By Alice Cuddy BBC News, Jerusalem


The call to Mahmoud Shaheen came at dawn.

It was Thursday 19 October at about 06:30, and Israel had been bombing Gaza for 12 days straight.

He’d been in his third-floor, three-bedroom flat in al-Zahra, a middle-class area in the north of the Gaza Strip. Until now, it had been largely untouched by air strikes.

He’d heard a rising clamour outside. People were screaming. “You need to escape,” somebody in the street shouted, “because they will bomb the towers”.

  • Kepabar@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.

    The question of ‘Why doesn’t Israel integrate the Palestinians?’ is a good one. The answer is numbers.

    Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.

    If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.

    I don’t agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.

    … But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.