It just doesn't mean anything. I disagree with you about Hezbollah's motives, but that's besides the point. No country in the world could ignore militarily what Hezbollah has done over the last year. To call the missile attacks an act of war would be to understate dramatically the campaign they've undertaken. You can believe Hezbollah's motives were pure and their campaign fully justified. Israel was still going to shoot back; after almost a full year of large scale rocket attacks, it was starting to look weird that they hadn't already. Hezbollah presumably just expected them to shoot back less effectively.
> No country in the world could ignore militarily what Hezbollah has done over the last year.
Only Israel reacts to terrorism with a genocidal rampage. No other country behaves like this. And it only behaves like this because it has been enabled by their allies, and the international community, who consistently let their crimes go unpunished, including but not limited to their settlement policy.
On the flip side, no colonized people in the world (except maybe Tibet) would ignore what Israel has done over the last decades. Decades of colonial occupation usually results in resistance and that resistance usually includes terrorism.
Israel’s behavior is not normal, by any measure, Hezbollah or Hamas’ behavior on the other hand is consistent with resistance group of colonized peoples.
Once again: Hezbollah occupies Lebanon. It is not a resistance movement. A majority of Lebanese (which is not majority Shia) loathes it. It's primary military engagements over the last decade --- even after including the casualties it incurred by opening a front with Israel over the last year --- have been in Syria, where it has been gleefully (and I use that word advisedly; look up the details, they've been making videos --- Madaya; Homs; Idlib) murdering children and civilians. You give the game away a bit when you equate Hezbollah with Hamas. They are radically different organizations. Both are terrible, but they are terrible in their own distinct ways.
I understand why people have a problem with Israel. It makes a lot of sense. But you cannot simply assume any declared military enemy of Israel is a resistance organization. We went through this with Ansar Allah in Yemen, which is literally a racialist fascist dictatorship representing single-digit percentages of the population, also managed by the IRGC QF, and also killing civilians by the tens of thousands.
In no way does Hezbollah "occupy" Lebanon. It is drawn entirely from Lebanese society. Truly a bizarre thing to keep repeating so stridently! Its also absurd to deny the literal origins of the group, as a militia that was attempting to defend southern Lebanon from an actual occupation? This isn't hidden, there are shelves of books in english on the origins of Hezbollah? The first sentence of the second paragraph of the wikipedia article on them, just to show what level of consensus there is, states the fact of its origins as a response to an Israeli invasion, and its source for this is....wait for it....the BBC.
Hey! I'm glad to see you. Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. If you want to argue that Israel bears some responsibility for the destabilization of Lebanon, I won't argue. But it was trained and guided by the IRGC from its inception; the modern incarnation of Hezbollah is directed by the IRGC Quds Force. If you want to argue that the two organizations (QF and Hezbollah) are separable, you have two simple fact patterns to contend with:
* Hezbollah fully mobilized to engage, on behalf of the Syrian Baathists, during the Syrian civil war. By some accounts Hezbollah was the most effective fighting force in the entire conflict. There was no clear ideological reason Hezbollah should have committed itself and other Lebanese militia to that conflict; it did so because Iran and the Baathist leadership of Syria are aligned politically. It's striking, reviewing the entire history of Hezbollah's military conflict, that the Syrian theater accounts for a plurality of all military casualties ever taken by Hezbollah. I'd like to understand your explanation for Hezbollah taking over 2,000 infantry casualties in Syria that excludes the IRGC directing them to do so.
* The Mossad pager attack struck Iran's foreign envoy to Lebanon (that's reported in the story we're commenting on) and dozens of Iranian Quds Force operatives in the Bekaa valley. I'm curious what your explanation of those casualties would be, apart from the obvious and widely reported suggestion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah was an instrument of the QF.
The claim that Hezbollah is directed by and is in essence an instrument of the Quds Force fits into a context of Iran's strategy of engaging militarily through a network of proxies --- the claim I'm making is one Iran itself makes. Iran's proxies include not just Hezbollah but Kata'ib Hezbollah in Iraq, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza --- Hamas being noteworthy because they had a falling out with the IRGC because they supported the Sunni insurgency in Syria.
It's wild to me, as a westerner, that on the leaderboard of "most salient military conflicts in the Middle East", Israel/Palestine ranks at best #3, behind the Saudi/Persian rivalry (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Yemen) and the Sunni/Alawite conflict in Syria (which claimed hundreds of thousands of noncombatant lives in Syria).
Hezbollah was a Khomeinist response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
This "response" being armed resistance to that invasion, specifically. Eventually not only forcing the latter's withdrawal, but handing it a decisive strategic defeat (from which it is still licking its wounds). As a neat little side bonus, the US was forced to leave with its tail between its legs as well.
Which makes it not only a you-know-what movement - but (by the end of that conflict at least) a very successful one at that.
Are you going to respond to my point about the "occupy" "fact" or...not? Plenty of resistance groups are trained by other state (and non-state) powers who have an interest in their success? Vietnam comes to mind! I don't know, maybe you would, but I'd be pretty shocked if you described the North Vietnamese army as "occupying" ....North Vietnam. Similar dynamics apply across pretty much any ideological axis you could name. The level of support that a resistance group gets for a militia which I haven't seen you deny (yet!) is made up entirely of Lebanese people does not somehow negate that that force is indigenous to its location/state/region/etc and is operating from a motivation to repel a state that had already actually occupied Lebanon for 20 years during a previous invasion. None of what Hezbollah did in Syria negates its origins or in anyway makes it an "occupier" of its own land. This is the point I made in my reply, nothing that I'm seeing in yours in anyway addresses that, if you think it does, please, feel free to explain it to me.
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power. The Syria thing is not a small deal.
I feel like if I have a stake in any part of these cursed threads, it's the notion that just because you oppose Israel --- a deeply problematic state, I agree with you preemptively --- doesn't make you justifiable. You saw the same thing with people talking up Ansar Allah when they were deterring shipping in the Red Sea. Literally a minoritarian racialist supremacist group!
To the extent that it is the dominant military power in Lebanon and it is directed by a foreign power, while enjoying something like 8% public support outside the Shia minority in Lebanon, I do feel comfortable referring to it as an occupying power.
Except that extent is tempered greatly by Hezbollah's broader social and political significance (providing government services in some areas, and being a leading party in the previous ruling coalition). Also, if we go by its standing in the polls, its support clocks in at 18.56 percent, and its broader coalition block came in with an additional 20 percent (which has quite a different ring from the "8 percent outside of the Shia majority" figure you were touting).
Point being - it's not simply a proxy of Iran, and (since the definition of a "military occupier", going by Wikipedia, explicitly requires a foreign power as a referent) that's where the assertion "Hezbollah occupies Lebanon" starts to lose structural coherence.
1) There hasn't been an official census in Lebanon in nearly a century[1], precisely because such statistics would upset a fragile balance of power between competing minority groups. So I'm not sure where you are getting the 8% public support outside the Shia minority line but if you have access to census data that literally the entire rest of the world, including and most prominently the Lebanese, do not have, perhaps you should share it! Not that that matters because even if you were correct about the support levels, given that Hezbollah is a genuine Lebanese political movement, made up entirely of Lebanese people, it cannot, ipso facto be an "occupying power". There are a number of different words to describe when an indigenous minority rules over an indigenous majority but "occupier" is not one of them, and the political function that that word performs in your argument is the reason I think maybe your doubling down on it, substance free.
2) I did not at any point say that the actions of Hezbollah in Syria are "a small deal". The actions of Hezbollah in Syria however, while truly heinous, have zero to do with whether or not it is accurate to call Hezbollah an "occupying power". You often try to draw in extraneous aspects to a particular point in these threads which are salacious or horrifying and seem to believe that these buttress your argument without ever actually illuminating the link, I feel like this is a perfect example of that. Maybe we're talking past one another, I don't know, but as I said, nothing that Hezbollah did in Syria in anyway makes it an occupying power in Lebanon.
3) I have never, here or at any time in any of these threads, held to some kind of childlike mentality that simply by virtue of "oppos[ing] Israel...makes you justifiable."
4) Plenty of resistance groups engage in ugly tactics or are either authoritarian from the beginning or become so over time. None of that makes those groups somehow an "occupier", or negates that they are resisting a real oppressor. Which, again, is my entire reason for jumping in this thread.
5) If your only reason to jump in these threads is to perform some kind of intellectual policing action, scolding and sneering at your interlocutors, presuming that their motivation is a kind of shallow reflexive opposition to Israel, I think maybe you lose the ability to claim that you are attempting to preserve an environment for "curiosity". I have tangled with you probably half a dozen times or more over this last year, not once have I felt you are in anyway "curious" or seeking to understand. Just the opposite. Do you think I support any and all opposition to Israel, simply because....it is opposition to Israel? You would be quite wrong stranger! I have prayed at more synagogues, just in Chicago, then you have probably, probably, set foot in in your entire life. I was a zionist for many years. None of this really needs to be said, and given you are unwilling to defend your own statements, commenting that you are "not going to litigate your politics" and that you "blame message boards" for other people "misunderstanding" your statements, I kind of feel like its a charity and gesture you are unwilling to extend yourself and do not deserve! But again, its worth putting out there, so at least other people can see it.
EDIT: Just to respond directly to a point you raised in your initial reply which I missed on first read, the amount of casualties that Hezbollah sustained in Syria, again, does not make it an occupying power of Lebanon, I can't think of a single reason why that would somehow make them occupiers. As to why they did that, I would assume for the guns! The guns and other military support that they receive from Iran overwhelmingly passes through Syria and had the Assad regime fallen that would have been a pretty bad day for Hezbollah! Seems like a powerful reason. The idea that the relationship to Iran can be reduced to one of puppet and puppeteer by gesturing at the number of Iranians killed or wounded in the pager attack is a strange one.
I'm sorry but my lived experience of this thread is that you're the one who jumped in. I'm happy you did so, but maybe we just leave this at "we disagree and our premises are too far apart for it to make sense to litigate".
My contention is that Hezbollah is a literal arm of the IRGC Quds Force, integrated into Iranian military command and control, operating in Iran's regional strategic interests, to the point of dragging Lebanon into another regional war for no apparent benefit to Lebanon itself; it is further the most powerful military organization in Lebanon and largely outside the reach of internal law in Lebanon. Ergo: I would say that Hezbollah is evidence of Iranian occupation of Lebanon.
If you want to dispute the definitions I'm using, that's fine; it's just about the most boring thing we could possible argue about. What I strongly object to is the notion that Hezbollah under Nasrallah has functioned as a "resistance movement", as has been claimed elsewhere on this thread. Ask a Sunni in Homs what they think about that claim.
You seem to have adopted a very convenient definition of “resistance movement”. In almost all colonial warfare throughout history, the colonized received international support. Sometimes this was just weapons and aid, sometimes these were international volunteer bridges, and sometimes whole armies of a supporting nation. For example, in Rhodesian bush war, not only were the main Zimbabwe resistance groups armed and supplied by China and the Soviet Union, but they also had fighters and armed groups coming from Mozambique, ANC (South Africa) and Zambia.
During the Gaza genocide Hezbollah has been one of only two international groups who have fought with the Palestinian resistance (the other being the Huthis). Not even Iran has fought to help Palestine (they merely sent a nominal amount of missiles for reasons other than the liberation of Palestine). The ANC, and Mozambique fighters surely were armed and supplied by e.g. the Soviet Union, who probably event gave them intelligence, military advice, etc. But at no point were they a vessel or otherwise integrated into any military unit of the Soviet Union. And they fought the Rhodesian Government on ideological grounds and in solidarity with their colonized partners on the continent, but also of self preservation as e.g. the Mozambique resistance probably saw an independent Rhodesian Government would be a thread to their own liberation.
To claim e.g. that the ANC were evidence of a Soviet occupation in Africa would be very ahistorical (and I don’t thing anybody would do that), but still (and I haven’t checked, so I may be wrong) it wouldn’t surprise me that many contemporary apologists of African apartheid did just that.
Was Hezbollah an active ideological adversary of Israel, a participant in the conflict between Israel and Hamas/PIJ? Absolutely. Does that mean it participated in what Iran calls "resistance" to the state of Israel? Absolutely. Is that Hezbollah's core function? Absolutely not. Hezbollah is a service branch of the Iranian military. In every conflict Hezbollah has fought with Israel, it has incurred fewer losses and contested less territory than it did in Syria.
Empirically, Hezbollah's function is to serve Iran's regional strategic interests. When those interests align against Israel, as they so often do, Hezbollah "resists" Israel. When they involve killing Lebanese Sunni political adversaries, they do otherwise. When they involve projecting Iranian military power in other foreign conflicts, that's what they do.
I walk down the street, and someone sitting down the side of the road asks for some spare change. I give them a couple bucks and keep walking. Am I a philanthropist? Maybe in that moment? But I am in reality a software developer.
If you want to argue that Hezbollah is both a resistance movement and a foreign military occupier of Lebanon, we might find a place to agree. But, obviously, us agreeing isn't important. I'm comfortable with what this thread says about our respective positions!
With that line of reasoning you could claim that the American Indian Movement is a foreign occupying power within the USA, as they receive support from and serve the strategic interests of other indigenous liberation movements around the Americas (including Nicaragua and Bolivia); Or you could flip the script and claim that the Nicaraguan Contras were a US backed foreign occupying power in Nicaragua.
That is simply not what a foreign occupying power means. Let’s take the contras for example. They weren’t just mindless drones of the US empire, they had their own strategic interest which happened to align with US interest in the region. Would they have been active without US backing, for sure, they just wouldn’t have been so successful (and therefore not as brutal).
The Contras main interest were to reinstate the pre-revolution powerstructure, and to make sure no wealth and land redistribution occurred, they adopted whichever strategy they saw fit, including a heavy anti-communism in order to secure US backing.
This feels like an argument about definitions. Substitute whatever term you prefer. Though: I don't find it plausible that the American aboriginal rights movement is directed by foreign powers.
I don't care about the moralizing in either direction. I don't care that Israel believes Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, I don't care that Hezbollah believes Israel is an illegitimate occupier. I don't care if Hezbollah felt justified in indiscriminately lobbing rockets at northern Israel. I don't care because it doesn't matter. They struck, Israel responded; they are near-peer military adversaries, and they are at war.
This to me just illustrates the futility of advocating for a "right to fight back" or a "right to resist". There is no such thing as a right to military strikes without counterattacks. Wouldn't it be wild if there were? If some adjudicator could just decide, you're in the right, they're in the wrong, you can fire thousands of rockets, they just have to sit there and take it? In reality, however, if you launch a large scale military offensive at a capable adversary, you're going to get hit back.
> There is no such thing as a right to military strikes without counterattacks.
I'm not "moralizing" I'm citing the UN, and nobody is saying that ^
Israel is a colonist apartheid. It doesn't have a right to occupy Palestine and Palestine does have the right to fight back.
It's not that Palestine can bomb and Israel can't, it's that Israel must dissolve. Israel has neither the right to bomb nor the right to exist. Palestine shouldn't use violence to make Israel dissolve but they have the right to.
Israel's policies may change (do note that a distinction is being drawn here between Israeli Arabs, who enjoy Israeli citizenship, freedom of movement, voting rights, Knesset membership, etc and Palestinians, who do not). The state of Israel is not going to dissolve, because there are no plausible pressures that can be brought to bear to make that happen.
Post WW2 history does not treat kindly the kinds of atrocities currently being committed by Israel. I don’t know of any state which actually survived being a perpetrator of a genocide (at least not as a continuation of a functioning state). Khmer Cambodia did not, Rwanda did not. The closest is probably Serbia (but they were merely complicit of a genocide committed Republika Srpska which now only exists as a part of Bosnia-Herzegovina) or Indonesia (which survived as a dictatorship before transforming to Democracy in a revolution 15 years after the East-Timor genocidal rampage; a revolution largely caused by the genocidal behavior).
If Israel is going to follow the pattern of perpetrators of modern genocide it will either voluntarily change, be invaded and forced to change, or hang on as a dictatorship for a couple of decades and change in a revolution. In any case an Israel as we know it would have to be a historic first if it would persist as this pseudo democratic apartheid state as we know it today for the next two decades. In other words—looking at history—chances are very much in favor of Israel dissolving.
I don't know what any of this is supposed to mean. This kind of rhetoric is what jams up curious discussions about what's happening in the region; Syria and Yemen host actual genocidaires --- in Syria's case, of Palestinians in refugee camps --- and have killed civilians in the last 20 years greater multiples than the IDF has in its entire history. But somehow, Israelis notice, it's only Israel that needs to worry about what history will say about it. Your list of comparable states is wild.
You need to find a rhetorical device for calling out Israel's war crimes in west Asia that doesn't involve attempting to line Israel, and only Israel, up alongside the Rwandan Interahamwe. I think reasonable people who you stand a chance of persuading recoil from these kinds of analogies, and they're right to do so.
My point was originally that history does indeed have examples of apartheid states dissolving, contradicting your prediction that Israel wouldn’t dissolve. My point was simply to prove you wrong by citing historic examples.
My point was never to compare Israel to Rwanda (which I never did) but rather, since you weren’t convinced by the original statement, to further my case by citing other genocidal rampages which did in fact lead directly to the downfall of the perpetrating state. Your point about Syria might be on par with that as it is hardly a functioning state, although I would argue that their atrocities against Palestinian refugees don’t come anywhere close to the one currently ongoing by Israel, nor other cases of post WW2 genocides.
The Syrian state ran out of ordinary munitions during the civil war, but so desired to ethnically cleanse Sunni Palestinian refugee camps that they improvised by packing metal oil drums with high explosives, nails, scrap, and bearings, and then dropping them from helicopters onto the camps. There's video footage. Soldiers in the helicopters have to light fuses on them by hand, like 1920s silent film villains. They adopted a tactic of dropping a barrel bomb, waiting 10 minutes for responders to come help the wounded, and then dropping another one on them; they apparently called it a "double tap". They did this deliberately, exclusively targeting civilians.
And, of course, they did this in addition to deploying Sarin gas. Have you ever read the New Yorker story about the Baathist Sarin attacks on Halabja? If not, can I ask that you go read it (it's on archive.is; steel yourself) and then come back and tell me how you think the IDF stacks up regionally?
By the way: these are the people Hezbollah engaged its largest ever military mobilization to support. In Madaya, they deliberately blockaded food supplies into the suburb for months; people ate their pets, and then grass. Then they starved to death. Hezbollah leaders set up food displays with fresh proteins and produce and filmed joke videos.
If you can find a genocide in post WW2 history that didn’t result in the failure of the perpetrators state, that only refutes the absolute strongest version of my claim. However that doesn’t refute my general claim that Genocidal states do in fact tend to dissolve over the following decades, and that history has examples of apartheid states—even heavily armed ones—dissolving into a single state democracy of all its people.
Looking at history the pattern is pretty clear, even though it is not absolute (nothing in history is).
Assuming it is genocidal. You classic genocide is rounding up people and killing them all, eg the Nazis on the jews. Israel's approach has been to let the Gazans get on with things with their population growing from 1.1m in 2000 to 2.04m in 2024 then being attacked and and killing 0.04m fighting back to get their hostages. If they are doing a genocide I'm not sure they are doing it right.
However if the goal is to create conditions favorable to what they coldly refer to as "voluntary population transfer", i.e. ethnic cleansing very much in the classical definition -- they they're doing a masterful job indeed:
Apartheid - more complicated. Many people dispute this. I think it's plausible to make a case that there is an apartheid in the West Bank, though it's not completely obvious (mostly because the people there don't want to be under Israeli rule, they want their own government).
> It's not that Palestine can bomb and Israel can't, it's that Israel must dissolve. Israel has neither the right to bomb nor the right to exist. Palestine shouldn't use violence to make Israel dissolve but they have the right to.
Israel should dissolve, and...? What's the next part of the sentence for what happens to the 9 million Israelis? What's the next step for people who are second, third and foruth-generation Israelis and have only known Israel as their home?
What's the implication of deciding that a state recognized worldwide and part of the UN must dissolve? What about the other dozens of states since then, must they also dissolve?
> It is not a colonist by any standard definition.
Yes they are. It's true that before the British Mandate of Palestine the population of Syria Palaestina was 3-11% Jewish (Mizrahi Jews) but most of the Jewish population of Israel is not indigenous to that region of the world (like how the Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe and Eastern Russia).
> Apartheid - more complicated.
It isn't, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch recognize it is Apartheid. As do Ireland and South Africa (countries who have both been victim to Colonist Apartheid violence).
Israel does not allow free passage between Gaza and the West Bank, that in itself is a war crime. Israel literally has a two tiered society, Israeli Arabs do not have the Right To Return like Jewish Israelis do. 50% of Arab Israelis are under the poverty line because of wage discrimination and other factors https://adva.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SocialReport2016... . Israel was even caught practicing eugenics on the beta Israelis.
> Israel should dissolve, and...? What's the next part of the sentence for what happens to the 9 million Israelis?
What are you filling in the blank with...? Nobody is asking for them to be deported. I mean obviously people like Yaakov Fauci would have to give back the houses they literally stole but a "1 state solution" does not require the deportation/killing of the Israelis. Elsewhere in this thread I linked the Oslo Accords, I suggest you read about them, peace is possible.
> It's true that before the British Mandate of Palestine the population of Syria Palaestina was 3-11% Jewish (Mizrahi Jews) but most of the Jewish population of Israel is not indigenous to that region of the world (like how the Ashkenazi Jews are from Europe and Eastern Russia).
Firstly, Jews are originally indigenous to that part of the world, they were ethnically cleansed from that area by Rome. This is not even disputed.
Of course Palestinians are also indigenous to the land! Many of them more recently.
And of course, multiple generations have Israelis have now been born and lived their entire lives in that land.
But none of this really matters. The standard colonial pattern is of a country sending its population to colonize a new land. That is just emphatically not what happened. Israel was largely founded by refugees who were fleeing persecution, or by Jews ethnically cleansed from their homes. That is just not what most people are thinking of when thinking of colonialism.
Hence the standard outcome that happens in colonies is that the people leave and return to the land they are "from", which is just irrelevant here, because the children of refugees have nowhere else to "return" to.
> It isn't, Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch recognize it is Apartheid. As do Ireland and South Africa (countries who have both been victim to Colonist Apartheid violence).
Yes, and many groups disagree with this, including the US and EU iirc. Human Rights Watch in particular is a very problematic organization that has a lot of complaints against it of being biased against Israel.
That said, I'm pretty sure that what I said is consistent with what they say in their report - there's a plausible case for apartheid in the Occupied Territories. They think it has now crossed the line to being legally apartheid, others disagree. This is relevant for the OT but not the rest of Israel.
Israel has a lot of discrimination and other issues with its Israeli Arab population, but it's almost entirely not legal discrimination.
> Israel literally has a two tiered society, Israeli Arabs do not have the Right To Return like Jewish Israelis do.
That is actually a very untrue example. Right of Return is a right of citizenship, the fact that some people have a right of return and others don't is not a discrimination against existing citizens.
I don't have the right to become a British citizen, that doesn't mean Britain is discrimination against me. It is just doing what every state does - defining who its citizens are via some metric, usually by being born to parents who are citizens, though different states define this differently. Israel is doing similarly.
> 50% of Arab Israelis are under the poverty line because of wage discrimination and other factors.
Wage discrimination does not prove apartheid or any systemic discrimination.
Let's remember that Israeli Arabs can vote, can be any profession they want, a large percentage of the doctors in Israel are Arabs, there are Israeli-Arab supreme court judges, members of the Israeli Congress, etc.
> Nobody is asking for them to be deported. I mean obviously people like Yaakov Fauci would have to give back the houses they literally stole but a "1 state solution" does not require the deportation/killing of the Israelis.
That is exactly what Hamas is asking for. Deportation and/or killing of all Israeli-Jews.
A one state solution is a ridiculous idea that is not what anyone in the region wants, not what anyone who has ever seriously considered what to do in the region that has had any power has advocated, and would almost certainly lead to the death of one or both of the ethnic groups in the region.
Even if not, what country would ever agree to double its voting population with a population that is completely culturally different?
What do you tell Israeli members of the LGBT community, that it's totally ok to have a one state solution by adding 100% more voters that come from a society that wants to make homosexuality illegal? Do you think they should agree to that idea?
> Elsewhere in this thread I linked the Oslo Accords, I suggest you read about them, peace is possible.
Great! I'm in favor. Like any other serious solution, this process aimed to create two states for two people. As I said elsewhere, this process largely died, in my opinion, because sincere efforts of the Israelis were met with refusal to sign an actual deal from the Palestinians, and then met with violence and terror attacks.
And the last ~17 years have seen Israelis completely convinced that there is no partner for peace and never will be, while ignoring that Israel itself is causing the conditions for there being no partner for peace!
Both sides have to just accept the fundemantal reality - there are 7 millions Jews and 7 million Arabs on this land, neither is going anywhere, the only solution is to reach a peace agreement. This will not happen through violence, only through a negotiated deal.
> Firstly, Jews are originally indigenous to that part of the world
No, that's not how this works. My 23&Me says my family came from Africa (as did all people), then southwest Asia then Europe but that doesn't give me the right to go to one of those countries and claim land.
> The standard colonial pattern is [...] That is just not what most people are thinking of when thinking of colonialism.
Man, you can't quote me talking about the British Mandate of Palestine and then say they're not colonizers. Literally before the Holocaust Britain was arming Jews to go colonize Palestine. Yes, Jews fleeing the Holocaust did find refuge in Palestine but fleeing an ethnic cleansing of their own doesn't make the colonization that was already ongoing more legal.
I'm not even gonna address the rest of this point by point, you're just insisting that a 2 state solution is the only way because a 2 state solution is legalized perpetuation of the colonization.
A 2 state solution is not the only way, it is colonization.
No, Hamas does not want the death/expulsion of all Jews, that's simply a lie.
> No, that's not how this works. My 23&Me says my family came from Africa (as did all people), then southwest Asia then Europe but that doesn't give me the right to go to one of those countries and claim land.
You brought up indigeneity. In what way are Jews not indigenous? I agreed with you that it's irrelevant right after. I don't think it automatically gives anyone right to claim any land.
> Yes, Jews fleeing the Holocaust did find refuge in Palestine but fleeing an ethnic cleansing of their own doesn't make the colonization that was already ongoing more legal.
Who exactly were the colonizers? The Jews who legally immigrated to that land under the Ottoman Empire? The Jews who legally immigrated to that land under British rule?
The 90% of the Jews who came to Israel because they literally had no where else to go after being in DP camps after WW2 and the UN voting for them to move to that land?
I'm not sure who are these mythical colonizers who came in and violent expelled Palestinians from the land. Most of the Jews either came legally through immigration or were refugees.
> A 2 state solution is not the only way, it is colonization.
This is literally the first time I've ever heard this claim. A two state solution is the stated goal of the PA, the representative of the Palestinian people. It was the goal of Arafat. Are you seriously saying that their goal, had it been reached, was a continuation of colonization?
I really don't know what to make of this argument. Two people live on a land and don't want to be part of the same state, for good reason. Both have reasonable reasons to consider that land theirs (certainly at this point) and nowhere else to go. What can be more sensible than splitting up that land?
>A two state solution is the stated goal of the PA, the representative of the Palestinian people. It was the goal of Arafat. Are you seriously saying that their goal, had it been reached, was a continuation of colonization?
I'm sorry but wasn't this also you?
> OK. Can we agree that withdrawing all settlements and the military means less occupation than before?
Obviously, there are many in Palestine who would agree to a deal that *granted them statehood* and meant less occupation than before even if it didn't mean the full return of the land.
This isn't a serious line of questioning, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth. You can't say they're doing more colonization without the deal and then say the deal was bad for Palestine.
First, occupation is not the same as colonization. Second, I was speaking of Gaza specifically when I talked about there being more vs. less occupation - not all of Israel.
> Obviously, there are many in Palestine who would agree to a deal that granted them statehood and meant less occupation than before even if it didn't mean the full return of the land.
So I don't understand what you're advocating. You said that a two state solution (which Palestinians so far have never agreed to) is just a continuation of colonization.
What solution do you think is a) the right one and b) the practical one? I don't understand how my advocating of what probably 95% of peace activists are advocating is wrong.
Occupation is not tautological to colonization but occupation can be the first step to colonization.
> You said that a two state solution (which Palestinians so far have never agreed to) is just a continuation of colonization.
It is a continuation of the colonization. It is also something the Palestinians *have* agreed to, that's what the Oslo Accords are.
> On September 13, 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Negotiator Mahmoud Abbas signed a Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, commonly referred to as the “Oslo Accord,” at the White House. Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians, and the PLO renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. Both sides agreed that a Palestinian Authority (PA) would be established and assume governing responsibilities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over a five-year period. Then, permanent status talks on the issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem would be held.
I'm fine with a 2 state solution if that's what the Palestinans want. My issue is that Israel is unlikely to follow the rules given their current behavior so why not just make it 1 state with equal rights? Is that really so scary? Equal rights?
But none of that matters because the first thing that has to happen before even a 2 state solution is a ceasefire.
> I'm fine with a 2 state solution if that's what the Palestinans want. My issue is that Israel is unlikely to follow the rules given their current behavior so why not just make it 1 state with equal rights? Is that really so scary? Equal rights?
YES! I don't know how else to say this. Giving equal rights which would effectively double the voting base with people who fundamentally oppose many things you think are important is terrifying. Again, if you were LGBTQ in Israel, and I told you we're bringing in 100% more voters who mostly think homosexuality is a sin and could now vote to make it illegal, wouldn't you think it's a bad idea?
And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the the new state acts like every other state that has a Jewish minority, and eventually decides to kill the Jews. Made even more likely given the years of animosity between the two peoples.
You are again and again asking if it's really so bad to do something that 99% of people, including almost all peace activists, say will end in the destruction of the Jews in Israel, one way or another. If that is the only option, it is one that will never be accepted. I don't understand why you can't see that, unless you think you know better than almost everyone else that lives in the area or has studied the area.
(I'm totally open to different arrangements like A Land For All, which aim to make an Israeli/Palestinian federation, basically a two-state solution that has deals in place like the EU which would allow citizens to move between the countries.)
Yes, of course I think they should have their own state like any other state. That's what a two state solution means.
I think there will need to be some security guarantees to prevent it from turning out similarly to Gaza. I have no idea what that should look like, from either side's perspective - but that's part of the negotiations for actually making the two states.
And I'm sure there will have to be similar security guarantees from the Israeli side, so Israel doesn't just decide after two weeks to invade because of a random terror attack.
> YES! I don't know how else to say this. Giving equal rights which would effectively double the voting base with people who fundamentally oppose many things you think are important is terrifying. Again, if you were LGBTQ in Israel, and I told you we're bringing in 100% more voters who mostly think homosexuality is a sin and could now vote to make it illegal, wouldn't you think it's a bad idea?
It's wild to imply Israelis are great to the gay community. It's clear Israel is fine with discrimination.
> Forty-eight percent of Israeli Jews said they agreed with the statement that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, where they make up 19 percent of the population of 8.4 million.
> In addition, about 8 in 10 Arabs complained of heavy discrimination in Israeli society against Muslims, the largest religious minority, while 79 percent of Jews questioned said Jewish citizens deserved preferential treatment.
And don't forget that I cited to you how Israel did eugenics on the Ethiopian Jewish community until at least 2013.
> And that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that the the new state acts like every other state that has a Jewish minority, and eventually decides to kill the Jews. Made even more likely given the years of animosity between the two peoples.
That is just mass hysteria. There are many diaspora Jews who feel safe where they currently live and acting like all Jews think Israel is the only safe place for them is actual antisemitism. Jews are not a monolith.
> You are again and again asking if it's really so bad to do something that 99% of people, including almost all peace activists, say will end in the destruction of the Jews in Israel
A ceasefire? I just told you hours ago that the first thing I really care about is a ceasefire.
You're just not responding to anything I actually said or anything I actually believe.
You asked why not give Palestinians "equal rights", meaning make them citizens of Israel with voting rights. I answered with why I think this would effectively roll back many liberal values of Israel, including LGBT rights, not to mention be an enormous risk for Jewish Israelis.
That has nothing to do with pinkwashing anything, I didn't say anything about the war (or what you call "the genocide"). You just haven't responded to my point, at all.
> It's wild to imply Israelis are great to the gay community.
The areas under full Israeli control are great for the gay community. Not perfect, and some areas of Israel are better than others, but far better than many countries.
It seems like in your zeal to only say bad things about Israel you refuse to actually see reality as it is.
> And don't forget that I cited to you how Israel did eugenics on the Ethiopian Jewish community until at least 2013.
I didn't forget, but I don't know anything about this topic at all and didn't have time to look into it. I don't comment on things I know nothing about, no matter what "side" it's on.
> That is just mass hysteria. There are many diaspora Jews who feel safe where they currently live and acting like all Jews think Israel is the only safe place for them is actual antisemitism. Jews are not a monolith.
Ok I was speaking with some hyperbole, but historically, except for the last 80 years, Jews have been discriminated against, killed or kicked out of most countries of which they are minorities.
Anyway, I just don't understand what is your actual view about the world, other than "Israel bad".
What do you think would happen if 7 million Palestinians become citizens of Israel and are granted the vote? What does that state look like in twenty years? That's what you're advocating, I want to understand what you think would happen.
> A ceasefire? I just told you hours ago that the first thing I really care about is a ceasefire.
Look, I'm in favor of a ceasefire. You are too.
I'm in favor of arriving at a peaceful solution that both sides are OK with. You are too.
The main thing I was pushing back on in my comment, was the idea of a one-state solution being anything other than ridiculous, whether in the guise of a new state, or by just "giving Palestinians equal rights" in Israel as it exists.
If you want to push for peace - it's worth advocating for things that a) have some chance of happening, and b) would not lead immediately to a situation that is 100x worse for everyone involved. That's why I advocate a two-state solution, as does almost anyone else seriously involved in pushing for peace.
