Everything else aside, this is an absolutely fantastic development and I really hope the ceasefire holds and all hostages are released.
I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state - that too with no word of objection from its allies.
We'll see where all of that goes.
I also found Trump's signalling in the whole issue odd. His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire.
Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there?
I graduated from an electrical engineering program at a big ten (U.S.) school in the mid '90s, and I am closing in on retirement. I spent today enrapt in an Oracle upgrade from 10g to 11g. Yes, our IT is COBOL-centric, and we are vastly behind the times. Much of today was spent (re)compiling C. The consensus is that I will have to think hard tomorrow about how to fix these problems.
While I was in school, I studied with many Palestinians in my college of engineering. I wonder often what happened to them.
At the same time, within Israel, Intel is the largest civilian employer. The Pentium M is an Israeli rework of the Pentium Pro legacy, and Israel is key to Intel's gains over the past two decades.
I wish that everyone that I knew from the Middle East was fully involved in the advances of Intel.
Perhaps my lost schoolmates' absence was precisely what Intel lacked, but such cultural divides are not easily bridged.
I've worked with a few teams based in Israel during my at Intel, namely in networking and transceiver technology space. I try to make a point of getting to know the people I work with through 1:1s, and you'll be pleased to know there is a good mix of Palestinans and Israelis working together. Everyone there was proud to have a very diverse team.
This is a great post. Thank you to share your personal experience. Do you think they were first generation Palestinians? Or multi-generation (parents or earlier immigrated)? I know that Michigan state (Detroit, etc.) has one of the largest Arab communities in the United States.
I went to school with some first generation Palestinians just 5-ish years ago.
One of them had to miss an entire quarter because Israel just wouldn't allow him to leave. He has never been back to Palestine since then because another detainment or missed visa problem, etc. would derail his career.
> One of them had to miss an entire quarter because Israel just wouldn't allow him to leave
Terrible.
Even in the current ceasefire terms, there's an explicit provision to have Israel agree to let the injured leave for treatment to neighbouring countries and be allowed to come back to the Strip.
Despite arguments to contrary, I can see why some claim it is an open-air prison.
Palestinians go back not because the Israeli+Egyptian+Hamas siege has turned the Strip in to Switzerland, but because they are steadfast in their resistance to ethnic cleansing & cultural erasure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumud
Kind of similar to how the Polish Jews setup schools, orphanages, religious institutions that in the Warsaw Ghetto as a form of resistance.
Because sex is pleasurable and people have a drive to overcome adversity and lead the most fulfilling lives they can. Israel depriving the Gazan population of those opportunities is also a form of collective punishment and torture.
These did not come at a time when Palestinians had unrestricted access to Israel, though. These happened while Israel was militarily occupying Gaza and the West Bank (yes, international institutions recognize Gaza has been occupied via blockade and control of resources, even though the IDF had "withdrawn").
> only if you're straight. if you're gay, the Palestinians will throw you off a building.
What building? Two thirds of them have been bombed by Israel.
> can you tell me what happens when Palestinians have unfettered access to Israel?
Palestinians lived in what is now called "Israel" for thousands of years. It seems that went just fine. It's only recently that an ethnostate has been established on their land and many of the original inhabitants ethnically cleansed or straight up murdered that hostility has risen sharply. Perhaps the ethnostate can be abolished and peace can return in the region.
> Can you tell me what happens when Palestinians have unfettered access to Israel?
What would happen is that human rights would have been upheld, apartheid would have been dismantled, refugees would have been given access to their former homes, as is their right.
I think I know what you are trying to insinuate here. And that insinuation is quite racist.
A large part of what is now Israel was the home to many Palestinians before they were forcibly removed from there. Forcible relocation of civilian population is a crime against humanity, and those that were displaced, as well as their descendants, have the right to return to their former homes, whether that home is in Israel or Palestine. Denying that right is also a crime against humanity. What happens to the ethno-demographic prospects of the state doing the crime should not be a consideration.
I might be wrong about this but the question “Can you tell me what happens when Palestinians have unfettered access to Israel?“ smells like you have some assumptions about Palestinians that makes it dangerous for non-Palestinians to live around. If you actually believe that, that would be a very racist assumption.
Your second statement is mixing hypothetical reality with an actual reality. Only Israel is pursuing ethno-demographic policies. You may believe Hamas wants to pursue similar but reverse policies, and you may even be right about that, but the fact is they aren’t. Only Israel is. If Hamas gains full control over an independent state of Palestine, and sets up an apartheid system where Palestinians maintains a systemic oppression against non-Palestinian Jews, then we can dismiss their prospects. But until then, we should only dismiss the prospects of those that actually are committing the crimes, which is the state of Israel.
> If Hamas gains full control over an independent state of Palestine, and sets up an apartheid system where Palestinians maintains a systemic oppression against non-Palestinian Jews, then we can dismiss their prospects. But until then, we should only dismiss the prospects of those that actually are committing the crimes, which is the state of Israel
I think after Oct 7, we can safely agree that this experiment has already happened and we know the answer.
> only if you're straight. if you're gay, the Palestinians will throw you off a building.
This is such a gross statement.
First of all, Palestinians are not all religious fundamentalists. Hamas is not Daesh. There is no sharia law in Palestine. Your statement is textbook islamophobia.
Second, are you really invoking gay rights in the context of a genocide? I'm sorry can you please send me the news article you must have read stating Israel is using LGBTQ-avoiding bombs? Because to argue that the LGBT community would have it worse under Palestinian statehood than the current genocide is truely mind-boggling.
Would you make the same claim about gay Jews in Germany? In the concentration camps?
21% of Israel's population is Arab - they have lived side by side with the Jews there for centuries. Why on earth would the Jews displace some of the Arabs and give full citizenship to the others if they just wanted the land?
I hate your pseudo-intellectualism - "uncook your priors" indeed. You've roasted your priors and burnt your likelihood.
Mandatory Palestine was way more than 21% Arab. And Jews did live side by side & were culturally assimilated, but those that migrated to Palestine/South Syria (after 1890s) didn't & had ambitions of an exclusive state for themselves.
> Why on earth would the Jews displace some of the Arabs and give full citizenship to the others
No, those that were allowed to remain ("the good Arabs") post 48 were under military rule for 2 decades.
Those that now remain occupied after 67 are under hybrid IDF+PA rule.
> hate your pseudo-intellectualism
Intellectualism? You give me too much credit. Hate the "New Historians" who are all Israeli & speaking their truth.
the Arabs who live in Israel today enjoy the same rights as the Jews.
the ones in the post 67 are under hybrid rule precisely because the Oct 7 attacks are the sort of things that happen when the people of Gaza and the West Bank are given freedom.
> Arabs who live in Israel today enjoy the same rights
Uncook:
There is no shortage of examples illustrating the widespread view in Israel that Palestinians' political participation should be monitored, controlled and curtailed, and that their right to vote and run for office should be drained of any meaning.
The Military Rule imposed on Palestinian citizens until 1966 treated this entire population as enemies, severely restricting their political activity. Mapai (later the Labor Party), which governed the state and most of its institutions in Israel's early years, refused to take on Palestinian candidates until the early 1980s and set up satellite parties for Palestinian citizens, dictating who would run in them and how they would vote.
Efforts to delegitimize Palestinian political participation continue to the present day, clearly showing that some of the Israel's leaders and the public at large see such participation as undesirable.
The message to Palestinians and their candidates is clear: Do not seek full equality and recognition of collective national rights. Demanding equality on matters such as land, immigration and national emblems is perceived as repudiating Israel’s constitutional principles, as it undermines the country's definition as a Jewish state.
Prime Minister Yair Lapid recently spelled out this principle, saying: "Twenty percent of the population are Arabs. We can and should give them civil equality... On the other hand, we will not give them national equality, because this is the only state the Jews have."
Palestinian citizens who choose to participate in the electoral process have no choice but to enter the political playing field with their hands tied. The parties representing them are barred from challenging the fundamental principles of the regime that is dispossessing and oppressing them. They cannot seek to abolish the laws and systems that harm them, which are considered defining features of the Jewish state. They cannot fight for a core democratic tenet: full equality for all those living under the same regime. This limits political participation exclusively for Palestinian citizens. No matter what they do or how they vote – constitutionally, their vote is worthless.
I addressed your claim that 48-Arabs have "equal rights" when the former Israeli Prime Minister himself doesn't think so and says so openly.
And rich of you to mention "the military rule ... 1966" when you knew nothing about it 2h ago (as evident from your previous reply). Judging from your other replies, you probably don't know a lot, but see yourself fit to engage in Hasbara-like fashion.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly and extremely badly in this thread. We've asked you before not to do that. We have to ban accounts that post like this, and I'm sorry to say that what you did in this thread is well over the line at which we'd normally ban someone, especially given the past warning.
I'm not going to ban you right now because the other account was also breaking the rules pretty badly. If you keep doing this, though, we're going to have to ban you.
Commenters here need to follow the rules regardless of how other commenters are behaving or how wrong they are, even on a topic as divisive as this one. Especially on a topic as divisive as this one. Note this from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You also broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread. That's seriously not ok, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and regardless of how badly they might be breaking the rules.
It doesn't look like we've warned you about this before, but it does look like you've been breaking the rules when arguing about divisive topics in other contexts. That's not ok, and we eventually have to ban accounts that do this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stay within the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it.
My college friend didn't attack anyone, but you are taking the sins of people who share his ethnicity and attaching them to him, and in the same breath bemoaning that we do that to the Jewish people (even though we never did that)
Based on that, he must have obtained a special permit to leave Palestine and fly to the US for higher education, but this had to be approved by Israel or he could not leave Palestine or transit through Ben Gurion Airport (remember the Palestinian's international airport was bombed into rubble a decade ago or so). One year they denied him for some Kafkaesque reason, I presume. By the time he sorted it out he had to arrange with the school to take a leave and start again the next quarter
So... Why not blame Egypt? You can answer if you know, but the question is really meant as a shrug towards bias and a plea for education in geography.
Egypt has an airport just west of Gaza. They have a visa exclusive program for Palestinians. And that's not new.
So based on the story, if you presume Israel was Kafkaesque then you must also presume that Egypt was at least as Kafkaesque if he was unable to leave from there.
Or worse... he was unwilling.
And yet, the story is about Israel for some reason. I'd ask why, but I presume to know the answer. Again, this is a shrug towards bias.
He didn't get his visa through Egypt. He got it through Israel, and when it was randomly denied, he probably couldn't apply for an Egyptian one in time to make it.
You've made a good faith guess, I think. But again, Egypt has a visa exclusive program for Palestinians. Visa exclusive means that Palestinians do not need a visa to enter and travel through Egypt. So, at least based on the story so far, the only visa he needed was an American one, having nothing to do with Israel except that he probably was afraid to enter Egypt.
This is all speculative in terms of how it relates to your friend. All this to make the point that bias and generalizing about things, and a desire to blame people one has been taught to hate, can be detrimental to one's success.
> All this to make the point that bias and generalizing about things, and a desire to blame people one has been taught to hate, can be detrimental to one's success.
I agree, you should see the way people are doing this under my very comment about my friend.
In the end, I am sure he knew more than most people about the options truly available to him. He was never biased or hating of anyone. Those who know him today would know
This is a one-sided description of the conflict. I am empathetic to Israel, because they also do not have a lot options.
Israel, as it it currently constituted (based on 1967 borders) is not a viable state if the West Bank is a hostile entity with a standing army, and funded to a similar extent as Hezbollah. The West Bank bulges into Israel and effectively cuts the country in half and places all strategic targets within shelling distance.
The Palestinian position seems to be "trust us that if you give us full, un-fettered independence, then we will not be a hostile entity" - but that's asking for Israel to place an enormous amount of trust in present and future Palestinian people and leaders, without any historical reasons to base this on, and highlighted by the worst case scenario of Hezbollah in the north, a foreign-controlled militia funded to the tune of 1 billion / year, and potential a hostile party in the West Bank (and Gaza) - effectively surrounding the country.
And it is more than just demilitarization. A demilitarized Palestine is not enough if, for example, Iran funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in arms to militia groups.
Hence we are where we are .. with Israel unable to disengage because doing so presents an existential risk to their nation.
> Israel, as it it currently constituted (based on 1967 borders) is not a viable state if the West Bank is a hostile entity with a standing army, and funded to a similar extent as Hezbollah. The West Bank bulges into Israel and effectively cuts the country in half and places all strategic targets within shelling distance.
This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea; "it's strategically important for us" isn't really sufficient justification for mass murder, and - on a purely geographic point - talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate.
And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?
> Iran funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in arms to militia groups.
This is the side that's not really been raised enough in this whole discussion. If Israel's war is with Iran, why is that war not being carried out in Iran? Does this have something to do with the fact that Iran is 1000km away from having a land border with either Israel or Palestine?
>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea; "it's strategically important for us" isn't really sufficient justification for mass murder, and - on a purely geographic point - talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate.
Russia is the largest country on earth, whereas the distance from the West Bank to Tel-Aviv is like 5 miles.
This roughly like arguing that owning a personal nuke is no different from owning a firecracker. The scale of the threats are separated by several orders of magnitude.
>And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?
Because the Palestinians rejected the 1948 borders, started a war, and then lost. Incidentally they also rejected the 1967 borders by starting a war in 1973 and losing that one too, but the consensus around those borders is at least a bit more solidified so people still pretend they're meaningful rather than null-and-void.
The work that has been going on for the past month is systematically destroying every known air defense asset of the Syrian government (and securing a key mountain peak with newly entrenched ground troops) in order to have a permanent air corridor with which to strike Iran.
The Israeli F-35s can get through right now, but they have limited payload and have to rely on slightly dicey refueling arrangements. With Syria under Israeli air cover, they can run tankers right up to western Iran and strike anywhere in the country.
Repeated, unilateral Israeli aggression is the status quo in the region.
>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea;
How many times have Ukranian terrorists murdered a bunch of Russian athletes at the Olympics? Or hijacked a 3rd nation plane carrying Russian tourists and then murdered them? How many bombings have Ukranian extremists carried out in Europe, targeting Russian tourists?
It is the same argument because whatever terrorism the victims of occupation engage in, or whatever terror groups exist among a much larger population of the occupied, is not an excuse to break international law.
Russia also made a number of excuses to annex the territories, the USA also fabricated a web of lies to justify their illegal invasion into Iraq. Criminals often lie or justify their crimes in any number of ways. None of which makes their crimes right. There are no exceptions to international law for fighting terrorism.
I know this isn't the time or place, but international law doesn't exist.
Well, it does but only by the consent of the participant and participants can withdraw their consent at any time, arbitrarily.
It's like how international treaties become worthless the second one party decides they don't want to abide by them anymore.
So, any time someone mentions "international law" I kinda just smirk a little bit and make the "jerking off and then ejaculating" motion with my hand.
The actual smallest country on earth, Tuvalu, can tell the UN to eat a bag of dicks and ignore every single plea to obey "international law" and the only remedy is embargo, begging, or the cruise missile.
>This is exactly the same argument that Russia has been using to annex territories such as Crimea
The rhetoric may be superficially similar, but facts on the ground aren't. The Russian state is not under an existential threat in the same way that Israel would be with Hezbollah in the north, and a similar entity in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel is a tiny nation with a tiny population. Russian and Israel's security issues are simply not comparable.
>talking about the West Bank doesn't justify anything to do with Gaza, which is geographically separate
They are linked, and highlight the core problem to Israel - namely - disengagement does not work with a hostile entity.
Israel in 2005 disengaged from Gaza. It wasn't a full disengagement as Israel still exerted control over the airspace and territorial water, but it also wasn't nothing and it was an olive-branch and a big opportunity. Instead it resulted in a Hamas electoral victory, and rocket attacks, and a circle of retaliatory actions from Israel and Hamas. Imagine a world, where post-disengagement there were no attacks from Gaza, no preparation for war and smuggling of weapons into Gaza by Hamas - by this point, where would we be? Would Israel still maintain the same kind of blockade? I just don't think so. I truly believe it would be a model for permanent peace and Palestinian statehood.
>And why the 1967 borders rather than the 1948 ones?
I mentioned 1967 borders, because as best as I can gather, that is the current Palestinian position. Although it isn't clear exactly what the Palestinian position is as Palestinians do tend to maintain some level of ambiguity on this point.
> If Israel's war is with Iran, why is that war not being carried out in Iran?
It goes the other way actually - Iran is at war with Israel. Iran is using proxies, Hamas, and Hezbollah to strike at Israel.
> I mentioned 1967 borders, because as best as I can gather, that is the current Palestinian position.
The Hamas position (as best I can figure it) is the dissolution of the Israeli state entirely and Palestine restored. Whether you consider that the Palestinian position is open.
The Israeli position (as best I figure it) is to do whatever it takes to be unassailable - everything else is second order.
There are much more moderate positions throughout both sets of people, but I feel like they're the defining ones because they drive the violence (and subsequent retaliation)?
> Imagine a world, where post-disengagement there were no attacks from Gaza ...
Imagine a world where pre-disengagement there's no radicals on either side. Imagine a world where Israel works with people displaced in 1948-1967, and utilizing its overwhelming economic advantage finds acceptable solutions to defuse the problems, instead of supporting more land grabs.
The big gestures (like withdrawing from Gaza) are of course important, but we still must not mistake cause for effect, or the outliers for the baseline.
Because the Palestian cause is not about the welfare of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian cause is about establishing an Arab state to displaced the Jewish state.
Why is demilitarization always a unilateral affair? Has this solved anything in the past 50+ years?
It should be either be bilateral militarization (a miniaturized MAD if you will - similar with the Korean peninsula I guess), or bilateral demilitarization and extensive UN force deployment.
There is an international perspective on the borders that I think should be mentioned. I think it is also worth mentioning that most people who live now in West Bank and the broader Palestine area were not consulted in how power and might is distributed, whether they benefit or suffer from it.
Egypt implementing a blockade triggered the 1967 conflict. It didn't come from nowhere. Then that was followed up by yet another war against Israel in 1973.
Taking over the west bank is not at all an acceptable response to something happening in Egypt's domain. Keeping the west bank is also not reasonable. Not sure why you would bring that up.
> "trust us that if you give us full, un-fettered independence, then we will not be a hostile entity"
I don't agree, that's an optimistic view of things. Most Palestinians (Hamas for sure, Abbas as well) never agreed to give up on the 'Right of Return' so its not really independence in a 2 state solution that they're looking for, it's the abolishment of Israel.
That's part of the problem as well - it's not exactly clear what the Palestinian position is - partly because I think they see things like 'right of return' (which is completely unacceptable to Israel) as bargaining chips to trade for something during negotiations.
The right of return is a human right which some Palestinians have according to international law. Whether it is acceptable or not for Israelis should not be a consideration. Majority rule was also completely unacceptable to white Rhodesians. But the international community correctly assessed this to be because of racist grounds and thus not worthy of consideration.
Palestinians might negotiate away the right of return at some future date, but any deal which denies them that right will be a human rights violation and thus court material to be reversed at an even later future. But regardless, what Israelis think is not of concern, and should not be a concern.
Great, why don't we start with the United States which is the richest most privileged country in the world?
"Mexican Cession (1848): The most significant event was the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). Mexico lost the war, and through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it was forced to cede a vast amount of territory to the United States. This territory included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Texas had already declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and was annexed by the U.S. in 1845, a major cause of the war."
"Displacement and Dispossession: While the treaty promised to protect the property rights of Mexicans who stayed, in practice, many lost their land through legal maneuvering, fraud, or outright violence. This forced displacement would have driven some south to Mexico."
Whatever doesn't belong to Mexicans surely belongs to Indians.
Sounds like a good place to start. After that - Australia and Canada. Once that's done let's do Israel.
There are land-back movements in the US. In addition, all native Americans have US citizenship. If Israel gave citizenship, equal rights, and the right of return to all those that were displaced since the 1940s and their descendents, then I imagine a one-state solution would be possible and a lasting peace could be achieved.
> In addition, all native Americans have US citizenship.
Yeah easy to do since almost all of them were exterminated. Why shouldn't all their old lands be brought back to them? Why do they have to settle in a few tiny reservoirs?
What about all Mexicans ? Plenty of them would like to move to the U.S, and as we saw some of them have legitimate territorial claims - why won't you allow them - are you pro apartheid? Because that's what the word means - separation.
Let me guess - it's way easier to abolish other people's countries than your own for the sake of impossibly high morals right? It's way harder when you have actual skin in the game.
Whataboutism is not an effective rhetoric device, and is unlikely to win any arguments nor to convince anyone. We can also talk about Tibetans who were annexed but not displaced, we can talk about Chagossians who were displaced but given citizenship. We can talk about Japanese Americans who were displaced, given the right of return, and payed reparations (in my opinion too small of a reparation). And we can even talk about Cyprus, I‘m not very well versed in that history, but I’m sure there is something to talk about there.
Point is human rights have been violated in multiple occasion throughout history, all around the world. We can talk about any of those all day, but it won‘t get us anywhere. Point is also that Israel is one of the current violator of human rights, and deserves to be called out as such, irregardless of other human rights violations throughout history. But the main point is Palestinians deserve to have their human rights, which they have been denied for 77 years, and are still being denied.
> Whataboutism is not an effective rhetoric device, and is unlikely to win any arguments nor to convince anyone.
At the very least it would be nice to hear that hypocrisy runs deep for many many people without actual skin in the game whose ancestors have done the worst things imaginable. They have to give up on nothing, but can feel morally superior by helping 'end colonialism' by ending Israel.
As for Palestinian human rights - they can get the right of return to the Palestinian state without destroying the Jewish state. But no, that's not good enough, the only way to create 100% justice is to 100% eradicate Israel in your eyes and in most Palestinians eyes. This religious/ideological principle has brought tremendous suffering to the region with not much to show for it.
You are arguing with a strawman. All we are saying is that Palestinians that were displaced after the 1948 terror campaign which created Israel, that it is their right to return to their homeland. It is indisputable that they have this right, and that denying them that right is indeed a human right violation that ought to be stopped.
Whatever happens to a supposed Jewish state should not be a concern. Jewish residents of the area have their human rights as well, but what they don’t have a right to is a demographic majority, a racial supremacy, etc., and any policy which aims to maintain a jewish demographic majority or a racial supremacy is illegitimate.
There is a justifiable argument for Israel to occupy the west bank and/or the Gaza strip (whether one agrees or not is another matter that I will not get into). Settling it is another matter entirely, and this action is what causes so much grief.
But what Palestinian supporters continuously fail to grasp is that every time Israel has tried to give (and there were many attempts in the 1980s and 1990s), bad actors have caused violence. This violence was a huge cause in support shifting to right-wing parties in Israel.
The tragedy is that a plurality of Palestinians would otherwise love to have a peaceful (two state or otherwise) solution, but the "bad" ones are well funded by outsiders, in particular Iran. If a Gandhi/Martin Luther King/Nelson Mandela figure emerged, they'd almost certainly be killed by Hamas,Hezbollah,etc.
But at the end of the day, there's no way the extreme elements of either side will agree to a permanent and dignified peace, because even if it would work it would mean the end of either of them (and Israeli PM was assassinated by a far-right Jewish nationalist).
I'm sympathetic to both sides myself. I'm sympathetic to Israel's position, need for security, and the fact that hostility against them is a given. I'm also sympathetic to the fact that the Palestinian people were pushed off their land, often with violence to a level that can fit the definition of genocide, during Israel's independence and subsequent annexations.
But there will never be a true peace so long as the extremists on both sides have as much power as they do. I know most Iranians are fed up with their government. My Iranian colleagues all are commenting that even devoutly religious Iranians back home are getting fed up. A lot of this is a house of cards, so I guess we'll see.
The fact that we use the term "Settling" and "Settlers" is kind of grotesque. These places are occupied, by Palestinians, who have to be ethnically cleansed (with varying degrees of violence) in order to establish new Israeli Jewish settlements. This is done with Israeli Jewish soldiers, a hundred thousand of whom now patrol hundreds of enclaves and all major routes through the West Bank.
Isreali and US right-wing leaders find a hostile Iran to be extremely politically convenient, and the military-industrial complex that they share with each other and with centrist parties just wants a reason to keep existing. People talk about a potential "War with Iran", but in reality we've given them maybe a dozen different diplomatic casus belli in the past decade, in part to deter them from political moderation.
That's how the term is used in the U.S. as well, when history classes describe "settlers" who wiped out the Native Americans who lived here through genocide, germ warfare, regular ol' warfare and displacement. I think in general when one sees the word "settlers" one should assume the worst.
> military-industrial complex that they share with each other and with centrist parties just wants a reason to keep existing.
This is so freakin' true. I feel like, if world peace ever reared its ugly head Americans would whine, "but jobs!" because of the hit it would give the military-industrial complex.
While this is a good development. Everything in this part of the world is on a rinse snd repeat cycle ever since the Assyrians and the Babylonians - it hasn't changed much except maybe its actually a little more humane then it was in the past (which says something). Sorry for the cynical take but this just does a temporary stop.
That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of European settlers via Zionism. It's easy to wave our hands and say "it's so complicated!" or "they've been doing this for thousands of years!" but it's not complicated, much like apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not complicated. Colonialism and ethno-centric racism are never good.
The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (aka, Jews who never left the Middle East), at 45% of the population [1]. This isn't about Europeans, or even "race": Mizrahi Jews and their Palestinian neighbors are racially indistinguishable.
Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews. [2] Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism, Ashkenazi Jews are firmly within the Middle Eastern/Levantine clade and are more closely related to Palestinians than they are any European group. [3]
> Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism
You're reading things OP didn't even write; and addressing a historical assertion with present-day facts.
OP posits that European settlers coming in during the Ottoman era (establishing Hebrew-only areas & businesses, only to later demand a Jewish State, in opposition to the local majority [0]) is what kickstarted the current conflict. It isn't a 1000 year old feud.
Mizrahis, save for Yemenis, migrated en masse after the conflict was irreversibly set in motion by Imperial Britain & various Arab states.
That's a high quality comment but nothing at all like the comment it is defending whose main thrust is that the conflict is simple to understand and one side is just wrong.
Apartheid, oppression, occupation, genocide, and ethno-nationalist supremacy are "just wrong", and not all that complex once you get past the lie that they don't exist.
Also, the comment's "main thrust" was in response to the claim that the area is 'just always like that', for 'thousands of years', which is categorically untrue; a deliberate thought-terminating lie. Israel's terror campaign and colonialist brutality of the last 80 years is something quite new and different, based as it is on brutal British and American colonial strategies.
> Go to Israel and look at the well dressed Palestinians shopping in the major malls in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and think about if that is really what apartheid looks like.
> Show me a population graph of Palestinians that decreases at all
You'd think Jewish/Israeli experts in Holocaust studies like Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, Daniel Blatman would know what a genocide looks like better than others. Of course, atrocity denial isn't anything new. And any decent populace reserves visceral disgust for those who do.
ישראל היא ממש מקרה פרדיגמטי של חברות כאלה, מקרה שעוד יילמד בכל סמינר באוניברסיטה בעולם העוסק בנושא
ישראלים טועים לחשוב שג'נוסייד צריך להיראות כמו השואה. הם מדמיינים רכבות, תאי גזים, משרפות, בורות הריגה, מחנות ריכוז והשמדה, ורדיפה שיטתית עד חורמה של כל בני קבוצת הקורבנות עד האחרון שבהם. אירוע מהסוג הזה אכן לא מתקיים בעזה. בדומה למה שהתרחש בשואה, מרבית הישראלים גם מדמיינים שקבוצת הקורבנות אינה מעורבת בפעילות אלימה או בקונפליקט ממשי, והרוצחים משמידים אותם בשל אידיאולוגיה מטורפת וחסרת כל הגיון. גם זה לא המקרה של עזה
Oh, right, I've interacted with you on this site before — you repeatedly lied about Hamas being willing to recognize Israel and renounce violence, and when I provided official Hamas statements to the contrary, you started making negative statements about people from "Brooklyn" [which I am not from], an obvious antisemitic dogwhistle that got your comment flagged and removed. I see from your comment history that you're still spending 90+% of your time on this site posting factually-incorrect anti-Israel content. Good luck! I won't be engaging with you again.
>Russia accuses Ukraine of oppression, genocide, and ethno-nationalist supremacy of Ukrainians against Russians in Ukraine happily pointing to the Azov brigade and all kinds of fringe rhetoric.
The most ironic thing about this is that Azov are almost entirely the "ethnically Russian, Russian-speaking-minority" that Russia claims to be acting in the interest of.
What makes me feel uncomfortable is the whole and eye for an eye argumentation in these debates. Your comment on the actions of the US makes me see that clearer. I do not think you can compare war crimes that will end in what-aboutism, and I do believe Israel, the US and Russia has commited horrible war crimes against civilians.
I do not get is how any sane human being can justify killing or abusing civilians at such large scales. A war crime is always a crime even though you might think it is justified.
There is no eye for an eye argument. The Gaza war is not about revenge, it’s about security. Israel didn’t poke out the Palestinians “eyes” because the Palestinians poked their eye first. They did it because they wanted the stop the Palestinians from poking their eye out before it happens again.
As far as justifying killing and abuse, the world is a complicated place. Personally I think killing is justified in self defense but you may not agree. Israel is certainly a bad actor but Hamas is far worse and unfortunately you do have to choose sides here.
What I think is clear is that Israel is not obligated to go easy on Hamas just because Hamas is economically and militarily weak. Being oppressed doesn’t automatically make you right.
Dig up WW2 German propaganda. It is the same hysteria around "security" aka "If we Aryans don't genocide, all the bad non-Aryans will genocide us".
> What I think is clear is that Israel is not obligated to go easy on Hamas just because Hamas is economically and militarily weak.
Not what the International Law Israel is signatory to, says. Besides, you'd do well to recall that NATO imposed a no-fly zone over Libya so that Gaddafi wouldn't bomb the living daylights out of the rebels who didn't have an Airforce to counteract. And we all know, NATO did no such thing for Palestinians.
> Personally I think killing is justified in self defense
The Israeli security narrative is not hysteria. It is a fact that Palestinian militants have committed terrorism against Israelis and they plan to continue to do so at every given opportunity. The same can not be said for the Jews in Germany(nor the Jews in Israel either, they have by and large not committed to a terrorism campaign like Hamas has). A bit confusing to me that you can’t see the obvious difference between lies and fact.
Unfortunately the Palestinians have left the Israelis with the options of “oppress the Palestinians” or “be the victim of terrorist attacks”. I don’t think they’re wrong for choosing to be safe.
"Settlements is security" is in fact a restraint on Palestinian part, while settlers/govt/IDF continue to ramp up the ante.
This article examines the choice made by the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since October 7, 2023, not to rise against the increasing oppression by the Israeli settlers, military, and government.
This choice, to which the Israeli public and professional discourse appears to be completely blind, is particularly surprising against the backdrop of the dramatic events of the past year.
> Jews in Israel either, they have by and large not committed to a terrorism campaign
Now that they rule the land, they don't. There's no need for "terrorism" as "militarism" has long replaced it. Back in the day, Irgun/Lehi, by all measures, were every bit Fascist terrorists themselves: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/terror-o...
> nor the Jews in Israel either, they have by and large not committed to a terrorism campaign like Hamas has
Israelis have killed at least an order of magnitude more Palestinian civilians than Palestinians ever killed Israelis, even before the 7th October war, even counting the 7th October war crimes by Hamas.
The fact that Palestinians do this with bomb cars while the Israelis do it in uniform and with sniper rifles or planes doesn't change anything about who the real threat to whose security is.
Israel has been in Gaza ever since the 1950s or so. They only stopped directly occupying Gaza about 18 years ago. They have since enforced a complete blockade of Gaza, and have shot and killed or bombed thousands of Palestinians, before October 7th.
Winning a war isn’t terrorism. The Palestinians and their Arab allies started every war except the original one and even that is arguable. Losing has consequences. The Palestinians can now choose to settle for what little Israel will give them or they can continue starting wars/engaging in terrorism which will lead to them never having any level of sovereignty.
> Winning a war isn’t terrorism. The Palestinians and their Arab allies started every war except the original one
There is no war except the original one, which never ended with a peace (although a few participants eventually made peace with Israel.) The other things often referred to as separate wars are just more active phases of the same war.
My response remains the same. The Palestinians have decisively lost. Their options are attempt to make whatever peace Israel will give them or die a slow painful death. Continuing to fight only makes things worse for them.
> The Gaza war is not about revenge, it’s about security.
Neither. It's about land, resources, and trade routes. The justifications are about revenge, security, religion, etc, but that's not what's keeping this all going.
> As far as justifying killing and abuse, the world is a complicated place.
There's nothing complicated about illegal occupation, apartheid, systemic rape and torture, or genocide. There really isn't.
> I think killing is justified in self defense
Sure, and the UN agrees. Try comparing casualty rates some time.
> Israel is certainly a bad actor but Hamas is far worse
By what possible metric? Certainly not as measured by civilian casualties. Not confirmed rapes or torture. Not hostages taken. Not in tons of bombs dropped on civilians, not on targeting of journalists and UN workers, not in terms of hospitals bombed, or schools, or mosques, or churches, or ancient landmarks. Not in terms of 'who started it'. Not in terms of buying media and politicians favor, or spreading lies designed to justify atrocities.
> What I think is clear is that Israel is not obligated to go easy on Hamas
They are obligated to follow international law. And we (the Western countries arming and enabling them) are obligated to punish their failure to do so.
> Gaza is worthless land, Israel does not want it.
You don't know about the Ben-Gvir canal? About Gaza's offshore oil? Maybe you could do a bare minimum of research before making wholly incorrect pronouncements, in your vain attempt to deflect from genocide.
> > by what possible metric?
> Their intentions?
This is where you get laughed out of the room.
> All the metrics you used are in Israel’s favor
They're really not.
> Israel doesn’t send their citizens to die in Zerg waves like Hamas does.
Not a thing.
> You are falling for Hamas’ strategy of killing their own people to make Israel look bad
Hamas doesn't kill their own people to make Israel bad. Israel does the killing, and the making themselves look bad. You might be thinking of the Hannibal doctrine? Again though, that's Israel.
> If Hamas had any amount of military of economic power they would kill every Israeli they could find
Netanyahu has long said that propping up Hamas is essential, so that a Palestinian state can be prevented.
And, what percentage of Hamas fighters are orphans, due to decades of Israeli brutality?
> The same is just not true for Israel.
That's counter to what hundreds of statements from Israeli political and military leaders would attest [0], as well as hundreds of pages of ICJ documents.
> Frankly I don’t care who started it
How convenient for you.
> litigating that will never lead to a solution.
Your belief in the ineffectiveness of 'litigation' is no excuse to ignore international law. You understand that, right?
> I agree the Palestinians are oppressed and have been treated horribly by Israel. But it’s mostly their own fault.
:o
Some day, I hope you can hear yourself.
> They keep starting wars they can’t win and then crying that they lose.
Wow it's almost as if they want to defend their land, even when up against a military force backed by the world's most militaristic superpower.
Also, remember when you said "Frankly I don't care who started it" earlier in your comment? But now it excuses brutal oppression? If only you were capable of recognizing blatant logical inconsistency.
The Vatican isn’t an ethnostate. There are many Palestinian Israeli citizens, clearly it’s not the race but the culture that Israel has a problem with.
Israel has many bad actors, few will deny that. But Hamas is much much worse and at the end of the day they can’t co-exist so you have to choose sides. Looking at the history of the last 100 years in the region it is clear to me that israel can not let the Palestinians into their country if they want any amount of security.
> reasonable counterarguments to all those accusations. To cover them all would result in a massive wall of text ... intractable security problems ... extremism in the wider region ... justifications for Israel's existence ... 'never again'
Goebbels also laid down "reasonable" arguments in "a wall of text" on intractable security problems, extremism among the diaspora, justifiable 'Reich must not fall again' rhetoric when it came to German Jews. He was indeed "just wrong". If 'never again' is our ethos, we mustn't be like Goebbels.
The [Palestinians] are responsible for the war. The treatment they receive from us is hardly unjust. They have deserved it all.
It is the job of the government to deal with them. No one has the right to act on his own, but each has the duty to support the state's measures against the [Palestinians], to defend them with others, and to avoid being misled by any [Palestinian] tricks.
The security of the state requires that of us.
> contrast Israel's behavior between Gazan vs Israeli arabs
Settler Colonialism 101. Nothing dramatic about it at all, as many have who spilled ink on the topic have taken pains to point out, like here: https://archive.is/UAs9G
Members of the same community were separated by chance into three different groups. All suffered occupation and oppression by Israeli governments. All had lands and property stolen, and all were denied collective national rights. But only those inside the Green Line were given citizenship (without anyone asking their opinion). East Jerusalem residents had permanent residency imposed on them (with a theoretical possibility of becoming citizens). And Palestinians in the territories got Dayan's “different relationship.”
After 56 years, the results of this experiment are clear. It’s the citizenship, stupid! Arabs in Israel, despite the discrimination and for all their reservations, have by and large integrated into Israeli society. Every day, we entrust our lives to Arab doctors, nurses, bus drivers, lawyers and mechanics.
Without any regard for the security issues, the conflict would be simple. That's not very helpful. Deserved or not, suicide bombings and missiles are real security issues.
Re: granting all Palestinians Citizenship
If the argument is that this would be a good idea, of course it would, as long as it were under a reasonably pluralistic system. It would be fantastic to see a single Israeli/Palestinian state with a slight arab majority, but everyone with their voice represented, all living in peace and harmony.
> Without any regard for the security issues, the conflict would be simple. That's not very helpful. Deserved or not, suicide bombings and missiles are real security issues.
Recency bias. Post 67, many a non-violent Palestinian demonstrations were met with Israeli violence [0]. And this has since kept escalating with each round. You'd think a peoples so utterly out-gunned would lay low, but they somehow aren't. There's something else that's fanning the flames, keeping the hatred going. Potentially, by whatever/whoever stands to benefit from the conflict, either financially (hi-tech [1]) or politically (Revisionists/Hamasniks/PA).
> the argument is that this would be a good idea
The argument is that, that ship has sailed, and so other than 2SS (67 borders), any other enclave-like arrangement (ex: Oslo) will not bring peace (instead lead to Goebbels-esque narratives & Fascist-esque behaviour). Though, 67 borders sounds like a recipe for a civil war.
>You'd think a peoples so utterly out-gunned would lay low, but they somehow aren't. There's something else that's fanning the flames, keeping the hatred going.
Never underestimate Culture, Religion and Nationhood as motivators - the West has a coloured history of martyring itself in the pursuit of all three in the 21st Century.
In this case they have a clear picture of their future; imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. In that context its easily understood.
Funny thing that the people that got citizenship to the place they were born and their basic human rights recognized by the government running them weren't subject to those motivations from "Culture, Religion and Nationhood".
> It would be fantastic to see a single Israeli/Palestinian state with a slight arab majority, but everyone with their voice represented, all living in peace and harmony.
Single state is a construct of few people with far-left views. They already tried something like that in USSR where they put for example Armenians and Azerbaijanians in the same state (and many other smaller examples within USSR). Look what happened.
I don't see even a single chance this will ever work, also it has zero support on the ground by both sides.
Prior to modern day Israel, there was 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid - the caliphate, in the form of the Islamic Empire and then the Ottoman Empire.
Not saying that this justifies anything, but the bloodshed for the past 100 years needs to be put into context of 1200 years of systemic oppression.
And yes, 100 years. The modern middle east should be looked at from 1920/1924 when the caliphate, one of the worlds largest, most powerful, and most impactful empires, was finally defeated. 1948 was just one of the significant events since that time.
How is this different than the Muslims currently pouring into Europe today? Whatever happened to "refugees welcome"?
It should be noted in context that in 1856 the Ottomans, after their war with Prussia, actively invited all peoples - not only Muslims - to come and settle the sparsely populated Holy Land specifically in order to collect more taxes. Jews and Arabs happily took up the offer. The last Jerusalem census to show a Muslim majority in that city was 1876, and the 50 years preceding it were neck and neck for Jews and Arabs majority.
> Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews.
This isn't true, and the link you posted in support of it contradicts it in the third sentence. 'less than a third of Israeli Jews' excludes Jews who migrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, or from the post-Soviet Union countries. In fact around 20% of the population of Jewish people in Israel arrived during the wave of migration which happened in the 90s and early 2000s.
It's not about race, but it is about the invention of a country that relies on specific demographics to exist (majority Jewish) which necessitate keeping millions of people stateless yet under the full control of an elite ethnicity who actually have the votes and the control.
And no matter where Jewish people are from, they are that privileged ethnicity. The Arabs in Israel get token rights (but you and I both know if they were a demographic threat in Israel those rights would be revoked). And the Arabs in Palestine get no rights in Israel but are fully controlled and blockaded by Israel. That's the ultimate source of the conflict. It's not thousands of years old, and it is partly about race (if you consider Jewish a race, as the nation of Israel does).
That's just false. The Arab minority in Israel has right to vote, the right to establish political parties, freedom of expression, freedom of association, free press, religious autonomy, separate educational systems, legal rights, etc.
Yes there are differences, but claiming that Arab israelis only receive "token rights" is a far cry from the truth. Of course this doesn't mean theres' no racism, but that's a different issue.
They don't have a right to own land in 90% of the country. You literally have to be Jewish to buy land. Also Jewish people started burning down buildings full of Arabs during the war. They can get evicted from their houses. They are discriminated against. And I don't think you're a full citizen if you can't even buy and keep property.
In the case of the ILA, you can buy it if you have full citizenship, but not if you are an Arab with a residence permit but not full citizenship. You can however buy land if you are Jewish and not a citizen. I find this somewhat racist still. Moreover, according to the above source from Human Rights Watch, Arabs still are de facto prevented from leasing 80% of the land. So my figure is not that far off. You also didn't dispute the fact that they have been evicted and contained. Which is also mentioned here.
They have also been steadily changing the rights of Arab Israelis over the course of 2024, as if their collective punishment of Palestinians needs to extend even to their own citizens, just in case: https://www.ft.com/content/3d57cf7c-a097-4e86-8f39-0f7720508...
I cannot find a source about the exact incident I was citing about arson perpetuated on Arab Israelis. It was a long time ago I read about that. So I will concede that seeing as I think my other points hold strongly. There are several incidents of arson and increased unpoliced violence in East Jeruselam and the West Bank though. I find this as clear evidence that the war crimes going on in Gaza are not just about retaliation to Hamas, but are part of a larger racist issue, since Palestinians in the West Bank logically do not deserve punishment for things Hamas did, but are being killed at far higher rates since this war. I say higher because children were always being killed every week in the West Bank, increasingly so in 2023.
> seeing as I think my other points hold strongly.
But they aren't. The initial claim was about Arabs in israel (aka israeli arabs), not Palestinians in the west bank / east Jerusalem which is a different topic.
Now don't get me wrong, i'm not gonna protect Israel's treatment to it's arab population, but let's get some facts straight. In terms of human rights you're still better off being arab israeli than being an arab citizen in most of the arab countries.
Bro when I said my other comments, I was speaking about the points ABOVE that statement. The ones I provided sources for. Both of which are about Arab Israeli citizens. Most of what I provided was specifically about Arab Israeli citizens. Are you being purposefully dense? I said I don't have evidence about the burning of Arab Israeli buildings BUT I have provided other points pertaining to Arab Israeli citizens that do hold up.
Anyway, saying "there's human rights violations but other countries have more human rights violations" is stupid and doesn't prove the point that Zionists are trying to make, that they are the victims in this situation and are not racists with an intent to genocide. Go say to black Americans in 20th century fighting for full civil rights "well at least you're not still in Africa, you'd probably be starving so you should really be grateful for this wonderful fair country". Those are two seperate issues.
Please read further on the first one. It talks about who can lease the land, what authorities its held by, and how Arab Israelis are limited in leasing the land.
I didn't realise the second one was behind a paywall. I do not have a subscription but it let me view it. Let me see if I can find an internet archive link and I'll put it below this text in an edit.
As someone who was defintely pro-palestinian and now changed his stance to "eeeeh it's complicated", I want to thank you for taking the time to rebutt falsehoods and to call out exaggerations rather than engaging with ready-made partisan talking points. I know doing that sometimes feels like pissing in the wind but in my case, it really helped question what I thought I knew and to admit that I was probably more ignorant than I thought.
I'm baffled by how you've changed your stance in such a way. I sympathise with the Israeli people for thinking it's complicated and I understand that we need to consider them and their livelihoods and trauma when talking about the situation, but at the end of the day, what Zionist project requires genocide and thier government subsquently is quite happy to slaughter people like dogs. No amount of "the other side did some bad things too" justifies that when the Israeli's are the only ones who have the power to stop it.
You are trying to get me to engage to the claims you are making, I will not do that. Instead I will tell you about my stance change assuming you care. This is not about "the other sides did some bad things too", it's about the claims made by the pro-palestinians and the reality of it, which I think this thread illustrates quite well. On one side you have someone who cares about understanding the situation before making any claims and one the other hand you have someone (you) who is on his morality horse kinda saying that the facts, details in your eyes, don't really matter since you are on the side of the opressed. Attempting to dumb down the situation to an oppressor/opressed schema might be true in present day at an abstract level but does not help anyone. It's easy to be right, just make a broad abstract claim, it's much harder to be relevant. I know how you feel, I felt just the same, you are high on your emotion : It seems like for once it's a clear oppressor/oppressed situation, like the one you have read in History books but ask yourself "Why doesn't everyone see it like I do ?". Is it only because of the undeniable Israeli state propaganda directed at the western world and everyone is blind to it ? Or is it because people much smarter than us have tried to solve the situation, and failed ?
Also do you care at all about a solution that would work for both parties ? Or do you only care that one party is right and the other, more powerful one, should vanish into thin air because they are wrong ?
> Or is it because people much smarter than us have tried to solve the situation, and failed ?
There are also a lot of people much smarter than us saying that the core parts of the Palestinian narrative are true (Nakba, land theft, apartheid and occupation, and yes, genocide, not talking about the religious Islamist stuff). E.g. the heads if pretty much all UN orgs and aid agencies.
Yeah its really not that people smarter than us have tried to solve the situation. It's that people much smarter than us with selfish motives (Israel and US) have engineered the fucked up situation we see now. And the people who are smart and want to fix the situation (UN, leftist Israeli academics, Palestinian leaders) are shut down immediately by Israel and the US, therefore blocking any progress.
I dunno man I've had a lot of people accuse me of being blinded by emotion on this but I am the only person who gave sources in this conversation. I've done a lot of reading, including of pro-Israel sources. The facts of the matter hold up. Israel is in the wrong. Again, the other side obviously did bad things but Israel is the one trying to create an ethnostate and then is acting surprised by the adverse consequences of that. Israel also is the only side with the power to stop this.
Anyway, I'll go back to being overly emotional by citing sources while the other side cites zero sources but is 'reasonable' because of their aesthetic of conservatism.
Edit: Also in terms of why do I think other people think differently, there are a lot of reasons. One is the genuine trauma of the holocaust. I totally understand why Jewish people felt like they could no longer conscience living anywhere other than a Jewish state after hundreds of years of pogroms leading to the holocaust. I also understand why they see anyone who is against them as antisemetic. There's lots of overlap between antisemitism and antizionism even if they are definitely not equivalent. I also understand that many people are scared of the instability in the region that be caused by the loss of a friendly westernised state and the possible formation of yet another total disaster of an Arab government. I also understand that it is not the choice of people who are grandchildren of settlers to have been born there and it is naive of me to dismiss the trauma of living in such a war torn place even from the more privileged side. None of these things makes it right to ethnically cleanse a people. That's the bottom line. And until we get Israel to admit that, we can't move forward, because the Palestinians cannot be gaslit out of their day to day experience of brutal military occupation and racist apartheid. They cannot be gaslit out of believing in the corpses around them.
Of course I don't believe we just dispose of Israelis for the sins of their forefathers. I believe they either need to give up a lot of land or they need to concede to having a multi ethnic state. Maybe the first one and then a plan towards the second so that neither side feels contained. This is easier said than done but it is what has to be done. Just like how South Africans had to forgive each other and the Irish and the English had to forgive each other, just on a more extreme scale. It's obviously a crazy thing to have to do, but you know what's worse? Continuing with a system that necessitates genocide.
I find it quite insulting that you see someone having the pro-Palestinian view and you think "oh yeah you're probably all for genociding the Israeli's to get your way"
That's unfair to your interlocutor who politely engaged with your point and tried give his source once, especially since you started with a false statement that you backed away from (with sources, to your credit).
I don't think you are blinded by emotions but "high" on them btw. I do not negate the fact that you are an intelligent, reasoning being. And it's fine, we all get emotional about things.
I understand how appearing reasonable is part of the aesthetics of conservatism but I still wouldn't trust someone who seem engaged in overtly motivated reasoning to get to the truth of something, and I am speaking of both sides here. If you don't show me your own doubts, I will doubt you.
Edit:
You show a lot of understanding and I think that's a prerequisite for any serious conversation but you also see how it is not very practical for any online conversation to have a wall of "I understand that..."
> I find it quite insulting that you see someone having the pro-Palestinian view and you think "oh yeah you're probably all for genociding the Israeli's to get your way"
Well you see the problem, like any dispute in any relationship, it's an endless chain of "I feel insulted that..." unless you have a strict framework for discussion where everyone feels heard.
Of course I don't see pro-Palestinians as having genocidal intent (and I take offence that you think I do :). I was one and I did not, but I also understand that an israeli person would be concerned about violent reprisals and wouldn't trust high on reighteouness pro-palestinians who would absolve themselves saying "Well they reap what they sow".
That's why peace is hard, it takes a saint-like dedication to dialogue and gandhi-like refusal of revenge.
I agree that a "they reap what they sow" attitude can be tempting but is totally unproductive. You're absolutely right that we need real empathetic dialogue from gandhi-like figures. That was what I was trying to say in my last response. If the Israelis can admit that their genocidal actions have been wrong and that they have to concede some of their land for paece and the Palestinians can acknowledge the Isrealis generational trauma, welcome their need for sanctuary and disband Hamas then we could get somewhere. What I object to is that most of the world seems to believe that the Israelis should not have to admit to their own faults and concede anything. Hamas is a necessary resistance force in the eyes of the Palestinians if the Israelis continue to beleive that genocidal action is justified. I say in the eyes of the Palestinians because this may seem ludicrous to some of us, but that really doesn't matter. What matters is dealing with the greivances of the people in the area once and for all.
> Yes there are differences, but claiming that Arab israelis only receive "token rights" is a far cry from the truth
Aren't the rights only subject to them being an ethnic minority in Israel? According to nation-state law, they could not be allowed to retain those rights if they became the ethnic majority
Keep things the same with Palestinians as wards of the state: Iran and others fund Hamas to continue the conflict.
Palestinians get an armed state: in 5 years Palestinians attack Israel and are utterly wiped out by complete military defeat and carpet bombing
Palestinians get an unarmed state.: lol like they have now? Smuggled arms, terrorism, eventual war, carpet bombing.
The essential geopolitical issue is that the Palestinians have never functionally accepted being defeated. So they never moved on and accepted peace in defeat like literally thousands of other ethnic groups historically in the history of ethnic conflict in the world.
Granted their only source of economic support is being funded to not accept peace by Iran and the Arab world for 70 years. That's four generations of Palestinians only existing to be thorns in the side of Israel and as useful fools.
At this point there is no good outcome for Palestinians. All roads lead to devastating military defeat politically. The economic basis of their existence (oil money) is rapidly fading. Old allies are now aligned with Israel (Sunni Arabs), impotent (Russia/Syria), or regionally deflated (Iran). Global warming is worsening. And they have increased their population 10 fold over 70 years with ZERO agricultural or economic ability to support themselves. Their political leadership is corrupt and paid to be militaristic and have authoritarian control. The West wont give them headline prominence anymore. The US is becoming insular, and we are entering an era of conflict and a fall in international diplomatic idealism
If you are a Palestinian and have any way to get out, get the effing hell out of there.
I could grant the Palestinians every moral high ground and argument. It won't change anything geopolitically and the Palestinians are utterly screwed.
Their only (impossible) chance is to reject Hamas, live in whisper quiet peace with Israel, develop tourism or some other economic basis to support their population.
And we all know reading that paragraph how impossible that is.
The best outcome would be that Israelis collectively decide that ethnic hierarchy isn't right as a state and commit to ending it. What you are saying is basically that black slaves couldn't be freed because all they'd do is try another ill-fated Nat Turner rebellion.
The Palestinians don't have to "accept defeat" if the Israelis can "accept ethnic equality". The same way the IRA and the PA (who renounced violence as an overture to Israel) never "accepted defeat" either.
Black slaves weren't funded, radicalized, and armed with military weapons and missiles with a stated goal of its leadership to kill all white people.
There are Palestinians that will get along with Israel. Newsflash, there are a ton of Palestinians living in Israel peacefully. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab.
The Palestinians need to lay down arms for a looooong time before kumbaya peace is on the table. Stop with the bullshit that West bank and Gaza just want peace. Gaza continued to politically elect Hamas.
Likewise Israeli right wingers are in charge of Israel, like if the southern states had a lock on the US government.
Peace was closest when Yassir Arafat walked away from an agreement that included a Palestinian state. He was probably paid to do by the Iranians, Arafat died worth hundreds of millions.
Finally,the Palestinians dug their own mass graves by increasing population by a factor of ten when they had no economy and lived off of world relief and Arab oil money.
That's why they will never make peace. They only way they get money to live is to fight Israel. If they don't fight Israel, the aid dries up and they starve. If they fight Israel, Israel unleashes military force and blockaded and they starve.
Geopolitically the Israeli right wing have won. The world doesn't care about mortality. The UN will probably even stop passing their paper resolutions, because the world has way bigger issues like Russia NATO Ukraine, China Taiwan, and Trump vs everyone, brewing trade wars, and the fact that Israel is allied with Sunni Arabs, and Iran lost all its proxies.
The Palestinians are losing their funders, losing practical military access, lost Egypt a long time ago.
Global warming will be kicking into gear, so that means widespread population movements and other issues that will take all aid from the Palestinians.
That's why it's so critical for the Palestinians to find a way to some sort of peaceful state with an economic basis. That is the very narrow historic window for their survival. There is no Israeli kumbaya moment. There is no UN intervention force.
The fact you say "they don't have to accept defeat" is utterly nuts. And it's why that brief path to some survival by the Palestinians in Gaza is virtually impossible.
> Black slaves weren't funded, radicalized, and armed with military weapons and missiles with a stated goal of its leadership to kill all white people.
They were actually all of those things... Do you not know what the Nat Turner Rebellion was?
> Newsflash, there are a ton of Palestinians living in Israel peacefully. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab.
No one ever answers this follow up. What would happen if those Arabs were a demographic threat to the Jewish majority of Israel? Would they still retain their voting rights past 50%? Be honest.
> Stop with the bullshit that West bank and Gaza just want peace.
I never said that. I said that when Israelis decide that ethnic hierarchy is wrong and commit to ending it, this conflict can end.
> Peace was closest when Yassir Arafat walked away from an agreement that included a Palestinian state. He was probably paid to do by the Iranians, Arafat died worth hundreds of millions.
Oh so we just throw out lies now? My comment could have been a lot shorter. What happened to Arafat's counterpart, btw?
> Finally,the Palestinians dug their own mass graves by increasing population by a factor of ten when they had no economy
Advocacy of collective punishment. Nice!
> They only way they get money to live is to fight Israel. If they don't fight Israel, the aid dries up and they starve. If they fight Israel, Israel unleashes military force and blockaded and they starve.
Well, like I said earlier, they could get money if Israelis decided to collectively end the policies of ethnic hierarchy... You know Gaza had an international airport, it had a luxury hotel. It was building an economy. Constant war makes that hard. And as long as millions of people in Palestine don't have citizenship in any country, much less in the country that controls their lives, strife is inevitable.
> There is no Israeli kumbaya moment.
I don't agree. The people of Israel have a collective consciousness that will prevail. Ultimately, whites decided to end slavery in the US. Ultimately whites decided to end apartheid in South Africa. Ultimately Israelis will decide to end their ethnic hierarchy as well. It doesn't have to happen, but I believe it will.
> The fact you say "they don't have to accept defeat" is utterly nuts.
It's not nuts. It's a factual statement. The IRA did not admit defeat even after its prominent members were all jailed. The ANC did not admit defeat even after its prominently members were jailed. History shows they don't have to admit defeat. Many here might say it would be better for them and the Palestinians. But there's understandable mistrust of both sides that making a step forward is difficult. The last time steps forward were made, the PA renounced violence only to have more and more of the West Bank stolen. Rabin welcomed talks towards Palestinian statehood only to get a bullet in return. We went from the highs of Oslo to the lows of the Second Intifada. That kind of backstabbing makes it hard for one side to back down, but there is agency on both sides. The US decided to end racial hierarchy, and it was painful, but worth it in the long run. I firmly believe Israel can do the same.
Nat Turner: a sideshow of American history. Also, armed only with muskets, not missiles explosives and automatic assault rifles, and not able to travel the world and enact terrorism.
50% Arab voting rights: let me get this straight, you admit Israel will never allow Arabs to gain majority voting, an ethnic racial hierarchy, but are arguing that Israel... Can stop apply a racial hierarchy for West bank and Gaza? So you're admitting that your "just do this" is impossible.
The IRA (I'm assuming you mean the Irish) were white vs white, and Christian. Palestinian "problem" is both ethnic and religious divide.
South Africa was probably related to the death of imperialism and the fall of British empire in particular. The whites were way outnumbered and required implicit world support to maintain that long term. The whites either relented or eventually would get the guillotine. Blacks had implicit power in numbers and surrounding countries. That's a totally different power dynamic.
Palestinian population problem isn't laying blame. It's the facts of the situation to highlight how precarious and vulnerable they are, and how little actual power they have. They can't sustain their population without aid, and that aid is implicitly dependent on them being a thorn in Israels side. No thorn, no food. So peace no food, war ... Blockade no food.
I respect your idealism, but I'm in my fifties (not Israeli, Arab, or religious, I have no skin in this game) and ... Look, the Palestinians have worked the moral argument for 74 years. During a time when geopolitics was reasonably quiet between the cold war and the post cold war unipower system. When there was still attempts at the UN, court of international justice, and other idealism internationally.
That era is coming to an end worldwide. Free trade is ending, America is turning insular/isolationist, global warming is in the rise, China is saber rattling, Xi is nuts, Russia is threatening NATO, the EU and NATO are fraying, right wing nationalism is on the rise.
The world is going to abandon the Palestinians. Egypt won't save them, Israel sure as hell won't. You call for impossible idealism, and I call for impossible realism.
Nat Turner had military technology of the time. You are just shifting the goalposts now to exclude everything that isn't exactly this situation to avoid discussing the reality that ethnic hierarchy is bad even in the face of valid security threats it shouldn't exist.
> let me get this straight, you admit Israel will never allow Arabs to gain majority voting, an ethnic racial hierarchy, but are arguing that Israel... Can stop apply a racial hierarchy for West bank and Gaza?
No, you admit that Israel would never allow Arabs to gain majority voting. That proves it is an ethnic hierarchy. Rights are not equal for each population. One ethnicity has the power and the other can never have it. That is what's wrong, and what I say should end. The Americans ended racial hierarchy. The Europeans ended racial hierarchy. The South Africans ended racial hierarchy. Israel must, and will end it as well.
> The whites were way outnumbered and required implicit world support to maintain that long term.
Just like Israel
> The world is going to abandon the Palestinians.
No it won't. Dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi might. But the people will never forget them. Even the Israelis have not forgotten them. Israelis themselves are some of the most vocal about their plight. And it's that spark that will lead them to freedom. You don't have faith in the people. You don't believe the people make change possible. I do. Call it idealistic, but every ethnic hierarchy has ended except this one. I think I'm just following the stats.
Ethnic hierarchies are a fact of history and geopolitics, especially where guns and hatred are involved.
Nat Turner was not financed to the tune of billions of dollars (inflation adjustment necessary) and employed by France to foment and continue fighting. He was not financed to torpedo any real resolution of slavery because it would mean the personal money train ends. Nat Turner did not have a Mafia authoritarian government oppressing a couple million people of his own kind.
The slaves didn't want collectively to fight and kill and jihad on their white masters. They just wanted freedom. They got reconstruction and segregation.
Slavery was only resolved with the bloody civil war. A civil war that America has the luxury of engaging in because it has no geopolitical enemies on its borders.
Does Israel want to kill a couple million of its people to resolve this in a civil war internally? When a dozen enemies would leap at the chance to attack them when they are weakened?
Look, you are dealing with more hatred, more barriers, more meddling external powers, more dangerous enemies.
Every ethnic hierarchy has ended? Us is still ethnically split along the echoes of slavery. The native Americans would also like to point out their situation. Russia is still the Rus at the core and subordinate ethnic stans, just like 1000 years ago. China is an ethnic hierarchy with the Han at the top. Turkey can't wait to reestablish a caliphate. South Africa has worse divisions than the US post apartheid.
The US native American population is basically the Palestinians. That is your analogue. Confined to reservations and poor. I don't want to hold them up as a model of "living as defeated people" but they exist, they have freedom to move in the US, and they aren't viewed by Americans as terrorists and periodically blown up. They have some economic determinism (casinos). That is the model the Palestinians need.
Again with Nat Turner you are just shifting the goal posts of course he didn't have billions but he did successfully kill a lot of whites and was feared and put up as an example of the dangers of ending slavery. Ethnic hierarchies by law with legally different rights based on one's ethnicity have all ended except in Israel. All what you are talking about are not legally encoded hierarchies. You're kind of just floundering so I'll leave you to it. Like I said before, and you didn't respond to, I believe in the people of Israel. They will not let their legacy be one of legally encoded ethnic hierarchy. They don't want to be China or Russia, they want to be America, where even the ethnically cleansed Native Americans are equal citizens (to use your own analogy) with equal voting rights and all
They could form a bi-ethnic country that incorporates both Jews and Palestinians with full rights. Or they could allow the Palestinians to have a state while retaining a Jewish state.
There's no reason why giving Palestinians rights and self determination would necessitate Jews to leave or even to abolish their country.
> Or they could allow the Palestinians to have a state while retaining a Jewish state.
The Palestinians won't take it because it would mean Zionism survives and they lose (sorry , that's how Palestinians and their supporters see it currently and for the last century). Bi ethnic country would work worse than it does in Lebanon (where it doesn't work at all) - it would be anarchy followed by bloodshed (of defenseless Jews) and another big wave of Jewish immigrants to countries that don't and never have particularly liked them.
I don't think it's quite that simple. Palestinian support for a two state solution has varied over time (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution#Public_opin... and the associated citations). I don't see any reason why it couldn't work under the right circumstances (e.g. Jerusalem as an international zone, compensation in place of Palestinian Right of Return, guarantees that Palestine would be protected, etc.).
What do you mean by "defenseless Jews"? Gun ownership is quite high in Israel and most of the population has military experience. I'd be much more concerned about it going the other way if anything.
I mean, this is the exact same logic people used as for why black slaves could not be freed (they'd take revenge on their former masters) or why apartheid South Africa couldn't end (they'd take revenge on their former superiors).
It may even be true, but it's morally not enough to continue to excuse ethnic hierarchy
I don't think its the exact same logic at all. Whites in America did not get massacred or lose any significant part of their culture and identity by abolishing slavery.
I'm not for ethnic hierarchy, I'm for a 2 state solution.
They did. Do you not remember the Nat Turner Rebellion?
It is the exact same logic. As long as Palestinians don't have a state and are controlled by Israel, their rights in the reguon collectively will always be less than the rights of the Jewish ethnic minority in the region. That is ethnic hierarchy. It's the exact same as Jim Crow in the US. Blacks were first not freed, then reluctantly freed, then barred from voting, then allowed to vote. And they were never a demographic threat to whites
Judaism is a religion. Being jew is not a nationality. More than 1 out of 4 israelis aren't jews, almost 20% are muslims, 2% are christians, there are also druzes, atheists and many others.
As you said, jews have lived there for millenias in what was called until very recently Palestine. Jews were palestinian before zionism. They could still be.
One country, one man, one vote. It is the only ethical way forward. Democracy moves conflicts from the realm of violence to politics. Abandon the idea that Jews have to be the majority vote.
Would you be okay with being responsible for the never before seen bloodshed that would result in, with millions of innocent people dying as the direct result of your actions?
Stay in the land that was allotted in 1967 (or 1948), don’t create settlements, allow the Palestinians territories to self govern and have open borders. Obviously that won’t stop bad faith actors like Hamas but that’s not going to stop with a war either. Bibi majorly screwed up by ignoring Gaza and allocating troops to guard West Bank settlements. Not claiming this will be a panacea, but I don’t see how Israel’s current plan will accomplish anything more than perpetual conflict and an increasingly radicalized population on both sides. Oh and kick out Itamar Ben-Gvir and the rest of the ultra right wing.
These are debatable arguments but at least fair and in good faith. I'm not at all saying that Israel is without fault in the current conflict or the decades worth of conflict going back to the formation of the state in 1948. However, I do argue that it has a right to exist, and by virtue of the settlement and development its millions of residents have invested in across the decades, that right is further fortified into the present day. Anyone simply rejecting this seems to ignore explaining what would be done to the millions of Jews living there.
I also argue that the political organizations representing the Palestinians (Hamas definitely included here) and several neighboring governments that have supported these organizations also have their own fault in not only prolonging conflict with unreasonable demands of their own against Israel, but also have fault in mistreating their own people in brutally cynical ways.
Israel was accused when it build a wall towards Gaza, but in the end it protected from suicide attacks of brainwashed children that were instrumentalized by a fundamentalist genocidal cult.
A lot of Palestinians did work in Israel, given that is over for quite some time now for Gazans at least.
I can agree on Ben-Gvir being a moron, but Israel justifiably demands security guarantees.
> blame upon a society largely built and carved out of barren land over decades of great difficulty
First, not all of it was "barren land": Not the places that were ethnically cleansed in 48 and 67. Second, you think any of it gives any society the license to do whatever they please?
> most bloodthirsty genocidal persecutions
Zionists back then didn't really care about those being persecuted in the diaspora [0], though they do find it fit to use it to justify their adventures in colonialism.
> having built a real country
The problem is, it is a phantom country for ~50% of the inhabitants under occupation.
> their desire for the total elimination of the Jewish nation of millions
Speaking of desires, one side is already acting on theirs to eliminate another peoples [1].
> Zionists back then didn't really care about those being persecuted in the diaspora
Zionists themselves were mostly victims . My grandfather and grandmother fled from Germany to Palestine in the 30s , a bit after Hitler got into power. I guess technically they were Zionists because they fled to Palestine as Jews, and took part in the state, but I don't think they particularly cared about Jewish statehood - they just wanted to live. All their family left behind in Europe was wiped out - this is the story of many of the so called colonialist Zionists.
They came with nothing, lost everything and then had to endure all the wars in Israel as well. There's nothing particularly special about the story of my grandfather and grandmother, it's the story of most Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.
You can call it "adventures in colonialism" and link to some bullshit articles all you want, but history is history.
Also, if you were a European Jew in the late 1940s after the fall of the Nazis, you were still faced with the prospect of living under the local governance of Nazi collaborators, continued pogroms [0] and antisemitism, and potentially Joseph Stalin's USSR. It's not like everything immediately went back to normal, either in real terms or psychological ones.
It's unsurprising that many wouldn't want to reintegrate with that society after what they experienced, even if they managed to avoid the camps (and especially if they didn't).
I'm fairly certain it's because they were ethnically cleansed from and/or simply murdered in the rest of the Middle East by the surrounding Arab countries. For example, Egypt tortured and dispossessed its Jews, forcing them out at gunpoint while holding their family members hostage so they wouldn't speak to the press [1]. Syria made it illegal for Jews to buy property, own a telephone, or even drive, and then seized all the property they already owned and froze their bank accounts, killing them if they fled [2].
Blaming this on "the Zionists" is like saying America wasn't at fault for seizing the property of Japanese-Americans during WW2 and forcing them into internment camps — it was Japan's fault for attacking Pearl Harbor, whipping Americans into an unavoidable frenzy that can't be condemned. Only it's more absurd, because Israel didn't start the war with those countries — they invaded Israel in 1948 simply for existing!
There is a difference between moral responsibility and factual causality. If you engage in colonialism and ethnic cleansing, its not surprising that both sides do it.
Its of course also true that Jews and other minority would have had lots of issue in Arab country with Arab nationalism on the rise. But Zionism clearly played a large role as well.
It was attack by various Zionist groups that result in Britain no longer wanting to control the area because they knew in any resulting deal and/or struggle they had a good chance of coming out ahead, and they were right.
I see: so ethnic cleansing is understandable if the other side started it first. Well then, perhaps you can answer a question for me: which side first tried to ethnically cleanse the other? Was it the Jaffa riots in 1929? The Kfar Sirkin ambush in 1947 after the U.N. partition plan? Which was the first act of violence in which one side tried to drive the other out, since in your opinion, "if you engage in ethnic cleansing, it's not surprising that both sides do it," and thus it's actually Zionism's fault for Arab countries ethnically cleansing their Jews?
You seem to be obsessed with finding one side to blame and then blaming it all on that side. And spend a lot of time point out the crimes of one side while not mentioning the reverse.
Sorry to disappoint, but I don't, both sides can be a morally wrong.
Zionism is colonialist and bad and was always going to lead to multiple forms of response and that is not surprising.
My understanding of this history is that the Arab Jews weren’t exiled in the same manner as Palestinians from Palestine. But rather these were mostly a series of voluntary exoduses with post-hoc discrimination (though some were no doubt pushed out under threat of violence). As I understand it Iraq banned Jewish emigration in an effort to prevent Zionists from getting an ethnographic majority in the newly independent Israel. It was this ban on emigration which stripped the Arab Jews of their possessions as well as their citizenship. A human rights violation without a doubt, but not the same crime as the terror campaign Israelis did against Palestinians in the Nakba nor the same crime of exiling a large part of the population and not granting them the right of return.
However unlike Israel, these neighboring countries have all reversed their discriminatory policies, and I think some have even offered reparations (I think all offer the right right of return; but few have taken the offer)[1]
The Wikipedia article you posted confirms my understanding of this, that there were indeed people pushed to leave because of violence and discrimination, but most people still left voluntarily.
Note that the article I posted is an example of a person who’s family was pushed out, but returned recently many decades later.
This is very different from the terrorism and expulsion of Palestinians out of Palestine, which was exclusively a violent affair.
This link you are sharing is an example of low quality journalism or propaganda - whatever you want to call it.
I'll give you some context - in 1948 Egypt declared war on Israel, which ended with a cease fire in 1949. From this context, it should become obvious that Israeli espionage operations in Egypt in early 1950s are warranted.
Even Avi Shlaim referenced in your article admits that it was mainly Arab nationalists who were driving the Jews out. These reactions are very similar to modern day shootings at Jewish schools in Canada or airport pogrom in Dagestan - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67258332
Pro-Palestinian crowd is unable to admit that they have imperfections and blames all these events on Israel / Zionists as well (I read a lot of forums from both sides). A common reference is "they made us do it" / "it was a Zionist school / plane". Drawing parallels between today and 1950s, it becomes very clear that it's old propaganda playbook trick. I would go even further and say it's a millenia-old antisemitism, where people would blame everything on Jews / witches / etc.
Now, back to the article you shared - "undeniable proof" - is an interview of a 89-year old man, who did not even hold the leadership role in an underground Jewish cell and did not claim first-hand participation in any of the events. More so, his interview is full of contradictory statements, including dates and attributions of who did what - I encourage you to do more research on that.
So on one hand, you have this "undeniable proof", and on the other hand you have many well documented actions of Arab nationalists and Iraqi government. And you choose to believe (even contradictory to Avi Shlaim) that it's all Zionists.
Next, thinking logically, there was no need for Mossad to do false flag operations, because there were enough actions by Arab nationalists and before 1950 there was a policy in place by Iraqi government banning Jews from emigrating to Israel - like if Jews didn't want to emigrate, why would they ban this? Once they lifted the policy, everybody left. This is very similar to USSR where millions of Jews left in early 1990s after the fall of the USSR. Probably propagandists will soon be explaining that this was Mossad false flag operations or some other Zionist tricks - I wouldn't be surprised.
It was more about local residents becoming Arabs than Arabs migrating in large numbers. Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from ancient Canaanites. More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age. Most conquerors just replaced or took over the old elites. Many people died in the process, and the survivors would often adopt a new culture, language, and/or religion.
> More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age.
This type of claims only shows lack of understanding of history as a science. It is actually impossible right now to make claims about this with any significant degree of confidence.
Without being overly facetious, the foundations of the modern University system have a significant role to play in that; e.g. the first university in Europe was established by Arab Muslims in the year 841 in Salerno, Italy.
The worse part for Mizrahi Jews is that they endured tons of suffering for things they had nothing to do with, and that even in today's Israel they are kind of second-class citizens facing discrimination by Ashkenazi.
3. Other arab countries also did not want to emigrate, Ben Gurion paid a lot of money for each family to encourage immigration. It is laughable to claim that arabs prosecuted jews, when in fact they coexisted for millennia and lived in the same neighborhoods without any segregation (that existed in Europe)
4. Mizrahi jews who immigrated to Israel suffered from severe discrimination by european ashkenazi. Only low paid jobs were given to Arab jews due to racism. Same racism is towards yemeni jews who were even subject to illegal sterilization
after the Nakba situation in arab countries changed, but it was reactionary to Nakba
* 1955 Wall St. Jrnl. 30 Dec. 1/3 The Communist Party Boss: Again accused the West of colonialist aims.
* 1958 Manch. Guardian Weekly 12 June 8/3 Mr. Bandaranaike's Government uses methods which it would denounce as ‘colonialist’ if they were employed by others.
* 1959 ‘M. Derby’ Tigress ii. 85 ‘And you were ― ?’ ‘A colonialist, Madam. I exploited these unhappy natives to make a fortune for myself.‥ We colonialists thought only of private gain.’
Just because it wasn't used as pejorative doesn't mean that the meaning then is something we today should consider it not a problem. What they meant was the same thing we do now. Its just that we now consider it something not all that nice.
Golda Meir told explicitly to NOT send poor, old, sick, and Holocaust survivors(!!!))
Because zionists wanted only healthy strong and ideologically zionist people to settle the land.
Zionists even signed agreement with Adolf Hitler (at the time when entire world boycotted Nazi regime) and opened the doors for rich German jews to escape Germany (~40k people across Germany), while completely throwing all other millions of jews to the holocaust
> Colonialism is a leftist ideology created by college professors in the 1970s
And that matters because…?
> Furthermore, there is no colony without a mother country.
I think you’re picking and choosing a definition of colony that fits your argument.
Here’s a more applicable one:
“ a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government”
Instead of making ad hominem attacks and playing semantics, why not argue against the actual ideas?
I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to?
I don’t know that I see a particular difference between ideas and semantics when the assertion is “Israel is a European colonialist project”
> I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to?
Much better.
I personally wouldn’t call Israel a European colonization effort. I don’t think Jews really had a homeland per se. AFAIK they were a nation without any land. It seemed like Israel was part reparations for the holocaust and part installing a strategic ally in the Middle East.
Maybe that’s a thin line.
I can absolutely see how someone could make that argument, though, when framed like this:
A fairly western style country, funded by wealthy western countries, taking and keeping hold of some land in a very not western style part of the world.
The IDF has been entirely dependent on US and European armaments and funds for all of its battles, with the only exception being the '47 independence war. Since then, Israel has been a Western military-industrial client state. The current genocide is entirely funded by the US.
It seems foolish, because giving the defense industry a free subsidy via Israel annoys our Arab oil suppliers and our oil companies, but there must be enough corporate welfare to go around because the defense companies and the oil companies haven't gone to war with each other directly, yet.
> I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland
Oh yeah, there's definitely no ties between the two. EU states definitely didn't send 1.76 billion euros ($1.9bn) (in arms) to Israel in exchange for the "security" Israel offers. /s
But also
> Israel is a society of immigrants and their offspring: 23 percent of the Jewish majority as of 2018 was foreign born, 32 percent was comprised of the second generation (Israeli born to immigrant parents), and 47 percent was third generation (Israeli born to Israeli-born parents).
In Sweden, 21% of the population is foreign born. 35% is second generation. The department for statistics did not publish numbers for third generation. The wast majority of immigration are done for economical causes.
Those numbers are to my knowledge fairly similar in many other European countries.
> 23 percent of the Jewish majority as of 2018 was foreign born
You know what population is usually foreign born? Refugees!
> even the Israelis themselves do have ties to their own personal homelands.
What ties do Yemenite Jews who fled to Israel have to a Yemen that is ruled by the Houthis, an almost comically Nazi-like group whose flag literally has "a curse on the Jews" written on it in big letters?
> Do you have any evidence that a large percentage of that population is refugees?
Have you not heard of the Holocaust? The majority of Israelis descend either from refugees from Europe (Ashkenazim), or refugees from Arab/Muslim countries (Mizrahim) whose homes were stolen by Europeans or Arabs, respectively.
> What was Yaakov Fauci fleeing from?
American born Israelis are a small minority.
> Many settlers in America were fleeing religious prosecution in Britain, that doesn't make them not colonizers.
So if a Palestinian from Gaza gets asylum in the US, does that make that Palestinian a colonizer of Native American land?
1) I gave you hard data, I don't count "You don't remember the holocaust" as hard data.
2) Prove it. Give me data not just your opinion.
3) Not really and I fail to see how this is even important. The US is not engaging in active colonization, it has fully colonized the US. You could even argue we've moved in the direction of decolonization by giving back some land to the indigenous population.
Can we agree an American-Israel dual citizen stealing the house someone is currently living in is different than someone fleeing ethnic cleansing?
Like if the US invades Greenland and that Palestinian fled to America and then participated in the colonization then yes they would be a colonizer.
The flip side of this double hypothetical is that Israel is actively building illegal settlements on Palestinian land so anyone who immigrates and isn't under legitimate duress to do so is a colonizer.
> The US is not engaging in active colonization, it has fully colonized the US.
The history lesson here is that if Israel were to just finish colonizing the territory and completely subjugating any opposition, like the US did, they will win in the long run. Meaning, the settlers are right, if not in moral terms, then in practical terms.
The US may pay lip service to indigenous land rights in flyover country, but nothing suggests it would consider handing over control of huge swathes of strategically critical territory to a hostile group of natives. That idea would be laughable, yet it is pretty much what many people believe Israel should do.
I do not normally swear, but what the fuck? We absolutely were expelled (genocided, really).
Or what else would you call the Romans banning us from our holy city Jerusalem (and renaming it, just like they renamed the whole region to try to deny our indigenousness, and also bulldozing our temple--you can go see it today, it's underneath the Al-Aqsa Mosque) and selling us as slaves around the empire and subsequent rulers forbidding us to return!?
1. Romans didn't just wake up one day and decide to banish ancient israelites from Jerusalem, they responded to the brutal and murderous revolt where local roman government was murdered.
2. DNA analysis showed that european jews (especially secular zionists) have no connection to the land of Palestine, it is Palestinians, Jordanian Christians, and Samaritans who are native.
3. Slavery is bad, a lot of people were sold as slaves throughout the history. Lets talk about who owned all trans-atlantic slave trade to America? Who brought all slaves in Caribbeans and American south ?
It was Dutch Jewish slave traders who were leading the slave trade
Now can we talk about reparations for slavery from Israel to all the Black Americans and mixed race people who are descendants of slaves?
TL;DR: After spending more time than reasonable gathering sources, I can conclude that, save for the first sentence in point 3 (and questions), every single sentence either justifies Israel's current conduct, is a flat-out lie, or both. It took me very little time to actually gather one source against these claims, I just wanted a ton.
> brutal...revolt
It was a rebellion. Against a settler-colonial group. You have previously expressed support for the exact same thing.
If that justifies genocide, what complaints do you have about Gaza? You should be cheering Israel on - Hamas killed innocents, back then they killed the people actually responsible (still bad but a different level).
Unless, of course, what really matters is that in one case it's the Jews being killed.
>DNA analysis
Also, about DNA analysis - what kind of DNA analysis do you have? Jews absolutely are connected genetically[1] and culturally[2]. Nice try, but false.
Also, most Israeli Jews aren't even European, as anyone with even the slightest amount of knowledge would know - they're from the Middle East and North Africa, having been pushed out by rising antisemitism after the creation of the state of Israel.
Also, reminder: historically, conversion was not allowed, neither was intermarriage, and even if it was it would not have been at all accepted by anyone, and given that Jews often had no legal recourse, were sold as slaves, and were at one point (following our revolt but that's beside the point) raped so much the rabbis decided "screw it Judaism is matrilineal now", and that genes can't tell you how they got there, this is in all probability blaming us for being raped too much.
Also: genotype is not indigenousness. End of goddamn discussion.
> slave trade
First of all, IF Dutch Jews controlled the slave trade, then the logical solution would be for Dutch Jews to partially pay reparations. But most Jews aren't Dutch; my family, for instance, traces its origins to places like Lithuania, Germany, Russia, Moldova, et cetera -- eastern Europe. (Before that, of course, Israel. But that's beside the point.) And as noted, most Israeli Jews are also not of Dutch descent. If it is Dutch Jews, one would think, well, Dutch Jews ought to be responsible, and not Jews whose ancestors never set foot in the Netherlands. (Never mind that the slave trade was only a small part of slavery).
But more importantly: they didn't. Your claim, as usual, is factually incorrect, in two ways. First of all, the Netherlands wasn't that big a player in the slave trade[3] and secondly it wasn't run by Dutch Jews[4].
In fact, it can be established that at most 70 percent of slave traders could be Jews.[5] ("Could be" meaning "if the moment they were allowed back into a country they immediately took over all slave trading by that country and also if they were let in in 1786 but 1776-1800 are lumped together they were let in 10 years early", to be clear.)
I look forward to your detailed rebuttal with well-documented, reliable, citations (no, Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not count)! Or your acceptance that you are factually inaccurate. Either one is fine; the former demonstrates a willingness to back up claims, the latter a willingness to admit wrongness. For now, I consider my copious citations sufficient to shift the burden of proof to you.
[3] https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefore.... "The Dutch share in the Atlantic slave trade averaged about 5 to 6 percent of the total...During the first eighty years after Columbus, the Atlantic slave trade remained firmly in the hands of the Portuguese [who, I note, had expelled their Jews in 1496]." See also the first link in footnote 5 below.
Note also that this applies solely to Ashkenazi Jews, the ones the conspiracy theory generally applies to and the most reasonable (a 1,000 foot pile of bullshit rather than a 1,001 foot pile, to be clear). However, this doesn't even matter, because most Israeli Jews are Mizrahim, from the Middle East and North Africa. I fail to see how a kingdom that was roughly from the Caucasus and extended into southern Ukraine could manage to get its genes into those of Jews whose ancestors lived in, say, Libya for centuries or millennia (and were expelled following Israel's independence, if you're wondering how they ended up in Israel. The whole exodus of Jews from Muslim countries was roughly equal to that of Palestinians from Israel. The reason you don't hear about the plight of those refugees is that Israel, at the time a young new state still working things out, accepted them quickly and without delay, often proactively getting Jews out to safety.)
In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.
The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD. Even from this population, there is a bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago where the population was down to 350 individuals [1].
By and large very very few Jews in Palestine/Israel are able to claim Levantine/Semitic genetic ancestry.
Many Palestinians and other Levantine people in Palestine who now practice Islam are far more likely have to have ancestors that were once Jewish that actually lived in historical kingdom of Israel prior to 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian crushed a revolt there.
The ancestors of these folks that today practice Islam in Palestine likely converted to Islam sometime after 637 AD when Arabs started to settle in Palestine.
It's pretty commonly accepted all over the world since basically forever that ownership is bequeathed from parents to children. This means that those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land than folks who have no genetic ancestry to the Kingdom of Israel and instead have ancestry with no genetic relationship that converted to Judaism about 1105 to 1285 years ago.
> those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land
Broadly speaking, any philosophy that rests on an oldest-claims-first metric are guaranteed to cause violence.
Information degrades the further we go back; you’re prioritising the wishy-washiest sources of truth. And the nature of human migration and interbreeding means the further you go back, the less likely you are to find genetic ancestors of the people who currently control the land. The people alive on the land you want them off. People with guns.
(The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong. Immigrants to America have less claim than white Americans, who have less claim than natives, except for all the natives who were conquered each other because they moved around too.)
It's not about the certainty of the information. The fact is that humans have always and will always migrate in large numbers for a vast number of reasons, and these migration movements are the main sources of cultural and linguistic change. So, any ideology with historical justification, based on how people in a region lived a long time ago is going to create wars because other groups lived there at other times, and ethnic and linguistic groups constantly change and evolve. Named regions, ethnic group boundaries, countries, and their delimitations change over time.
> The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong.
There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits. Genetic analysis can reveal indications of regions and ethnic origins but these are barely linked to phenotypical traits and cannot be inferred from the latter. Linguistic communities are the bearers of a shared culture, not anything related to the bogus and outdated concept of "human races." It's also worth pointing out that the claim that "racial migration is wrong" does not follow from any of the other considerations, nor is it needed to support them in any way. I suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong? Otherwise I don't get the final remark.
> There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits
Race is a social construct. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The constructs of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” are as real and deadly as the geographical boundaries they each draw.
> suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong
If one’s ancestors define legitimate claims to where one can live, then one cannot legitimately live where one’s ancestors were not. In a weird way, the historical returners do a full swing to the xenophobic anti-immigrant types. (There are people who I’ve heard seriously argue that accepting Palestinian refugees is literally genocide.)
Exactly. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything since we all share the same ancestry, going back to the same primates or something[0]. We should focus on the issues at hand and work to avoid making the situation worse. Forcing all Israelites or Palestinians to leave is not a feasible solution. The problem needs to be addressed through peaceful negotiations and immediate support for those in need.
> The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi
Wrong, Mizrahi are the majority.
> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria
I don't know hope you did it, but wrong again, DNA studies show Ashkenazim have a large Canaanite DNA component. The other part is largely Italian due to admixture within the Roman Empire which forcibly annexed Judea.
if you trust DNA study, you should know that the same DNA studies show that Palestinians are the ones who are native to the land of Palestine, not ashkenazi!
you cannot claim to be native to the land, just based on some fairy tale non-scientific religious book, and stuff that happened some 2000+ years ago.
even if you decide to trust the religious book, you should know that jewish exile is a G-d's punishment for sins and a gift - so that jewish people can be a light to other nations and build a better world for everyone
> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD
Probably not worth reading your comment past this sentence.
You’re confusing something…
They are from Eastern Europe through the way of Germany and probably Italy (where they likely did quite a bit of mixing with the local before becoming mostly genetically isolated) prior to that.
False, there is a lot of wiggle room open for interpretation in your “DNa studies”.
I need to tell Israeli professor of history Sholomo Sand from Tel-Aviv University that he is a white supremacist antisemite for pushing his Khazarian theory and bringing all the receipts in his book
Yes, genetics studies are open to interpretation, but not the interpretation that Ashkenazi are completely unrelated to other Jews. The evidence simply does not support that.
Sholomo Sand is not a geneticist nor was his hypothesis based on genetics. The fact that he's a Israeli history professor doesn't mean much here. The man didn't want to be a Jew, religiously or ethnically, and found the most complete way to accomplish it.
No, the claim of ashkenazi as being native to the Filistine while completely ignoring arabs who have vastly more native component of DNA by any measure.
Also jewish DNA is closest to northeastern anatolian component that is being suppressed as non politically convenient
I don't think this "claim to land" works in the modern age.
Countries were established and fought for in blood all thorough history, and the winners kept their land. End of story.
Unless we are talking about some remote village, every single country was funded on blood and violence, and after a certain point it just makes no sense to track it.
By that logic, the claim that the land is exclusively(!) Jewish because this used to be the territory of the Jewish state ~2000 years ago works even less though.
Fair enough. With that in mind, at what point does it no longer make sense to track it?
There must be some principled position where you can argue when it does and or does not make sense. In the case of this conflict, we're talking about a conflict where a few folks that directly experienced it are still alive and that many folks whose parents experienced it are still alive.
The Nakba is more recent than the Holocaust by a few years. Should it get the same treatment? Countries like Germany are still paying reparations.
In the US, we constantly have discussions about the institution of slavery in the US that ended in 1865. Jim Crow laws are more recent injustice however and only ended in 1865.
The Ukraine likewise had the Holodomor. There's actually a fascinating video of Abe Foxman of the ADL speaking with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, telling him that it would be unproductive to talk about "your genocide, our genocide", but at the end of the day that's what we have here and it only seems fair to give comparable treatment for comparable catastrophes.
Speaking of catastrophe, I've always found it somewhat ironic that the word Nakba and the word Shoah (the original vernacular used to describe the Holocaust before it was replaced in the late 60s) both have the same meaning. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe and Shoah is the Yiddish word for catastrophe.
I'm not saying where that line should or should not be, but it only seems fair that if we're going to draw a line that victims of different but comparable injustices should be given comparable treatment.
Genealogical research shows the strongest link between the ancient Canaanites and the current middle east population is with the Palestinians and Lebanese. There are some genetic links between Palestinians and the ancient Israelites with this theory that many converted to Islam after the invasion.
However, you are correct in that many historians describe the population was added to, and never replaced. Supporting the DNA links.
From this I would conclude that the Palestinians are indigenous through the pre-colonial link. Most Jews in Israel are not indigenous but they share cultural links and lets not forget the wars they won in 1948 and 1967.
What is bizarre, is the ban on genetic testing for Palestinians and this pseudo-history in Israel that Palestinians never existed. Something distorted is being taught in Israel at many levels.
You’re conflating two theories: one widespread, and one fringe. The theory that the Ashkenazi population experienced a bottleneck is widely accepted; claiming that Ashkenazim are actually a remnant of the Khazar Khanganate[1] is both fringe and typically associated with antisemitic conspiracies.
(Note that I say antisemitic, and not in a manner that involves conflation with Zionism: going against the overwhelming majority of generic evidence to make a claim about a Jewish ethnic group that doesn’t even majority reside in Israel reeks of a blood-and-boden anger against Jews because of who they are.)
Fair enough. I didn't realize that the Khazar hypothesis was fringe. I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.
What is still fair to say is that many Jews in Israel do not actually have a continued occupation of that land going back thousands of years as was claimed by the person I was originally responding to.
4% in 1872 is a very low number. Absent the mass immigration that diluted the local population and a Nakba that expulsed many, that 4% population there in 1872 would still be about 4% of the population today give or take a few percentage points assuming the fertility rate of that 4% and the 96% percent that were not Jewish were comparable.
Many of the Jews that are in Israel today are of European descent (i.e. no thousands of years of continued occupation of Palestine) and many of the Jews that are in Israel today that are of Arabic descent are there due to Zionist terrorism from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah prior to 1948 and the mass migration from around the Arab-Israeli war. For example, Avi Shlaim from Oxford University has given numerous interviews on the terrorism committed by Zionists in Iraq to coerce the Middle Eastern Jewish populations to concentrate in Palestine as part of the Zionist project.
What is indisputable is that the claim of a continued presence of Israel/Palestine by Jews going back thousands of years really only applies to a very small percent of Jews in Israel. The reality is that that number is most certainly dwarfed by the quantity of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that can claim to have "lived there for thousands and thousands of years" per the person I was replying to.
> I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.
Where?
I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop. Israeli Jews shouldn't use them to justify continuing to displace Palestinian Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs shouldn't use them to justify displacing the millions of Jews who live there now.
To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups, with both Southern European (Roman period) and Northern European (medieval onwards) admixtures. Some people use this to make irredentist arguments, which leads to ridiculous (and antisemitic) responses like the Khazar hypothesis. But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.
Can't think of any particular sources off the top of my head. It shows up from time to time in different places.
> I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop.
I generally agree. I generally argue for reciprocity and even handedness. If someone else claims a certain argument as legitimate, then it's fair to use that same argument for counterclaims. In this case, the person I was replying to was making the "blood-and-boden argument", which means it is fair to apply that same argument to the counterclaim for those against whom they feel entitled to the same territory.
Me? I have no dog in this fight as my ancestry is so far removed that I can't claim it. My take is that if you go back in your ancestry and you can't point to a single named ancestor in your family tree (unbroken. you have to know everyone between you and that person), then you really can't claim connection to a place as you can't physically place a specific ancestor in a specific community (town, city, village), much less a controlling interest or other form of ownership. I've researched my family tree back to about the 1500s. That's about as far back as 99% of people can claim because written records largely dry up in the 1500s, with the exception of some folks with ties to nobility.
In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?
> To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups.
A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry. Pretty much all Europeans have paternal and maternal haploproups whose origin is in the Middle East. In fact, I would reckon that the only individuals in Europe today that don't claim ancestry to the Middle East would be folks whose ancestors migrated directly from Africa to Europe. Almost everyone else from Europe is going to be able to claim the Middle East. https://vimeo.com/50531435
> But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.
Makes sense. I'm going to incorporate that into my understanding here. Thanks for the corrections.
As a followup, I just did some googling and it looks like Ashkenazi Canaanite ancestry likely originated around 1000 BC.
According to Wikipedia, it looks like the Northern Kingdom of Israel was established around 900 BC and the Kingdom of Judah existed around 850 BC.
Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).
That all said, I'm still with you that blood-and-boden arguments are bad, but if folks are going to make that claim it's still worth asking questions about whether that claim is any stronger than the blood-and-boden arguments presented by others.
> In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?
If I had one, I would be a moderately successful philosopher instead of a moderately successful software engineer :-)
I don't think there's a good "just" definition for control of territory: claims of original or ancestral ownership are hard to verify (and subject to this kind of hell-in-a-cell irredentism), while "working" definitions uniformly favor the most ruthless or powerful party.
Instead of arguing for rightful possession on lines of originality or power, I often think counterfactually: who would, all things being equal, be the ideal stewards of a piece of land? Under that framing the answer is almost always a secular, liberal democracy where national ties are more significant than ethnic or religious ones.
Very few of those exist, and the ones that do are strikingly imperfect.
> A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry.
It really depends on what you mean by "reach." As noted above, the Ashkenazim had a significant population bottleneck event, and are genetically distinguishable from other peoples living in Central and Northern Europe. Whether that makes them "closer" to Levantine ancestry or not depends on your perspective: you could argue that they admixed relatively little given their isolation from their original ethnic group, or you could argue that the admixture that occurred was proportionately significant.
> Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).
I don't know if it's a logical error or not, but it's an incomplete picture:
* The Jews that became Ashkenazim left the Levant in multiple waves, for multiple reasons (anthropologists will say things like "push and pull factors," which really just means "some were pushed out by hardships, and others were pulled away by opportunities, etc.").
* The likely ancestry of Ashkenazim dates back to ~900-1000BC, but this doesn't itself represent a date range for when they left the Levant. To make it intuitive: there's no distinction between someone living in the Levant in 300 BC with that ancestry and someone living outside the Levant with that same ancestry: they'd look the same in terms of the genetic record.
* Historical records aren't very detailed for the period, but a significant record of Jewish Levant-Europe migration comes from the decades following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Josephus (who is Jewish, but is writing as a Roman citizen) records around 100,000 enslaved on just one occasion among several[1]. These slaves were likely transported further into the empire for labor in both Greece and Italy, which in turn is a likely explanation for the Southern European genetic component within the Ashkenazim.
TL;DR: There's more than one factor that explains the flight of Jews from the Levant. However, our strongest historical record for large scale migration strongly suggests that the bulk of what became the Ashenazim arrived in Southern Europe in the first and second centuries, and then moved further into Central and Northern Europe during the Late Empire and Early Medieval periods. That migration was in turn primarily caused by "push" factors (mass enslavement and murder following the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt), followed by subsequent "pull" factors (subsequent normalization of Jewish status in the Roman empire, stable lives outside of a post-temple Levant, etc.).
I think you're confusing me with other folks on HN. I value cohesive high trust societies so I'm personally in favor of assimilation and much more gradual changes to any culture.
I think a change from 96% to 67% in 76 years is a catastrophe for culture indigenous to a region, and it's not a surprise that the Nakba followed such a rapid change without assimilation. The rate should be one where outsiders coming into a society become part of that society instead of splintering the society.
In chemistry terms, it's the difference between a solution, emulsions, suspensions and mixtures. In my mind, the goal should be cultural "solutions". If the rate of change is such that you end up with enclaves that resist mixing, then that leads to decline of trust and civic engagement. You end up with a society that is highly political and fragmented and liable to balkanize and potentially engage in armed civil conflict.
Arab is not a race. Most Arabs never arrived from anywhere, they were locals who adopted (often violently, sometimes not) large parts of Arab culture for long enough to consider themselves Arabs.
The Arabians never had the resources or population to engage in settler colonialism you are thinking of. Even if they wanted to (and perhaps they did), they just couldn't go around replacing anyone. So from the start the conception of Arab is about peoples slowly becoming Arab, not being replaced by arriving Arabs, in large part.
This is true of most old empires. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, early Ottomans generally don't setttle areas they conquer. They don't engage in industrial extraction either. They form a ruling class and collect taxes. Any cultural influence that have was because of longevity rather than any interest in forced conversion. People project their impressions of more modern empires to pre-industrial ones that didn't have the same aspirations or even institutions to accomplish those aspirations.
That's really not true, e.g. the wikipedia page on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[1]. This dates way back to the Assyrian and Persian empries explicitly moving conquered peoples around in their empires in order to safeguard their rule. This book on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[2] explicitly states, with references, that the Ottomans habits were inherited from the steppe Turks, the Byzantines (=the Romans) and the Arabs.
there are several flaws in your typical zionist argument:
1. jews as a minority have lived in the lands of Filistine and Jerusalem peacefully and coexisted just fine for millennia, before the zionist project.
2. the fact that small minority of jews lived there does not give an excuse to ethnically cleanse the local population of arabs.
3. the claim that modern european jews from Rhine and pale of settlement (AshkeNazi) have any connection to ancient Israelites from 2000+ years ago is laughable. Most genetic analysis proved that it is Palestinians, Jordanian Christians are native to the land, not european settlers from Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine with last names like Mileikowsky (Bibi's actual name), Mabovitch (golda's name) etc.
4. Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.
5. All studies have shown that Israel/zionism is a colonial settler project created by Brits to secure Suez Canal from the ottomans. Later it would become American "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the middle east to bomb and murder oil rich countries in the middle east
> Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.
Oy vey, granada is in Spain, you just proved my point that antisemitic pogroms are purely european thing.
Iraqi jews did not even want to migrate to Israel and leave Iraq. Mossad had to organize several bombings and false flags to scare the Iraqi jews and force them to migrate[1]
in other arab states, Ben Gurion paid money to encourage jews to immigrate and settle Filistine. Moroccan king begged jewish community to stay and not to immigrate
Granada in 1066 wasn't Spain, it was the Taifa of Granada in Al-Andalus. That part of the peninsula was fully invaded and governed by muslims. Already for two centuries. The massacre perpetrators were a muslim mob.
You're being presented with perfectly valid arguments, clearly proving that your point is false, and still insisting on ignoring them because they don't agree with your narrative.
The grand point still stands: when compared to Europe, Arab world largely coexisted and lived peacefully with jewish community. Until zionist settlers showed up.
Antisemitism is purely european concept, and some might argue that expulsion of jewish people from Europe to Middle East was the original Final Solution by Hitler (before he decided to just kill everyone).
So all that Zionists have achieved is just realized the dreams of Adolf Hitler
The Hebron, Mufti of Jerusalem and arab nationalism. The recent synagogue attacks, the examples are so countless that we even have an extra word for it. Oy vey, indeed, if you think that underlines your point.
Everything else about this aside: the reason most European Jews have Europeanized last names is because they were forced to adopt them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries[1].
(Also, why spell it “AshkeNazi”? That seems inflammatory with no connection to reality, since the root is Ashkenaz.)
1. ICC and ICJ's accusations of genocide by israel
2. israeli government led by Kahanite leaders like bezalel smotrich and ben gvir. Kahanism was recognized by USA and EU as a terrorist organization with fascist ideology and is named after terrorist meir kahane
3. public announcements by israeli leaders and journalists about "Israel needs Lebensraum"[a], dreams of conquering greater israel from Nile to Euphrates[b] stealing land from 6 other countries
There are way too many similarities between nazi germany and the zionist regime
There’s no connection between Nazism and the word Ashkenazi itself. Ashkenazi just means “someone from Ashkenaz,” which is what early medieval Jews called Germany.
(It’s almost impossible to engage with this comment, because of how ridiculous it is: for one, the majority of Ashkenazi Jews don’t even live in Israel. For another, intentionally using an ethnic identity as a stand-in for Nazism is cartoonishly offensive.)
The ICC has not accused Israel (or any Israeli leader) of criminal genocide. They have accused them of some other things, many serious,but not genocide.
The ICJ hasn't ruled on the south africa case, so i think its wrong to say they have accused Israel. South Africa has accused, the ICJ is in the process of deciding if their accusation has merit but hasn't ruled yet.
I agree that it's not ethnic cleansing, but that's an awful support. Just because you're bad at evil doesn't make you not evil. Like, I assume Israel's population has gone up since October 7, which doesn't make it any less attempted genocide.
That’s cool and all but the Israelis are in Israel already, there’s no turning back the clock on Zionism without the mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to.
Palestinians have a legitimate historical claim and so do Israelis. They’re exactly that, historical. If both sides can’t let those be history, it’s either eternal conflict or the elimination of one of them.
Ethnocentric racism is never good and it is, indeed, rampant in Israel, but it's hard to compare European colonialism to Zionism for a few reasons. The cultural and historical affinity of Jews, including Jews residing in Europe, was nothing like that of Europeans to the Americas, Africa, or East Asia. For well over a millennium Jews were praying for a return to Zion three times a day, even after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its later conquest (from the Byzantine Empire) by the Arab Islamic Empire, there have been many (small) migrations of Jews to the area [1], there has been an uninterrupted (small) presence of Jews there, and Jews in Europe were considered "racially" oriental "semites". Unlike European-style settler- or exploitation colonialism, there wasn't any metropole to Zionism, in the name of which colonisation was taking place. Finally, the bigger migration by modern Zionism in the time of the Ottoman Empire (that is when this conflict started, not under the Brits, who came into the picture -- after Tel Aviv was a city), came as a result of difficulties the Jews experienced in Europe and the Russian Empire, and certainly not on behalf of those powers.
That's not to say that Israel (like all countries in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand) isn't a form of settler colonialism [1], sometimes openly and consciously so, but it is different from European colonialism (and in some respects it can be different for the worse, at least compared to some specific European colonies).
So yes, some things are simple, but your comparisons to things that were quite different actually shows how other things are not so simple. But it is precisely because history is often complex and almost never easily generalisable that I hate using it either as moral justification or condemnation of present events. I don't think that the fact both Arabs and Jews came to the Levant through migration and conquest (even according to both culture's own national mythology) has any bearing on present moral responsibility. In the end, as you say, ethnocentric nationalism is just wrong.
That is wrong. There were conflicts before, the Hebron massacre (1929) for example. There was an Arab nationalism and the Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler and planned a middle-eastern Holocaust.
Also, Jews were expelled from surrounding nations when Israel was founded, even more than Palestinians were driven from what now is Israel. There never was any compensation or talk about their right to return and these are not Jews with European ancestry.
Frankly, I think not a single statement of yours is true.
Whose colony is Israel? Do you even understand what this word means?
You are just parroting some propaganda lines that you don't understand. The propaganda lines that were specifically constructed to appeal to emotions (by referencing European colonialism that started with exploring Africa and India with subsequent conquest, which did result in many bad things, but has nothing to do with what happened in Israel beyond some superficial similarity).
Colonialism was bad because the colonial powers took freedoms away from the local population, siphoned their wealth to the country-colonizer while devastating the colony's inhabitants. Israel did nothing of sorts. It never wanted to have anything to do with the local population. In fact, one of the major sources of conflict was that Jewish population that came to replace the Turks who owned the land worked by the locals didn't want the locals to work that land anymore. And the landless peasants thus became unemployed / unemployable.
So, Arabs living in Israel used to be servants to the Turks, but once Jews replaced the Turks, and "freed" the Arabs, the later discovered themselves to be useless and without means of sustaining themselves. Not a good spot to be in, but hey, at least now they were "free" (I do use this ironically, I don't think they wanted that kind of freedom). Arabs, of course, thought about former Turkish land as their own (because they used to work it), but it's no more theirs than it is Jewish or whoever else inhabited that area historically.
Bottom line, claiming land based on some historical past that was cancelled by more recent historical events is a road to nowhere. And if you try to follow it, Jews probably have a better claim to that territory than Arabs, who invaded and occupied that territory later.
But, more importantly, today, the conflict isn't even about the land at all. All major players would be willing to make territorial concessions, if the core of the problem was addressed. And people are at the core of the problem, not the land. Something needs to be done with the Arabs inhabiting the occupied territories: they need to get some kind of a political status with an eye to permanency. Either completely abandon the program of building an independent state and join some other country, or the opposite. But neither seems likely. And so the conflict will go on for as long as this issue isn't solved.
It's 'not complicated' if one is lazy. The comment is missing a lot of mitigating pieces of information:
- the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent
- the lack of options for Jews facing persecution, pograms and a holocaust given immigration policies of nations around the world
- the many Jews in Israel formerly from middle-eastern nations
- the complication to the birth-right citizenship argument that all Jews have Israeli ancestry (albeit very distant, in many cases)
- the UN Partition Plan for Palestine
The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. It's not the Palestinians' fault that their land was least bad refuge for Jews, but it probably was.
>The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right.
So true on a theoretical basis, and at the same time both sides are wrong for fighting on that same basis.
Leaving the only sensible participants those who are committed to complete non-violence for a few generations, no-one else could possibly have beneficial actionable input without making things worse.
>the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent
You have my upvote but I consider this a fairly weak argument from all sides.
After WWII there were only three kinds of people remaining on my home planet:
1. Those that won WWII.
2. Those that lost WWII.
3. Those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.
Everyone else was killed.
Sure, it's a fresh start, but pretty gloomy when you think about it.
The winners rightly would be expected to take the lead from that point on, drawing lines of co-operation highly focused on preventing any more worldwide conflict in any predictable way. Definitely for the foreseeable future at the time, and it has proven to work more effectively than any other peace initiative in human history. Relative to the overall threat.
Anyone who was saved by the winners of WWII and was not completely delighted with the outcome has certainly never had legitimate grounds for complaint considering the alternative. How quickly some people can forget.
Then again religious hatred and/or superstition can misguide some otherwise intelligent people from just about anywhere, and this is nothing new since cave men were all there was.
Of course it's been quite a while since prehistoric times, so too late now, nothing that happened before WWII will ever be a reason for further conflict ever. They'd have to be a complete moron.
Looks like the world had settled into its most peaceful time by about 1950.
Realistically the only major war that remained was a cold one after that, and regardless of whether you were unappreciatively saved by the winners of WWII, or happened to be disgruntled losers, the only way to change it was to start WWIII. At one time everybody knew that.
Which "everyone" also knew would take one hell of a suicidal maniac, but if it happened it would probably be dealt with along the lines of how Kamikaze tactics were proven to be overcome when the scale reached world-threatening proportions.
It was already the 20th century with worldwide communication and everything, and the century was only halfway along. Naturally with such a worldwide war brought to conclusion without complete destruction everywhere, previous conflict up until that time had been made as equally prehistoric as in 19,500 BC ever since.
How could people forget so easily? Who would possibly be suicidal enough to let that kind of bloodthirsty hatred rule again?
I think my wording was a bit vague there. By 'two empires', I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948 (ie: the Ottoman, and then the British).
When zionism came about, Palestinian arabs were not in power and could not determine policy.
Zionist jews spend years wrangling (sometimes violently) promises and concessions from the British, and finally from the UN, who, at the time, seemed like the legitimate bodies to grant them.
In retrospect, 'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?' but that's with the benefit of hindsight.
Not that either side is evil... it's a complicated conflict.
>I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948
That's the kind of thing I think people should be able to disregard altogether.
Not just because it's ancient history of the Middle East, but the whole world went through so much.
After all that, it was not supposed to matter any more what happened before.
Almost all the lucky survivors could move forward and there was maximum worldwide consensus that non-violence was the way to go.
Even some of the absolute losers of the war moved forward non-violently to a better outcome than any other way.
The Hatfields & McCoys were never going to stop feuding either, until they declared multi-generational peace, that's the amount of time it takes for co-existence to eventually give way to constructive interaction, rather than destructive interaction.
>'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?'
Exactly what I mean, doesn't matter what anybody anywhere did before the war.
It was only after the war when the British came out on the winning side, that made them an arbiter of these kind of things. If the Germans would have won it surely would have been much worse, with an entire political party focused primarily on spreading hatred and oppression as a growth tactic.
No traditional business or inherent right to govern was responsible for British decisions that were capable of shaping destiny.
The Crown just happened to already be there actually keeping the peace before the war, until the British empire was threatened across the entire world, and peace completely lost on the planet. I like to keep in mind that you could have spent the war years in isolated communities on a number of continents and had no knowledge whatsoever that a war had even taken place. You were still saved by the ones that won WWII, there's no getting around it.
Even though the British had gotten there in the first place because of their own misguided war-like efforts of conquest, that didn't give them legitimate rights to anything.
Their empire was actively reversing all kinds of war-like tendencies like never before, along with every other person no matter what their religion or culture, that a peaceful world was suitable for. And withdrawing from an occupation that was quite painful itself.
You know, reversing like the Hatfields & McCoys. Remember if a hateful violent culture develops, and generations go by without resolution it never really matters any more what they are fighting for. Nope. Never. Really. Matters. And it can get a lot worse when the population grows with each generation because pretty soon there are not enough mountains for everybody.
Things were pretty simple with only 3 kinds of people for a while, but since prehistoric times there's often been some violence-prone contingent that would not be compatible with world peace without major change in attitude & behavior.
The world-wide window of opportunity for complete non-violence that opened after the war will never close until WWIII.
It's what you do with it that matters until then.
For those few that failed to quit shooting you could say that it's like the war never ended for them so they're stuck in a historical impasse. But the day the war ended it pushed any continuing conflicts right into the "prehistoric" category along with all the ancient stuff that would best be non-glorified if not completely forgotten because that's what's proven to work so well.
Once it was proven that almost the entire world could become deathly hateful of their adversaries, then stop shooting and rapidly turn it around for unprecedented co-operation, then anybody can do it, and those who failed to heed the example have only worsened their own outcomes.
Just like my hillbilly ancestors did for so many generations. Nobody who actually had academic schools could have taught the lessons of WWII until it was over anyway. Even those with academic traditions going back millennia, if they didn't stop teaching anything that could lead to violence after that, then they have failed worse than the most illiterate hillbilly. Lots of those mountain dwellers didn't even get schools until the 20th century.
The feuding parties were as hateful and uneducated as people can get. You don't want to be like them any more, you want to learn how not to be like them so you don't get stuck in permanent hate. If that means forgetting the past, maybe that's the only way to learn sometimes. To some extent it could have been easier to declare peace without very much tradition of formal indoctrination.
The most effective teaching could turn out to be teaching how to forget.
The first thing that always needs to be done is to stop shooting, who knew?
>it's a complicated conflict.
It stays complicated, even after the shooting stops.
That deserves a proper response, but I find its length too intimidating to come up with a suitable one.
If we view the conflict from such a high level, I also have a take. My take is basically 'utilitarian': nobody anywhere in the world has a right to live anywhere outside of what other people accept (or other people tolerate, at least).
From my point of view, it's a waste of time to argue over who has a 'right' to the land based on birth-right, history, religion, etc; both sides make sound arguments to those ends.
What matters, in my view, is only what arrangement will placate all the parties involved (jews, muslims, and other).
It's a 120 year old feud, quite a lot, and even with a one sided extremist view such as your own I would at least hope anti semitism, pogroms, the holocaust and the right for self determination would make you see there's at least a bit of complexity here.
Also - even if this take was true , what's your end game - all states based on past colonialism need to be abolished ? Or is that the right solution only for Israel. E.g if Mexico starts bombing the U.S to get back Mexico, parts of Texas etc, we should all support them right?
"The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud"
Well, actually, it is.
There were 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid up until the caliphate was defeated and broken up in 1920/1924. For 1200 years, non-muslims lived under apartheid (Dhimmi). Up until that point, Islamic supremacism was as firmly established as white supremacism was in America.
I suppose if America (which itself was built on war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid) was defeated in WWI, broken up into various nations, and some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? After all, at that time, Native Americans accounted for only .25% of the population. Since there were so few of them it would make no sense for them to have their own nation.
Wars have consequences. Many ethnic groups lost their lands due to the expansion of the caliphate over 1200 years. The caliphate was then defeated, and things have changed.
"... ethno-centric racism are never good".
While in no way saying that this supports the idea that "ethno-centric racism" is good, you should read the constitutions of the 22 Arab countries in the Arab League. They have, as their basic principals that they are Arab/Muslim countries, and have Islam/Sharia as their law. So, are all of these countries also illegitimate ? Or, just Israel ? Or maybe America should change its constitution to declare that America is a white European country based on Christian law ?
> some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ?
You know that would have been great. But who are the native Americans in your example? Majority of Zionists that established Israel and their groups arrived by ships from Europe. Wouldn't that more resemble England and Spain colonization expeditions in your example? Weird.. like the story almost matches exactly to the how colonies were established
Such an ironic example to give voluntarily.
Let's take a look at the background of Israel's founding fathers and where did they came from:
- David Ben-Gurion - Poland
- Aharon Zisling - Belarus
- David Remez - Russia
- Pinchas Rosen - Germany
- Moshe Sharett - Ukraine
- Haim-Moshe Shapira - Belarus
- Yehuda Leib Maimon - Moldova
- Mordechai Bentov - Russia
- ...
Case in point, most weren't natives who lived there under "apartheid" but actually left Europe looking for a new land, backed by... England and the US (Sorry Spain, not this time).
If you're struggling to use the real events in history and have to resort to a "hypothesis", it's a sign something is off and you're twisting history a bit too much. At least make sure it's not ironic, next time.
If you were a European Jew in the late 1940s after the fall of the Nazis, you were still faced with the prospect of living under the local governance of Nazi collaborators, continued pogroms [0] and antisemitism, and potentially Joseph Stalin's USSR. It's not like everything immediately went back to normal, either in real terms or psychological ones. Even if you survived your friends, family and neighbors are GONE.
It's unsurprising that many wouldn't want to reintegrate with that society after what they experienced, even if they managed to avoid the camps (and especially if they didn't).
It is ridiculous to just throw them into the same category with the English and Spanish colonists searching for riches in the New World.
Migrating to Palestine and living in that land is not an issue in itself. I wish them prosperity much like everyone else. The problem is the crimes that were committed by the Zionist militias such as Irgun who were viewed as terrorists orgs even under UK mandate, in additions to the settlements and establishing an apartheid state later:
1. Kicking millions of Palestinians out of their homes and villages and building illegal settlements
2. Massacres committed with no accountability (soldiers posing and documenting it, not fog of war)
Both of these practices are STILL ONGOING and have been for almost a century.
Then regular civilians come from all over the world to live in those illegal settlements and justify it or claim they have nothing to do with the atrocities when they're a major support for it and why the suffering continues.
Many more problems were results of Israel being built on ethno-religious foundations:
3. Giving refuge to pedophiles (wanted by US and INTERPOL) because they're Jewish? WTF? [1]
4. The recent rape and sexual harassment of prisoners [2]. Israeli protestors went to the streets and even rioted to defend the soldiers accused of it and were proud of their actions. Tell me how should I feel when I see them doing that?
5. The attack on World Central Kitchen convoy? [3] Killing 7 aid workers in multiple clearly marked vehicles on a coordinated mission with the IDF. What came of it? They just laid off a couple of people like the commander Nochi Mandel who oversaw the attack. The same commander signed an open letter to block humanitarian aid. So what is the punishment for killing 7 innocent aid workers? You move to the private sector it seems with higher pay grade.
Fuck me! Any group that commit such crimes and act proud with no shame are lunatics and should be held accountable but this doesn't seem to happen in Israel. Even the citizens seem to take pride in it. [4]
My problem isn't with specific group. I'm referring to Israel as a state. I don't care about the religion of its people or what land they live on as long it's lawful and they're no committing war crimes. I'd feel the same about crimes in Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Africa.
There is nothing made up about 1200 years of oppression by an empire that was built on conquest, numerous forms of slavers, ethnic cleaning, and genocide.
This is not something that happened thousands of years ago, it ended 100 years ago, and is directly relevant to what is going on today.
The fact that some of the founders of Israel were the descendants of those who fled their native lands due to oppression does not change anything, any more than Palestinians who are born in different countries would no longer have ties to their homeland in the Middle East.
And yes, I firmly believe that the Palestinians have a right to a country of their own, but not at the cost of eliminating Israel and imposing sharia law
> The fact that some of the founders of Israel were the descendants of those who fled their native lands
Only some founders were foreigners? Do you want the full list? Literally none, 0%, were "native", born in the region or anywhere near it, here's the full list of people who signed it and where they came from:
- David Ben-Gurion (Poland)
- Daniel Auster (Ukraine)
- Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (Ukraine)
- Mordechai Bentov (Poland)
- Eliyahu Berligne (Belarus)
- Fritz Bernstein (Germany)
- Rachel Cohen-Kagan (Ukraine)
- Eliyahu Dobkin (Belarus)
- Yehuda Leib Fishman (Moldova)
- Wolf Gold (Poland)
- Meir Grabovsky (Moldova)
- Avraham Granovsky (Moldova)
- Yitzhak Gruenbaum (Poland)
- Kalman Kahana (Poland)
- Eliezer Kaplan (Belarus)
- Avraham Katznelson (Belarus)
- Saadia Kobashi (Yemen)
- Moshe Kolodny (Belarus)
- Yitzhak-Meir Levin (Poland)
- Meir David Loewenstein (Denmark)
- Zvi Luria (Poland)
- Golda Meyerson (Ukraine)
- Nahum Nir (Poland)
- David-Zvi Pinkas (Hungary)
- Felix Rosenblueth (aka Pinchas Rosen) (Germany)
- David Remez (Belarus)
- Berl Repetur (Ukraine)
- Zvi Segal (Poland)
- Mordechai Shatner (Ukraine)
- Ben-Zion Sternberg (Ukraine)
- Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit (Morocco)
- Haim-Moshe Shapira (Belarus)
- Moshe Shertok (Ukraine)
- Herzl Vardi (Lithuania)
- Meir Vilner (Lithuania)
- Zerach Warhaftig (Belarus)
- Aharon Zisling (Belarus)
37 signatories, and not a single one were from that land or had any clear links to it whatsoever. You act like it was to protect the locals but not a single one was present? How much clearer do you want to it to be? It was a land grab from the very beginning
Before the Balfour Declaration, the British promised the region to the Arabs if they helped fight against the Ottoman Empire via the McMahon–Hussein correspondence:
Basically, the region was double promised to both sides during WWI, Arabs in the region being promised it first. This crucial detail is somehow often left out of any discussion regarding the Balfour Declaration even though it preceded it.
You truly fail to realize that there were people living there, and it wasn't an empty plot of land that could get promised by the British to one group or the other?
I think the Israeli and Palestinian authorities would let atheists decide their problems as long as they agree with what they want, baring that, your argument probably isn't going to land with any of them on its merits, especially if it calls their religions "mythology."
I think there's some more you can learn today. The Jewish people have been around well before Christ or Muhammad - some where around 1000 BCE not since the Balfour declaration. That doesn't mean anything regarding this comment thread but that you should know the difference between Jewish people and Israel the state.
> The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to.
What? Palestinians don't claim the land based on a promise by God. They claim it because they hold the legal documents going back for centuries. Even those expelled in 1948, still have the fucking keys covered with their grandparents blood after the Nakba ethnic cleansing.
You know what? let's forget about legal documents, about who is native to the land by DNA, since it's you know "complicated", right?
1. Zionists today (not a story in the past) continue to put outposts in Palestinians farms to snatch more and more land.
2. Israeli troops and settlers killed 171 Palestinian children in the west bank (an area smaller than Delaware) in 2024 alone [1].
3. They continue building illegal settlements on Palestinians land that's illegal even by US admission.
4. Israel is taking advantage of the power vacuum in Syria and advancing deeper inside Syria borders while taking more and more cities. It's literally provoking and asking for another war where they will claim they were victims.
5. The blood of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is still fresh [2] and more crimes in the past with no one held accountable, soldiers are literally posing and filming their war crimes with no accountability. Many humanitarian orgs believe the number of those killed is actually undercounted as many are still undocumented.
They celebrates killing babies (who they claim will be terrorists of course) so soldiers are praised and incentivized to annex entire blood line like savages.
Here's a challenge for you: Emit labels like "Palestinians" and "Israelis" and ask someone with no prejudice, hearing it for the first time, "who is in the wrong?" If you are honest and not manipulative you'll get your answer.
But nah let's stick to the theory that the entire world is against us and respond to any other theory that it's "complicated" while continue committing war crimes openly admitted by our soldiers ever since Israel was established.[3]
Do you agree that everyone who was involved in war crimes to be held responsible, no matter what ethnicity, religion, or passport they hold? That is the core of the problem, Israeli have done more terrible things than the side they claim as terrorists.
If I try to use ancient religions to justify violently forcing a claim to your house and land, then you're entirely within your right to defend yourself by any means necessary. That's not a thing any more. This might help you understand: [0]
And, many Jewish people decry Zionism as a perversion.
The background behind the current conflict goes something like this:
Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down. The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British. The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it. The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them. They lose. The Jews gain more territory. The Arab parts of Palestine get annexed into Jordan and Egypt.
Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less.
Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area. Even during the Ottoman Era. In fact, Zionism started during the Ottoman Era. Also relatively few people lived in Palestine, less than a million total in 1922. And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs (plenty of Jews lived all over the middle east).
You completely left out the Nakba. Which you would have to to even attempt to make this point.
> The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them.
I assume you're talking about the "Arab Invasion" of 1948? So, that would be after the Nakba started. In fact, Deir Yassin occured only a month before Israel was founded.
You're very obviously leaving out facts not in an attempt to be succinct but to obscure the actual history.
> The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends.
There is a lot to say about this part, but just one point: the plan included the establishment of a Palestinian state which Israel has blocked since its inception. So no, they did not abide by the plan. The plan has never been implemented.
>Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down.
It's wrong to reduce Zionism as solely a reaction to european hostility, such narrative simplifies the origins of Zionism by framing it purely as a reaction to European anti-Semitism, ignoring other cultural, religious, and political factors. Zionism also emerged from a broader context of national self-determination movements in Europe. Those European Zionists were also quite racist and did describe the native population of Palestine with the hebrew N-word "kushim" which had to be ethnically cleansed:
"Neither Zangwill nor Weizmann intended these demographic assessments in a literal fashion. They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway. In this connection, a comment by Weizmann to Arthur Ruppin, the head of the colonization department of the Jewish Agency, is particularly revealing. When asked by Ruppin about the Palestinian Arabs, Weizmann replied: "The British told us that there are there some hundred thousands negroes [Kushim] and for those there is no value.” quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
>The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British.
Palestine was occupied by the British, which even the Zionists themselves classified as such. That's why Zionists also bombed the King-David Hotel full of British officers whom they regarded as occupiers of Palestine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
>The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it.
> The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them.
That is brazen zionist propaganda that reframes the zionist colonial project as some poor damsel in distress that was just innocently trying to take over Palestine when the natives just tried to attack the poor jews for no reason. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy56Q1a0Flc]
David Ben-Gurion has also recorded in his writings that the partition was just a starting point and that they would ultimately expand anyway. Most explicitly, he states: "My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning." -https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/04/06/the-ben-gurio...
>Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less.
Again a reductive and zionist summary that is ahistoric and misleading. A more detailed and substantiated account is provided here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy56Q1a0Flc
>Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area.
After the initial Crusader conquest, many Jews who survived the massacres either fled or were expelled. In 1187, Saladin, the Muslim leader of the Ayyubid dynasty, recaptured Jerusalem. He allowed Jews and Muslims to return to the city. This marked a significant restoration of the Jewish community in Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land. Either way, your narrative tries to deny that Zionism is a colonial project but that attempt is in vain, since there is simply too much evidence for that. Zionists also made no secret that it was a colonial project until colonialism became a bad word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Jewish_Colonization_...
> And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs
Another blatant attempt at rewriting of history that omits crucial parts to paint a false narrative. While there was a portion of hostility towards jews as a reaction to the crimes committed by jews in Palestine the main driver were a multitude of reasons such as:
Organized efforts, such as Aliyah Bet, focused on helping Jews immigrate to Israel, often in defiance of British immigration restrictions during the Mandate period.
Zionist organizations conducted educational campaigns to foster a sense of identity and urgency about moving to Israel, emphasizing the need for a national homeland.
In countries like Iraq and Yemen, Zionist emissaries used social and economic pressures to encourage Jews to leave for Israel. This included highlighting the dangers of staying in increasingly hostile environments and emphasizing the opportunities in Israel.
In Iraq, a series of false-flag bombings targeted Jewish sites. Researchers and historians have proven that these attacks were false flag operations carried out by Zionist agents to create a sense of urgency and fear, prompting Jews to emigrate.
The infamous "Lavon Affair" in 1954 involved a failed Israeli covert operation intending to destabilize Egypt by planting bombs in Egyptian, American, and British-owned targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
Operations like "Magic Carpet" (Yemen) and "Ezra and Nehemiah" (Iraq) were launched to bring Jewish communities to Israel. These operations were often portrayed as rescue missions from adverse conditions while the real reason was that they were needed to help with the colonization of Palestine.
>persecution by Arabs
Finally, the zionist attempt to rewrite history regarding the relationship of Muslims with Jews is also dishonest and deceptive. Anyone with basic education in history will see through it:
"David Wasserstein (Vanderbilt University),”How Islam Saved the Jews”
By the early seventh century Judaism was in crisis. In the Mediterranean basin it was battered by legal, social, and religious pressure, weak in numbers and culturally almost non-existent. It was also largely cut off from the Jewry of the Persian empire, in Babylon, present-day Iraq. The future seemed clear: extinction in the west, decline to obscurity in the east. Salvation came from Arabia. Islam conquered the entire Persian empire and most of the Mediterranean world. Uniting virtually all the world’s Jews in a single state, it gave them legal and religious respectability, economic and social freedoms, and linguistic and cultural conditions that made possible a major renaissance of Judaism and the Jews. The significance of Islam for Jewry has been interpreted very variously since the middle ages and is a source of controversy to this day."
The fact Jews emigrated to the Muslim world is an indictment of the Christian one, not praiseworthy for them. If we're killed every Tuesday in Europe but every other Tuesday in the Islamic world and move there it does not mean they were good to us.
Yeah those bad Muslims the "only" thing they ever did was save jewry from extinction and help them flourish and in return we rewarded them with colonization and genocide /s
"First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity...
Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.
But this was all prevented by the rise of Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for the Jews."
- https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/so-what-did-the-muslims-do-f...
The Ottomans definetly deserve a ton of blame, but tbf the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was in the midst of a massive collapse of authority from the Balkans to Basra.
IMO, almost all the instability across Eurasia is because of the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Qajar, Mughal, and Qing Empires.
It would be like if the US, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, snd Mexico all fell into a protracted collapse over 50 years at (roughly) the same time.
Actually it goes back a bit further, basically to the dawn of civilization. The first battle in recorded history was between Egypt and the Hittites, the Battle of Megiddo, in what is today the state of Israel [1].
> Everything in this part of the world is on a rinse snd repeat cycle ever since the Assyrians and the Babylonians
That's an incredible statement, as if the rest of the world is somehow different. The only thing special about these regions is that they've had complex states for longer, so of course state-based warfare would go back farther.
On another level, there absolutely have been periods of stability in regions of the middle east, for periods of time we would consider long.
Western Europe went through ~200 years of brutal religious wars from the advent of Protestantism. The same is going on in the Mideast, it just started only 100 years ago with the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The conflicts with the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Hittites came down to geopolitical factors that don't exist anymore. Mostly, the Levant separated the empires of Mesopotamia and Anatolia from Egypt. The numerous battles that happened at Meggido occurred because that was a chokepoint of the Way of Horus, the principal land trade route from Egypt specifically and Africa generally to the rest of the world. Besides trade, the Levant had tended to serve as a buffer zone between pharaonic Egypt, which preferred hegemony over outright empire, and other empires who always seemed to want to expand towards Egypt. The Assyrian military campaigns in particular are a reaction to the 25th dynasty in Egypt convincing rulers in the Levant to ally themselves more closely with them at the expense of the Assyrians.
The current conflict is a different beast. The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the careless meddling of western powers in the aftermath. The Jewish diaspora, Zionism, and the Holocaust. The Sunni-Shia conflict.
> the Levant separated the empires of Mesopotamia and Anatolia from Egypt. The numerous battles that happened at Meggido
The Egyptians were a major force in fomenting regional frictions with Israel. And the Levant remains a crossroad—it borders by land or sea the spheres of influence of the EU, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf monarchies, Egypt and America.
> convincing rulers in the Levant to ally themselves more closely with them at the expense of the Assyrians
Iran versus the West (and Gulf monarchies) in literally Syria.
The region isn’t pre-destined for chaos. But the geography and history make peace difficult. (There is always another person who can “legitimately” claim some land when you’re sited next to the cradle of civilisation.)
My point, however, is that the Levant as a buffer state against expanding empire and a chokepoint of overland trade has ceased to be the source of conflict. Marine shipping means the Levant is no longer the chokepoint of trade with Africa. We don't have empires trying to grow contiguous swaths of land anymore. To the extent states have tried to grab land in the Levant, they're doing so because the land is adjacent to them, not as a buffer against external empires who find the land strategically useful to control.
They literally razed Bablyon to the ground including the entire population after over 15 months being under siege and afterwards trying to change the lands hydrology so that people couldn't resettle - probably one of the harshest destruction but not the only one.
I guess its an improvement - not one thats remotely impressive.
Are you being metaphorical when you say literally? Or is this a reference to the conquest by Cyrus the Great?
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I'm just not familiar with any historical event you are describing.
From what I've heard, and I'm not an expert, I wouldn't characterize any of the conquests of Babylon as a 'razing', And the eventual abandonment of the city was more a result of slow decline and changing geological conditions.
I do like to learn about the history of the area, so if it's just something I'm not familiar with, please point me in the right direction.
And literally decades later the coronation of Nabopolassar founded the Neo-Babylonian empire, soon before the Assyrian empire that destroyed old Babylon crumbled. It remained a major settlement after the destruction, it just took them a few decades to rise again.
99% of historical accounts about the sacking and destruction of cities are exaggerated. Even Carthage grew as a settlement mere years after the Romans destroyed it (the whole “salting the land” thing is an 18/19th century invention).
That's a bit light on details. Here's an account by king Sennacherib:
> I destroyed the city and its houses, from foundation to parapet; I devastated and burned them. I razed the brick and earthenwork of the outer and inner wall of the city, of the temples, and of the ziggurat; and I dumped these into the Araḫtu canal. I dug canals through the midst of that city, I overwhelmed it with water, I made its very foundations disappear, and I destroyed it more completely than a devastating flood. So that it might be impossible in future days to recognize the site of that city and its temples, I utterly dissolved it with water and made it like inundated land.
However since he was punishing Babylon for rebelling one time too many, he had reason to exaggerate.
Hmm, what do you mean? Like, compared to ancient times, or compared to a previous point post-WWII?
Certainly the organization of one side of this conflict into a state rather than militias naturally has tempered things since the early days where entire villages were being wiped out at random, but both sides are pretty openly engaged in terrorism to this day (targeting civilians for political reasons).
I like how even in this thread, you have many people - almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight - bitterly arguing about who is right and wrong (turning it into a fight about US politics as a bonus). Human nature and tribalism really is a terrible thing sometimes.
I agree with you, although I certainly hope you and I are wrong. It would be nice to see people let go of past injustices on both sides long enough to have a lasting peace.
> It would be nice to see people let go of past injustices on both sides long enough to have a lasting peace
It's not past injustices. Israel is occupying, annexing and settling more land now. It's not some tit-for-tat between neighbours over past wrongs, it's one neighbour that is chasing away the other to take their house.
A lot of Israelis literally had their (or their parents') homes stolen by Iraqis, Egyptians, Moroccans. In total, Mizrahi Jews had land around 4x the size of Israel stolen from them (and they still have the deeds to prove it). A peace treaty can't truly be comprehensive until they get reparations for that injustice.
Are you saying that somehow there is a transitive property between Palestinians and Iraqis or Moroccans so that if a Moroccan steals a house then you can have your right revenge on a Palestinian? And why not on a Swede or a Thai?
Or are you saying that it was all right for Israelis to have their houses stolen then- since it is all right for them to steal houses now, it's just how it goes? I don't get it.
Literally. When you get down to it people just hate Arabs and want to collectively punish them. It's fucking weird and racist. Palestinians do not get to suffer for Arabs from other countries who pushed out the ancient Israelis or Arabs from countries that expelled Mizrahi Jews (lets not even get into how much that was provoked by the Zionist project). They are not collectively responsible.
Not to sound terse, but I think the retort here is clear: morality exists, and it's important that we do our best to follow its guidance. It matters who's right and who's wrong! I absolutely agree that deciding on absolute historical blame for one "side" or another over many generations isn't helpful, but we absolutely need to litigate who's violating whose rights if we want to set things straight.
"It's all complicated and people in this part of the world are unusually tribal/violent" has been used to explain away this conflict since its inception in the US, which we have no right to do as a primary stakeholder. We (US citizens) have a stake in Gaza because the situation would be completely different without our aid, both direct (i.e. massive shipments of weapons and offering the services of our military) & indirect (i.e. using our UNSC vote to block otherwise unanimous resolutions against Israel).
To bring it all back to the one absolutely-litigated conflict in the western canon for clarity, as we so often do: was WWII about "tribalism" and both sides being prone to violence, or was it about unjustified aggressors and justified responses? Despite the nuances of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think we would all immediately endorse the latter position. Why not in this case, too?
WWII involved a conflict to unconditional surrender. The equivalent for Israel and Palestine would be letting one state completely destroy the other and then rebuild it in its own image.
> ...was WWII about "tribalism" and both sides being prone to violence, or was it about unjustified aggressors and justified responses?
All of the above. One of the major powers on the winning side was the British Empire, which existed because of a global campaign of unprovoked invasions that was pretty much unprecedented. And there was Stalin, who may escape the "tribalism" label on the basis that his campaigns of political murder were so wild it is difficult to discern patterns.
If we assume for the sake of tradition and argument that the responses were justified it might have been one of the few times in a century that the British were involved in a justified response. A momentous conflict indeed! It must have been unsettling for them. And, in all seriousness, they weren't involved because it was justified. They were acting amorally and it is a coincidence they were on the justified side that time.
Morality do exists. People were loudly complain about the US behavior ever since 9/11, years after years asking when retribution was finished (which did not even ask the question if retribution was morally right).
Litigate who's violating who is unlikely to happen. A lot of people thought Obama would bring some change but rather than litigating, more people got droned and one of the worse symbols of the wars did not get closed. Setting things straight will likely only happen in hindsight after everyone responsible are long dead, and even then people will resist it as a matter of personal identity.
I do not see lasting peace coming from litigating the past, and especially not from the US.
> almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight
This is a common Zionist take saying that just because someone is not from the region, they cannot criticise Israel's mass slaughter of children. Also, this has very much to do with American politics, as the US is the main backer of the apartheid state.
I count myself fortunate for missing the references to US politics, but seeing oppression and war discussed with a framing of "who should win" as a dispute of claims, history and ethnicity rather than as a tragedy of money, military power and cruelty (what is the problem that is solved by bombing children?) is very disheartening.
> I like how even in this thread, you have many people - almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight
A popular chant is "The children of Gaza is our children too." Israel has killed up to 5% of Gaza's population and injured ~15%, about half of whom are children. It's not tribalism to be disgusted by such carnage. I don't agree with the claim that we don't have a stake in this fight.
> I like how even in this thread, you have many people - almost certainly very few of whom have no real stake in the fight - bitterly arguing about who is right and wrong
Yep, this is what it's about - a morals swinging contest to see who is purer. I mean, I would have assumed if there was in fact a genocide taking place in Gaza everyone would be happy there's at least a ceasefire but no - no one gives a s**, at least not on this thread. It's about shitting over Israel to feel morally superior more than anything else.
What swayed me to one side was not looking at the past, but looking at the future. One side is able to develop this land and benefit the rest of the world. The other side is unstoppingly doing damage to others, even in my home country (France), while providing no value whatsoever.
What an absurd thing to say. You could say the same of any oppressor and/or colonizer in history. "Well at least they're doing something useful with the land, the people that are being crushed under their boots are just screaming angrily and acting aggressive. All the oppressed are good for is slave labor and dieing." Lucky many people around the world have evolved their morality beyond 'might makes right'.
What do you mean, have evolved their morality. They threw 7000 rockets in resident housing for 6 months, kidnapped civilians with babies 9 months old, and you support their right to create a state with an army, and last time they had a state, they voted 51% Hamas.
Sounds awfully like a crime against humanity, and supporting this is probably illegal.
No offense (really!!!) but "that's just how people of that race are" isn't a very cool thing to say, my friend. They're humans, just like us -- that's the problem!
I am not smart enough to have an opinion on the situation in Gaza that's much more complicated than "people dying is bad", but I struggle to understand how the continued annexation of the West Bank by Israeli settlers, supported by the government and army, is anything other than clearly ethnic cleansing. If it had stopped ten years ago, and it was now a conversation about uprooting the established communities there, maybe then there's room for nuance and so on, but it didn't: it's ongoing.
>And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state
As opposed to the neighboring states (and Hamas), which mostly have religiously tolerant, fully democratic governments that fully respect civil rights, and which of course have never openly stated that they want Israel to disappear from existence, not at all leaving it implicit that its millions of Jewish residents should be ethnically cleansed from the region.. Yes?
The further we are from a people, the more we tend to group them into monoliths. As monoliths, both sides are monsters, with the best one can argue being that one side's monstrosity is justified.
Break them down further and you can find the actual monsters--those self-interestedly seeking either their own aims, or, some random aim at any cost, even when the aim is impossible and its costs massive.
What the hell does your statement have to do with the very real, practical natures of the governments and political organizations of neighboring countries and lined up against Israel through a number of ideological arguments?
I'm not talking about monoliths on either side. I'm specifically referring to states in the region with authoritarian and even despotic governments with exactly the traits that the comment I originally responded to claims about Israel.
I could name a dozen Arab leaders who were assassinated by Arabs for expressing interests in making peace with Israel. If we start looking them up I wager we'll get to two dozen.
Because all Israelis are the same? A right extremist assassin murdered Rabin. Even among the right he was almost universally condemned. Keep in mind Rabin was democratically elected on the promise of Peace.
Because it's a cultural arms race. What kind of nation do you think is capable of manifesting in those local conditions, a progressive social democracy like Sweden?
Israel has been hindering a democratic process in Palestine since forever. It was a borderline explicit policy to bolster hamas to split the Palestinian rule in two to be able to say "we have no negotiating partner". Netanyahu has been quoted saying that outright.
Very few of the Fatah concessions ever led anywhere despite promises from Israel, leading many palestinians to think that Fatah was weak. Which other "strong" democratic options were there? PNI? Third Way? They were never serious options.
Now, the Fatah party has been incompetent and corrupt. I am not saying democracy would have sorted itself out in Palestine, but I am saying that if Israel would have wanted a democratic development in Palestine, it would not have dealt with Fatah in such bad faith.
Nor, I must add, would they have killed any palestinian (Gaza) leaders opening up to peace with Israel. Ahmed Yassin was killed just months after started proposing a long term truce on the condition of a Palestinian state in the west bank and gaza. his successor (al-Rantisi) suffered a similar fate after a similar proposal. Then Jabari in 2012. Then they killed Haniyeh who was the principal negotiator during all recent peace talks.
None of these men were innocent cute bunnies by any means, but Israel has been sending a clear message for many many years: negotiation will be done by force.
This refers (I imagine) to internal Israeli politics - a certain portion of the Israeli populace fears that Netanyahu is attempting to make Israel less democratic by various means. This was a topic that caused mass protests in Israel before October 7th, and continues in some form even now.
Except Zionists are capable of establishing and running a democratic state (however flawed according to some it might be).
It would be silly to pretend that’s even remotely close to being an option for Hamas. For starters modern Islamic fundamentalism is inherently incompatible with democracy (amongst other reasons).
Expecting that organizations like Hamas could somehow magically change for the better is pure madness regardless of everything else.
Hamas is not an Islamic fundamentalist organisation. They are Muslims, but they have not twisted the religion for extremism; they are not ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.
"Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."
Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts.
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.
Yes, and I did mention it was updated. After 30 years of being an explicitly extremist organization, do you really think that overnight they changed ? What would be the reason for this ?
No, as you said yourself it happened over a long period. And the reason? They probably realised they were getting played by Israel, who wanted them to be violent to "justify" their continuing genocide of the Palestinian people and theft of their lands.
That may not be - but they are not just muslims (some would argue not even proper muslims due to the atrocities). They are definitely a terrorist organization. Whether that is done with religion in mind or something else, doesn't change that fact. I mean looking back at the Oct 7 terrorist attack, it's truly despicable.
If you want to play semantics, going by deeds the IDF, and even the Israeli state, is a far more heinous terorist organisation than Hamas.
The Oct 7th attack was terrible, but the Israeli response (both the initial response when many Israelis were killed as well as the hell wrought unto Gaza) has been downright evil. And they way Israel whipped people up into a frenzy with sick fantasies about "40 beheaded babies", "babies on washing lines", mass rapes etc was utterly despicable.
Most israelis don't see it that way, are shielded or simply choose to look at it as survival and the IDF having to do what they "need to do". But yes you are right, it's downright evil.
> the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is temporal
No, it isn’t. Very few revolutions (i.e power inversions) have succeeded by indiscriminately killing the dominant side’s civilians. That frequency, moreover, goes down over time.
Using just fairly recent examples, Russia and China's communist revolutions were notably brutal and had no problem with harming civilians. They won.
North Korea and North Vietnam (now just Vietnam) were also brutal against the other side. Both of them are running their own countries.
To go a bit more recent, the Taliban was behind a bunch of terrorist attacks. They now run Afghanistan.
To be fair, though, North Korea and Afghanistan have basically no allies in any sense due to their behavior. And the people who fought against North Vietnam and lost were just as savage as them. But Vietnam and China are happily traded with, and nobody outside of old folks in America think anything bad about Vietnam these days. If anything, a lot of people think it was unjustified to have ever fought against them.
I mean, the IRA succeeded and that wasn't but 20-30 years ago? They are largely no longer seen as terrorists.
Hell, Israel is a good source of terrorist groups becoming legitimate. Prime Minister Menachim Begin went from leading a terror outfit to elected Prime Minister
The IRA of the 20s Irish war of independence succeeded, but were less obviously terrorists. I think it's inaccurate to say that the provos succeeded. Success for them would've been if Northern Ireland left the UK and joined the Republic. It didn't. The Good Friday agreement is hardly an unalloyed win for them.
And, um, they absolutely largely are seen as terrorists.
Are you kidding me? The Provos went from convicted, imprisoned terrorists to the legitimate heads of government in Ireland and legitimate heads of government in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein was largely led by provos for quite a while after the Good Friday Agreement.
Idk, many people see the IRA insurgency as having had good outcomes for Ireland and Northern Ireland, so like they say, one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter
Indeed, a former leader, Gerry Adams, is on the cusp of a substantial payout in recompense for a long imprisonment that wasn't squeaky officially done by the books.
It's not just that former Northern Ireland "terrorists" now hold positions of power, they are also being (potentially) awarded for hits they took during their struggle.
before oct7 there was a somewhat broad consensus that Hamas are bad and are terrorists.
nowadays however, Hamas are hailed as resistance and freedom fighters. Only jewish hasbara still calls them terrorists, everyone else is sympathetic to Hamas, even Donald Trump, given his zionist position
You don’t resist by filming yourself slaughtering children under captagon. Please see what French resistance was.
Hamas and its apologetics are terrorists. And barbarians
how do you call israeli soldier bulldozing palestinian children? israeli atrocities are much worse because of casualty numbers are much higher on palestinian side and 60% of victims are children and women
> how do you call israeli soldier bulldozing palestinian children?
Technically a war crime, but of the variety that happens in every war and has basically never been punished. Anywhere. It’s horrible. But that’s war. There is no such thing as a clean or just war, it’s always going to be horrible, the aim is literally to kill each other.
It seems once every ten years we find a war and zoom in closely and realise that war is horrible. The lucky ones this time were Ukraine and Palestine. The unlucky ones, basically everyone in Southeast Asia and Africa.
Was the holocaust just war? Was the Warsaw ghetto uprising a war against Germany? It takes 2 armies to have a war, not a colonized people locked up in an open air prison fighting against a sophisticated army, armed by one of the world's superpower, in flip flops while the colonizing army can't even bother to focus on the fighters and so just drops 2000 pound bunker bombs on entire families over and over again for 15 months straight.
South Africa has compiled dozens of pages documenting explicitly genocidal intent from high ranking israeli officials for its ICC case.
"UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war"
> Was the holocaust just war? Was the Warsaw ghetto uprising a war against Germany?
Not a fan of creating caste systems of victimhood. But in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, how many German civilians were killed?
And I never said "just" war. I said it's war. Russia is killing children [1]. We've killed children [2]. There are multiple live conflicts in which children are being targeted and killed [3]. This isn't okay. My point is we haven't found a way to do modern war without this sort of collateral damage.
> a colonized people locked up in an open air prison fighting against a sophisticated army, armed by one of the world's superpower
Hamas is armed by Iran. Not a superpower, but certainly a capable regional power.
Apartheid. Gandhi. Hell, M. L. K. It's a lot harder to claim the moral ground when both sides are committing war crimes.
> You’re saying that if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin and other German cities they would have decided not to do that?
No, I'm saying if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin--and did--the moral case wouldn't be so clear cut.
I'm also saying that if they had the capacity to bomb Berlin, they would have been well advised to focus first on strategic military or final solution targets.
> effectiveness of strategic bombing is of course debatable
Strategic bombing doesn't work [1]. (By and large, it hardens the opposition.)
It's debatable, but pretty much only as a theoretical concern as the history of pure (conventional) strategic bombing is a set of straight failures.
> population of the Warsaw Ghetto had no such option. Therefore anything they could do to harm the Germany state would be fully justifiable
If they had the option to bomb Berlin--particularly repeatedly--they probably also had a way out. (Not necessarily literally. But if you're able to manaeuvre in the enemy's capital, you have resources and thus options at your disposal.)
>But in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, how many German civilians were killed?
You mean like the 25000 Nazi civilians which the UK and US brutally murdered in Dresden? The civilians were the explicit target of the Allied bombings. Or do you mean like the Palestinian civilians, women and children, whom Zionists brutally murdered in the Nakba and Tantura with its mass graves to establish their apartheid state?
>And I never said "just" war. I said it's war. Russia is killing children [1]. We've killed children [2]. There are multiple live conflicts in which children are being targeted and killed [3]. This isn't okay. My point is we haven't found a way to do modern war without this sort of collateral damage.
It's not collateral damage, Israel intentionally targets civilians, they are not collateral damage, they are the target: "The Biden administration has quietly continued to supply arms to Israel. Last week, however, President Joe Biden publicly acknowledged that Israel was losing international legitimacy for what he called its “indiscriminate bombing."[1], "Israel/OPT: New evidence of unlawful Israeli attacks in Gaza causing mass civilian casualties amid real risk of genocide"[2] "Damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families in Gaza"[3]
This is only a fraction of the clear evidence proving that Israel targets civilians intentionally and most of these are from months ago. Since then, Israel has become even more brazen in their targeted murder of civilians and entire families[3] and extermination of entire bloodlines.
>Hamas is armed by Iran. Not a superpower, but certainly a capable regional power.
That's a laughable comparison and I should have not even dignified it with a response. There is a world of difference between receiving a bunch of shitty rpgs and receiving $100+ Billion dollars, F-35 fighter jets and 2000 pound bunker buster bombs that wipe out entire families.
>Apartheid. Gandhi. Hell, M. L. K. It's a lot harder to claim the moral ground when both sides are committing war crimes.
Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd. Jews who took revenge on Nazi civilians were not judged by it because people with common sense knew the full context and trying to "both sides" that would have been seen as absurd and as Nazi apologia. The Gaza prison break was the first time in Palestinian history where Israel has tasted a fraction of its own medicine and they couldn't handle that and whipped themselves into a genocidal frenzy and by that shown the world their real face without its diplomatic hasbara mask.
> You mean like the 25000 Nazi civilians which the UK and US brutally murdered in Dresden? The civilians were the explicit target of the Allied bombings.
Not the Holocaust or Warsaw Uprising?
And there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel.
> only a fraction of the clear evidence proving that Israel targets civilians intentionally
"Indiscriminate bombing," "mass civilian casualties," "risk of genocide" (emphasis mine), and "wip[ing] out entire families" are not evidence of "target[ing] civilians intentionally." And as I said, even if they are, that's something every great power has done when it went to war in the last half century.
Again, that doesn't make it okay. It just makes it deeply precedented. You (and I) have a problem with war per se.
> a world of difference between receiving a bunch of shitty rpgs and receiving $100+ Billion dollars
Hamas has received something like $20bn of aid from Iran. That's roughly what the U.S. has provided Israel in the last few years. Of course Israel is a superior fighting force to Hamas. But Hamas wasn't defenceless. (It was still allegedly firing rockets this week.)
There are a set of evil-slash-stupid people in this story. Hamas' leadership is among them. If you're going to cite South Africa and the ICC, you can't clip out the parts that you don't like without either compromising yourself or the source (the ICC).
> Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd
Excusing one side's war crimes undermines the argument. Like, one of Netanyahu's racists could construct a similar argument about the millenia-old persecution of the Jews and Hamas' explicit aim of not only destroying Israel but exterminating Jews. If war crimes being criminal depends so deeply on context, they're no longer open-and-shut cases that can be judged from afar.
> Jews who took revenge on Nazi civilians were not judged by it
There was no armed-resistance equivalent to Hamas among the Jews.
A better example might be found among the Native Americans. (Or La Résistance.) Even there, the practical lesson is attacking civilians at best doesn't work. (At worst, it galvanises the population against you.)
Why single out that part and avoid mentioning the massacres of Palestinian women and children in the Nakba and Tanatura by Israel's founders to establish an apartheid state on top of the mass graves of Palestinians?
>And there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel.
If the bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel, why did America go onto commit the "the single greatest acts of terrorism in human history" by dropping 2(!!!) atomic bombs on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
[https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2015/08/hiroshima-and-nag...]
And if "there is recognition that strategic (conventional) bombing of civilians in WWII was (a) useless and (b) cruel" then why did israeli officials reference the bombing of civilians in Dresden as their model for Gaza before they started the genocide and "dropped 70000 tons of bombs on Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined" and "hit Gaza Strip with the equivalent of two nuclear bombs" https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/5908/Israel-hits-Gaza-...
>Hamas has received something like $20bn of aid from Iran. That's roughly what the U.S. has provided Israel in the last few years.
That's a figure which you most certainly made up and did not even bother providing any sources for. Any data about that is unreliable anyway because Iran doesn't disclose any figures regarding that while America does, so that is a dishonest argument to make anyway. Any reliable sources quote estimated figures ranging from 20-100 million which is a far cry from $20bn: "Historically (1990-2000), Iranian funding to Hamas ranged from $20-100 million per year" - These are still guesses and US being Israel's ally has also an interest in inflating the numbers to justify its overspending and absurd funding of Israel.[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_support_for_Hamas]
The United States has provided Israel with over $160 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, whatever the Palestinian resistance receives pales in comparison because its limited to what can be smuggled into Gaza. Israel has an actual army with tanks and receives fighter jets from the US to exterminate the civilian population of Gaza because they can't reach guerrilla fighter in tunnels like in Vietnam.
> Of course Israel is a superior fighting force to Hamas. But Hamas wasn't defenceless. (It was still allegedly firing rockets this week.)
That's exactly the point, Hamas isnt an army with tanks and fighter jets but they arent completely defenseless, they, like the Vietcong, have tunnels and since Israel can't reach them, Israel instead murders civilians to put pressure on hamas. What do you call it again when an army kills civilians in pursuit of political aims? ter·ror·ism
/ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
>> Both siding an almost century old brutal colonial occupation and a 15 Month long Genocide is extremely absurd
>Excusing one side's war crimes undermines the argument.
It doesnt undermine anything, Jews have committed warcrimes against Germans civilians who had once been Nazis as retribution, but when talking about the Holocaust someone says "both sides committed Warcrimes" it would be seen as Nazi apologia. You are clearly trying your best to "both sides" a century of brutal occupation and now genocide, but it still won't change the fact that the israelis are the colonizers and the Palestinians the resistance with the right to defend themselves against colonization.
>Like, one of Netanyahu's racists could construct a similar argument about the millenia-old persecution of the Jews and Hamas' explicit aim of not only destroying Israel but exterminating Jews. If war crimes being criminal depends so deeply on context, they're no longer open-and-shut cases that can be judged from afar.
This is straight up nonsense and israeli propaganda. Zionists already bend over backwards and invent the most absurd narratives to justify their century old occupation of Palestine akin to "actually our Palestinian slaves are oppressing us from the concentration camp we locked them up in and are disturbing our colonial project, so we're the real victims here". Even the Nazis used a similar narrative to justify their persecution of jews by claiming that Jews actually declared war on Germany first. [The Jewish "Declaration of War" against the Nazis - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4614991]. If a jewish prisoner in Dachau had written in his diary that he will kill all Nazi Germans if he can escape the concentration camp would you accept the narrative of a Nazi claiming "See? The Jews wanted to also genocide us, so the holocaust was justified actually" Of course you wouldn't. You're regurgitating all these zionist narratives because you're clearly a zionist who ignored mountains of evidence of the past 15 Months so you can prevent any cognitive dissonance and uphold your unmaintainable zionist worldview, but it will collapse under the weight of the evidence which you tried to ignore, downplay or subconsciously suppress.
>There was no armed-resistance equivalent to Hamas among the Jews.
Wrong. The Jewish Combat Organization: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Military Union: Żydowski Związek Wojskowy. Not that it matters anyway, if the jews had chosen not to fight back against their oppressors that would have been their choice. the jews suffered under the Nazis for about 12 years, while the Palestinians suffered under zionist terrorism and colonization and now genocide for more than a century now.
>A better example might be found among the Native Americans. (Or La Résistance.) Even there, the practical lesson is attacking civilians at best doesn't work. (At worst, it galvanises the population against you.)
If it really doesnt work Israel shouldn't have done it for 15 months straight.
> If a jewish prisoner in Dachau had written in his diary that he will kill all Nazi Germans if he can escape the concentration camp would you accept the narrative of a Nazi claiming "See? The Jews wanted to also genocide us, so the holocaust was justified actually" Of course you wouldn't
Isn’t it notable that this is a hypothetical? Jews aren’t killing Germans. Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans, Indians aren’t bombing England…there is simply a choice that has been made in the way some groups have prosecuted past persecution that is relevant to present treatment. Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
Israel and Palestine is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds. As long as those hard lines exist, the people can’t coëxist. (There are people in this thread complaining about millennia-old transgressions. Like, so the Mongolians owe the Turks reparations?!)
And practically speaking, that sort of points—long term—to a single path for the region. (It’s notable, too, that nobody is willing to accept Palestinians as refugees. Both out of security concerns and because the nutter wing would label helping people as facilitating genocide.)
>Isn’t it notable that this is a hypothetical? Jews aren’t killing Germans. Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans, Indians aren’t bombing England…there is simply a choice that has been made in the way some groups have prosecuted past persecution that is relevant to present treatment. Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
It's notable that your Zionist sensibilities don't ever allow you to reflect properly on a hypothetical which was suited to your israeli propaganda regarding the inversion of victimhood. Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution.
It's also notable that you intentionally twist and misrepresent any given situation to make dishonest and misleading arguments. Like "Native Americans aren’t bombing Americans" but they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide, but now it's over for them because the American colonial project succeeded and made a comeback impossible for them. The Palestinians are still being genocided, we're witnessing their active colonization, so for you to compare post-colonial indians to an ongoing colonization of Palestinians is so asinine that it's indicative of bad faith.
>Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement.
Don't be ridiculous, people could have forgotten something that only happened in the past, but the zionist colonial project has never in its century long presence in Palestine ever stopped murdering, ethnically-cleansing, stealing more land and now genociding Palestinians. It's like you going to Dachau and telling a jew in the camp that "Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement" during their ongoing genocide.
Furthermore, the difference between Palestinians and other groups who have been successfully colonized and diminished is that Palestinians are part of a religion with almost 2 Billion members in a region surrounded by nations of that faith. That's why colonial powers invest huge amounts of money into regional dictators, who against the will of the population, help protect the colonial outpost from being kicked out. The dictators, however, will not be able to hold onto power forever.
>Israel and Palestine is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds.
"Germany and Jewry in 1940 is a fucked situation because both sides have hardlined the other as terrorists or genociders. Both side reject the other’s label, and on somewhat credible grounds." [The Jewish "Declaration of War" against the Nazis - https://www.jstor.org/stable/4614991]
Again miss me with your Zionist/Nazi apologia, the Palestinians have been subjected to brutal occupation, ethnic-cleansing and genocide for a century and they have every right to armed resistance. Your "both sides" zionist trash argument is toothless and a disgusting attempt at inversion of victimhood. Israel has been founded on the mass graves of Palestinian women and children by Zionists who even US and UK classified as Jewish-Zionist terrorists: https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
If you don't want people to develop a genocidal hatred towards you then dont build an apartheid state on the mass graves of their women and children, then commit genocide and pretend that you're actually the victim while you're genociding them. Anyone with a sound mind and a proper education will see through that zionist gaslighting.
>It’s notable, too, that nobody is willing to accept Palestinians as refugees.
You mean notable like the Jewish refugees who nobody was willing to accept?
British support for the Zionist project was even motivated by british antisemitism.
And even the US established a quota system, Immigration Act of 1921, which limited annual immigration from Eastern European countries with large Jewish populations. These restrictions remained in place during the 1930s and 1940s, significantly limiting Jewish refugee admission during the Holocaust era. Interesting behavior for Israel's great "ally" America.
Labelling everyone who disagrees with (or merely doesn’t understand what you’re saying) you a Zionist or genocide sympathiser is satisfying. It’s easy. But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang. (I make the former distinction because, again from a distance, the people I know in e.g. Lebanon are much more balanced than what I hear in New York.)
Because if both sides are absolutists on from the river to the sea or whatever, there isn’t a discussion. There is no room to compromise. As Clausewitz said, there is necessity for politics by other means. Those other means are deadly.
And yes, I’m saying that the uncompromising rhetoric being pushed by people thousands of miles away from the conflict is driving up death tolls. Sykes and Picot didn’t kill these people. But they caused the circumstances that lead to their deaths. A lot of foreign activism around this issue is repeating the mistake of drawing boundaries—rhetorical and geographic—from afar, considering only the views of one side or, worse, their own assumptions about what one side should believe.
> Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution
And they were wrong. Understandable. But wrong.
If that had turned into a political movement it would have destroyed sympathy for their cause. (In the same way Israeli extremism is sapping support for Israel today.)
> like you going to Dachau and telling a jew in the camp that "Generational hatred for crimes committed by ancestors isn’t a requirement" during their ongoing genocide
If you can’t see the difference between an unarmed concentration camp and a foreign-armed militant group lobbing rockets, sure.
> they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide
Which tribes? Because the ones who hit settlers got wiped out more frequently than those who bid for time.
> like the Jewish refugees who nobody was willing to accept
>Labelling everyone who disagrees with you a Zionist or genocide sympathiser is satisfying. It’s easy. But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang. (I make the former distinction because, again from a distance, the people I know in e.g. Lebanon are much more balanced than what I hear in New York.)
That's not what's happening and you are consistently misrepresenting the facts and the situation. The initial suspicion of you being a zionist has been confirmed by your consistently bad faith rhetoric trying to justify, deny or downplay the genocide. In some of your other conversations with other people you tried to downplay the death count of children to which they provided the evidence that you're wrong and you ignored it.
> But it also makes it virtually impossible to distinguish, from a glance, which side is more extreme, the pro-Palestinian side in the West or the Ben-Gvir gang.
If you have difficulty deciding which side is more "extreme" after 15 months of continuous genocide, then don't be surprised when you are correctly identified as a zionist. The people defending themselves against a century of brutal colonization and genocide on the other hand have every right to be "extreme" and such smears don't have the silencing and demonization power they used to once have.
>Because if both sides are absolutists on from the river to the sea or whatever, there isn’t a discussion. There is no room to compromise. As Clausewitz said, there is necessity for politics by other means. Those other means are deadly.
"Both sides". If you think that after 15 months of genocide there will ever be permanent "compromise" then you're simply naive. If I were Palestinian I would never stop fighting the genocidal colonizers who subjected the Palestinian people to a century of suffering, vilification and genocide. And it seems that resistance won't either: https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-has-another-sinw...
>> Many Jews who escaped the Nazi concentration camp had a natural and immense hatred towards Germans in general and they also acted upon it by killing Germans who had previously been Nazis as retribution
>And they were wrong. Understandable. But wrong.
They weren't wrong and you also admit that it's "understandable" so it's clear that most people sympathize with them in that regard and don't classify it as wrong. that's why there are dozens of hollywood movies and shows of jews taking revenge on Nazis which have become popular blockbusters.
>If that had turned into a political movement it would have destroyed sympathy for their cause. (In the same way Israeli extremism is sapping support for Israel today.)
But it did turn into a movement: Zionism. Zionists weaponized the holocaust to turn zionism from an unpopular movement [as can be seen in pre-zionist jewish culture: Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn - Oh, You Foolish Little Zionists (Yiddish Anti-Zionist Song) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMRwk8WDd4] into a more appealing one.
The problem is that the twisted ideology of Zionism made the Palestinians pay for the crimes of Nazi-Germany. Zionists even collaborated with Nazis and sabotaged jewish boycott efforts of Nazi-Germany so they can garner support for the colonization of Palestine. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement]
>If you can’t see the difference between an unarmed concentration camp and a foreign-armed militant group lobbing rockets, sure.
Again you completely strip the context to which that statement was attached to so you can make snide and asinine statements. I already corrected you regarding your false claim that jews supposedly never fought back against their oppressors but you clearly don't care to remember because it would ruin the validity of your vapid response. [e.g. Jewish Combat Organization: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Military Union: Żydowski Związek Wojskowy]
>> they did do that during their ongoing oppression and genocide
>Which tribes? Because the ones who hit settlers got wiped out more frequently than those who bid for time.
Apache Nations, Lakota/Dakota, Seminole Nation (which never officially surrendered!) but it doesn't matter which tribes specifically resisted colonization, what matters is that you made a false claim and I corrected you on that.
"Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs of Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the Land of Israel." -Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall.
This is pure Hasbara-style hyperbole - Hamas is not "objectively" evil, and there is zero evidence that Hamas have raped or tortured anyone for months.
But if that's the standard you're using, then it's a documented fact that Israel rapes and tortures detainees, often to death. There is video evidence and hundreds of testimonies. The Israeli gov even debated on why it's OK to rape detainees, and when the police tried to step in and do something, Israeli citizens rioted - in favour of the rapists! Absolutely sick.
Israeli bulldozer drivers have bragged about driving over hundreds of Palestinians, both dead and alive. Israeli drones deliberately target children. Israel routinely designated areas as "safe", then bombs them. Israel has deliberately prevented humanitarian aid from reaching civilians. Israel routinely targets civilian infrastructure, including water storage facilities. Israel has destroyed almost every mosque in Gaza, just for fun. Israeli politicians spout the most vile genocidal BS on a daily basis. Israel has recently stolen yet more land in Lebanon and Syria. - and of course, Israel is still breaking the ceasefire in Lebanon, and even targeted UN peacekeepers. And of course, just before the Gaza ceasefire deal Israel went absolutely nuts bombing Gaza (even more than usual), just for the lolz. Oh, and Israel has weaponised antisemitism to silence critics of its genocidal, apartheid regime, and appears to have captured several western governments.
Israel is objectively an evil, apartheid regime, determined to spread islamophobia
> there is zero evidence that Hamas have raped or tortured anyone for months
Well there's a line.
> it's a documented fact that Israel rapes and tortures detainees, often to death
The fact that there are evil people on both sides (as well as people on both sides who are both not evil and have very valid arguments) seems to befuddle us. And by the way, you can take a stand on the war as a whole while conceding that neither party in this has behaved well, though both have behaved somewhat in step with the precedent of warring states and Middle Eastern insurgents, respectively.
> I only see evil from one side - Israel. The absolute depths of horror they have unleashed on the Palestinian people is unfathomable
If you're not seeing evil where an ICC prosecutor sees war crimes, you're probably biased. (That's totally fine if practical for you. And the ICC could be wrong. About everything. But it's a flag.)
> it's their own fault for being Arabs
What? I said Hamas are following the precedent of Middle Eastern insurgents. Tactically. Strategically. In their aims and the source of their weapons.
Hamas have been atrocious, both in the October 7 attack and in how easily they dismiss the destruction of Gaza, but no more so than e.g. Hezbollah. (Less so than ISIS or FARC.)
> Hamas are not "insurgents" either
Israel controls Gaza. Hamas are fighting Israel and hiding among civilians. That's insurgency. La Résistance were insurgents.
Then by (your own admission) you are a rather horrible (i.e. extreme/fundamentalist) person. If you purposefully decide to ignore or even justify atrocities committed by one side.
At least you have enough self-awareness to admit that which I guess is something…
Breaking: killing kids[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] including a NINE MONTH OLD BABY[17] not evil when done to Jews (never mind that some weren't)
Do you realize how contradictory you sound? It's one thing to say Israel is eviler. It's quite another thing to say Hamas isn't evil at all.
The only conclusion I can come to is that you are antisemitic or (willfully, there is no excuse for speaking as if you know and not knowing the first thing, not now, not with so much information easily available) blind.
Those deaths are tragic, and yes, one baby was killed which is particularly awful.
For many of those dead, we will however simply never know if they were slain by Hamas or the IDF[0] (as so many were), as Israel would not allow an investigation - an evil act, made doubly evil by the fabrication of all manner of vile attrocity porn (40 beheaded babies, babies on washing lines, mass rapes etc) to gain consent for a genocidal response.
So yes, of course those deaths are terrible, but history didn't start on October 7th, you have to look at the decades of land theft, dehumanisation, torture, rape, murder and bombing at the hands of Israelis. Israel's response was to act like Israel: more murder, more torture, more rape - and on a truly unfathomable scale. Israel has wrought a holocaust upon Gaza, and the West Bank hasn't been spared either.
And no, criticising an apartheid state publicly undertaking the most foul atrocities imaginable - at industrial scale, mind - does not an antisemite make.
Electronic Intifada as a source:
The EI is...quite the source. It has argued Hamas is akin to the ANC of South Africa,[1] quietly ignoring that the ANC did and does not do many of the horrific atrocities Hamas commits against its own citizens[2] (let alone Israeli citizens), glorifying Hassan Nasrallah[3], declaring without evidence that Israel is not a nation that is deeply traumatized (the majority of its citizens having been genocided for 2,000+ years) and also evidently not knowing the first thing about epigenetics[4], advocating against posters that simply state that people have been kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza and declaring such a thing to have 'genocidal sentiment'[5], defending and glorifying October 7 at least five times[6] and even referring to Hamas soldiers killed because...um...they were soldiers attacking civilians as martyrs[7], arguing Zionism--a Jewish idea from the start--is rooted in antisemitism, showing a drastic misunderstanding of what that implies (that a Jewish state is needed because the world simply cannot be trusted with Jewish safety)[8], do something effectively equivalent to asking the general US population what counts as transphobia or racism or Islamophobia, rather than the trans, Black, and Muslim communities respectively[9]. But I will humor them.
>["all" of Israel being built on land Palestinians were expelled from in 1948]
This claim is easily and demonstratably falsifiable. Much of Israel was owned by Jews in 1945[10]. And much of the rest of it was 'public and other' land, no more Palestinian than Jewish (and the public land could be transferred to the Jewish country by the UN or Britain, of course).
>[genocide claim]
This is a genuine question that I have asked people many times and never gotten an answer to - is this genocide or simply the high (and horrific) death toll that comes with urban warfare? Gaza, after all, has a population density higher than New York City. It would be difficult for even the most humanitarian army imaginable to wage war in New York City without many civilian casualties. Among urban warfare in similarly-dense areas, or projected death tolls for those (I'm sure the US government has done some report on the projected civilian deaths from a war in NYC), is Gaza exceptional?
Of course, there is much more to a genocide than the death toll -- but that is what outlets like EI tend to lean into, although a death toll does not a genocide make.[11]
>[rape as a lie]
This is a disgusting claim. The rapes have been corroborated by the UN (as the Electronic Intifada has noted). Furthermore, much evidence cannot be gotten, because the witnesses are dead, and the bodies themselves, one hopes, quietly buried. There was massive rape, and Hamas at least seems to have been lax about punishing it, if not encouraging it top-down.
They treat deaths by Hamas of fleeing fighters as somehow Israel's fault because Hamas was waiting for Israeli soldiers. By this logic, most if not all of the adult male Palestinian deaths in Gaza are actually Hamas's fault; Hamas, after all, is little-distinguished from the civilian population.
[The baby]
Their defense is that...er. They were trying to kill adult civilians? That's not a good defense.
[Hannibal Directive and civilian deaths]
Haaretz has published a thorough investigation of the deaths here: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-18/ty-article-st.... (If you can't read it, they accept email accounts generated with email services like Temp-mail or 10minutemail.) Very few of the deaths are attributable to the IDF, simply because the IDF was occupied defending its own bases and responding.
> history didn't start on October 7th
For hominids in that region, it appears to have started about 1.5 million years ago (https://www.persee.fr/doc/paleo_0153-9345_1988_num_14_2_4455), although they didn't have writing. Some of the earlier historical records we have (historical here construed to mean non-Biblical) are interesting because they appear to affirm a Hebraic presence three thousand years ago[12]. Other historical records confirm Rome's forced exile of Jews, the discriminatory policies Jews suffered under, the 1948 attacks by everyone around, and the 1948-67 failure of Jordan and Egypt to set up independent Palestinian states in the West Bank (including Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter, which Jews were expelled from and prohibited from entering to pray at the Western Wall, the holiest still-standing site; but that's another story) and Gaza respectively. There is a long history, and starting the clock in 1967 isn't accurate either.
[11] Genocide requires intent. To take two examples - suppose Australia decides to attack Nauru, a small island nation of about 1,100 people. They embark on a campaign to systematically exterminate every Nauruan for some inexplicable reason, and succeed. This is a clear-cut case of genocide. But suppose on the way, Australia acquires a nuclear bomb and plans to detonate it over Nauru, ensuring no survivors. Unfortunately, the plane gets derailed, and the confused pilot accidentally detonates it over Singapore, killing 100,000 Singaporeans. While this killed many more people than Nauru, it was not a genocide itself; it was an accident (and an attempted genocide of Nauruans). The proportion of the population is also iffy. If Australia's plan was a small land invasion (which killed 2 Nauruans before being repelled) and then, if that failed, dropping five nukes on the island, but all five went off track and dropped on poor Singapore, killing 1,000,000 Singaporeans, despite the fact that that killed many more Singaporeans both in absolute numbers and proportionally than Nauruans, it could still be described as an attempted genocide of Nauruans and not one of Singaporeans.
> Hamas are hailed as resistance and freedom fighters. Only jewish hasbara still calls them terrorists, everyone else is sympathetic
No. About 20% of Americans support Hamas; 4% the October 7th attack [1]. It’s an extreme minority.
People are sympathetic to Palestinians. Not Hamas. The best way for the foreign pro-Palestinian movement to fuck this up for Palestine is to falsely equate Palestinians with Hamas.
Going back to the top point: Hamas hasn’t succeeded. Gaza’s occupation looks like it will be far more draconian than it was a few years ago, with the strip separated by security cordons all controlled by Israel.
> everyone else is sympathetic to Hamas, even Donald Trump
Trump's peace plan [2] is anathema to everything Hamas fought for. All the way to recognising anexations of currently-Palestinian territory.
>No. About 20% of Americans support Hamas; 4% the October 7th attack [1]. It’s an extreme minority.
Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet, even if they supported the resistance most of them wouldn't publicly admit that. American discourse, despite it's "freedom of speech" mantra, has a history of mccarthyist silencing to shut down debate, that's why certain ideas can't always be publicly expressed or one's affiliation revealed.
>Going back to the top point: Hamas hasn’t succeeded. Gaza’s occupation looks like it will be far more draconian than it was a few years ago, with the strip separated by security cordons all controlled by Israel.
Hamas has succeeded in their primary goal which was reminding the world that they still exist[1] and they won't let any normalization happen without a Palestinian state. They successfully derailed any normalization efforts. Another victory is that, for the first time ever, people, even ordinary americans, openly recognizing them as the resistance and showing support on social media where some of those tweets receive 150-250k+ likes, which was impossible before the genocide.
In contrast to before where people always had to hide their support in order to prevent being accused with the common smears by zionists who wanted to shut down debate and suppress any information that would reveal that its the zionists who have a century long history of zionist-terrorism[2] and that the natives have a right to resist colonization without being demonized for it.
>Trump's peace plan [2] is anathema to everything Hamas fought for. All the way to recognising anexations of currently-Palestinian territory.
Trump waffles a lot to appease his donors, what his real opinion or plan is can be discovered by his actions in due time. Many israelis were disappointed by his ceasefire push and said that this deal was "forced upon israel".
Edit: the zionist brigade is quick, not even 10 seconds after posting this reply it already had a downvote lol.
> Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet
So we've moved the goalpost from everyone supports Hamas to everyone secretly supports Hamas, they just won't say it, but I know it's the case regardless?
> Hamas has succeeded in their primary goal which was reminding the world that they still exist
Yes, when they went into this war and when they rejected the deal in May I'm sure they were thinking that the tens of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of thousands--if not millions--scarred for life, with the prospect of America recognising Israeli anexations in the West Bank on the horizon, was worth a few more hits on their Wikipedia page.
I suppose we can't know what Hamas' goals are right now. But Sinwar's goals were clear. And this war has been a total failure per his goals.
> what his real opinion or plan is can be discovered by his actions in due time
No. But his track record can be scrutinised. That said, if people believing the guy who recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, wants to reinstate "maximum pressure" on Iran and hangs out with this guy [1] thinks a self-governing Palestine is the way to go, and that results in a longer cease fire, sure. I'm all for it.
> Many israelis were disappointed by his ceasefire push and said that this deal was "forced upon israel"
I know some pretty forcefully pro-Israel Israelis. They're all in favour of this plan because it (a) returns hostages, (b) gives Israel a chance to recoup and pot some shots with the Houthis and (c) is a temporary cease-fire.
(Not saying some weren't disappointed. If he were still alive, Sinwar would probably reject it. But expecting zero crazies in any population is, well, crazy.)
> the zionist brigade is quick, not even 10 seconds after posting this reply it already had a downvote
One, it's an Israel-Palestine thread. Everyone is going to get downvoted.
Two, "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" [2].
>So we've moved the goalpost from everyone supports Hamas to everyone secretly supports Hamas, they just won't say it, but I know it's the case regardless?
No I never claimed such a thing but I've just put your statistics in context and provided some explanation. You're shadowboxing with your antagonistic rhetoric.
>Yes, when they went into this war and when they rejected the deal in May I'm sure they were thinking that the tens of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of thousands--if not millions--scarred for life, with the prospect of America recognising Israeli anexations in the West Bank on the horizon, was worth a few more hits on their Wikipedia page.
Another needlessly quarrelsome and misguided framing. Most of the world is now aware and understands the Palestinian struggle and that's not just "a few more hits on their Wikipedia page" but e.g. Ireland, a european nation, among many others, joining South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel and Israel closing its dublin embassy. And there are many more substantial developments in that regard, so downplaying that in such a manner is just weird.
>No. But his track record can be scrutinised. That said, if people believing the guy who recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, wants to reinstate "maximum pressure" on Iran and hangs out with this guy [1] thinks a self-governing Palestine is the way to go, and that results in a longer cease fire, sure. I'm all for it.
Trump is a businessman in nature so he will act in a manner that is consistent with that and not upsetting his donor base too much, until something happens that disturbs that calculus. Trump is not ideologically driven, so if the price of supporting Israel fundamentally changes, due to unforeseen change, he will act adequately according to his own interests.
>I know some pretty forcefully pro-Israel Israelis. They're all in favour of this plan because it (a) returns hostages, (b) gives Israel a chance to recoup and pot some shots with the Houthis and (c) is a temporary cease-fire.
That could very well be, I am simply judging by the extreme infighting between hardcore zionists and the statements and sentiments of popular israeli news channels.
> Ireland, a european nation, among many others, joining South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel and Israel closing its dublin embassy
Really? A nation destroyed for a protest letter from Ireland? A trade union wouldn't even settle for this.
> there are many more substantial developments in that regard, so downplaying that in such a manner is just weird
I'm weighing it the way we do history. Goals were set. None were achieved. To the extent we can measure them, the goals are further away than before.
When push came to shove, nobody came for Palestine. Hezbollah and the Houthis came closest, but the former folded and the latter was contained. Hamas' closest regional ally, Iran, left them out to dry. Same for the Arab monarchies and America's adversaries, Russia and China. Sinwar was counting on a regional conflagration; it never came. Before the war that wasn't apparent.
They trended on Twitter and college campuses, and I guess got a thumbs up from Ireland. But to the degree South Africa got the ICC in the ring, it largely served to (a) underline that both sides committed war crimes and (b) undermine the ICC's authority (note: not legitimacy) as a court versus think tank.
> until something happens that disturbs that calculus
Sure. Based on current patterns, the trajectory is towards a cease fire and hardened occupation with some recognition for annexations.
That could change--things can always change. But in a world where the rules-based international order is crumbling, now is a bad time to have only norms to fall back on.
>Really? A nation destroyed for a protest letter from Ireland? A trade union wouldn't even settle for this.
It has symbolic meaning to which Israel responded with closing its embassy. You can downplay it however you want, but these are significant developments that will be discussed in lectures and history books.
>I'm weighing it the way we do history. Goals were set. None were achieved. To the extent we can measure them, the goals are further away than before.
Hamas had the goal of derailing normalization and they achieved that. An unexpected bonus was the reconquest of Syria which made the dictators of the Arab world also tremble in fear that their continued betrayal in form of normalization efforts with israel, contrary to the will of the people, could lead to their own demise as well.
>When push came to shove, nobody came for Palestine. Hezbollah and the Houthis came closest, but the former folded and the latter was maintained.
Another desperate attempt at downplaying the efforts of the resistance. Both Hezbollah and especially the Houthis did support Palestine, within their means, at significant cost to their own population. Since Israel's main solution to everything is just to ruthlessly bomb civilians and civilian infrastructure which even a congressman, Thomas Massie, has called out Israel for: https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1849165384571560052
An american congressman openly calling out Israel and receiving 111K likes - unimaginable before the Genocide, that's significant.
>Their closest regional ally, Iran, left them out to dry. Same for the Arab monarchies and America's adversaries, Russia and China. Sinwar was counting on a regional conflagration, and it never came. Before the war that wasn't apparent.
This is just the rhetoric of a person who thinks that geopolitics is checkers when it's actually chess. Iran obviously tried to avoid direct confrontation with Israel to prevent a war with the US so it primarily fights Israel via its proxies so the actions of the proxies are also the actions of Iran.
>Sinwar was counting on a regional conflagration, and it never came. Before the war that wasn't apparent.
What evidence do you have for that claim? I've seen video footage of Sinwar stating that they will derail normalization, which they achieved, and "exposing all the normalizers" which they also achieved. The world has seen Israel's true face, without a mask, and it's ugly.
>They trended on Twitter and college campuses, and I guess got a thumbs up from Ireland. But to the degree South Africa got the ICC in the ring, it largely served to (a) underline that both sides committed war crimes and (b) undermine the ICC's authority (note: not legitimacy) as a court versus think tank.
These attempts at downplaying the cultural impact of the past 15 months is just outright strange. The ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu which many people thought would never happen. The reaction to this decision then exposed America and many of its european allies as frauds who claimed to care about "international law" but never actually did because they refused to comply so they can protect their war-criminal ally. this has proven that the whole "international law" charade was always just an imperial and colonial tool to impose western will on the global south. These events are crucial and will be discussed and lectured about in universities across the world.
>Sure. Based on current patterns, the trajectory is towards a cease fire and hardened occupation with some recognition for annexations.
Well the israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappe thinks that "This is the last phase of Zionism", he has his opinion and you have yours, we shall see.
>That could change--things can always change. But in a world where the rules-based international order is crumbling, now is a bad time to have only norms to fall back on.
The "rules-based international order" died the moment the crusaders of "international law" have given impunity to their colonial outpost to commit genocide with impunity and then proven that they will ignore ICC rulings when the outcome is not in their favor. If I were Russia or China, I would be extremely happy about that because the next time America or Europe lectures them about morality or international law, they can just laugh it off.
I'll agree with you that the conflict, as well as the Ukraine war, has shown that the UN is largely irrelevant for conflicts of this proportion.
I don't think that's good news for Palestine however - it just means that, in certain contexts, the maxim of "might makes right" is much more openly acknowledged, which favours Israel because they're a nuclear power. You'd have to get Iran (or some even bigger power) involved for the balance to shift and the war clearly showed that this wasn't happening (fwiw, I think Russia and China don't care one bit about Palestine, they just like it if the conflict is ongoing and creates division in the West).
We don't know what history books are gonna write 100 or 200 years into the future and even if we did, it will be irrelevant. We don't today condone the way in which Caesar slaughtered the Gauls, but they still lost the war. In any case, I don't think the war, or history books, will care about Twitter likes in some far-off country.
> these are significant developments that will be discussed in lectures and history books
If one party wants control on the ground and the other will settle for footnotes in history books, maybe we have something Israel and Palestine agree on.
> Both Hezbollah and especially the Houthis did support Palestine, within their means, at significant cost to their own population
Both non-state actors. And Hezbollah backed down after being decimated. The Houthis are still going, but part of the ceasefire is giving oxygen to Israel to focus on long-range operations.
> it primarily fights Israel via its proxies so the actions of the proxies are also the actions of Iran
Yes. The proxies are neutered. Iran is strategically weaker than it’s been in decades. Hamas has gone from being a threat to a charity case, from fighting for things to trading lives for textbook references.
> they will derail normalization, which they achieved, and "exposing all the normalizers" which they also achieved
How? Part of the ceasefire is continued normalisation. If normalisation is rejected the ceasefire ceases and we go back to war.
> I were Russia or China, I would be extremely happy about that because the next time America or Europe lectures them about morality or international law, they can just laugh it off
Versus before? The last time the lectures worked was in the 90s. For anyone.
Tactically speaking, I’m halfway convinced the folks who came up with Defund The Police and think everyone supports Mangione have architected the pro-Palestinian movement in the West. It started as a solid expression of sympathy. But it’s developed into another project of name calling, genericising terms like genocide (if everyone is committing genocide, it’s not something you can punish), and labelling barely-symbolic wins as monumental historical reconfigurations. (An Al Jazeera op-ed predicts Israel’s downfall. Next thing you know, Mika Brzezinski will be predicting a Democrat resurgence and the Daily Caller a GOP single government.)
All this has done is polarise and strengthen opposition to the Palestinian cause by falsely making it seem the Palestinians are as nutty as the pro-Palestinian protesters. (Meanwhile, on the center left, it looks disturbingly like people who have no knowledge of the ground truth again trying to draw borders in the Middle East from abroad.)
Going into a discussion to lecture never works; if there is no curiosity or capacity to question, it’s not an exercise in activism. It’s a child running away to the end of the block, taking satisfaction in the imagined panic and regrets of their parents who likely never noticed their absence in the first place. The current state of rhetoric from both sides points to one outcome: an increasingly-irrelevant Gaza and lots of dead for people to write sympathetic history books about.
> Tactically speaking, I’m halfway convinced the folks who came up with Defund The Police and think everyone supports Mangione have architected the pro-Palestinian movement in the West. It started as a solid expression of sympathy.
The pro-Palestine movement has a much longer (and varied) history, but the main links between parts of the (especially radical) left and the movement were established in the cold war, see e.g. the German RAF going to PLO terrorist camps or the famous 1976 hijacking of a passenger plane by pro-Palestine activists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid
That wasn't always the case, though, one of the first countries to recognise Israel was the USSR.
In any case it's weird whenever somebody pretends that what's going on now is in any sort of way a completely novel development, these fault lines have existed for decades.
>Both non-state actors. And Hezbollah backed down after being decimated. The Houthis are still going, but part of the ceasefire is giving oxygen to Israel to focus on long-range operations.
Hezbollah was not decimated, the IDF simply bypassed fighting hezbollah entirely by going straight for lebanon's civilian population in its typical zionist-terrorism approach [https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1849165384571560052] to inflict an unacceptable cost on civilians and put pressure on hezbollah to stop fighting. What are such tactics called again?
ter·ror·ism
/ˈterəˌrizəm/
noun
the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine - "The logic is to harm the civilian population so much that they will then turn against the militants, forcing the enemy to sue for peace"
>Yes. The proxies are neutered. Iran is strategically weaker than it’s been in decades. Hamas has gone from being a threat to a charity case, from fighting for things to trading lives for textbook references.
The proxies have not been neutered, that's just your zionist fantasy. they still possess large arms arsenals and are a real threat. If they had been neutered, Israel wouldn't have any reason to make compromises but they did in accepting the ceasefire. The only new problem for Hezbollah is the now defunct supply route from Iran through Syria, but they didn't even meaningfully deplete their current arsenal so they have enough time to find solutions for that. On the other hand, Hezbollah's new problem is also part of Israel's new problem, which is Syria, but that's a topic for another day.
>Versus before? The last time the lectures worked was in the 90s. For anyone.
People are quick to forget, Gaza is a fresh reminder for a new generation that "international law" is just a big charade.
>Tactically speaking, I’m halfway convinced the folks who came up with Defund The Police and think everyone supports Mangione have architected the pro-Palestinian movement in the West. It started as a solid expression of sympathy. But it’s developed into another project of name calling, genericising terms like genocide (if everyone is committing genocide, it’s not something you can punish),
Some incoherent rant that's essentially genocide denial in disguise, I shouldn't have even dignified this with a response.
>All this has done is polarise and strengthen opposition to the Palestinian cause by falsely making it seem the Palestinians are as nutty as the pro-Palestinian protesters. (Meanwhile, on the center left, it looks disturbingly like people who have no knowledge of the ground truth again trying to draw borders in the Middle East from abroad.)
None of that is true, that's just your distorted zionist perception of reality speaking. The pro-Palestinian protestors are sane and normal, it's genocidal Zionists like you who are the nutty one's trying to mislead people with weaselly rhetoric just to justify a genocide.
>Going into a discussion to lecture never works; if there is no curiosity or capacity to question, it’s not an exercise in activism. It’s a child running away to the end of the block, taking satisfaction in the imagined panic and regrets of their parents who likely never noticed their absence in the first place. The current state of rhetoric from both sides points to one outcome: an increasingly-irrelevant Gaza and lots of dead for people to write sympathetic history books about.
Gaza's relevancy is at a historic high, otherwise we wouldn't be still talking about it. And your "if there is no curiosity or capacity to question" reminds me of Neo-Nazis who use such rhetoric to soften people up before they engage in blatant genocide denial, so it makes sense that zionists like you would use the exact same rhetoric to justify or deny an ongoing livestreamed genocide.
>Since both sides are using terrorism it’s fine, right?
It would be fine if the US & UK would at least start acknowledging Israel as the biggest terrorist organization in the region which makes proscribed terrorists organizations look civilized in comparison: IDF said bombed apartments were Hezbollah base - but most killed were civilians [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrn0nwn0eqo]
That way we would come full circle since the precursor to the IDF is already historically recognized as a terrorist organization by both the US and the UK:
I’m sure that if you asked most people in Europe or the US they’d would agree. I’d bet on average more strongly than before the war.
I mean Israel is deeply flawed, oppressed and is committing war crimes. Can disagree about that.
Hamas on the other hand is objectively evil and should be destroyed. Arguing about what cost exactly is worth paying for that is reasonable disagreeing with the premise itself is wrong and immoral.
> nowadays however, Hamas are hailed as resistance and freedom fighters. Only jewish hasbara still calls them terrorists, everyone else is sympathetic to Hamas, even Donald Trump, given his zionist position
I don't think this is anywhere near a mainstream position.
As https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42722937 said, I was referring to the judicial reform and the gradual erosion of civil rights that the current government is driving forward within Israel, not in the occupied territories.
This is an intra-Israeli conflict that is (mostly) independent of the Israel-Palestine conflict (and also of the question how democratic a state is anyway that keeps ~50% of its inhabitants under permanent military rule). It falls more in line with the other shifts towards populist or authoritarian governments we have seen in the West. (Trump, Orban, Erdogan, etc)
It does have a unique Israeli flavor to it though, which does circle right back to Israel/Palestine: That the political force that's driving this authoritarian shift forward is closely associated with the settler movement and the most extreme voices regarding the Palestinians. This was also the case before the war - however, they took the war as opportunity to further erode civil rights, e.g. free speech and manipulate institutions such as the police.
> Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
It was pretty much like that before. They're just being a lot more open about wanting to wipe them out.
> And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state - that too with no word of objection from its allies.
Israel does not have a fundamentalist, authoritarian government! There are some fundamentalist and far-right parties in the current coalition but they have little power to push their own policies except to threaten to bolt the coalition. For all the talk of those 2-3 ministers to who belong to these more extreme parties to eg legitimise new settlements, repopulate gaza, they don't have enough power to actually pass such laws and none of these ministers none of whom hold the top 8 roles in government.
The most religious/fundementalist of the the parties UTJ believes in land for peace and have said so many times over the years (but like the majority of the Israeli public, they wont mention it, let alone push for it, during wartime so as not to reward terrorism) and was fully behind all the ceasefire proposals in the past 18 months.
And it's certainly not authoritarian. Israel has full powers of protest, free speech, and in fact it's generally the press that have the strongest voice not the government.
And "that is actively at work undermining democratic structures" is also wrong. They are trying to reform Israel's supreme court system which many legal scholars agree badly needs reform as the justices are largely self-selected yet have the power to override legislation without referring to existing law (the so-called reasonableness test which no other country has).
> And it's certainly not authoritarian. Israel has full powers of protest, free speech, and in fact it's generally the press that have the strongest voice not the government.
Israel maintained a prerogative from early in the war to assassinate essentially every known journalist in Gaza, and they did it by bombing their homes and killing their families. West Bank and pro-Arab Israeli journalists were merely arrested and held without charge.
A foreign territory that israel is at the same time at war with, but also controls borders, imports/exports, airspace and the population registry.
Also, what about the West Bank? The PA is decisively not at war with Israel, yet the occupation there is even stricter than in Gaza. The Israeli government seems to view it as a Schrödinger's territory that at the same time is part of the state and not part of the state.
It's called disputed territory. That's the nature of disputed territory. South Korea doesn't owe North Korean citizens any rights while they are at war (since the 50s), for example, and claims the whole Korean peninsula.
It is wrong to say the PA is not at war with Israel. They currently have a cooperation agreement they are holding to. The PA still compensates any terrorists committing attacks against Israel and disputes Israel's sovereignty. The issue is not resolved as the implementation of the agreements at the Camp David accords were interrupted by the second intifada.
This is what is called an unresolved conflict. It is true that Israel has full military control. The reason the conflict is unresolved is because the Palestinians refuse to capitulate under any circumstances, and because despite all the claims to the contrary, Israel is actually unwilling to destroy, oppressively occupy, or perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinians.
In the recent conflict, as punishment for the (inexcusable and revolting) mass killing of Israelis by Hamas, Israel has killed vast numbers of innocent civilians -- 10s of thousands more than could possibly be justified by legitatimate military operations -- and has deliberately killed several journalists, destroyed healthcare infrastructure, and deliberately caused water and food shortages and mass civilian displacement. Its reputation is in tatters and will remain so for decades.
Be aware that this account has only one post (this one) and was created around 8 months ago when reports started to appear about Israeli influence on American public opinion online.
"Israeli State-sponsored Internet propaganda include the Hasbara, Hasbara Fellowships, Act.IL, and the Jewish Internet Defense Force. Supporters generally frame this "hasbara" as part of its fight towards improving their image abroad given continued Israeli human rights abuses, and also against anti-Israeli agitation and attempts to criticize it. There is substantive evidence that Israel heavily uses data-driven strategies, trolling and disinformation and manipulated media, as well as dedicating funds to state-sponsored media, for overt propaganda campaigns."[1]
"In June 2024, Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs was revealed to have paid $2 million to Israeli political consulting firm STOIC, to conduct a social media campaign, fueled by fake accounts and often employing misinformartion, targeting 128 American Congresspeople, with a focus on Democratic and African-American members of the House of Representatives. Websites were also created to provide young, progressive Americans with Gaza news with a pro-Israel spin. Among the objectives of the campaign was amplifying Israeli attacks on UNRWA staffers and driving a wedge between Palestinians and African-Americans to prevent solidarity between the two groups. "[2]
Sure, I have already made a lot of them in the context of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Sorry, it's just tiring to repeat the same things all the time in these threads.
So the assertion that these parties hold "little power" is contradicted by their significant roles in the government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, was appointed to a newly created ministry position granting him authority over the state's police force. Ben-Gvir, a former follower of extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, has a history of incitement and inflammatory remarks towards Israel's Arab population. [1]
Such appointments indicate that these parties have substantial influence within the coalition, as without them there is no coalition anymore.
These parties have successfully advocated for policies aligning with their agendas. The coalition agreement with the Religious Zionist Party includes commitments to expand settlements in the West Bank and to work towards applying Israeli sovereignty over these territories.[6] Which contradicts what OP stated.
As to the claim that the government is merely "trying to reform Israel's supreme court system" overlooks the implications of these reforms. The proposed changes aim to shift power from the judiciary to the Knesset majority coalition, including an "override clause" that would allow the Knesset to overturn Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority vote.[2][3][4]
There are reports of increased government influence over media outlets, with certain channels promoting nationalistic agendas aligned with the Prime Minister's views.[5]
Before the attacks Israel was in the process of normalizing relations with Gaza. For example, they were increasing work permits monthly. Here is an article from summer 2022
Gaza was not under occupation. It was blockaded because after the occupation ended they decided to ramp up attacks on Israel via. rockets and suicide bombings.
At question was whether Oct 7th was provoked. It was not. It was a full scale ground invasion with military attack plans. Sympathy with the invader doesn't change that. Think objectively.
> His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable
His base and the people surrounding him have the habit of ostracizing anyone who doesn't fall in line behind him, rather than being guided by principle (Which is why Pence is no longer his VP pick, and why basically his whole cabinet is full of sycophants compared to last time).
Trump's whole shtick is to take whatever is happening, and spin it into "This was my whole plan all along", then take the credit for it. This is why you never see him give concrete policy proposals in interviews, and is also what will likely happen with the russia/ukraine war. Whatever happens is good, and was part of Trump's plan, and his base will fall in line or disappear politically.
Exactly. This war has really messed up the world and Israel for generations to come. Never mind the devastation in Gaza.
But the Palestinians cant keep living under occupation. Everyone should continue to exert pressure for a free Palestine or the cycle will continue. The fundamental goal of the current Israeli government is to never have a Palestinian state, which will always be a major barrier unless sanctions are introduced.
Trump was interesting.. Im sure we’ll find out one day what it was all about. But if he really was the catalyst in this I will take back my words and eat humble pie. Someone has suggested the ceasefire is just a show, so we watch carefully.
<< This war has really messed up the world and Israel for generations to come.
Possibly. There does seem to be an uptick in previously unvoicable sentiment that was quickly squashed anywhere it showed on social media. I will say this. My parents went out of their way not to discuss some political events with their children ( communism - different rules apply and kids are dumb ), but in 90s, when similar 'war' raged and newshead was convincingly telling me, who to root for, my father unusually said 'you may want to check how Israel came into existence.' For the longest time, I did not. October surprise was a reason to get some of the dust removed from those books. It is not a good look. One could argue it is worse than US colonization of Indian lands.
My understanding is that decades past when Israeli liberals tried being nice to Palestine and letting them self govern they were rewarded with more bombings and conflict. It isn’t a politically tenable position in Israel anymore to let Palestine (and Lebanon) “just be,” and that’s equally the fault of Palestinian behavior as it is Israel’s.
I am sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, but the truth of the matter is that Israel has a valid claim too and military superiority to back it. If Palestine is to self govern, it and the rest of the nations around it need to convince Israel that they won’t try to wipe Israel off the map (or, alternatively, to succeed at it, which I’m sure many Western protesters would celebrate). Until then Israel will just dominate them instead.
I did. But if several nation-states would pledge larger grants, I would have some hope that i.e. the trucks with the building materials would get through border-crossings, e.t.c.
Individual donations are a drop in a very big and leaky bucket.
> Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there?
If you think a 78 year old alone is capable of such feats of planning, you have more faith in the elderly than most. Read any of his speeches that are off the cuff and you will see that Trump has incredibly poor working memory, vocabulary, and attention. This is to be expected from an elderly individual, but not from a great strategist. These are the results of large groups of people working towards goals, not heroic individual feats.
One not particularly obscure theory is that Netanyahu was prioritizing Trump coming to power over a peace/hostage deal and now that Trump has power, Netanyahu seeks to benefit from prioritizing the hostages. Trump is claiming credit for it and probably doesn't care about the timing.
Not obscure at all, as it wouldn't be the first time a hostage situation is used for a presidential campaign [1]:
> The timing of the release of the hostages gave rise to allegations that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the 1980 United States presidential election to thwart Carter from pulling off an "October surprise".
At times it seems as if the other side hasn't figured out how to do much of anything, or alternately, they've forgotten as they steadily get older and older without passing the reins of power off to younger generations.
maybe it is the latter because it always starts out well so you can't say total incompetence for the first decade or maybe two decades at most but it always invariably ends up the same way
well always maybe pushing it twice so far it's like watching a NFL team lose the super bowl because of inability to defend this one play
Netanyahu was simply pushing his opportunity to do what Israel hardliners have wanted to do for as long as possible (basically aggressively lash out in every direction without consequences and red lines). It was always going to need to be wrapped up, even within Israel there was strong internal pressure. Waiting until is Trump is coming in gives Israel a free golden ticket with him by timing it right and Netanyahu's careers basically over after this anyway, so he has nothing to lose by doing it earlier, absent internal revolt.
OK since no one else has said it yet, "according to a source familiar with the details"[1] (I know) Trump has basically told Netanyahu to agree to the ceasefire including the return of hostages. Then if they decide to break the ceasefire and go back to relentless bombings, Trump will still continue to support them.
So it could be a tactic to get Hamas to release whatever hostages are still alive, then get right back to the new status quo.
This actually makes perfect sense for Trump. He's only claimed to care about the Israeli hostages. I'm sure he feels great about taking credit for their return.
Sadly I suspect this will be the case… I don’t hold much hope on this whole thing actually ending… but I do have a glimmer of hope that they may have reached a tipping point due to one of the many slowly shifting parts of this tragedy… no idea what the tipping point is from the outside but it does kinda have the vibe of “maybe this is going to fall apart if they keep pushing”
Hamas broke the last ceasefire. Israel doesn’t need to do anything as it’s expected there will be a Hamas offshoot group who launches a rocket into Israeli civilian areas thus restarting the need for Israel to defend itself.
What are their goals at this point? Looks to me as an outsider like they’ve had multiple wins and should take that. Hezbollah, Syria, successful strike on Irans missile facilities, Gaza is a pile of rubble.
> goal is to eliminate Hamas, or at least prevent them for returning to rule the Gaza strip. That has not been accomplished
Can it be?
Hamas were idiots for launching the October 7th attack. In part because they trashed any moral high ground they might have had by attacking both military and civilians. In part because they picked a fight they couldn't win. (Granted, they counted on regional support that number came.)
At what point does Israel prosecuting its own Vietnam in Gaza meet the same razor?
The common criticism is that Netanyahu never really worked on a day-after plan, so while the IDF managed to take lots of territories and gain many military victories, there was no clear idea of what to do when the fighting stops, which allowed Hamas to re-take areas that were already taken, and to set themselves up for the future.
I think ideally what should have been done is setting up alternative leadership in Gaza, namely the PA with assistance from Saudi Arabia or something like that. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that in back-channels, the PA was asked to take this kind of role and basically said "until Hamas is gone, it's too risky for us, please finish off Hamas first".
> At what point does Israel prosecuting its own Vietnam in Gaza meet the same razor?
I mean, people make these kinds of comparisons all the time and insinuate that Israel should stop fighting. But the Vietnam war lasted, what, twenty years? And it was far less important to the US's security than this war is to Israel. As Ezra Klein once said, if you look at the timeline of the US's reaction to 9/11 and map it onto Israel's reaction to October 7th, the US had still not even begun the Iraq war by this stage - it started more than two years after 9/11 iirc.
(I'm not saying that I think the war should continue, btw - I'm very much in favor of this current deal, and I highly suspect the war is dragging on for political reasons and not actual reasons of security, which is both harmful to Israel in various ways, and devastating to the civilians of Gaza, who deserve so much better than their current situation. Ideally Israel could take out Hamas which would be better for the people of Gaza themselves, but it's unclear if that's possible, and the price they are paying in the meantime is far too high!)
Never mind that Hamas will STILL have hostages after the deal is done. That Gaza is ruled by an organization stating they’ll continue doing an Oct 7th again and again.
How are you proposing the deal could be made more fair?
Keep in mind:
Israel killed 100x more civilians than Palestine during this conflict, and more damage was done to Gaza than any European city during wwii. 90% of the population is displaced. 10% are casualties. Israel intentionally blew up all the civil infrastructure (hospitals, doctors, engineers) first.
There are > 17,000 children that have no adults to care for them any more. That’s 10 orphaned kids for every Israel civilian casualty in the middle of a famine with no support infrastructure.
It could be made more fair if all the hostages were released. Why would international society accept hundreds of peaceful civilians being tortured, raped and murdered for over a year as acceptable?
Israel actually built a lot of the civilian infrastructure, including the largest hospital in Gaza. It's pretty clear those places are being used as terrorist hideouts and to launch rocket attacks. Why is it acceptable to shoot rockets purely targeting civilians while breaking a cease fire agreement?
> hundreds of peaceful civilians being tortured, taped and murdered
There is no absolute evidence that any of Hamas' hostages have been raped or tortured - according to released hostages, they were treated very well! AFAIK the only known instance of Hamas murdering a hostage was when a fighter lost it after Israel killed his entire family - all the other deaths have been a result of Israeli bombs (because if you want hostages back, you bomb them... right?!).
And as you doubtless know, many of the "peaceful civilians" are actually serving IDF members...
And as you also doubtless know, Palestinian hostages are routinely raped and tortured to death in Israeli dungeons - there is a wealth of evidence.
> It's pretty clear those places are being used as terrorist hideouts and to launch rocket attacks.
This is what Israeli Hasbara do - repeat unevidenced claims until people accept them as "truth". But it's lies, there isn't a shred of evidence that Hamas as used even a single hospital as a "terrorist hideout". You know who has repurposed Gazan hospitals for military ops? Israel - every accusation is a confession with them.
You wrote in your comments that the hostages were treated well. This is absolutely not the case.
There are plenty of hostages, btw, who have openly discussed that they were raped repeatedly. I don't have the stomach to reread the hostage accounts but they are easy to find online.
This "news article" doesn't support your claims - it only says the IGF claims these hostages were killed a short while before they reached them. Given the IGF has murdered Israeli hostages up close, has taken the approach of reducing gaza to rubble, and is constantly caught lying, it's far more likely these hostages were killed by bombs or IGF bullets.
How are you supporting a group that would take a newborn baby as a hostage? What drugs do you need to take to pretend that it's ok and defend the kidnappers?!?
I'm not supporting Hamas or what they did on October 7th. I'm against genocide and the utterly, utterly horrifying actions of the IDF, and against Israeli propaganda that has been used to manufacture consent for a modern day holocaust.
BTW, Israel has killed at least the equivalent of one Palestinian child every 30 minutes since October 7th. That is just mind-boggling evil at an industrial scale.
> How are you proposing the deal could be made more fair?
Keeping hostages is a war crime. A fair thing would be for Hamas to follow its obligations under international law and unconditionally release them (before anyone says, well israel did X which also isn't allowed, 2 wrongs don't make a right).
> more damage was done to Gaza than any European city during wwii
How are you quantifying this? I'd be surprised if Gaza has more damage than say Dresden.
Israel's prisons are full of Palestinian hostages kidnapped from Gaza and the West Bank. Their courts have no jurisdiction over them and have no issue calling anyone a terrorist.
I just fear this will cause western media and politicians to and declare the crisis to be over (after it had began on Oct. 7, of course absolutely out of the blue and without any context...) and go back to pretending everything is back to normal. Never mind that Gaza is still in ruins, the west bank is still being annexed, Israel still has the dual role of "all authority, no obligations" over the Palestinians, while making it pretty clear they have no vision for them at all, apart from "maybe they just vanish into thin air tomorrow".
And never mind that Israel still has a fundamentalist, authoritarian government that is actively at work undermining democratic structures and civil rights even inside the state - that too with no word of objection from its allies.
We'll see where all of that goes.
I also found Trump's signalling in the whole issue odd. His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire.
Is this just his usual "appear unpredictable by all means" spiel or does he have a strategy there?