this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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By "ancestral", how far back do we go? 200 years? 2,000 years? 20,000 years...? It's somewhat ironic, that that "homeland" has been under "foreign mandate" pretty much all the time.
Native Americans had a way better claim to the land, since in many places they were the first ones to settle there. Can't say the same about Syria Palaestina, or any of the dozens of names you can call it.
"Too bad" some didn't accept a UN Resolution, went to war, and lost.
Don't cite me on that last one, cite Mahmoud Abbas:
Abbas faults Arab refusal of 1947 U.N. Palestine plan
Which was 70 fucking years ago! Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself. After a certain point, the borders are the borders, and you can't just point to territorial wars from decades past as justification for not recognizing its nationhood.
Which is the story of all nations, actually. How many times has Europe been conquered by other empires and dictatorships? How many native populations have been been displaced by colonialism?
I'm not saying it's right, but it's the bloody history of how our each of our nations have been founded. No matter what soil you stand on, it was subjugated by somebody else.
Entire terrorist groups have been founded on the idea of some territorial subjugation from the 1800s gives them the right to enact violence on the nations of today. So, I don't subscribe to this idea that we should point to the actions of 70 years ago as justification for wars or terrorism or rejecting the sovereignty of a nation.
Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?
Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?
Which part? The strip of land west of Israel that was involved in the latest terrorist attacks, or the other strip of land east of Israel? Which one is Palestine? Because it can't be both. And Palestine didn't even agree to both when it had the chance in 1947.
And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country, if they want to lay claim to both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All they have to do is march their army in the West Bank, cross Israel, and arrive at the Gaza Strip. (Insert Gru four-panel here.)
It's also too bad the PLO/PLA is too in bed with terrorist groups to have a standing army that would be involved in defense, instead of bombing citizens partying at a music festival.
In our bloody history of war over the past several thousand years, I can't recall a war that didn't involve starving children, homelessness, the death of civilians (accidental or otherwise), and all of the other horrors that it entails. War sucks, and it's especially brutal on the defensive side.
Having said all of that, Israel certainly needs to calm down its hard-on for atrocities and police its own warcriming. Israel had some sympathy with the catalyst of the war (the music festival bombing), and quickly lost all of that when it decided to go gung-ho on the whole Gaza populace.
Though, it is especially unfortunate that one side chooses to hide behind terrorism, instead of clearly identifying military over citizens. Maybe if the PLO didn't embrace terrorism, their citizens wouldn't be in this dangerous spot.
I... what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn't be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
So... getting away from the back and forth, I have a feeling that the underlying thing you're saying, that Hamas is a violent terroristic organization and they shouldn't have killed or raped all those people at the music festival, I agree with completely. Where it breaks down for me is:
To me, no one should get raped at the music festival and no one should watch their children starve. Both of those seem like straightforward things to believe. Anyone on either side who's for a realistic path for peace is the the ally, and anyone on either side who's justifying atrocities is the enemy (as you seemed to do for deliberately starving children -- saying that it happens by accident sometimes, as a way of excusing Israel doing it on purpose, is deliberately missing the point of what I was saying I think.)
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges, and find some people whose solution to "they did an atrocity to us" is something other than "Let's do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it'll show them not to do that again."
(* "them" being very loosely defined and including a whole bunch of innocent people)
You seem to miss my point: A single country cannot be composed of two completely separate regions, because they cannot defend both regions, especially when trying to defend against their aggressor would involve marching across said aggressor's territory. There's only a few solutions to this problem:
Perhaps Palestine shouldn't let foreign powers influence them and clean up their terrorist elements, instead of promoting them.
I'm not saying what Likud is doing is right, but right-wing fuckheads are going to do what right-wing fuckheads do the world over. See also: Nixon and the Korean War peace talks, Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan and Iran-Contra, the Bushes and all of their wars, Trump and Afghanistan (or about a million other things), the Tories and their numerous sudden resignations, Putin and every other right-wing leader in Europe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
Seems fine to me, but you and I know that's not going to happen.
I see this more of "let's completely annex Gaza Strip, so that it's ours and we get to clean up the area and flush out terrorists ourselves". At that point, if some terrorist group in Gaza Strip decides to bomb another target in Israel, it's entirely Israel's problem and they alone get to deal with it. Because Palestine sure as fuck isn't handling it now.
It's a shit solution, because war always is a shit solution. And again, Israel needs to calm the fuck down with their civilian causalities. But, it is a solution. With an ending. It ends. No more 70 years of debate about Middle East peace talks or whether Gaza Strip is a nation or a part of Palestine or is in this lawless, terrorist-filled region of an in-between state.
I mean, let's look at the US and their wars of aggression against terrorism. They've had a pretty fucking terrible track record, but during the time the US occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, they were better countries than what they were before or afterward. Iraq had free elections. Afghanistan was undergoing a feminist movement. But, the Iraqi military ran like cowards when ISIS invaded, and Trump sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban. I think if the US thought of them as a stepping stone towards allies in the Middle East (like Israel), and less like these short-term military projects, we might still have these countries in their more progressive states.
But, hey, I've already acknowledged that it's a shitty solution, and we're a couple of intelligent people, so instead of "finding some people" for this solution, which is what we've been doing for the past 70 years, let's just talk about what the solution should be. What's really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I've lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn't Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It's been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You've been talking about this "realistic path for peace", right? What's that path look like?
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the "stronger" party in the situation, when their "solution" is some kind of rampant injustice.
Like if the US lost patience with Israel's current government, and got a coalition together, landed UN troops in the West Bank with the support of the whole rest of the world to deport all the settlers back inside the 1993 borders (summarily executing any of them that tried to resist the deportation, and just leaving them dead in the street), and hauled away Netanyahu and half his cabinet to the Hague to stand trial (alongside, yes, Hamas leadership who's guilty of much more numerically minor atrocities), you would never accept that that's justified because they're "solving the problem." Even though that's a lot milder and more measured than what Israel is currently doing to "solve" -- i.e. just carpet-bombing the country and causing a man-made catastrophe of famine destruction that's killing innocent people on an industrial scale.
This is a really good question. Here's a comparison showing injuries alongside deaths, here's a comprehensive breakdown of deaths up until the beginning of the current "war," and here's a breakdown for the current conflict itself.
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don't think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide -- so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn't just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then -- sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop, and then two, we have to try to address the root causes that are leading to the killing, and come up with something that is livable.
Ben-Gurion actually touched on this exact point, as far as root causes:
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
Because that sort of "justice" is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don't have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
I think the problem is that they've been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there's a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I'm against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I'll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn't need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it's Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn't, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don't even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they've held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn't currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it's still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because "our God is not theirs".
Because the world is filled with nuance and shitty solutions.
I defend that Israel is a country, and don't defend arguments based on ancient grudges from decades past. I'm not even defending what Israel is currently doing, but what solutions do you think they should be doing in response to a terrorist attack? (Which was the last straw in a series of terrorist attacks.)
You mean the Oslo Accords? Remind me again who fucked that one up?