Of course those in authority who knew about the camps were in many cases anti semitic anyway, which is probably why they kept the information quiet and closed many of the routes which Jewish people were using to escape.

Racism is always present and the tropes which underlie it influence much of people's thinking. Unfortunately that's still as true for muslim and Arab peoples, and unlike anti semitism it isn't widely condemned. It has even been used by the Israelis who paint the Palestinian's as dirty and lazy, alleging that they never farmed the land properly, when in fact they led a low impact sustainable lifestyle, whereas Israel tends towards more industrialised agriculture.
I don't think having 6 million of your ancestors killed justifies deliberately killing women and children does it?

eazybee

Trying to raise the faults of Israel is simply an attempt to minimise the crimes of Hamas.

I agree.

Trying to raise the faults of Israel is simply an attempt to minimise the crimes of Hamas.

You would also have seen that the figures in the chart covered Israeli casualties also, and were broken up by the cause, age and sex, community, weapon used, whether the fatality/injury was to a civilian or a member of an armed group or disputed, and whether it was inflicted by a soldier, a settler, or unknown or disputed. A lot of detail to have been fabricated by a PR machine.

Israeli casualties were mostly gathered from media reports. Does anyone really think that not a single one of the Israeli media reports is biased towards the state of Israel? Yet the reports coming out of Palestinian territory are widely believed to be from a PR machine?

If there were, side by side, a German newspaper article from WW2 and a smuggled-out letter of the same date from a Jew graphically describing life (and death) in a prison camp, which one would be given most credence, and which would have been "just a PR exercise"? In retrospect, we know the truth - it was genocide. Should we wait for the verdict of history on this war before urging humanitarian action to prevent genocide ?

Oreo

Elegran don’t add to the Palestinian PR machine when there are so many Israeli hostages still held prisoner, innocent victims, many have been killed already but there could be still 100.Spare a thought for them and their families and for all the over 1,000 murdered and raped, many of them children and inside their own homes.

* Oreo* My post and link at Sun 10-Mar-24 21:06:24 do not refer to anything published by what you call the "Palestinian PR machine" It is from a UN source - the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Had you taken the trouble to follow the link, you would have their history -

"Our History

In 1998, the United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs became the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), establishing dozens of field offices around the world since then.

In September 2000, the Second Intifada started in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt); violence escalated, many people were killed or injured regularly, and humanitarian conditions deteriorated. Shortly thereafter, at the request of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO), OCHA deployed staff to the oPt to serve as focal point for the humanitarian situation. Additional staff arrived following another escalation in spring 2002.

That year (2002), Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon requested support from the UN in addressing the needs of Palestinians. Subsequently, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent his Personal Humanitarian Envoy, Catherine Bertini, to assess the humanitarian situation in the oPt. In 2003, following her recommendations, the Secretary-General approved the creation of an OCHA office in the oPt.

We established our oPt headquarters in East Jerusalem, and subsequently opened a sub-office in Gaza. Later, we formed field coordination units in Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron, covering the northern, central and southern West Bank respectively"

Glorianny

flappergirl

Glorianny

maddyone

Hamas are a brutal organisation. Women’s rights are pretty much nil in Gaza.

But it is Israeli bombing killing them and Israeli imprisonment where they are raped.
This has been declared a "war on women"
www.greenpeace.org/mena/en/in-solidarity-with-palestinian-women-this-international-womens-day/#:~:text=While%20progress%20toward%20gender%20equality,

It is always women who suffer most when men wage war. The bombing of Gaza is utterly vile and indefensible but for god's sake don't try to tell me that Hamas are a beacon of light and hope for women. They are a misogynistic group of men with extreme cultural (not Islamic) views. You would be doing women a great injustice to suggest otherwise.

Whatever Hamas are it is Israel who has enabled them to develop and expand. Where you have a people unable to leave a certain area, only permitted limited amounts of water and electricity and subjected to assaults by the military they will necessarily turn to the organisation they hope will free them. Palestinians have been let down by the other countries of the world and Israel has continued to discriminate against them.
During the conflict women are not just being killed by the bombing there is evidence that IDF troops have executed them after they have surrendered along with their children. There is also evidence of rape by Israeli soldiers.
www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un-experts-appalled-reported-human-rights-violations-against

Trying to raise the faults of Hamas is simply an attempt to minimise the crimes of Israel

I'm not trying to minimise anything. I'm saying that women are the most oppressed demographic in Gaza by both its criminal oppressors (Israel) and its own misogynistic, draconian and largely self serving government.

I totally agree that this situation has been allowed to fester by an equally self serving global community which, in itself, constitutes crimes against humanity.

If the world doesn't care about Palestine, you can rest assured it cares even less about its women.

How is it that they are being allowed to do this sort of thing? How far must it go before they are stopped? Just what is happening to our country? OUR country, I must emphasize.

👍 paddyann

So you agree the King should not apologise for slavery,

Because of that statistic Maddyone Israel has been given free rein to terrorise,imprison and murder tens of thousands of people for over 70 years.How long can we allow Netanyahu and his vile cohorts to get away with mass murder and war crimes because of something that happened nearly a century ago.They must be stopped ,its insane to let the Israeli government keep on their track of move people out destry their homes and build on their land.I saw today that Israel will build 3000 NEW houses for Israelis on the destruction they have been committing in GAZA.I stand with Palestine .As I have and many Jewish friends who march with us do to .We wont be silenced by bigots and people too scared to speak out

Very few speak of it here