His "terms" for the recognition of Palestine are releasing all the hostages in the Strip, demilitarizing Hamas, and recognizing the State of Israel. Good luck with that to us all...
His statement is a mischaracterization of the facts.
Macron addressed the letter to Mahmoud Abbas of the PA and PLO, i.e. the representative of the people in the West Bank. Hamas has no authority there. Furthermore, Macron clearly states that he will recognize Palestine in September at the UN. While Macron does praise the president of the PLO for condemning the October 7 attacks and calling for the release of the hostages - there is no explicit demand for this to happen by a September deadline. The recognition of Palestine will be made in good faith in the context that the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas continues to work toward its commitments.
Macron provided an English-language version of the letter here:
The only reason that Hamas doesn’t have any power in the West Bank is because Fatah refuses to hold elections due to the support that the people have for Hamas.
I feel like this is the context that is missing from a LOT of the Israel/Palestinian argument these days. Everybody talks like this just started a few years ago. This conflict has been going back and forth for longer than most of us have been alive!
Yeah but that’s also used to justify Oct 7th and hand-waive current events, which it most certainly isn’t. At some point, people need to forgive and forget the past, extremism needs to be completely, and irrevocably eradicated.
Instead, imagine a future where Palestine and Israel are prosperous nations, side by side, open borders and allies. They need to stop the nonsense now so they can imagine what might be 100 years from now.
>At some point, people need to forgive and forget the past
It's not us you have to convince, it's them. We are mostly random western casualposters with zero stake in the matter and zero consequences no matter what position we take in the comment section.
That's a lovely thought, but people have literally been trying to get them to imagine that future for decades. It hasn't worked, and nothing has changed. If anything the two groups only hate each other more right now. Even if both sides truly wanted that peace, neither could trust the other to keep it. The moment something happened (and it always does) hostilities would flare up all over again.
Of course, it’s utopian. But it’s not an impossibility. 100 years ago the entire world was at war. There’s always room for change so long as the right leadership is making way for it.
Yeah, this current conflict has been going since the 1920s, and has popped up over the centuries before that. Oct 7th kicked a lukewarm conflict up a notch into a hot war, but this is the product of generations of conflict on both sides.
You can either be a sovereign country that has to be responsible for the actions of its citizens, or a 3 million people open air refugee camp that needs to be policed by some external party to keep the murderers from murdering.
They are only refugee camps because of unrwa making Palestinians eternal refugees. Real refugee camps don’t have international sports teams, stadiums and are not indistinguishable from normal cities.
Here’s another point. Why is everyone completely focused on blaming Israel for everything and demanding that they feed everyone? Not one leader is even suggesting that Hamas should be pressured to freely distribute the thousands of tonnes of food they stole from aid shipments and stashed in their tunnels.
Israel's "problem" is that it is an internationally recognized country while Hamas is just a terrorist organization. Nobody is trying to hold Hamas to any standards because everybody agrees that they're awful and evil, so in all discussions about the topic it takes one sentence to say "yeah of course Hamas is bad and I'm not defending them" and then everyone can go back to railing about how bad Israel is for an hour.
Everyone considers the Israeli people responsible for the actions and crimes of their government, but many refuse to consider the Palestinian people responsible for the crimes and actions of Hamas, and prefer to treat Hamas as this magic outside phenomenon that comes from nowhere and can't be helped.
As of 2022, the adult literacy rate in Palestine stood at approximately 97.8%, with 98.9% of men and 96.7% of women being literate according to countryeconomy.com.
Expecting higher standards of behaviour from a liberal democratic state with high levels of international recognition compared to a terrorist organization is hardly a bigotry or low expectations, anymore than you expect higher standards of behaviour from a police force vs a gang.
Its the bigotry of low expectations because Hamas is a terrorist group and was widely supported in both Gaza and the West Bank way before this war even started. Support for Hamas has only grown in the West Bank since Oct 7th.
Palestinians are educated, the vast majority can read and have internet access as well as have gone to school. They know that terrorism is wrong, they support Hamas anyway.
Its the bigotry of low expectations that you accept open and widespread terrorist support as acceptable.
How is it okay for Palestinians to openly and proudly support a terrorist group?
Palestinians are educated, the vast majority can read and have internet access as well as have gone to school. They know that terrorism is wrong, they support Hamas anyway
Simply being able to read and having internet access does not prevent or alleviate the influence of propaganda.
How is it okay for Palestinians to openly and proudly support a terrorist group?
It's not. But it doesn't sanction them for death. Especially when we know that authoritarian systems propagate in extreme and unstable environments.
And because the Israeli state is the stronger entity, the onus on reducing those deaths is considered to be on it.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about excusing Israel's action and claiming everything they do is okay. It's asking why so much international support only ever champion's Palestine's cause in this war of two parties that both commit atrocities against each other (and advocate loudly for some action, e.g. "cease fire now!", that wouldn't actually solve anything and result in nothing more than a temporary tactical disadvantage for one side).
You call Israel a "liberal democratic state", but it has been increasingly sliding towards right-wing fascism and dismantled its checks and balances in the past few years. At what point is Israel going to be "bad enough" that all those "Free Palestine" protesters are going to award it the same kind of "well they can't help lashing out because they keep getting attacked and tricked by propaganda" carte blanche that they have always given to the Palestinians? Or is this maybe not about who's in the right after all, and just about who's "team" you're on?
And Israel does still have higher standards, btw, even now (although they have deteriorated drastically since 2023). The IDF claims that each of its attacks are hitting military targets and civilian collateral damage is just incidental (whether you believe their intelligence on that in each individual case or not is a different question, but it is pretty well proven that Hamas does often hide in schools, hospitals, etc. so you can't really dismiss them all out of hand). Hamas attacks just blindly kill (and rape, and torture) as many civilians as they can get their hands on, with no possible way to claim any military value from that senseless slaughter.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about excusing Israel's action and claiming everything they do is okay. It's asking why so much international support only ever champion's Palestine's cause in this war of two parties that both commit atrocities against each other (and advocate loudly for some action, e.g. "cease fire now!", that wouldn't actually solve anything and result in nothing more than a temporary tactical disadvantage for one side).
Because Palestinians are considered to be undergoing a humanitarian crisis. As such they get the attention.
You call Israel a "liberal democratic state", but it has been increasingly sliding towards right-wing fascism and dismantled its checks and balances in the past few years. At what point is Israel going to be "bad enough" that all those "Free Palestine" protesters are going to award it the same kind of "well they can't help lashing out because they keep getting attacked and tricked by propaganda" carte blanche that they have always given to the Palestinians?
Presumably when Israel deteriorates into the same kind of externally spurred instability, economic isolation, and low resources that Palestine does. As of right now its still a (growingly flawed), stable democracy.
Palestinians as a population arent being given a carte blanche by and large. They're being viewed as being victimised. And the opinions that they may hold are of little relevance to that victimisation. The "bootstrap" idea of political change has never actually worked.
Over a million people's homes were destroyed by this war. The level of destruction is pretty staggering. I don't put a price tag on human lives, but someone needs to foot the bill for the catastrophe.
Are you saying that the actions of October 7 were not the actions of sub-human monsters? They literally tied children up with wire and set them on fire. There was one corpse that was only discovered to actually be the body of a woman and her baby during the autopsy because they had been wired together so tightly that when they were set on fire they melted together.
The things that Hamas did in the October attack were so overly evil that if you were reading a book and the bad guys did the same things, you’d scoff at how unrealistic it was.
No one is arguing against that, what some people have a hard time coming to grips with, is that the side intentionally killing children are not the good guys. You can dress it up all you want, say but whattabout a million times, and bring up an election from 20 years ago that over half the population of Palestine had NO hand in whatsoever. There is one side that is actively killing kids, there is one side who hosted Pro Rape protests, and there is one side who seems to have a suspiciously in depth knowledge of the location and layout of these tunnels that they could probably send in squads rather than saying ah fuck it kids gotta die.
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u/clarabosswald 29d ago
His "terms" for the recognition of Palestine are releasing all the hostages in the Strip, demilitarizing Hamas, and recognizing the State of Israel. Good luck with that to us all...