US president Joe Biden said that Israel is starting to lose support due to indiscriminate bombing in Gaza amid Hamas war. The comments come after Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted again that US is with Israel as Tel Aviv aims to destroy Hamas and recover hostages held in Gaza.
“They’re starting to lose that support,” Joe Biden told a campaign fundraising event in Washington as per news agency Reuters. The US president also said that Benjamin Netanyahu needs to change his hardline government.
Guess Biden looked outside his bubble for 2 seconds.
That’s an interesting choice of language. The areas that Black South Africans were forced to live in during Apartheid were called Bantu-stans.
The “Stan” is a reference to place names in Urdu / Persian commonly ending in “stan”, meaning “land”. Pakistan, Turkmenistan, etc. Don’t need to reach as far as South Africa.
@ripcord yeah I know, it’s from the Persian and common in Central Asia, meaning place of or homeland. This is also why it was used (with a derogatary implication) in South Africa.
I still find it interesting that Netanyahu is using it to refer to parts of Palestine. Chosen for the same reasons.
As the saying goes, history may not repeat, but it does rhyme.
It’s also a weird point to make even ignoring the well-observed dogwhistle. I doubt the Palestinians would back the Palestinian Authority either. Hamas came to power because that organization, and the PLO before, were not effective at protecting the interests of the people. Israel violated diplomatic agreements made with and encroached against the PA/PLO-led Palestine, so the people voted them out (plus or minus an intifada or two). The Palestinians old enough to remember the government before Hamas hardly hearken back to it as the good old days.
What comes next needs to be immense support of Palestine from Israel. Israel will need to pour support towards Gaza and the West Bank as though they were their own citizens. They need to provide huge short-term security and even huger and longer-term food and medical aid, along with sincere experts there to help Palestine rebuild both social and physical infrastructure. They will need to commit to that aid until Palestine becomes a functional, independent state. If they do not, there will just keep being another Hamas, continuing violence, endless retaliation… until there’s no more Palestinians left to bomb.
The Bibi government won’t do it, either. Israelis who want an end to the cycle of violence have a moral imperative to vote the religious fundamentalists out of their own state, or else they need to accept they are complicit with the religious fundamentalists running their neighbor’s.
Starting with lifting the blockade. Not very surprisingly, Gaza wasn’t always the aid-dependent shithole it is today, so until it’s out of that state nothing can change. Unfortunately, Israel’s policy in Gaza right now is “no development, no progress, no humanitarian crisis”.