“Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces that began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Its objective was to frighten and prevent Palestinian Arabs from returning to villages captured by the Yishuv and make conditions difficult for Arab armies attempting to retake territories. The operation resulted in severe illness among local Palestinian citizens. In the final months of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Israel gave orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighboring Arab states such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, but they were not carried out. Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and IDF chief of general staff Yigael Yadin oversaw and approved the use of biological warfare.”

  • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    The region has be subject to terrorism for far longer than Israel has existed.

    Israel is just a new face on conflict that is ancient.

    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Israel is just a new face on conflict that is ancient.

      No, that’s a bullshit and an insidious myth used to justify and normalize the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians

      • The Birth of Israel Myths and Realities - Simha Flapan

      The Zionists not only sought to colonize Palestine but, as Pappe shows, “…it also hoped to secularize the Jewish people, to invent the ‘new Jew’ in antithesis to the religious Orthodox Jews of Europe… The Orthodox Jew was ridiculed by the Zionists, and was viewed as someone who could only be redeemed through hard work in Palestine… The role of the Bible within Jewish life offered one further clear difference between Judaism and Zionism… the Bible provided ‘the myth for our right over the land.’ It was in the Bible that they read stories about Hebrew farmers, shepherds, kings, and wars, which they appropriated as describing the ancient golden era of their nation’s birth. Returning to the land meant coming back to become farmers , shepherds and kings. Thus, they found themselves faced with a challenging paradox, for they wanted both to secularize Jewish life and to use the Bible as a publication for colonizing Palestine. In other words, though they did not believe in God, He had nonetheless promised them Palestine.”

      In reality, Pappe believes, “…the takeover of the West Bank in particular, with its ancient biblical sights, was a Zionist aim even before 1948 and it fitted the logic of the Zionist project as a whole. This logic can be summarized as the wish to take over as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible… After the occupation, the new ruler confined the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in an impossible limbo: they were neither refugees nor citizens—they were, and still are, citizenless inhabitants. They were inmates, and in many respects still are, of a huge prison in which they have no civil, and human rights and no impact on their future. The world tolerates this situation because Israel claims —and the claim was never challenged until recently—that the situation is temporary…Israel is still incarcerating a third generation of Palestinians…and depicting these mega-prisons as temporary…”

    • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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      18 hours ago

      That is literally untrue. There is no ancient conflict over Palestine, unless you count Europeans crying over having lost the holy land.

        • tyler@programming.dev
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          7 hours ago

          Several of those seem like (at least according to the Wikipedia articles) that they’re two armies from other regions just meeting in those locations. 2 3 of those battles only lasted a year. One of them lasted a month. I don’t really think you can say it’s any sort of “ancient conflict” over the region. It’s a region of earth just like all others and there have been battles there. If there’s a river or water access then there’s probably been a battle at it, no matter where it is.

          Those links amount to maximum 15 3(!) years of war. We’re over 70 years with the current conflict. Literally 5 23x as much as your links for the past two thousand years.

          I don’t really know much about this subject, but I just wanted to jump in because I read your links and they literally just seem like a meeting place for two armies. Not that the land itself was being fought over.

          Edit: I didn’t realize that the first battle you linked was only a single year, but the conflict lasted over ten. So I updated my post for that.

          • echindod@programming.dev
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            2 hours ago

            I guess I’m not sure what you mean by “Ancient Conflict”. But the Levant was historically a strategic piece of land that biodged Anatolia/Mesopotamia with Egypt. Control over this region has been a constant battle through out recorded history.

            As I admitted in my first response if you mean something like control over a homeland/holy land, like the conquest of Canaan, yeah that’s a relatively recent thing. But as far as battle ground, I think you should think more about what those battles mean in context of history. Van de Mieroop has a great History of the Ancient Near East that I would highly recommend. Mostly because ancient near eastern history is really cool.

      • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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        18 hours ago

        the Crusades were more than just Europeans crying… some counts suggest that up to 9 million people died from the different expeditions

        • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io
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          18 hours ago

          I mean yes, but the point is that there’s no long-running intra-regional conflict over Palestine. The Caliphate conquered it in the 7th century, then nothing for a few centuries, then Europeans made a fuss in the 11th-13th centuries and that was it until WWI.

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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      18 hours ago

      Not really true of all of the Levant, but largely true for Acre for the last thousand years. First the crusaders killed everybody, then the mamluks killed everybody, then after being a fishing village for a time it became a port again, Napoleon bombed it, the British used it as their prison and port and it got targeted, and then you had this. It had it worse, historically, than post roman Jerusalem.

      • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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        18 hours ago

        Genocide of Canaan

        Genocide of Amalekites

        Genocide of Misianites

        Neo-Assyrian Empire campaigns

        Jewish-Roman Wars

        The Crusades

        All of which acts of terror, by modern standards, were committed. Poisoning a well, burning crops, rape, torture, etc. were how war was done.

        The Middle East has been settled for 10s of thousands of years and humans have only recently decided that genocide and acts of terror are not cool.

      • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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        18 hours ago

        There are so many sources. The Bible for instance shows that people have been living in and fighting over that region for a long time.

          • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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            16 hours ago

            It’s obviously not 100% true, but as a list of stories compiled by Jews in ancient Babylon, it can certainly show that Israel was a land flight over by many for a long time. There are also other sources, eg the Greeks, Romans, Persians, British invading the land at one point or another. And it’s not surprising, it’s the linchpin between 3 continents, very strategically useful.

        • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
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          18 hours ago

          So you are just taking out of your ass while also repeating zionist propaganda.

          Good job 🤡