r/Israel_Palestine

It seems that even with "peace" agreements, the future of Israel in the region is not sustainable.

Arab Opinion Index 2025

The Jewish Labour Movement’s national chair says Labour’s next leader must “hold the line” on antisemitism.

But whose line? And at what cost?

My new piece examines the politics behind that framing - and argues that at a moment of immense Palestinian suffering, closing down debate is not anti-racism. It is erasure.

Holding the line for whom? A response to Ella Rose-Jacobs and the Jewish Labour Movement

https://aidanmneal.wordpress.com/2026/07/03/jlm-ella-rose-jacobs-palestine-antisemitism/

I always see people claim that Israel has extensive power to "defend" itself against its regional adversaries completely on its own. The argument is usually that Israel doesn't strictly need US aid to sustain its military superiority or maintain its posture regarding the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria.

Yet, recent events show that when the US decides to put the brakes on escalating a conflict with Iran, Israel ends up stopping too, even if it seems against their own strategic will. There are reports that Trump essentially told Netanyahu: If you want to continue the war on Iran, you can, but you're on your own. That warning alone seemed enough to make Netanyahu halt his plans.

So, why is that?

Why does Israel rely so heavily on US backup for Iran if they are truly self-sufficient?

Does Israeli "military superiority" only apply to fighting asymmetrical forces like Hamas or Hezbollah? (And if so, why is it framed as regional superiority against nation-states?)

I’m genuinely trying to understand the gap between the rhetoric of a completely independent, dominant Israeli military and the reality of their reliance on US strategic veto power when it comes to major regional wars.

Article link here

A few thoughts, with excerpts from the article:

>The conditions that gave rise to the organization—occupation, dispossession, and humiliation at the hands of Israel—are as severe as ever. And in the Gaza Strip, there is no comprehensive alternative to Hamas’s governance. . . . In fact, Hamas is so weak it can no longer suppress armed challengers in its own territory. Today, five militias, each made up of a few dozen to a few hundred men, are fighting Hamas for control over Gaza, including the Popular Forces led by Ghassan al-Dahini and the so-called Strike Force Against Terror led by Hussam al-Astal. Hamas is also up against several armed families, such as the Dughmush and Shuhaiber clans in Gaza City and the al-Majayda clan in Khan Younis. These groups will not develop into a Hamas 2.0 because they lack relationships with Iran or Arab governments and are openly backed by Israel, which has provided them with weapons, money, and aerial support. . . . Perhaps the most damning evidence of Hamas’s collapse is that the once zealously defiant group is starting to surrender. In January 2026, it said that it would abolish its administrative bodies in Gaza, and by May, Hazem Qasem, a spokesman for the organization in Gaza, had stated that the Hamas-run government was “ready to hand over administration” to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body overseen by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace. Some analysts view Hamas’s willingness to transfer authority as a tactical concession. But it is better understood as a distress signal.

That sounds like an Israeli victory over Hamas as an institution can only be achieved by Israel holding the line and letting the conditions in Gaza that will enable Hamas' overthrow to continue.

>In fact, it appears that many Gazans have started to give up on the idea of armed resistance overall. In September 2023, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 51 percent of Gazans thought that armed struggle was the best way to end Israeli occupation and build a Palestinian state. By October 2025 (the latest month for which polling data is available), that share had fallen to 34 percent. That hardly means Gazans want an Israeli occupation, a government led by the Palestinian Authority, or any other externally imposed governing body. But they do want electricity, safety, freedom of movement, jobs, education, and, above all, to stop burying their children—outcomes that Hamas cannot deliver.

Everyone who here claimed that Hamas as an ideology cannot be defeated militarily is officially BTFO. An ideology can only be defeated by (1) removing the group promoting it from power and (2) showing the people that said idology cannot deliver on its promises. According to this article, an Israeli military victory is achieving both.

>Even though Hamas is fiscally, militarily, and politically ruined, its leaders are unwilling to completely give in. Some seem to be hoping that they will eventually stage a comeback akin to what followed Hamas’s wars against Israel in 2008–9 and in 2014, when the group rebuilt its tunnel network and replenished its rocket arsenal. Other Hamas leaders cling to the group’s survival to simply keep their jobs and stay relevant. Almost all of them want to avoid answering for a war that killed over 73,000 Palestinians and displaced almost the entire population.

If Israel withdraws and ends the war before Hamas is actually defeated, then Hamas may be able to pull it together and resurge. This is especially likely if America also follows through with Trump's TACO capitulation to Iran and enables the IRGC to secure $300b in funding.

>That Hamas wants to portray itself as strong makes intuitive sense. More surprising is Israel, which is likewise carrying on as if Hamas is still formidable. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a good reason for maintaining this charade: he needs a threat to justify his aggressive approach to security, his refusal to engage with Palestinian statehood, and his alliance with the far right, especially ahead of Israeli elections in October. He has said that Israel will not allow Gaza to begin reconstruction until Hamas is demilitarized. And it appears that Israel intends to control the enclave indefinitely. According to an investigation by Al Jazeera, Israel now has 40 military outposts in Gaza—eight of which have been built from scratch since the October 2025 cease-fire. A force on its way out would have no need for such permanent structures. If Netanyahu acknowledged that Hamas was in fact a phantom, he would come under mounting global pressure to stop occupying Gaza without offering its people political rights.

Bibi insisting "that Israel will not allow Gaza to begin reconstruction until Hamas is demilitarized" is the correct strategic move for Israel. What is the alternative?

The article argues very convincingly that Hamas is on the way out specifically because of the current material conditions of Gaza under Israeli occupation and blockade (and indirectly because of the Iran war and its consequences to Hamas' supporters in Iran and Qatar). If that is true, it would be an incredible strategic misstep for Israel to end those material conditions before Hamas either formally accepts that it has lost and demilitarizes or is violently overthrown by a rival group willing to work with Israel. Doing so risks enabling Hamas to do as it promises to do: consolidate, rebuild, and resecure power.

This process of gradually forcing Hamas to accept that is has lost will undoubtedly take some time - the ceasefire was signed in October 2025 and Hamas is still stubbornly not demilitarized or removed. Some "phantom". Israel is constructing "40 military outposts in Gaza" to enable the IDF to remain in Gaza until that is completed. Israeli entrenchment is the logical, tactically sound reaponse to Hamas' refusal to admit defeat.

The author is incorrect to argue that these "permanent structures" for are part of a nefarious secret plan for Israel "occupying Gaza without offering its people political rights" "indefinitely". I understand the objection that many have to the neo-Kahanists in Israel's coalition and the genuine fear that the current Israeli government will use the Gaza war as an opportunity to undo the 2006 disengagement. I share those same concerns!

But Bibi's own statements on Gaza in August 2025 before the October 2025 ceasefire explicitly states that Israel will only withdraw once Hamas is disarmed and removed from power. Further, as the Board of Peace reported to the UNSC in May 2026 (direct link to PBS news article about Mladenov's report here), Israel is required to withdraw from Gaza pursuant to the ceasefire and Trump's "20 Point Plan" only once Hamas has disarmed, and that Israeli withdrawal has stalled because Hamas' disarmament has not occurred.

>For Netanyahu, this cynicism is nothing new. His entire political career has been built on managing the Palestinian question, not resolving it, and he has been happy to indirectly partner with Hamas to do so. In the years leading up to October 7, Netanyahu encouraged Qatar to fund Hamas in order to keep the leaders of the West Bank and Gaza divided and thus less capable of negotiating on Palestinians’ behalf. The logic that produced the policy remains essentially the same: whereas Netanyahu once needed a strong Hamas to prevent a peace process, he now needs only its specter.

This is completely backwards.

Bibi's policy of permitting Hamas to exist and receive funding from Qatar was intended to "buy quiet" in the hope that Hamas would eventually normalize; and, because a ground invasion to remove Hamas was seen as politically impossible due to the anticipated international objections and the domestic costs measured in both money and soldiers' lives.

(See this 2023 NYT article and 2024 Washington Institute historian Martin Kramer thinkpiece; I also highly recommend listening to this podcast by Israeli reporter Haviv Rettig Gur summarizing the past 30 years of this history).

Moreover, the international community has for years advocated for Israel to permit Qatar's payments to Hamas, as the payments have been consistently framed as necessary to prevent humanitarian catastrophy in Gaza. The payments began after Hamas kicked out the Fatah-led PA and the PA decided to stop authorizing payment of civil salaries and aid transfers, as part of Fatah's long-term civil war against Hamas. It has been, quite literally, ongoing for as long as Hamas as ruled Gaza.

(See e.x. these 2018 articles from CNN and Reuters, and these 2016 articles from Reuters and Times of Israel, and this 2012 article from NYT. See also this 2013 Al Monitor article which notes that Qatar has been funneling money to Hamas since 2008, shortly after Hamas violently seized control over Gaza from the PA.)

It seems many people believe the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was ethnically cleansed in much the same sense that Kfar Etzion was and that Palestinians were from hundreds of localities during the war through which Israel was established. The situation was quite different in the Jewish Quarter though, as explained in Benny Morris's 1948. Of course the Arab Legion's capture of the neighborhood was violent, but as he concludes his telling of that history:

>On the morning of 28 May a delegation of rabbis arrived at the quarter’s Haganah command bunker and announced that they intended to surrender. The commander, Moshe Roznak, agreed that they open “truce negotiations.” Glubb described what followed: “Two old rabbis, their backs bent with age, came forward down a narrow lane carrying a white flag.” In no man’s land they met a Jordanian officer and said that they were empowered to negotiate. [Abdullah] Tall demanded to see the quarter’s mukhtar, Rabbi Mordechai Weingarten. Weingarten, accompanied by his daughter, Yehudit, duly appeared, and the negotiations began in a nearby café. A brief ceasefire was agreed, and Weingarten returned to the Jewish Quarter, where representatives of the inhabitants and the defenders voted almost unanimously in favor of surrender; only the IZL representative abstained. Shaltiel was not consulted or informed. Rosnak, Weingarten, and Tall then signed an instrument of surrender. Tall agreed that the civilian inhabitants and all the women would be free to leave for West Jerusalem; army-age males (or “combatants”) would become prisoners of war. Seriously wounded combatants were to be set free. By then, of the 213 defenders, thirty-nine were dead, and 134 were wounded.

>The fears of the quarter’s inhabitants proved groundless; the Legion had learned its lesson from Kfar Etzion. The Legionnaires deployed in force and protected the Jews from the wrath of the gathering Arab mob. The soldiers shot dead at least two Arabs and wounded others as they guarded the Jews. One POW recalled: “We were all surprised by the Legion’s behavior toward us. We all thought that of the soldiers [that is, Haganah men] none would remain alive. . . . [We feared a massacre. But] the Legion protected us even from the mob, they helped take out the wounded, they themselves carried the stretchers. . . . They gave us food, their attitude was gracious and civil.”

>The Legionnaires took prisoner 290 healthy males, aged fifteen to fifty—two-thirds of them, in fact, noncombatants—and fifty-one of the wounded. The other wounded and twelve hundred inhabitants were accompanied by the Legionnaires to Zion Gate and freed. The quarter was then systematically pillaged and razed by the mob. The fall of the Jewish Quarter, an important national site, dealt a severe blow to Yishuv morale.

Also notable is the fact the ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists who lived in the Jewish Quarter didn't own much of it at all, as can be seen on the Jewish Agency's land ownership map, the neighborhood being just a bit north west from the dot for Silwan. As far as I'm aware they only owned two synagogues, including one Morris curiously describes as having been blown up "without reason" when the reason is that Haganah were hunkering down in the synagogue and refusing to evacuate.

Anyway, I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this history, and particularly those of anyone who had previously imagined it differently.

Ben Jamal and Chris Nineham should never have been prosecuted.

But that is only half the story.

The other half - and the part almost nobody has examined - is how Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Stop The War Coalition framed the case through claims of “Zionist” pressure, Jewish communal leverage and hidden political power.

My new article:

https://aidanmneal.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/the-part-of-the-ben-jamal-chris-nineham-story-everyone-missed/