Israel prepares response to Hamas attack

which was probably on a guy about to launch a rocket, which was probably in revenge for his brother getting kidnapped last week, which was ....

Israeli aggression is incessant, but its intensity and deadliness vary. There was a major offensive last summer, with a lot of damage to buildings (especially PNA ministries), couple-of-hundreds dead and thousands wounded (over the course of several months), about half (maybe more, mayble less) of the parliament members imprisoned and some cabinet members as well. Right now the intensity is lower than that, and rumor is another intense campaign is in planning.

So before zionists entered palestine and before palestinians were oppressed palestine was chock full of rabid arab nationalists and islamist terrorists?I don't think so.

I don't know about the rabid part, but of course Palestine was chock full of Arab nationalists. There was something called the Ottioman and British Empires, and during the Mandate period there were plenty of Palestinian nationalists, as well as Zionists. You seem to be saying that it's all Zionism's fault, this is reductionism. A lot of the land the Zionists acquired were bought from the landowning Palestinians (the same Palestinians who were negotiating Palestinian independence with the British). The landowners did not give a fuck about the peasantry. Palestinians were oppressed before the Zionists, by Palestinians.
Read some fucking history before you mouth off like a little bitch.

Alan and Jospeh have it right.

Yeah, Joseph K's "which was probably on a guy about to launch a rocket, which was probably in revenge for his brother getting kidnapped last week, which was ...." is straight off the News at Ten.

really? i just get quite bored with the leftist chorus of 'israel started it,' which true or not misses the point that nationalist violence is the problem, regardless of who shoots first in a given instance, and framing things in terms of which nationalists started it tends to preclude class analysis (as does the BBC's 'both sides' bollocks). i mean both israel and hamas et al are perfectly capable of unprovoked attacks as much as they are retaliation, but i don't feel the urge to side with the guys with the smallest budget

I never claimed that both sides had equal resources and budget, but that's hardly the point. I'm interested to see how far you stretch your logic. Who do you think the real enemy is in the Israel-Palestine conflict?

eh?

questions of cause and effect aren't automatically reactionary on account of there being nationalist violence, questions of cause and effect based on which of the nationalist parties started it are. the commonality between the leftist 'israel started it' and the bbc humanist 'both sides spiral of violence' is to start with a notion that there are two essentially distinct sides defined by nationality - that doesn't make you a nationalist, but it is a nationalist analysis. of course those nations are 'material' insofar as they are lived out and thus they must be taken into account, but they're far from the basis of a communist analysis.

MJ, stop throwing straw men around, of course i know that bantustans, occupation and repression are the material circumstances which 'create' suicide bombers - i'm taking issue with the apparent leftist need to ascribe string-pulling deviousness to the israeli state and good honest self-defence to palestinian nationalists. (there's also the subtext which may or may not be operative here that those conspiring jews must be pulling all the strings and those dumb arabs are only capable of reacting to israeli violence - i'm NOT accusing anyone here of anti-semitism, just pointing out a resonance with the need to paint israel as always active and palestinian factions as always reactive).

The first reply:

To be fair to Big Jack McTussoch he was referencing "a bloke" and not giving his own opinion, but he then followed it with ...

(unless that's ironic somehow and has gone over my head)

seems to paint the israeli state as always active and palestinian nationalists/islamists as always reactive

You ever heard of NEFAC?

apparently the proletariat has a country after all, and it's technologically inferior.

even in the recent lebanon conflict, how was hizballah's rocketing of israeli towns anything to do with self defence? and of course israel attacked following a provocation (executing a long-formulated plan however), maybe hizballah didn't expect such a massive (over-)reaction, but surely their action puts the lie to the idea they just react to israel. and of course even in leftist nationalist terms it's absurd to conflate hizballah with 'the lebanese' - it's such a factionised society anyhow before taking even class into account.

Any resistance is good resistance, and a victory for Hez against Israel is a victory for the world.

Staying alive....?

Power to the people who wear sunglasses over their emoticons!

I find that hard to believe, considering that just a few weeks before that, a similar move by Hamas at the Gaza Strip, where an IDF outpost was attacked, and a soldier was taken captive, resulted in a massive Israeli offensive on Gaza.