Israel Having Time Of Its Life Live-Tweeting Assault on Gaza
Maybe Israel doesn't have a choice but to explode chunks of the Gaza Strip, because Hamas has been shooting rockets into Israel. And maybe not! We are told we must support The Good Guys, though, because of the Bible, and then later when the Good Guys do not accept our version of ancient things, they burn in hell? Right?
Either way, it seems pretty clear the good old time the Israeli Defense Forces is having live-tweeting its bombardment of Gaza , complete with propaganda leaflets and multi-lingual Facebook pages , is mucho fucking creepy.
First of all, they've got hashtags, which seems like a move you only make when you are kind of having fun. Nobody wants their epitaph to read "Here Lies Uncle Mahmoud, A #PillarOfDefense Landed On Him."
Then there are the running score counts:
Since beginning of #PillarOfDefense, the IDF has targeted 156 terror sites in the #Gaza Strip.
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 15, 2012
(For some context: #PillarOfDefense started yesterday , and the entire area of Gaza is 141 square miles. That's a lot of "terror sites.")
There is also this one, which shows a translated pamphlet being dropped on Gaza that says that if you don't want to die, you should "take responsibility for yourselves" and get away from bad guys:
As part of effort to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, IDF dropped 1000s of leaflets in Arabic with this message. twitter.com/IDFSpokesperso… — IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 15, 2012
Way to rocket YOURSELVES, @Palestine.
And this one, the creepiest of them, there is no snarky commentary for it, just kind of ponder how an exploded Palestinian would feel about it, if he could actually get on the internet:
Tonight, more than 1 million Israelis are going to sleep in bomb shelters. This operation will bring a better tomorrow.
— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012
Thanks, IDF, for reminding us how soon after a bombardment we should start PR spin: During. [ Twitter ]
Good God almighty you're an idiot. Have fun fucking the corpse of that strawman you continue to fearlessly attack even after learning that it is, indeed, a man of straw.
Palestine had substantial self-governance in the Ottoman empire. Before the British took over, they had <em>already</em> promised the land to the Jews (Balfour declaration was 1917). As a result, Jewish immigration, which had been a very slow trickle from the start of the Zionist movement in the late 19th Century, greatly accelerated under British control. On a semantic point, I suppose you could say it wasn&#039;t &quot;their country&quot;, but it was a territory where they had enjoyed autonomy, and where after the 1947-8 conflicts hundreds of thousands of people who could trace their occupancy of the land for centuries and millenia were displaced from their homes, so &quot;their country&quot; better describes the reality of that history than &quot;not an independent entity&quot;.
As to partition, I&#039;m sorry but that&#039;s also a vast oversimplification. Menachem Begin, for example, said that he only accepted the partition plan because it would provide a platform from which to take the rest of the territory. Neither side accepted partition as a final status, the Palestinians rejected it as an initial status because it was taking away from what they already had, the Jewish Agency accepted it because it was giving them something they did not have.