@visegrad24 Israel should also say that they will only negotiate with the Lebanon government. This makes it clear that Israel & Lebanon are two sovereign nations.
@mikepompeo@DanLinnaeus Israel shouldn’t wait but strike first, hit hard, and take Hezbollah out. Trump & Vance will fume but do nothing. This is a golden opportunity.
@DavidM_Friedman@MissDiagnosis Fair enough! I’ll wait for the fat lady to sing. So far the opera is a tragedy in the making. Yes, the orange guy has a history of turning on a dime. A surprise ending would be welcomed.
@ConceptualJames Do you see this as "one step backwards to take two steps forward?"
I can't.
Trump is facilitating the funding of a vicious Islamic terrorist state. We're funding terrorism.
@icarvsvivebat@ConceptualJames That’s my point. He talks crazy, acts erratically and flip-flops. It’s just a question of waiting for him to reverse himself. It’s Trump, after all.
From what I read even Rubio wasn't fully committed:
"... an intricate and ambitious plan [for regime change] presented by David Barnea, head of Mossad, to Donald Trump on 12 February was not adopted or implemented.
Rather, Trump chose the more limited option suggested by his Secretary of State Marco Rubio: a massive bombing campaign that would inflict huge damage but avoid committing the US to a prolonged effort to reshape Iran’s internal governance."
https://t.co/nQgm82jPft
@VividProwess Vance was quiet when Trump was pounding Iran. Now Rubio is quiet. Waiting, no doubt, for Trump to come to his senses.
Remember when Trump was going to annex Canada until he wasn’t? And 100% tariffs? And leaving NATO?
Waiting may pay off. Or not.
@VividProwess Vance was quiet when Trump was pounding Iran. Now Rubio is quiet. Waiting, no doubt, for Trump to come to his senses.
Remember when Trump was going to annex Canada until he wasn’t? And 100% tariffs? And leaving NATO?
Waiting may pay off. Or not.
@VividProwess Vance was quiet when Trump was pounding Iran. Now Rubio is quiet. Waiting, no doubt, for Trump to come to his senses.
Remember when Trump was going to annex Canada until he wasn’t? And 100% tariffs? And leaving NATO?
Waiting may pay off. Or not.
@VividProwess Vance was quiet when Trump was pounding Iran. Now Rubio is quiet. Waiting, no doubt, for Trump to come to his senses.
Remember when Trump was going to annex Canada until he wasn’t? And 100% tariffs? And leaving NATO?
Waiting may pay off. Or not.
@VividProwess Vance was quiet when Trump was pounding Iran. Now Rubio is quiet. Waiting, no doubt, for Trump to come to his senses.
Remember when Trump was going to annex Canada until he wasn’t? And 100% tariffs? And leaving NATO?
Waiting may pay off. Or not.
In modern discourse, people like to speak as if the Arabs of Palestine owned the land which became the British Mandate, which was 'stolen' from them. This claim was made into a famous series of colored maps showing a sequence in which the land was 'stolen,' starting with it all being 'Palestinian.'
This discourse, of course, conflates issues of sovereignty and private ownership. No Arab population ever had sovereignty over the land, which had been ruled by empires for thousands of years.
But the impression given by the discourse is that they had private land ownership, which gave them a right to sovereignty, having lived in the area for centuries.
True?
In reality, about 60% of the Arab population lived on just 12% of the land, which became the British Mandate, a small sliver of land called the Fertile Triangle, connecting Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Nablus.
The other 40% of the population lived on just another 8% of the land.
This is despite the entire area being very rural with no densely populated cities.
The rest of the land, the local population avoided, considering it unlivable due to disease or uncultivable due to the hostile conditions of the soil. 80% of the area was Ottoman-owned public lands, belonging to no Arab, peasant, or nobility. No one lived there, though a small population of nomadic Bedouins wandered it and grazed their flocks. The local population did not live there, did not own it, and did not have a political or moral right to stop refugees from finding refuge there.
Why? Because Ottoman law held that land local people abandoned and did not cultivate or live on automatically became public lands. The British inherited these lands in the Mandate.
Zionists legally purchased their lands, about a 50/50 split between these public lands and lands owned by absentee landlords (slightly more weighted towards private purchase). Not infrequently, the private landlord lands had been public lands until recently, which the Arab nobility ( called effendi) schemed to buy before the Zionists did, so they could 'flip' them at a profit.
In a typical effendi Arab scheme, they would talk the British into selling some public lands to peasants to farm, for 'humanitarian' reasons and to 'keep the lands from the Jews.'
These same nobles would lend the peasants, who were illiterate and penniless, the money to buy the land and begin farming it. These loans were usurious, charging interest rates of 30% to 60%.
After a short period of time, when the Arab peasants couldn't repay the loans, the Arab nobles would foreclose and take the land.
Then, they would sell it to Zionists at a handsome profit, while telling the poor peasant the Jew had stolen their land.
This is how real life works in the Arab world, and how you get a century-long conflict.
And that ‘Fertile Triangle’, here is the reality of how ‘fertile’ it really was before the Zionists brought the spirit and methods of rehabilitation to the area.