Replies to post #425220 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

"And what did Hamas do with Gaza when Israel withdrew in 2005? Build factories, employ Palestinians, grow olives, grow tourism?"

Is this what you call "withdrew"

Israel controls the Gaza Strip's northern borders, as well as its territorial waters and airspace. Egypt controls Gaza Strip's southern border, under an agreement between it and Israel.[59] Neither Israel or Egypt permits free travel from Gaza as both borders are heavily militarily fortified. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip

The port has been bombed. So too the water treatment facilities, the sewage treatment, the hospitals... the power generation. There's no end to the criminality of the Israeli government.

There are no roads in or out, except what Israel allows. Produce is allowed to rot at checkpoint. Fishermen aren't allowed to access the sea.

As one scholar put it, it's "the quiet suffocation of two million people, offered only two options: either to die screaming in war or die silently under siege." (Khaled al -Hroub - professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Northwestern University in Qatar and author of two books on Hamas)

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-gaza-hamas-elections-ceasefire-last-war-not-why

[sortagreen]

JERUSALEM — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, a top Israeli general gave a speech saying he saw “revolting trends” in today’s Israel that he compared to Nazi-era Germany and Europe in the 1930s.

No surprise — this has created a big stir in Israel, flaring again Sunday.

In his address, Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, essentially the No. 2 man in the army, warned his fellow citizens, “There is nothing easier than to hate those who are different; there is nothing easier than to sow fear and terror; there is nothing easier than to behave like animals.”

[The Holocaust] must make us think deeply about the responsibility of leadership, the quality of society, and it must lead us to fundamental thinking about how we, here and now, treat the stranger, the orphan and the widow, and all who are like them.

If there is one thing that frightens me about the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying the revolting trends that occurred in Europe as a whole, and in Germany in particular, some 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of those trends here, among us, in 2016.

There is nothing easier than to hate those who are different; there is nothing easier than to sow fear and terror; there is nothing easier than to behave like animals, conform and be self righteous. It is worthwhile, and even necessary, for Holocaust Remembrance Day to be a day of national soul searching. And in our national soul searching we must include phenomena that are very disturbing.

-Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/08/the-israeli-general-who-compared-the-jewish-state-to-nazi-era-germany/