lol what a load of baloney. They would vote for them because if they didn’t they would either disappear, lose whatever they have, or have family members belted to smithereens. Maybe go and have a read of some of the reports that Amnesty put out.
And the whole “if” thing is hilarious. When do you think Hamas will be bothered with true free and fair elections? When do you think the PA (PLO) will come back and have some free and fair elections?
PA parades that it is a democratically elected government then proceeds to never hold elections.
I think the suggestion is that Hamas is popular only because they’re treated with contempt no matter who represents them, so may as well kick some freckle while you’re at it.
Much the same reason why Sinn Fein had so many elected in Northern Ireland.
And there in a nutshell is the problem with the entire Middle East since the founding of Israel. Every single other country had the destruction of Israel as their highest priority.
Always denied their right to exist.
That’s a question that can’t be answered. Depends which side of the fence you are on. What constitutes a state? When does a state exist? What does international law say? What does the United Nations say?
Given that international law, and international boundaries are ignored every day by multiple states and non states, do either of those concepts mean anything?
The Israel Palestine conflict war whatever you want to call it, is yet another hold over of the fact that the middle east has oil. The British didn’t want to upset the House of Saud nor Egypt, the US was trying to flex it’s muscles, hundred of thousands of dispossessed Jewish people were flocking to their “homeland” and the “victors” had to do something.
They tried their hardest to do nothing but in the end they had to do something.
Meanwhile the Jewish people were busy buying land from the Arabs.
It’s a problem with no real solution and too many people with vested interests.
The point now is that Israel does exist and the fact that it still exists is due to its continued defence of its borders against the will of every single other Arab state.
If there hadn’t been so much enmity to the concept of Israel in the beginning a single state solution could probably have been brokered back in 1948.
But there are far too many players with too many agendas now. All the players on both sides have their own best interests at issue.
I admire the state of Israel, I admire that it still exists. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have every single border under attack for years on end and to be constantly at war in your own country.
That does not mean that I agree with all of their methods.
But personally I think they just see The Palestinians as just another problem that they have to deal with to protect their borders and nothing anyone says or does is going to change it.
Until they have secure borders nothing will change.
That’s just my opinion.
Think it got recognised as a non member observer state by vote in the UN General Assembly a few years back, although a lot of UN members do not recognise it as a state.
Sharma was running some sort of line about it during the Wentworth by-election, as to the position Australia should take in some UNGA process.
The IOC has observer status in UNGA. No reason why Palestine should not have some status there.
palestinians are in refugee camps and territories because they were forced out of their own country and until the right of return is dealt with there will be no solution.
The conflict triggered significant demographic change throughout the Middle East. Around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelledfrom their homes in the area that became Israel, and they became Palestinian refugees[21] in what they refer to as Al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”
An interesting statement that still basically holds true in this situation, neither side will budge and will continue to not budge.
Benny Morris, in his 2004 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” summarizes it from his perspective:
“In retrospect, it appeared that at Lausanne was lost the best and perhaps only chance for a solution of the refugee problem, if not for the achievement of a comprehensive Middle East settlement. But the basic incompatibility of the initial starting positions and the unwillingness of the two sides to move, and to move quickly, towards a compromise—born of Arab rejectionism and a deep feeling of humiliation, and of Israeli drunkenness with victory and physical needs determined largely by the Jewish refugee influx—doomed the “conference” from the start. American pressure on both sides, lacking a sharp, determined cutting edge, failed to budge sufficiently either Jew or Arab. The “100,000 Offer” was a classic of too little, too late.”