Personally I think the Israeli leadership is deliberately provoking Hamas into terrorist acts so that they can have the pretext to ethnically cleanse the region of Palestinians, and have the West's support, too.

What is the internal response to Palestinians who oppose and protest Hamas?

Maybe, I don't place much faith in those sorts of theories when these things first happen but it wouldn't shock me. I've heard the concert location was moved 2 days before the attack as well but haven't seen any proof.

Either way I don't agree with flattening Gaza in response.

18

There's nothing contrarian about what i'm saying though. US-SA relationship has soured during Biden's presidency. This was largely as a result of both Biden publicly condemning MBS for Khashoggi death as well as the fact that the US was trying to normalize relationship with Iran. Subsequently what happened is the Ukraine-Russia war kicked off and we wanted to hurt Russia by implementing price caps on their oil. Now we wanted the Saudis to essentially pump more oil to account for the Russian oil that would be coming off the market but instead SA and Russia decided to cut production which basically was a huge fuck you by the Saudis to the US for blaming MBS for Khashoggi's killing publicly. Western MSM articles even framed it that SA is helping Russia. Fast forward some more, and we hear that SA and Iran are trying to normalize ties, with Iran basically bringing the Houthis to the negotiation table with Saudis to end the Yemen war. This is a huge development that absolutely blind sided us and is a net negative for Israel.

Now as I said, there's no way to prove this, but these evolving dynamics are for sure relevant and linked to this war today, which many see (including in the western MSM) as an attempt by Iran to blow up the potential agreement between Israel-SA. It's not some conspiracy theory that Iran would benefit from that deal falling through, nor is it that hard to believe that Iran could in theory pull strings in Hamas, which they fund to the tune of 100 million a year (according to US state department).

Yeah US Saudi relationship is trashed, definitely going to factor in

We can add it to the things we can agree to disagree on. I do not think they are as relevant as you do.



Saudi have agreed to oil stabilization as good faith. How much oil does our strategic reserve have after meetings with Saudi Arabia? Record lows. We have known for weeks/months what their plans with oil were going to be or else we wouldn’t be operating with record low levels in our reserve. Things between Saudi could de-escalate which would be a disaster for us, but that’s not the base case here. The only way I see that happening is the X factor China. It’s still a very mutually beneficial relationship

This post was edited by Bazi on Oct 10 2023 08:38pm

Saudis probably want to maintain the status quo as much as possible IMO but the situations void described basically showed them they will be put on the chopping block just as easily as any other middle eastern country.

I doubt they want to burn everything down by devastating the US economy but I think it will affect their decision making going forward, to what degree I don't know.

Yes only at Saturday.