Bisan is going home.Two days to travel a distance of 40 KM. She won a Grammy Award for her courageous coverage of the Gaza Carnage.
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I suppose the Halperns of the world will engage in their usual sophistry of âit is all the same continuumâ, but it doesnât seem remotely helpful to have a US President publicly urging Netanyahu to extreme reaction as a ceasefire enters a shaky period. In the space of a week, Trump has explicitly endorsed ethnic cleansing and is now calling for âall hell to break looseâ, which presumably includes the 2000 lb âbunker busterâ bombs that Biden was withholding. But I guess those are also on a continuum.
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Yes, thereâs basically zero incentive for the Israelis to abide by any agreements when they know thereâs no limit on their actions.
If the hostages are all released, what is to stop them killing every single person in Gaza? Theyâre well on their way.
I donât like Hamas at all, but in their shoes, given the way Trump and Netanyahou keep talking and behaving, Iâd be very reluctant to achieve the exchange of prisoners. As you say: what guarantees will the Gazans have once it is achieved? None.
Sisi has threatened to cancel his upcoming white house meeting with Trump if taking Palestinian refugees is on the agenda. With the amount of aid Egypt receives from the US and the expectation of retaliatory cuts pushed by Trump, I dont think many would have guessed at this as a tactic from him
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About $250M has already been frozen by DOGE, with only the military assistance still in place (for now). In a way, it is a tactic that Trump pre-selected for Sisi. If the US wants to go back to the relationship pre-Camp David Accord, it wonât take much. The Muslim Brotherhood will have no objections.
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I donât think they have much choice. If they donât comply, all the Gazans who have moved back into the fire zones are basically hostages. If they do comply, they are at the mercy of Netanyahu but a fragile ceasefire might hold. It has been evident for at least a year that Netanyahu doesnât actually care about the fate of the Israeli hostages.
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Yeah fair enough, itâs better for all Gazans if they comply. Unfortunately, Hamas donât seem to care much more about the Gaza civilians than Netanyahou⌠
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As much as I would love to blame The Scumbag, I think itâs the leaders like Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz who are the real culprits.
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Or, hear me out, letâs stop blaming people and start trying to incentivise these shitbags towards a real peace that works for civilians.
Then start prosecuting the war criminals.
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I didnât understand.
Like it or not, they are the people who hold power, so either find a way to remove their power, or get them to the point where itâs in their interests to create a lasting peace.
Right now itâs the exact opposite, that itâs very much in Netanyahuâs interests to prolong the war.
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When Netanyahu rejected a similar ceasefire deal (probably in May 2024), Yair Lapid, and Benny Gantz should have offered him their support to keep the government (these three would have had a majority) in exchange of accepting the deal. and threatened to resign from the Parliament if he didnât. Their resignation would have forced an election and Likud was a mess at that time.
I hesitate to comment further as Iâm not that familiar with Israeli politics, but my understanding of what happened is that it didnât matter what Lapid and Gantz did, because the government would have stood nonetheless, and in fact would be more dominated by the far-right if that had happened.
My knowledge of Israel politics/governance is superficial, at best. But, can a government still stand if a third of the members resign from the Parliament? At one point Benny was polling 30-40% compared to 15% for Likud.
Yair Lapid, and Benny Gantz are the only two who have/had the political strength to take on Netanyahu. They didnât.
Why didnât they? Because in general, they agree with Netanyahouâs treatment of Gaza and Palestinians. They disagree with him on other issues, but apart from some minor details, not on this.
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True. And they are forgetting the fact that Israel canât/wonât have a momentâs of respite unless they embrace the Palestine issue.
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Just one minute is enough to see the mindless brutality unleased on those poor souls.
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Iâm surprised I still see the odd building standing.
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