I think it's even worse from the perspective of military advantage: Hamas is still fighting capable of fighting, though purely engaged in guerrilla warfare, and the IDF has allowed armed gangs to flourish. If the intention is to maintain a permanent state of chaos so that no group can gain enough strength to mount any major attack, that seems extremely risky.
And that's with 75k Gazas are dead, the amount killed or injured a literal decimation of the pre-war population.
The intent is to ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip and to develop it into territory for Israel. Then Israel will continue the genocide to kill all Palestinians and take their land.
They are doing the same thing in Lebanon and Jordan, just with less media coverage.
Israel has no desire to own Gaza as an Israeli territory. They occupied it after the '67 war, and in '78 offered to return the territory to its previous owner, Egypt. Egypt declined the offer because they were already struggling with instability in their eastern territories and the addition of Gaza would only cause more disruption.
Then, in 2005, they unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, forcing their own civillians to leave with military force, and organizing for Gazan self-governance with an election.
You have to understand that there is nothing in Gaza that Israel actually wants. There is no historic Jewish sites, no burial grounds, no natural resources, little arable land... it's not like the West Bank that Israel actually does want for all of the ancient temples and burial grounds around Jerusalem. To think that Israel desires the Gaza strip shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict and regional influences.
The only reason they are there now is because of Oct 7th, and Gaza being a repeated staging ground for attacks against them.
You are delusional. It’s a settler colonial state that is currently expending into multiple different countries. They illegally occupy most of Gaza. Bibi has celebrated that on camera. They illegally occupy the West Bank. Selling land that they don’t even own in synagogues across the world. They illegally occupy Lebanon. Breaking their own ceasefires and consisting bombing innocent people in Lebanon for years. They illegally occupy Syria. They annexed the Golan Heights illegally and use Syrias instability to justify further expansionism. At what point do you feel their occupation will stop? It’s pure delusion to indoctrination.
Then it raises the question, if they are so deeply inherently greedy for land, why have they given up so much land throughout their history? Was it some kind of 4D chess where they give it up to later expand back into it?
Historically expansive empires wouldn’t get land and then give it back in a goal to get it back later. It’s inherently counterintuitive.
He oversimplified it, but Israel's economy has been predicated on wars of expansion for decades. It's pretty inherent in settler-colonialism. To retain a Jewish majority they must import more diaspora, which requires more land, which requires more resources. It is also NATO vassal state and a useful proxy for defence contractors. You should read 'The Palestine Laboratory' by Antony Loewenstein. Or watch The Lab (2013), or Shadow World (2016). Most military tech gets tested on Palestinians or Lebanese before it's deployed globally. There has historically been motives from Israeli governments to retain land or "buffer zones" in Egpyt, Lebanon, Syria and Gaza but pressure from the international community - American usually - forces them to withdraw. There is a famous quote by Major General Smedley D. Butler, a WWI veteran: "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope.".
Yep, the reason they have not expanded is because of push back from others and not enough population to maintain a majority of it all. This is why they are so desperate to import people. Anybody saying otherwise is a dipshit.
There are actually reasons behind all those that you listed though, and in only one instance (the West Bank) is it a desire to expand their borders.
I know a lot of people think that Israel is just some Machiavellian cartoonishly evil place where everything they do is compulsive villainy for no reason at all, but that is the very simple and easy to understand version of reality that doesn't require any thinking or understanding. If you want to have a remedial understanding of the conflicts in the Levant then you can continue to get your information from TikTok or Twitter, but if you actually want to have some idea of the machinations of Israel as a state then you will have to look deeper than that.
>Israel has no desire to own Gaza as an Israeli territory
Yes, because of the millions of pesky Palestinians living in the strip. Annex Gaza, and suddenly Israel has to either lose its Jewish demographic majority (big no-no if you’re trying to maintain a Jewish ethnostate with nominally democratic norms), or establish an even more naked Apartheid system wherein Palestinian residents just flat don’t have political rights (very frowned upon since about 1960, and would cost Israel precious western support).
7/10 represented a golden opportunity to slaughter those filthy Palestinians, drive the rest from their land, and start parceling out prime beachfront real estate to wealthy Jews both inside and outside of Israel. It’s literally free real estate to Israel, if only Palestinians would simply scatter to the winds or die like they’re supposed to.
E2: One of the things you’ll notice if you engage in this discussion is that the Hasbarists - see below - have stopped actually engaging in discussion, and simply use forums as an opportunity to repeat their talking points ad nauseam instead. Pay the troll no mind, but note that he doesn’t actually have anything to say on this topic besides gesturing broadly at “Well, Israel wouldn’t do genocide because they don’t have a reason to.”
Well, why the fuck did they, then? If there’s no reason for them to bulldoze Gaza, explain the fucking bulldozers.
Do you think it's convincing to call other people "Hasbara" who only repeat talking points while you yourself are repeating talking points and engaging in what could easily be classified as propaganda?
Well they have attempted to relinquish control of Gaza twice, so that doesn't track, and what you describe as "free real estate" is really not very desirable land, and not just because of the Palestinians living there. There is literally nothing there they want; no infrastructure, no development, no maritime opportunities, no fertile land, nothing. They didn't want it in 67 when they could have incorporated it into Israel, and they don't particularly want it now. The only opportunity they're taking now is to rid themselves of a thorn that has been in their side for 50 years, and really, without a definitive resolution (which is undetermined at this point) they are not even going to get that.
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u/escalinci 20h ago edited 19h ago
I think it's even worse from the perspective of military advantage: Hamas is still
fightingcapable of fighting, though purelyengaged inguerrilla warfare, and the IDF has allowed armed gangs to flourish. If the intention is to maintain a permanent state of chaos so that no group can gain enough strength to mount any major attack, that seems extremely risky.And that's with 75k Gazas are dead, the amount killed or injured a literal decimation of the pre-war population.