Israel are going to start WWIII

You did indeed, and thank you for that. And yes I was asking in good faith, but I was slightly surprised that you answered in good faith, ie that you were so upfront and even slightly dismissive about the way Hamas deliberately chose to use the civilians they governed as human sacrifices.

Many posters tend to deny that this is what is happening - I presume because they think it looks a bit bad to say they have some sympathy or understanding with a terrorist group that is also the official government of a place doing that.

So do you agree that if Hamas had not been elected in 2007, Gaza could have been a decent place to live now, with - among other things - an airport meaning that they wouldn't have to get permission to go to Egypt or Tel Aviv if they want to leave the country?

IOW Hamas has been a disaster for Gaza, and now has deliberately brought down death and destruction on Gazans rather than risk finding themselves sidelined by the Abraham accords and other peaceful developments.

You did indeed, and thank you for that. And yes I was asking in good faith, but I was slightly surprised that you answered in good faith, ie that you were so upfront and even slightly dismissive about the way Hamas deliberately chose to use the civilians they governed as human sacrifices.

I wasn't dismissive about anything and I don't like your accusations that I was.

So do you agree that if Hamas had not been elected in 2007, Gaza could have been a decent place to live now, with - among other things - an airport meaning that they wouldn't have to get permission to go to Egypt or Tel Aviv if they want to leave the country?

That's an impossibility for anyone to say. But one thing is for certain. Netanyahu and Likud's deliberate effort to undermine the Palestinian Authority and their efforts at unifying Palestine and achieving a two state solution made a bad situation much much worse. Gaza is the way it is because of Israel and had they not been so dogged in their approach to destroy a two state solution things may, indeed probably would have, been much brighter than they are today.

The fact of the matter, however, is that Israel under it's current regime aren't the slightest bit interested in a two state solution. They want the Palestinians gone and they wish to take their land under the banner of a Greater Israel. Until that aim is no more, the region will not see peace.

IOW Hamas has been a disaster for Gaza, and now has deliberately brought down death and destruction on Gazans rather than risk finding themselves sidelined by the Abraham accords and other peaceful developments.

Israel has been a disaster for Gaza, including its support for Hamas who, more than likely, would have remained a fringe organisation had it not been propped up by Israel in order to marginalise the Fatah and Palestinian Authority. This was done in a deliberate effort and the blowback is what we saw a year ago.

None of the footage I saw even mentions Palestine or 'freedom'. Plenty of cries of Allah akhbar and this is for god/may we become martyrs etc etc. Seems like most of them just wanted to kill jews and infidels. I think people are confused, or deliberately misled, when they portray hamas as a resistance movement. They are just your basic Islamic extremists who want to kill anyone who isnt like them, including irish/western people if they had their way.

Release hostages, surrender arms and assembly all members on a beach for processing my the IDF.

Where did I say that?

I already told you who was there first. You literally responded to it. Something about saying it being divisive.

Why the feigned ignorance?

Use all the resources, donations and money that poured in to make a life, build a future, drop the hate of from the river to the sea and be neighbourly, drop the knife, stop always going for the throat.

War will never be nice and there will always be collateral damage and loss.

But in this case, civilian deaths have be utterly disproportionate. Israel has not "done the best it can" - it has reacted in an all-in berserker mode.

The certainly do not have "the job done" and they almost certainly will continue to be in a perpetual war with its neighbours.

For a country that purports to crave security and peace, it's going about it arse-ways.

Unless of course, as seems to be the case, it intends to achieve peace and security by simply exterminating everyone around it.

Not content with razing Gaza, it's now perpetuating its war in Lebanon and apparently has its guns trained on Iran.

Who's next?

After Oct 7th? That's relatively simple: they should have denounced the families/groups that were holding the hostages. That's something I can't get over: that there were mothers who saw the Bibas children and other slightly older children being kept prisoner and didn't feel an overwhelming need to help them. That's inhuman. Like spitting on Shani Louk's dead body - that was the ordinary people in Gaza. Notice that Sinwar's body doesn't seem to have been desecrated - and certainly hasn't been paraded through the streets of Tel Aviv for cheering crowds to spit on. And he's not a 23 year old girl who was just at a concert.

And if you mean before that? Well it depends on when exactly - but accepting the Oslo agreement would have been a good point. Though I agree the the Israeli right - and Netanyahu in particular - bear a large measure of blame for that too.

So if we can go even further back, accepting the UN declaration of the state of Israel in 1947 and not attacking them in 1948 would have been much MUCH better. As would accepting Isral's right to exist at any of the various other negotiations that were more or less close to succeeding. In 1967 for instance, if the Palestinians had accepted Israel's existence as Jordan and Egypt did, Israel would, I think, have been more ready to withdraw to its earlier boundaries. Same at Camp David - it's the fear of a new invasion that, for some Israelis, justifies them refusing to give back the strategic areas they took in battle.

The IDF will not see that as an error. They have a penchant for "gloating", filming it and distributing it.

"The most moral army in the world" - sure…

Ideally.

Really? That is my point.

Israel weren't in Gaza on Oct 6th - and anyway if the violence visited on Israeli civilians had been due to brutal treatment, how come Hamas were so popular after throwing people off rooftops for being gay or on the mere suspicion of giving Israel information? They were pretty brutal to Gazans, but that doesn't seem to have led to attacks on the wives and children of Hamas militants, oddly.

OTOH some of the people murdered in Israel on Oct 7th were men and women who used to drive sick Gazans to and from hospitals in Israel for medical treatment - not terribly brutal one imagines. Didn't save them though, did it?

So no, that's an excuse, not an explanation.

I find that hard to believe but ok: there are a number of countries that should be currently before the UN accused of genocide. That they aren't, seems to suggest that Israel's feeling of being singled out for this may have some truth to it.

Especially as it's very hard to see how any claim of genocide stacks up when there is no genetic or cultural difference between Palestinians and Israeli Arabs - it'd be as though the Nazis tried to kill all French Jews but still had German Jews living and working perfectly normally in their hospitals and tech sector, and even in the Supreme Court. Oh and in the army. Because Israeli Arabs are joining the IDF in record numbers, even before Oct 7th, but even more so since then.

Israel weren't in Gaza? No, they just ensured all Palestinians live in an open air prison while stealing fresh land (often accompanied by extreme violence) to make room for new illegal settlers. Here just some of Israel's actions in the year before October 7:

The only reason to ignore the background is if you support or at least wish to excuse the ethnic cleansing policies

Ah - now I have you. I just couldn't see the link between the post I quoted… I see it was my last sentence you were debating…

Every signatory has a legal obligation to report genocide. Why no-one has reported the countries you mention is either because there is no evidence of it or there is a political motive. I honestly wouldn't know which - I don't know anything about those countries.

As for Israel feeling singled out, isn't that a prime example of whataboutism? They are either guilty or not - regardless of what else is going on in the world.

If Israel believes it has a robust defence, it should have no concerns. But accusing SA of blood libel and pointing its finger at other nations makes me think that they do not have a robust defence. The judges will decide and the hammer will fall. My opinion and speculation is irrelevent.

As for your 2nd para, that will be irrelevant to the court. They will tease apart the convention definitions, analyse the evidence and judge if Israel has intentionally committed genocide.