Someday this War's gonna End

[carmanmemoranda]

All the more reason they should have watched it. Own goal. Shot themselves in the foot. Gave Israel the excuse they wanted and opened the door to their own annihilation.

Do you think the long term issues will be sorted as easily as "their own annihilation" ? Or is it just opening a bigger can of worms, with potentially much worse consequences, for not just that area.

Very naive to think "this will sort it"

 

[Odds]

According to UN Trade and Development, the GDP per capita in the West Bank decreased by 4.5 percent, “indicating a substantial drop in living standards and household incomes.” The overall GDP for the West Bank and Gaza combined was about $17 billion in 2023 — a 9.1 percent decline from 2022. “How, under everyday restrictions,” Ramallah business consultant Sam Bahour asked me, “can businesses recruit talent, or visit customers, or suppliers, or coordinate with partners?”

Dealing with all the restrictions has “made Palestinian businesspeople unusually resilient,” Khalidi adds. Competent leaders, emerging from companies having interlocking ownership patterns and directorships, become national figures willy-nilly. “The business community,” he says, “are something like the leaders of the Zionist Histadrut” — the Zionist pioneers’ Labor federation — “in the 1930s and ’40s, wielding economic and incipiently political power, anticipating a future state.”

...

What would that state look like?

All the talk of a "two state solution" provides scant information on how Palestine can develop a national economy with integration of Israel investment and without Israel interference in internal affairs.

 

[Odds]

Forty-nine public companies are listed on the Nablus-based stock exchange with a total market cap of around $5 billion. “They attract a third of shareholders from outside the country, and have mostly evolved from family businesses,” Ammar Aker, the former CEO of the telecom giant, PALTEL, and now the PA’s regulator of financial services, told me. The key to the performance of these companies is “genuine rule of law, or at least the end of flagrant corruption,” he says. “Unless you build real hope, unless you build a Palestinian state with full mandate to have peace with Israel, nothing good can come about.”

 

[Odds]

Fifty three listed companies are owned by the Palestine Investment Bank and the PEX was Established in 1995 as a private company aimed at promoting investment in Palestine, holding its inaugural trading session in February 1997. In 2010 PEX transformed itself to become the second publicly traded Arab stock exchange entirely owned by the private sector. PEX listed companies are divided into five sectors: banking and financial services insurance investment industry and services. Shares trade in Jordanian dinars and US dollars. PEX member securities companies (brokerage firms) operations are extended across the West Bank and Gaza Strip and authorized custodians are available to work on behalf of foreign investors.

A big problem is they have no currency of their own. Without control over your own money supply you're a lame duck in a pond full of sharks...for example, approximately 100,000 Palestinians find employment in Israeli companies as low-cost labor, earning significantly less than the average Israeli worker, leaving them vulnerable to the volatile political conditions around their terms of employment.

mtf...

 

[fillyboy]

I didn't realise goat herding was such a big business.

 

[JohnD]

Israel has killed the goats.

Demolishing homes, schools, hospitals, pharmacies, shops, maternity clinics, banks, registrars of births, marriages and deaths, council offices, police stations, sewage works, water supplies, roads, farms, olive groves, places of worship, cemeteries, museums, libraries and historic monuments is not "war on Hamas."

It is a concerted effort to wipe Palestine off the map , destroy its history, and make it uninhabitable for anybody except Israelis.

 

[Lirefighter]

Israel has killed the goats.

Demolishing homes, schools, hospitals, pharmacies, shops, maternity clinics, banks, registrars of births, marriages and deaths, council offices, police stations, sewage works, water supplies, roads, farms, olive groves, places of worship, cemeteries, museums, libraries and historic monuments is not "war on Hamas."

It is a concerted effort to wipe Palestine off the map , destroy its history, and make it uninhabitable for anybody except Israelis.

View attachment 389870

Do you think that the Palestinian civilians are beginning to realise that Hamas don't have, and never have had their best interests at heart?

 

[fillyboy]

Do you think that the Palestinian civilians are beginning to realise that Hamas don't have, and never have had their best interests at heart?

I suspect so. There's also a realisation that in 1947/8, they were offered the exact same deal that Israel was offered.

Hmmmmm?

 

[Lirefighter]

They could have been an example to the rest of the Arab States on how prosperous a secular (Islamic influenced) democracy can be, yet they chose to dig tunnels instead.
I do feel for the minority of Palestinians who just want a peaceful life, but unfortunately, their governing authority has crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.
Lesson's will, I'm sure, be learned.

 

[Odds]

I didn't realise goat herding was such a big business.

Among the many firms in Israel to do business with Palestine The Bank of Jerusalem and the ironically named Paz Oil Company find goat herding extremely profitable.

There are 14 banks in Palestine: eight Palestinian, five Jordanian and one Egyptian. Total Palestinian bank deposits exceed $18 billion, while they lend only about $11 billion, or roughly 60 percent of liquid assets, a rate fully 25 percent lower than Western banks.

 

[Odds]

A couple of weeks ago the Norwegian government said it would review its sovereign wealth fund’s investment in Israel after the Scandinavian country’s leading newspaper revealed that the nearly $2 trillion fund had a stake in an Israeli company aiding Israel’s war in Gaza. Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who manages the world’s largest fund, ordered the central bank to conduct a review of the fund portfolio to make sure Israeli companies aiding the occupation of the West Bank or the war in Gaza are barred from investments.

Allahu Akhbar@Al Jazeera

...after so many years of Hamas insurgency. Netanyahu’s government wants Americans to conclude that, given any kind of independence, Palestinians would be dominated by jihadism. And, before Oct. 7 and its aftermath, there often did seem to be a willingness among educated, moderate Palestinians to elide, if not tolerate, Hamas in the name of national unity, or to project steadfastness in the face of Israeli occupation. Recent polls show that, in the West Bank, as in Israel, over 60 percent prefer a regional peace based on a two-state solution and normalization if the alternative is a regional, multi-front war...But business leaders would provide the economic, technological and cultural infrastructure of any state people like Barghouti, if freed, would try to organize. Business leaders are the bearers of a bourgeois revolution, after all. They, like their Israeli counterparts, have grown accustomed to cosmopolitan ideals, global markets, gender equality and scientific arguments. Politico

 

[Odds]

A good way to bring Israel to its senses is to apply sanctions to the letter:

Calian, a Canadian technology company, has suspended shipments of GPS antennas to Israeli military technology firm Elbit Systems after confirming that a delivery went out last weekend. The decision follows the release of a report that analysed Israeli import data and publicly available shipping records, appearing to contradict the Canadian government’s claim that no arms shipments to Israel have been authorised since last January.

The Palestinian Youth Movement, which co-authored the report, accused Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand of misleading the public. “If we hadn’t caught this in real time, Canada would still be denying it. How many other shipments have slipped through while Anand lies to the public?” said Yara Shoufani of the group.

However: Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz has approved the military’s plan to conquer Gaza City and authorised the call-up of about 60,000 reservists to carry it out, his ministry confirms.

 

[Munroast]

could of ended a long time ago if they had just released all of the hostages - hamas clearly have not had enough yet

 

[Odds]

Their intention is no different than what Ukrainian soldiers have been fighting for: an independent country.

Why would they give up that ideal?

 

[blup]

Interesting article about Paul Weller's stance

MSN