President Biden Calls Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas: Read It For Yourself
President Biden on an official call April, 2021. The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
With the latest escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging on, President Biden had calls with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
From The White House:
Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
MAY 15, 2021 • STATEMENTS AND RELEASES
President Biden spoke today with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to convey the U.S. commitment to strengthening the U.S.-Palestinian partnership. They discussed the current tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank and expressed their shared desire for Jerusalem to be a place of peaceful coexistence for people of all faiths and backgrounds. President Biden updated President Abbas on U.S. diplomatic engagement on the ongoing conflict and stressed the need for Hamas to cease firing rockets into Israel. They expressed their shared concern that innocent civilians, including children, have tragically lost their lives amidst the ongoing violence. The President expressed his support for steps to enable the Palestinian people to enjoy the dignity, security, freedom, and economic opportunity that they deserve. In that regard, he highlighted the recent U.S. decision to resume assistance to the Palestinian people, including economic and humanitarian assistance to benefit Palestinians in the West bank and Gaza. The President also underscored his strong commitment to a negotiated two-state solution as the best path to reach a just and lasting resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel
MAY 15, 2021 • STATEMENTS AND RELEASES
The President spoke today with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The President reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza. He condemned these indiscriminate attacks against towns and cities across Israel. The President updated the Prime Minister on high-level U.S. engagement with regional partners on this issue and discussed ongoing diplomatic efforts. The President noted that this current period of conflict has tragically claimed the lives of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, including children. He raised concerns about the safety and security of journalists and reinforced the need to ensure their protection.The President shared his grave concern about the intercommunal violence across Israel. He welcomed the statements by the Prime Minister and other leaders opposing such hateful acts and encouraged continued steps to hold violent extremists accountable and to establish calm. They discussed the current tensions in Jerusalem and expressed their shared desire for Jerusalem to be a place of peaceful coexistence for people of all faiths and backgrounds. The President voiced his concern about violent confrontations in the West Bank. He expressed his support for steps to enable the Palestinian people to enjoy the dignity, security, freedom, and economic opportunity that they deserve and affirmed his support for a two-state solution. The leaders agreed to continue the close consultation between their teams and to remain in touch in the days ahead.
It’s sorta weird how the actual war crime at start of all this appears to have gone completely unmentioned.Report
You’re going to have to be a lot more specific.
Which “war crime” which “start”?
Far as I can tell people are spun up over some Palestinians being forced off “their” land in the West Bank by the court system.
Apparently after the war of 1948 the West Bank was in the hands of Jordan and they did anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing. Jews were forced off their land and fled to Israel. That land was given to Arabs. Then in the war of 1967 the West Bank changed hands and was now under Israeli law. Israel passed a law saying Jews victimized by ethnic cleansing could get their land back if it was under Israel control (for obvious reasons it’s only Jews that can do that).
So it’s a microcosm of the situation at large.Report
I think that this is in reference to the building that used to house the AP being destroyed, given the timing…Report
It was reported years ago by the Atlantic that Hamas…
1) Has offices in that building with the AP
2) Occasionally has guys in the AP’s office threatening them
3) Occasionally launches rockets from their parking lot
All without the AP reporting on it.
We also have a twitter statement from an Obama staffer who, while strongly condemning the leveling of the building, admitted that the Hamas office was in there because he’d talked to people who worked in the building.
With all that I’m not sure the word “war crime” applies.Report
Maybe it was a different war crime, then.Report
This is, of course, pretending that Israel has any right to attack Palestine in a general sense, which they do not, Palestine being an occupied territory of _themselves_ and thus under their protection under international law.
Everyone here has fallen for this idea that Palestine and Israel are at war.
No. Israel won that war. A _long_ time ago. (And that war wasn’t even with Palestine.)
Israel is now an occupying power (Again, this is of incidental territory that it seized during the war and not even of the people it was at war with.), and there are quite a lot of things that it, flatly, is not allowed to do to the people whose country it occupies.
Here, have some Geneva: Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.
IDF has feet on the ground in Gaza. They have assault teams. They had all sorts of ways to do that without blowing up a building.
And I don’t know why we’re talking about this building…Israel, at this point, is blowing up hospitals and random apartment buildings.Report
Israel is now an occupying power…
Which almost everyone, including Israel’s highest courts, acknowledges. The holdout is the Knesset, which knows darned good and well how expensive the services they would be obligated to provide are.Report
A ground invasion that needs to shoot at anyone who gets close because Hamas’ “uniform” is civilian garb would be amazingly ugly and increase the body count by many orders of magnitude.
Stopping civilian populations from being subjected to terrorism is a legit military operation. Hamas presumably plans those terror ops from inside that building and sometimes launches them from the parking lot.Report
Pssst: It isn’t possible to do ‘ground invasions’ on parts of a country you yourself occupy. That is, in fact, utter nonsense.
What is happening here is CRIMES. Launching weapons from a place occupied by Israel into Israel is a crime. It is not a war. You cannot magically make it a war, because there no other country to be at war with. Wars are between governments. Israel is in control of the territory, ergo, they are current government, as an occupying force. (Aka, they are the ‘temporary’ government until some other government can be established.)
If Israel cannot _police_, and note the word police, the territory it currently occupies, with armed police officers, and investigations into lawbreaking like launching missiles. I suggest it STOP OCCUPYING THAT TERRITORY.
For the record, Israel actually can’t police Palestine, because they have literal no support of the population, and police only function when you have the support of the population.
This does not mean the ‘police’ are allowed to switch to BLOWING UP BUILDINGS, nor does it mean the military can be called in.
No, stopping your civilian population from being subject to terrorism from _other_ parts of your civilian population is not a legit military operation.
“Looks like we’re bombing the meeting place of the KKK today, boys. Suit up.”Report
Err David, Israel isn’t currently occupying Gaza, where the missiles are being launched from. Now I agree with you they should stop occupying the West Bank; in all honesty they should get out as soon as possible either dragging the settlers with them or threatening to leave them behind but that’s a moot point on the subject of these missile attacks from Gaza.Report
Occupation ends when the occupying power restores full sovereignty to the territory. Continued “boots on the ground” are not a necessary condition.
Israel says Gaza is not sovereign, cannot be sovereign w/o Israel’s approval, and actively controls the territorial ocean waters and airspace. That meets the legal definition.Report
The Gaza Strip doesn’t have a government to restore sovereignty to unless one is referring to the Palestinian Authority which hasn’t had a significant presence in the strip in years. No doubt the Israeli’s would love to stop blockading the strip and policing its borders but they’re trying to stop weapons from being hauled in and shot at them from there. If they were similarly disengaged from the West Bank they’d pretty much be in an unassailable position morally, if not legally, speaking.Report
LOL. You are simultaneously arguing that Israel is not somewhere that it cannot restore sovereignty to because that place has no government!
If Israel isn’t there, and there’s not a government, who exactly do you think is in charge? How do you think this works?
That’s right, the people in charge, at least internally, are the actual government, Hamas. The entity that has been the government in Gaza for over a decade, despite the previous government attempting to hold power, or the later unlawful attempt to remove them.
You may not _like_ that fact, but weirdly, it isn’t actually your business who the government of another country is, and neither is it Israel’s.
It is, perhaps, a concern of the Palestinians that they have a large disagreement between who is in charge of their country, but it’s worth pointing out the reason there hasn’t been another election _since_ Hamas was elected in Gaza and the Palestinian Legislative Council was stood down is that it is a near certainty that _more_ of Hamas would be elected. And the supposedly President of Palestine has been issue directives without any legal backing.
Aka, while there are two competing governments of Palestine, it’s the _Hamas_ government that has strong claims of being legitimate.
There’s a new election in 3 days, more Hamas officials will probably be elected, we shall see who accepts that outcome.Report
Well heck, if we’re talking about Hamas being the Palestinians government then at that point we’re talking about an entity which has been lobbing rockets indiscriminately at civilians (often from hospitals, schools etc) for years. The Israeli’s shooting back at Hamas over that isn’t going to ruffle many feathers beyond the usual suspects. Heck, if the Israeli’s could drag themselves out of the West Bank they could probably shoot back at Hamas indefinitely geopolitically speaking.Report
Yes. That exactly.
Hamas is also openly genocidal and wants a one-theocratic-state after the Jews are pushed into the sea. They’re Islam’s answer to skin heads, and that is very popular.
The Palestinians don’t want peace, they want a victorious war quickly followed by some sort of final solution.
And it’s not just the Jews who are on their hit list. There are other minorities who shouldn’t exist and therefore won’t.Report
So Israel’s best solution to a genocidal opponent is to commit open genocide and forcibly take land . . . which is a driving force behind the genocide in the first place . . . . How well’s that working out for them?Report
What are you defining as genocide?
When I say “openly genocidal” I mean “calls for the death of all Jews in it’s charter”, has something close to no Jews in territory it controls (because they’re killed or everyone expects them to be killed), and so on.
If you’re talking about “human shields killed while targeting military targets”, then that’s not genocide. Similarly “the legal system deciding that anti-Jewish ethnic cleaning in the 1950’s was illegal” isn’t genocide.
Israel has a population that’s about 20% Arab.
Speaking as a non-Jew non-Muslim, if I had to pick a place to live in the ME, it’d have to be Israel because of how the other places treat their minorities (for many “genocide” is the appropriate word in a serious conversation).Report
You…do understand that Israel pushed _Palestine_ into the sea right? They stopped barely short of the sea, but…just barely. That’s literally what that Gaza Strip _is_, where Israel pushed the inconvenient-to-their-democracy Palestinians almost into the ocean…and into Egypt.
And you do understand the only _actual_ entity taking any land is…Israel? Like, that’s literally what the protests are over.
Hey, guess what? If a country occupies your country for almost three generations at this point, you tend to want them to go away.
This is something Israel has done to themselves.
Almost all of that is just rhetoric. Palestine poses literally no threat to Israel in any manner whatsoever. Palestine doesn’t even have a functional army. It has no air power. It has nothing.
And the ‘rocket attacks’ are bullshit. 90% of those are crap cobbled together, gas cans strapped to what are functionally fireworks, only small fraction are actual missiles. And it’s easy to tell this because there is a fully assault going right now, and the amount of Israeli death is still in the single digits, last I checked.
And there is no reason for these attacks to continue in a Free Palestine. Every time they happen, they happen in response to Israel doing something.
They’re just a convenient excuse…’Oh, those must stop before anything is done’, so literally any random person launching one voids everything.
Here’s an idea: Why don’t we blame the _actual governments_ for their actual policy decisions?
Like…seizing territory and giving it to settlers. Which as I think I pointed out, has absolutely no security justification at all…it actually turns into something _else_ Israel has to secure!
Considering that literally all the outcry in the last two decades has happened due to that behavior, and it also flatly illegal under international law, maybe Israel should stop doing that?
You have _really_ drunk that Kool-Aide, huh?Report
Was that in the war of kill all Jews of 1948 or the war of kill all Jews of 1967? And the claim is they won’t “stop just short”.
It’s not just the Palestinians, most of the ME is like that. Israel got most of it’s population from ME Jews fleeing antisemitism.
And look at how the non-Jews are treated. The Atheists haven’t invaded or taken land away from anyone, so they’re a good stand in for “serious minority Islam doesn’t like” and presumably what life would be like for Jews in the ME without Israel. 13 Countries in the ME have the death penalty for being an atheist. Or if you look at local Christians, they also are enjoying a slow moving genocide.
In order to call it “just rhetoric” we need to ignore the wars, killing every Jew they can get their hands on, terrorizing every Jew they can, and the occasional official statement saying it’s not just rhetoric. So what would they have to do to convince people that it’s not just rhetoric?
As far as I can tell, all they lack is the ability. Oh, and we also have how they treat their own minorities which looks pretty genocidal but I’ll cover that below.
As long as they’re openly genocidal and killing/terrorizing every Jew they can get their hands on, it’s part of Israel’s job to make sure they never can pose a threat.
Every time one of them is fired, it terrorizes tens of thousands of civilians as they flee for shelters. Any loss of life is a bonus on top of that.
They define “Palestine” as all the land Israel took in all of the wars including 1948. The genocidal aspect predates the occupation by about 20 years and the settlements by more. In Gaza they were forced to choose between economic aid and continuing to kill Jews and they chose the latter.
There’s no reason to believe the attacks will stop if there’s a Free Palestine and every reason to believe they’ll just get worse. This is why Arafat couldn’t make a counter offer in 2000. Amazingly and stupidly, they’re still fighting over whether or not the Jews get a country.
The land was sized in 1967. The settlers were in the 80’s. By the 80’s the Palestinians had spent 40 years convincing Israel that just the basic concept of peace was unthinkable. By that time they’d passed up at least 3 different opportunities to simply make peace, i.e. in ’48, ’49, and ’67.
The settler movement is absolutely a problem, but I can’t tell if it’s making things worse because it was so insanely bad before they existed.
This sounds like a request for links and details.
In 2007 about 3000 Gazans were Christian. In 2011 the Christian population was less than 1400. That’s not just fire-bombings or death threats, there are also forced conversions. Comparisons to the Taliban come up a lot. There aren’t supposed to be Christian institutions or Christians there. Similarly, the atheists get death threats (or attacks) and have to flee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism_in_the_Gaza_Strip#Effects_on_Christian_populationReport
It was in the war of ‘We are pissed at Europeans conquering parts of the Middle East and now they have started settling people here’.
LOL. That is, indeed, the area of Palestine.
However, I meant, the rocket attacks would stop if Palestine merely was large enough, and free enough to operate itself.
I can’t even figure out what you’re talking about. The settlements started _before Israel existed_.
Are you asserting that _Mandate Palestine_ was openly genocidal toward Jews?
..you think Palestine should have made peace with Israel _while Israel was actively seizing new parts of it_? What?
…and who exactly do you think should have made this peace? Palestine had no government. There was a pretend government in Egypt that wasn’t controlling any land and had no control of any forces to have them make peace.
Hey, maybe the Jewish population should have made peace in 1947 instead of blowing up Arab houses, eventually leading to a _civil war_?
Hi, I’m Dark Matter, and I lump together Middle Eastern countries in some weird stereotype.
Do you know what’s going on in Middle Eastern countries WRT to atheists? They are following a very stupid system laid down by the Ottoman empire where each religion basically is in charge of its people. Each religion handles it own marriage, social rules, property inheritance, etc.
Not only does this not handle atheists at all, but it is incredibly fragile and results in majority-religion countries enforcing norms on other religions in violation of how it is supposed to work.
Boy, that’s a really stupid system, isn’t it? Any country that uses such a system should not…aw, hell, I can see where this is going. Israel uses that system, too, and in fact, atheists cannot get married in Israel. Interfaith marriages can’t happen there, either, or gay marriage…at least, not of Jewish gays.
The Middle East has live quite peacefully with large populations of people of _all sorts_ of religions for literally thousands of years.
Throughout all of history before the 1920s, the place you wanted to be if you were Jewish was as one of the native minority populations in Palestine or Iran or anywhere. Anywhere to the West of that, you were likely to get murdered…and I’m not talking about Nazis, I’m talking about Good Christian Folk.
Perhaps you should try to figure out if there was some notable event that happened in _changed_ how people in the Middle East felt about Jews in from 1930-1948, and why Jews have slowly left other Middle Eastern countries. And what resulting conflict has seriously strengthened Islamism?
I’m personally wondering if it might be when the UN engaged in _ethnic cleansing_ in the name of European Jews, replacing a large population of Muslims with them.
These Muslim populations, saw both Jews and Christians literally driving Muslims out of their homes(And that, of course, isn’t the _only_ thing. ), and become more radicalized.
The way to deradicalize them would be to STOP DOING THAT SHIT.
Once again, we get a fun ‘citation needed’ from Wikipedia. There’s no evidence that the Christian population is that low, and it’s almost impossible to get demographic information from Gaza because Israel won’t allow people in. At some point you’re going to realize, that’s because the people talking to you are lying.
Literally everything you have said about this wrong.
Under the Parlimentary system operating in Gaza, there are literally seats _assigned to Christians_, as a specific minority protection. (Like more Parliament do.) There are multiple Christian churches. I assure you, Christians are ‘supposed to exist’.
The ‘force conversions’, to date, are two _disputed_ people. They caused a lot of outrage, but, again, it is literally two people, even if it did happen, which is disputed.
The Wikipedia article you cite literally says ‘Attacks on Christians and their property are rare,[43] with the notable exception of those on The Teacher’s Bookshop.’ Violence that Hamas immediately condemned.
Is Hamas putting the population of Gaza under burdensome conservative religious law? Yes. Do I think this is a good idea? No, I disagree with putting religious laws into effect in _any_ country. Does this mean ethnic cleansing? No, it doesn’t.
All this is rather easily easy known, and the fact you are so sure of _wrong_ information should cause you to reconsider your sources.Report
That is the narrative. However in ’67 the bulk of Israel was Jews who fled ME countries.
It is possible the genocidal religious fanatics would trade violence for prosperity. But as much as we want to think that, it’s not what they have a history of doing. They were offered economic support/trade/etc before. The conditions attached, i.e. give up killing Jews, made it unacceptable.
I was talking about the settlements on “stolen land” in the 1980’s. The line of thought is the Arabs were willing to live with the borders of 1967 and Israel should trade everything it won in that war for peace. However, if you consider the Jews at fault just for being there at all, then sure. That line of thinking won’t work.
The UN proposed a deal that Israel signed off on in ’48, that was rejected. Similarly, Israel would have been thrilled to have peace after the wars of ’48 or ’67.
This is like saying Florida has no government because its international relations are run by the US. If memory serves, the West Bank at that time was controlled by Jordan.
I guess we could have handed the issue to the UN and let them come up with a peace plan the Jews would sign off on.
Yeah, I couldn’t get married in Poland either. Marriage laws can be stupid when combined with religion+gov. Presumably there are work arounds like “converting” to whatever religion and then leaving but whatever. But let’s check out the ME states.
64 percent of Muslims in Egypt are reported to approve of the death penalty for those who leave Islam. Though persecution of blasphemous atheist are often carried out by law in the Middle East, some states like Turkey and Lebanon do allow atheists to live rather safely though withstanding any promise of legal form of safety.
some scholars have been opposing the death penalty for apostasies in the Islamic realm
Atheists, and those accused of defection from the official religion, may be subject to discrimination and persecution in many Muslim-majority countries.[119] According to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, compared to other nations, “unbelievers… in Islamic countries face the most severe – sometimes brutal – treatment”.[3] Atheists and religious skeptics can be executed in at least thirteen nations… While a death sentence is rare, it is common for atheists to be charged with blasphemy or inciting hatred.
Hmm… odd. There isn’t a section on Israel at all in the “Discrimination against atheists” wiki.
We care how minorities are treated now or within living memory and not “thousands” of years ago.
It is fair to think the anti-Jewish purges in the ME in the 50’s were the result of the creation of Israel.
It is unfair to blame all negative events on Jews, that’s scapegoating. Iran’s issues should be focused on the Shaw. It seems a reach to blame the Jews for the Taliban shooting girls for trying to learn how to read.
If Islam in general everywhere has become a lot less tolerant of minorities and modern-world-changes starting in the 1920’s, then even Israel is probably too small to explain it. It is probably more of a general response to modernity/technology.
However even if true we have the problem on what to do about it. Trumpists are upset that the wrong side won the election, handing the Presidency back to Trump is a non-starter.Report
Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza. The rocket attacks from Gaza began as soon as it withdrew,Report
The official position of the UN, the international courts, the US, the EU, the UK, and most of the other governments in the world is that Gaza is legally “Israeli occupied territory.”
Trump’s plan would have given Israel much of what it wanted, but it didn’t change the US position on that status of Gaza. Couldn’t really, given that it would make Israel responsible for military security and have Israelis staff all border crossings, even those with countries other than Israel.Report
What we need is a land saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98Report
What do you suggest Israel do about Gaza? Stand back and let their population be terrorized?
They’ve already withdrawn to the degree they can. The number of boots on the ground is roughly zero. They have the blockade but countries at war are allowed to do that. Hamas (i.e. the elected government) wants a genocidal war and to terrorize the Jewish civilian population and they’re using their own population as human shields.
When Hamas won the election in… 2005? Israel and the West told it if they want the West’s economic development and trade they’d have to give up killing Jews. They wouldn’t do that. Israel isn’t willing to pay for the terrorism of its population, and we thus had an embargo which morphed into a blockade after Hamas kicked out the PA in 2007.Report
See, here you’re claiming the countries are at war. That’s what defenders of Israel always do. They pick whichever framework allows the illegal actions of Israel. (And usually they don’t even actually do that. See below)
So let’s take this idea that the two countries are at war, and apply them to everything else you’ve said here.
First, if the countries are at war, than Gaza is launching military strikes, not ‘terrorism’. Presumbly in retribution for Israel seizing Palestinian land.
Sorry, I guess if it’s a war, it would be Israel ‘conquering’ Palestinian land?
Israel has invaded and conquered Sheikh Jarrah. And Palestinian has responded, with rockets. Right? That’s the war framing?
Well…stealing civilian property for other civilians, during a war, is explicitly a war crime. You can take it for yourself, for military operations, but can’t give it to anyone.
Just as importantly, speaking of how bad this defense is, it doesn’t even work for the military blockade. Do you know what requirements there are for a military blockade of a country you’re at war with?
You have to openly publish an all-inclusive list of what you forbid, and that list cannot include certain items on it, like food.
Here, have a link of what Israel’s doing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_imports
And a quote: Israel says that the importation curbs are in place to pressure Hamas.
Wow, that is so illegal.
Pretending this is an actual war (Which it isn’t), Israel is flatly, completely violating the international law that governs military blockades of countries.Report
Indiscriminate military strikes targeting civilian populations (while hiding behind their own) which have no objective other than terrorism?
“Terrorism” still sounds like a good word and this is breaking all sorts of war rules.
If the claim is that country boarders don’t change during a war, then I have news for you. Boarders changed during the war of 1967, which was fought because Israel’s neighbors tried to destroy it. After that the question becomes “who owns that land”, and was the anti-Jewish ethnic cleaning in 1949 legal under Israeli law?
Last I checked, the number of people who starved last year in Gaza was roughly zero. Food gets through, although I’d guess Israel plays economic war while they’re at it.Report
Most strident anti-Zionists believe that Israel’s occupation began with with the partition of Mandate Palestine in 1948. This is Hamas’ official line along with that of the Palestinian Authority in general. Some of the more realistic ones might be willing to concede that nothing could be done about 1948 but many others take the position that the only just solution is “No Israel” or “No Israel, No Jews.” So saying that Israel is an occupying power isn’t that much of an argument when millions of people believe that Israel is an occupying power merely by existing and Tel Aviv is just as much as an illegal settlement as anything in the West Bank.Report
That land has, literally, never been part of Israel.
The families who lived in Sheikh Jarrah moved there after Israel ethnically cleansed itself to create itself in 1947-1949. That is actually the war crime that started all this, although I was referring to the newer one.
These displaced refugees, and this is important, moved OUT OF ISRAEL. Into the East Jerusalem of Sheikh Jarrah, which was already Palestine. It was controlled by Jordan at the time. Yes, Jordon, having noticed that Jewish settlers _literally killed and displaced 700,000 Palestinians_ and really couldn’t be trusted, removed them from Jerusalem. Was that ethnic cleansing? Sure.
But fun fact: That isn’t actually what is claimed here. No one is actually claiming that Sheikh Jarrah was owned by Jews in 1948. It’s not part of the ethnic cleansing by Jordan.
They’re claiming it was owned by Jews in 1885. Under the Ottoman empire. Those are the people who have been granted ‘ownership’ of the land.
In addition to this being absurd, it’s worth pointing out there’s basically no evidence of this. There really aren’t property ownership records from back them, and certainly not any chain that show current ownership. That was literally four different governments ago.
And I point out: Almost _all_ of Israel was own by Palestinians in 1885. And 1946, for that matter.
—
And here’s a fact: It doesn’t matter who actually ‘owned’ that land, at the individual level. That land is part of Palestine. It is not part of Israel.
Even if you want to argue there is some ‘right’ for people who owned the land in 1967 to get their land back, it is land that is IN PALESTINE and is not part of Israel. It doesn’t matter who owns the deed…I can’t buy land in Canada and have the US military start defending it from Canadians, and treating it like it’s part of the US!
That’s what happens in Israel. All the time. And that is the actual war crime I was referring to…Israel has constantly been stealing Palestinian land.
That’s what happened here. It’s not people objecting to Jewish people living in Sheikh Jarrah, or that the land is being taken from one person and given to another. It’s that the Israeli government is _stealing_ Sheikh Jarrah from _Palestine_ and making it part of _Israel_.
That’s how it works. Israel has constantly conflated ‘Jewish settlers owning property’ and ‘That makes it part of Israel’ since literally the very start…that is essentially what Zionism is, that’s how it functioned. That was the justification for the creation of Israel…and meanwhile, of course, they stole tons of Palestinian land.
But you can’t _buy_ parts of other countries and make them your own.
Incidentally, the reason Israel wants that land is that they are literally trying to build a theme park. Called the ‘Holy Basin’. It requires them illegally seizing large part of Jerusalem.Report
In 1947, there were about 100 Jewish houses in the neighborhood. …following the 1948 War. The Jordanians expelled all Jews from East Jerusalem, and the Jordanian Custodian of Enemy Property was established in 1948 to handle property taken from Jews that had fled or been expelled from the territories then under Jordan control, including the property in question.
[It’s banged around in the legal system since Israel took over in 67.] In 1982, the Palestinian residents signed an agreement accepting Jewish ownership of the land while being allowed to live there as protected tenants. The Palestinian residents have since repudiated the agreement, saying they were tricked into signing it.[27] They have ceased paying rent.
The Palestinian Authority does not recognise the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem and insists that Palestinian land laws apply to land transactions in East Jerusalem, which forbid any sale of land to Jews.[26]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheikh_Jarrah_property_dispute
The land was annexed by Israel in 1980.
Wars move Borders.
Israel doesn’t have set borders because it doesn’t yet have a peace deal with the Palestinians. The Palestinians refusal to make a peace deal has cost them and continues to cost them. This is where we get the phrase “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.Report
Wow, 100 Jewish Houses, you say? Why that must be…not actually a lot at all for such a large neighborhood.
I love you eclipsed out the fact it wasn’t Jordan who did that, but the British Authority. Aka, the people backing Israel! Here, let me fix: In 1947, there were about 100 Jewish houses in the neighborhood.[citation needed] In March 1948, given their exposed and isolated position in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the British authorities ordered the residents to evacuate. within two hours. [citation needed]
That’s…not ethnic cleansing. That’s ‘Jewish settlers have seized control of this British colony from the native population with the backing of Britain, and our reach is not _quite_ far enough to defend you guys, so get back here within our borders.’
Now, there was later ethnic cleaning. But, again, if we care about undoing ethnic cleaning, and want to reverse it…Israel literally can’t exist, it was created by ethnic cleansing.
The creation of Israel was total chaos, started by Israel. It resulted in hundreds of thousands displaced Palestinians. And tens of thousands of Jews.
100,000s of Palestinians were forced out of now-Israel and some amount of them ended up in the properties seized from Jews.
10,000s of Jews were forced out of remaining-Palestine and ended up in properties (And in fact, an entirely _country_!) seized from Palestinians.
For some reason, the second group have the right to return and seize their property back…and they’re not even doing that, they’re selling their ‘property’ to far-right settler organizations who are getting fricking Americans and whatnot to move there.
But, again, this isn’t actually the problem. If there were just Jewish people moving into Palestine, whatever. The problem is Israel declared these things ‘settlements’ and constantly treats them as part of Israel, when they are, in fact, still part of Palestine. In explicit violation of international law.
The problem isn’t ‘Who owns this house?’. The problem is ‘What country is this house in?’
Israel courts shouldn’t actually be making decisions about that land _at all_. It is not in Israel.
The word is actually ‘stole’, not annexed. You can’t just annex parts of other countries.
That is absolutely not how military occupations work under international law.
And Palestine doesn’t have to make a peace deal with anyone. Palestine was never at war with Israel. Other countries fought wars _inside_ Palestine.Report
BTW, this keeps getting overlooked in all this: [if we care about ethnic cleansing and undoing it,] Israel literally can’t exist, it was created by ethnic cleansing.
Palestine was a British colony. And there was a movement to create a homeland post-WWII, and Palestine seemed sort of obvious. Britain could actually just give Palestine independence, it’d done it plenty of time before and the British empire was basically being reconsidered at that point anyway.
But there was a large problem: The native population.
Even if every Jew that was on board with the thing move to Palestine (And a lot of them did.), and every native Jew in the area supported a Jewish state, the non-Jewish population would outnumber them. That doesn’t work in a Democracy, does it?
So what had to happen is only _part_ of Palestine was needed, and enough of the native population had to go elsewhere.
Now, the British were really good at chopping countries up randomly, but Palestine was a region that, while not a ‘country’ in a sovereign sense for a very long time, was…well-understood grouping. It’s not some arbitrary lines drawn on a map, like some Middle East ‘countries’. One side is ocean and the other side river, and then Egypt has a clearly-defined start at the Sinai penisula that they’ve had forever, and the only thing anyone ever argued about were the Syria and Lebanon borders. It was under Roman rule, then Ottoman rule, then British, but it was one entity.
There was no obvious place to split another country off, and anyway Jewish settlers were everywhere, the Zionist movement hadn’t really been specific.
So Britain committed a War Crime. They basically decided ‘We want a Jewish democracy, so…we need to have the population be majority Jewish. And that means we have to remove the population that _aren’t_. Or at least enough of them.’
And I think that ‘War Crime’ does deserve capital letters, because it required a gigantic amount of ethnic cleansing, across an entire country, and required shoving enough natives into small areas that were, in some hypothetical sense, not part of Israel.
And we can go on from there, but fundamentally, the massive crime at the start of the creation of Israel rather undoes any whining about their property ownership. Or maybe it would be a reasonable amount of whinng if they didn’t _keep_ doing it, didn’t keep trying to take territory, wedging a smaller population into less and less territory.
—
I said this a while back, and it has happened: There were only every two options…a one-state solution, and a two-state solution.
The two-state solution is gone. There is never going to be an independent Palestine. It’s clear Israel will never allow it.
Which means, at some point, possibly at gunpoint, Israel will be forced to make Palestinians citizens of Israel instead.
There will be one-state, and it will be Israel…for about ten minutes, until the voters rename it Palestine.Report
There will be one-state, and it will be Israel…for about ten minutes, until the voters rename it Palestine.
Golly. I guess I see why Israaelis might oppose a single state, then. It’s the rational play.Report
And can you also see why their tactics in that “rational play” come off looking very much like Apartheid?Report
Oh, yeah.
Personally, I think that a 3 state solution is the rational play for Israel. The West Bank can be the nice Palestine that is urbane and has the diaspora Palestinians and the Gaza Strip can be the MAGA Palestinians and now you’ve got two different groups of people to deal with and dealing with one doesn’t automatically mean dealing with the other.
(Or, hell, give Gaza back to Egypt. It’s your border now, guys!)Report
They’re not going to do that, they want the West Bank for themselves. The West Bank is actually a fairly nice area, unlike Gaza, which they could care less about.
And they have plans for building in that area. Tourist attractions and stuff.Report
Yes. Especially if we strip out history, intentions and just look at power.
However when I look at openly genocidal people who are trying to set up a theocratic state to repress minorities while rejecting any concept of peace, I conclude they create a lot of their own problems.Report
Briton tried to keep the Jews out because it was so alarming to the Arabs. The “White Paper of 1939” attempted to limit Jewish migration to 75k over 5 years (only 51k of that was used) with further immigration being determined by the Arab majority. Jews were restricted from buying Arab land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
Then (same link) after the Holocaust there was huge illegal Jewish migration to Palestine (i.e. “Aliyah Bet”).
This time period is when we had Jewish terror groups opposing Briton’s control over Palestine.
Big picture there probably weren’t enough Jews in Palestine to make a functional country, even after the war of 1948. Then the surrounding ME states kicked their Jews out.Report
Gee, I wonder why Arab Palestinians might be so worried about Jewish immigration in 1939?
“Why do Palestinians dislike the foreigners who just helped foil their war of independence against the British, because those people want to seize the country for themselves and Britian is more sympathetic toward them?”
And what exactly is your premise here? ‘If Jews had been freely allowed to move into Palestine, they could have had a majority there?’ And thus…?
First, no they couldn’t have, the Jewish population was still incredibly low, and second, does this logic work in any other country?
“If America had allowed free immigration of the Chinese, the Chinese would be in charge now, and this is why it is perfectly fine for the Chinese to conquer half the US.” What?
I’m generally in favor of immigration, but…it’s not really the same thing when _one_ colonizing group (The British) are helping _another_ colonizing group (European Jews moving to Palestine with an explicit purpose of Zionism.) to replace a native population so much they can claim to be the true population.
And…this isn’t even what happened…the replacement population was nowhere near large enough and just sort _seized_ the place anyway, and herded all the extra people off into ‘another country’ so they could claim to be a democracy.Report
My point is the British saw this coming and tried to stop it.Report
Yes, agreed. This brings us back to “Israel doesn’t have agreed upon boarders. The Palestinians’ refusal to make peace has cost them a lot and continues to cost them more.
The government of Israel disagrees and has control.
Wars move boarders. That’s one reason why they’re a very high risk thing.
Yes, the Palestinians would have been better off if they’d made peace after the war of 1948, or even the war of 1967. Or even the attempts at peace in 2000 (etc). Everyone could have agreed upon boarders so everyone could go on with their lives.
A big reason they can’t do that is agreeing upon boarders means no right to return for the generations of people who were sent to refugee camps after the wars. They’re waiting for Israel to be destroyed so they can get back their lives.Report
Israel agreed to defined borders in 1948 when they signed on to the UN Resolution that created their country. They have regularly and routinely violated that agreement since.Report
They did. They’ve been dragged into wars when their neighbors tried to destroy them and those boarders have changed since that agreement was made.
And we’re still dealing with fall out from that. Not just the war from 1967 but also the war of 1948.Report
You keep describing things that are factually war crimes, and asserting ‘These true facts’.
They are indeed true.
They are also war crimes.
Just deciding that part of another country is yours is, in fact, a war crime. It’s actually the _worst_ war crime, ‘starting wars’.
Israel is the only country in the world that refuses to define its borders…and I don’t mean ‘Other countries disagree’, I mean it literally does not appear to have stated borders with Palestine.
That was actually one of the demands _of_ Palestine in the peace talks in 2013.
Palestine, in those talks, indicated it was perfectly willing to accept the 1967 borders. Israel was not. They want more.
Again, and I keep repeating this: The idea that Palestine should be punished by _other countries_ attacking Israel is completely insane. And also…getting fairly racist in how you’re saying it, like it’s somehow reasonable to punish Palestinians for other Arab things.Report
Are you seriously trying to describe 1967 as Israel starting a war so it could take over the West Bank? If that’s the case I strongly suggest you go visit wiki. 1967 was a repeat of 1948 with all of Israel’s neighbors trying to end it.
That’s something that they could and should do. However “1967 borders” is pretty unrealistic, there’s been another war since then and population movement.
If we want Israel to set boarders, we’re suggesting is Israel proclaim what it wants. If we want to end the occupation, then we’re suggesting Israel take what it wants and leave the rest.
The real question is whether that turns the parts of the West Bank Israel leaves into Gaza-2, Gaza-3, etc and we have an even larger mess on our hands as the Palestinians go to war yet again.
If the USA goes to war with Canada and loses Michigan, 50 years later Michigan doesn’t get to claim it’s not part of the USA and shouldn’t be punished for the war.
I haven’t suggested the Palestinians be punished for other Arab things, I’ve suggested that boarders move in wars and that Hamas is openly genocidal (and popular enough to win elections because of that).
If we want to talk about ethical disconnects, let’s mention a few:
Jews in Israel win a war, so it’s reasonable for Arabs to punish their own Jews?
It’s was Israel’s fault in the wars of 1948 and 1967 because Jews aren’t supposed to exist so it’s fine for their neighbors to try to kill them?
Is it reasonable for Arabic countries commit genocide on their own Atheists/Jews/Minorities?
What it comes down to is this is a really nasty part of the world and the most ethical player in it seems to be Israel. That is very unfortunate, but claiming the Palestinians aren’t genocidal doesn’t pass even a minimal review of the evidence.
And btw, I’m sure you can find places where Israel is less than ethical (most ethical isn’t the same as ethical). But the big nasty question remains, where would you want to live as a minority? If you wouldn’t dare live in Gaza or the West Bank because the Arabs would kill you, maybe that says something about their culture/ethics/interactions?Report
This subthread reminds me of one of those situations where someone finds themselves wedged into a corner with only impossible choices, and yet continues to insist that all the choices which led to this predicament were the only possible ones which could have been made.
Both parties in this are wedged into this predicament; They can’t win, can’t surrender, can’t quit or walk away.
So the only possible solution is to continue fighting the endless war, because, of all the possible options, living in a constant state of terror and bloodletting is the least painful.Report
Not unlike Republicans in the US huh? What’s with humans that we just can’t cop to mistakes and keep digging our collective holes deeper and deeper?Report
I’m thinking of the 1850 Mexican/American War, where a “war occurred” and “borders changed”, and people who went to bed one night as Mexican citizens woke up the next morning to discover that they were American citizens.
But the important fact was that they were citizens, with all the rights and privileges. Their land claims were secure, they were able to vote and have a say in their own governance.
But they also accepted the terms and built new lives as American citizens instead of launching a protracted guerilla war.
Those two outcomes were connected and interdependent.Report
The issue is ultiamtely one of identity poltics. The Jews of the Holy Land, to use the most neutral term possible, wanted it be a Jewish state. The Palestinians wanted it to be an Arab state conected to other Arab states. Neither side wanted to deal with the other population or be in the role of the minority. That both sides had theocratic sides did not help. Religious Zionists who imagined a Torah based society for the Jews. Muslim Palestinians that saw Palestine as a Muslim state based on Islamic principles and practices and part of a wider Islamic world. For obvious reasons, lots of people found these various theocratic visions either non-thrilling or extremely thrilling.
There is a certain brand of utopian that envisions either a bi-national Palestine or a multicultural Palestine but they have the problem that next to nobody who lives in the Holy Land wants this. The Jews and Arabs can’t agree on a name, symbols, history, or holiday calendar for the country. Was the mass immigration of Jews a sign of Jews rebuilding a new society in the face of persecution or white settler colonialism?
I think a lot of Israeli Jews and Diaspora Jews wanto to know what protections they would receive from islamic theocratic politics and the attempts to create the Islamic Republci of Palestine. We don’t want to be burried as a minority population. A lot of the world treats these concerns as irrelevant.Report
Which is why ultimately any sort of peace will require as a precondition the abandonment of triumphalist sentiment and the adoption of some kind of secular multicultural identity.
And yeah, I know how glib that sounds coming from a secular American.
So, again, I don’t claim to have any big answer here.Report
What I don’t like necessarily about the Pro-Palestinian side in the West is how they project these values on the Palestinians en mass. I guess this is sort of pre-requisite for the settler, colonialist Israel narrative.Report
And the reason Israel didn’t do that is they would be outnumbered in their own country. The country they had mostly created out of moving there to start with.
But they weren’t offered that deal.
The Palestinian people would have been happy with a new country. They’d been fighting for it for years against the British.
They didn’t end up in a different country…well, they did, but they were always going to do that when the British left. But they ended up ‘in a country’ that explicitly couldn’t allow them to vote. (And said they had to live in a small area that was, somehow, some other country.)
This is exactly why the Arab resistance movements had been fighting against the Jewish resistance movements for years, despite them both nominally being on the same side of ‘Get the British the hell out of here’. It was because the Jewish resistance movements _explicitly_ were trying to create a ‘Jewish country’ out of a country that was not, in fact, anywhere near majority Jewish.
And the Arabs foresaw some, uh….rather large problems with this. All of which turned out to be true…and more.Report
The bulk of these “choices” are ‘masses-of-people-doing-stuff’ so it’s hard to see how things turn out differently. A certain percentage of Jews feel a strong connection to “the holy land” and moved there. A higher percentage of Arabs were going to be offended by the idea of a Jewish state.
Now there were a few key points where things might have turned out differently. Some Israeli leader might have pulled back from the West Bank and left enough to build a contiguous state. Arafat might have taken land for peace in 2000; he might have had the stature to pull that off and him being “king” might have made him bold enough to risk shafting everyone waiting for the RoR.
It would be amazingly useful if the RoR didn’t exist or if the offspring of a refugee weren’t a refugee.
It would be useful if every single house and who owns it weren’t viewed as a life or death struggle by the tribe at large.
Ideally, we’d be solving these mixed-population issues by letting people buy/sell houses so we’d see self-selection. In practice that would result in rich Jews buying West Bank houses from Poor Arabs. That doesn’t work if the Palestinians insist on the death penalty for selling land to a Jew.Report
No…_that’s_ not why Israel started the war. That was just a lucky side effect.
Israel started the Six-Day War because of Eygpt refusing passage to Israeli ships in the Stait of Tiran.
Notable…Eygpt’s blockade, being of clearly defined things (mostly oil) does seem to be legal (Unlike the Israeli one of Gaza)…although they did have an agreement they wouldn’t do that in return for Israel withdrawing their _last_ invasion force in 1956.
It’s weird how we never talk about 1956, isn’t it? When Israel just…invaded Egypt. The first time. Weirdly not ever mentioned.
Anyway, the attack of Egypt by Israel in 1967 was, _indeed_, a war crime (Again, warmongering is literally The War Crime.), as was continuing to hold land they seized and asserting it was part of Israel.
Ah, yes, when Israel refused to return part of Egypt it had stole in 1967, there was indeed another war. The first one _not_ started by Israel, I guess? Well, technically, the two countries were still at war, but Egypt did violate a ceasefile…in an attempt to regain _part of itself_.
Again, I repeat: There is one country that has attempted to expand itself at the expense of other countries, and no, despite what you have imagined and been informed, Israel is not magically doing that because ‘other people attack them and lose’.
Every single bit of territory that Israel has ever had (Including the original), it won in a war _it started_.
You just keep hearing history that starts about _ten seconds later_, where Israel just mysteriously has all this land somehow and mysteriously other countries are attacking it.Report
I stand corrected, although that was hardly the only reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_Six-Day_War
The creation of every country is a crime.
There is always some other people and/or authority who was there before. And that people always took it from some other group as well.
Typically we forgive countries the crime of their own creation.Report
No, unfortunately history proves otherwise.
The theory is that if you can grab land and hold it for some length of time, everyone will just sort of forgive and forget and move on.
Except…Russia just grabbed Crimea, which had been held as part of Ukraine for a couple generations. China took back Hong Kong, which had been held by the British for centuries. The Balkans exploded over land claims which had been held by the Communist bloc for generations.
And the fu@king Confederates are still whining about their lost country 150 years after the fact.
Seriously, it never ends. The people who drew the maps in 1948 just blithely assumed everyone would just sort of suck it up and move on, but they didn’t, and won’t.Report
My retort is that a lot of anti-Zionists just assumed that after the Holocaust, Jews would quietly return to their homes, suck up, and deal with whatever situation they found themselves in. When it turned out that Jews weren’t going to passively accept persecuted minority status under different types of regimes and demand some sort of place of their own, things got tough. Like they really don’t seem to understand why not wanting to be part of the Islamic Republic of Whatever is an unattractive proposition to most Jews.
I really think that many anti-Zionists find Jews clinging to their identity confusing. Since they mainly see Jews as a weird type of white people, they assume that the perfect solution to anti-Semitism is for the Jews just to stop being so Jewish and become normal post-ethnic secular affluent white people. Any problems we have by remaining Jewish is just our own fault for clinging to our identity. It’s all false anyway, so why stick to it?
Never mind that they would never say this to any other persecuting group or that their perceived answer was tried in the past but did not work. A lot of them just find Jewish identity too troublesome to deal with, so they would prefer not to deal with it. They want a simple vulgar anti-racism where it is all about virtuous people of color fighting patriarchal capitalist racist imperialists whites and the Jews just confuse their simple dualism.Report
Yes.
Every inch of land has a history that is covered with blood caused ownership changes.
You’re correct that people don’t forgive and forget, but it’s unusual for anyone other than those involved or their descendants to care.
The long term solution to Israel is for it to become a “normal” country. That means defined borders, going to war if it’s subjected to acts of war including terrorism, and being forgiven the crime of it’s existence.
When I look around the world at what we put up with from normal countries, it’s hard to think Israel would rate any attention if it weren’t Jewish.Report
Matt Yglesias recently made the point that there ethnic conflicts across the world that involve millions more people and are incredibly more deadly than the Israel-Palestinian conflict that get much less attention.
The fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves the Jews certainly helps the conflict become more mythologized but that isn’t really the only reason. The real estate involved, the Holy Land, is another big contributor the how big the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is. Nearly every Jew, Christian, and Muslim on the planet is going to have some feelings of connection to the conflict because the Holy Land is involved than say Sri Lanka and the conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamil residents.
I think the small scale of the conflict makes people feel it is more solvable than other ethnic-conflicts.Report
Its also next door to the oil fields that we still have not rid ourselves of being dependent on. Thanks to us, Israel can threaten them when this gets out of hand.Report
The small scale is an illusion. Both sides are proxies for larger groups who send in money and other support.
Those larger groups have jobs and other interests at stake but no personal skin in the game and can insist on maximal conditions for ending the conflict.
Israel also serves as a lightning rod for attention away from whatever. We can’t stop abusing our people until Israel deals fairly with its. Time spent with the UN focused on Israel is time and focus not spent on my civil war or election fraud.Report
The reason people in the US care is because Israel is only able to do this with US support.
The reason people are protesting is that it would be _trivially easy_, and completely reasonable, for the US to say to Israel ‘You do not do a single settlement in Palestine territory, ever again, or the money from us is cut off’.
I am actually, 100% sure that no one here has any objection to that. ‘Israel, stop doing blatantly illegal things that lead to violence and wars.’ is a _completely_ reasonable thing to condition the US’s military support on!
Being forgiven of something requires, at minimum, stopping the current and ongoing harm first.
Israel, at minimum, has to firmly declare it won’t take more land. It has to firmly declare it has borders it recognizes. It has to stop doing power rationing in Palestine, for something I literally haven’t mentioned but is a giant issue. (Why don’t they generate their own power? Israel bombed the power plants and won’t let them construct more.)
It has to create a formal blockade list and allow shipments of _non_-military things through, including construction materials to fix the buildings it levels. (Or, hell, if it’s that worried about smuggling…it could supply the stuff…like it is supposed to, as an occupying power.)
Right now, Israel has stated they are _rationing food_ inside parts of Palestine, cutting back so that people remain hunger. This is, again, blatantly illegal under international law.
I would have a lot more sympathy for ‘Israel’s creation was a bad choice but we need to move past it’ if Israel still wasn’t, to this day, making bad choices that hurt people.
And please note, I am pretending all of Israel’s security concerns are real. I disagree, but ‘security’ has always been the justification for anything Israel does.
Well, did they need to _try to take part of Palestine_ a few weeks ago? That wasn’t any sort of security concern! As I’ve explained, that actually makes security a lot harder, because Israel is taking weird disjointed pieces and having to guard them all. It’s _bad_ for Israel’s security!
But it happened because their far-right political party, has a platform of ‘slowly stealing Israel’, and their far-right president is under indictment and having a good ole fashion bombing of Palestine when Palestinians react predictably to another land grab by throwing some rocks, which then allows Israel to overreact with armed force, which then causes Palestine to react some shitty rockets…is the only thing keeping him in power.Report
We gave chemical weapons to Sadam to use against Iran and got 6 digits (hundreds of thousands) of people killed.
We kill something like 5 digits worth of people every year in Afghanistan, total of something like 6 digits of civilians.
We got 6 or even 7 digits of people killed in Iraq.
Israel just killed about 232 people in Gaza. So do we care about that 1% as we do Afghanistan and 0.01% as much as Iraq?
Let’s just list our top five recipients of foreign aid. Afghanistan (#1), Iraq (#2), Israel (#3), Jordan (#4), and Egypt (#5). Do we get all spun up when the other four countries do something bad like taking a house?
Adjusted for size of GDP, we’re giving 5x as much to Jordan. So… what do we make that aid contingent on? Stopping honor killings, human trafficking, and torture? If we’re not going to care about that sort of thing, then why should we care about real estate judgements by the legal system?
The big difference seems to be the underlying thought that Jews should be held to different standards. Or more bluntly, that they shouldn’t exist at all there.
Agreed… although expect a lot of screams when it does.
Construction material is used to build tunnels to sneak militants under the wall where they can kill Jews. (Lots of) Power is used to create rocket launchers. In Gaza, the “military” gets first bite at the apple so anything that is “dual-use” ends up being “military”. The government of Gaza has priorities, economic development and helping civilians is below attacking Israeli civilians.
You mean, why does the Israeli legal system think that it can make judgements over annexed land and how can they possibly rule that anti-Jewish ethnic cleaning is illegal?
Better question, why should we care? What their court system is doing seems less bad than our history of racist use of eminent domain. So at what point did our racist use of eminent domain draw the threat of war and international condemnation?
Is Israel’s human rights record really worse than Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan (just looking at a map right now)? Or if we’re holding them to a different standard, why is that?Report
We actually _do_ make foreign aid contingent on outlawing those things! And we try to make them actually enforce the laws.
See, the difference fundamentally is those things are not actions by the government. They are things accepted by those societies, but we do force the governments to, at minimum, outlaw them. Enforcement is very spotty, but they are all illegal.
Because otherwise, our money is _supporting_ those things.
Like with Israel.
Everything you hear about Israel’s action about Sheikh Jarrah in the mainstream media is filtered through the claims of Israel. Here: https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-manipulate-facts-downplay-sheikh-jarrah-evictions-palestinian-families
This actually wasn’t an example of ethnic cleansing. Those properties were abandoned by Jewish settlers during the creation of Israel when it became clear that Israel could not hold the entire country it had tried to seize. There was, indeed, ethnic cleansing under Jordan, but not in Sheikh Jarrah, which was already empty.
Now, the Jews fleeing probably did fear reprisals from Palestinian sources, but…I don’t actually care? Because the people who led _into_ those houses were, in fact, fleeing an actual military force too!
Here’s a long, long page. These were Palestinian villages that ended up unoccupied after the war. Some of them abandoned ‘voluntarily’ due to being too close to a war (Like Sheikh Jarrah, but the other way), others were literally driven out at gunpoint and their village burned to the ground:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_villages_depopulated_during_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus
Here’s the order to the Israeli forces: “Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered.”
And the people displaced by that moved into houses that Jews abandoned _outside_ the ‘conquered territories’. That’s literally who moved into Sheikh Jarrah, Jewish refugees from the rest of Palestine.
That entire area of ‘Mandate Palestine’ had tons of property abandoned by people who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side in 1948, and people have been living in it for 70 years now. On both sides.
Now…apparently, only those Jews get their property back. As part of, I must point out, a systematic attempt to bring parts of East Jerusleum under Israeli control to eventually make it _part_ of Israel, as the Media Matters page makes clear.
You’re the one who talks about how the past is past, and how wars redraw property lines. Well, that property line got drawn _within Palestine_.
War might redraw property lines, but the reserve is also true: Redrawing property lines can, and does, start wars.
That is merely because you do not know the facts.
Um…other countries condemn the US all the time?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/03/19/us-should-address-structural-racism-concrete-actions
As for why they don’t threaten war…I’m confused as to who here you think is threatening war with Isreal?
As to the reason no one threatens war with the US is because we are an incredibly formidable military power and it would be insane?
‘Why don’t people call the US to account for its actions like people are demanding we call Israel to account?’ is a hell of a take, man. It’s because when they _do_ call us to account, we don’t like it and often respond poorly, and we’re the 800-pound gorilla.Report
LOL. Obviously, I meant Palestine refugees from the rest of Palestine.
Me saying the wrong thing is sorta funny, though, because, the creation of Israel was an immensely destructive act in the Palestinian territory, causing not only massive harm to Palestinians, but to long-native Jewish residents of the area, who _also_ got massively displaced. (Note that doesn’t really include what we’re talking about, which wasn’t even a residential neighborhood until 1900 or so.)Report
Sure. Moving national borders causes all sorts of problems.
Now for individuals it’s supposed to be a “bad few years” recovering and not “the rest of your life sucks” much less “so does life for your kids and grand-kids”.
After the war there was a vast exchange of population(s). Israel did everything it could to help its fellow Jews (displaced by itself or the Arabs) but the Arab refugees, and their descendants, are largely still waiting for the destruction of Israel.
The grandchildren of the Jews whose lives were disrupted don’t go to bed at night wishing the war hadn’t happened and they lived in an Islamic Republic.Report
When I said “torture” I meant “the government torturing people”.
That’s a pretty good link but let’s sum it up. “There are larger issues”.
Arguing/explaining “the larger issues” is ignoring specifics. We expect courts to do the reverse. That link argues this is more than squatters not paying rent on someone else’s land. So… are they squatters not paying rent on someone else’s land?
Yes, the law isn’t equal. Jews have a right to undo Arabic ethnic cleaning, Arabs don’t have a right to return. Israel is an ethno-state and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. That’s very common.
Wiki (and for that matter you), are pretty clear that “abandoned” means “fled because of the war” (wiki claims ordered out by an army with 2 hours notice).
That means they didn’t sell the land, their property rights were simply terminated by Jordan’s ethnic cleansing in 1948. The legal question then becomes “did they legally own the land before the war” (I don’t see any dispute that the answer is yes) and “was it legal for Jordan to sever property rights as part of their ethnic cleansing efforts (Israeli law is clear the answer is “no”, Jordan is clear the answer is “yes”). The legal counter argument that the Palestinians are making is that Israeli courts don’t have jurisdiction.
Adding to that we have Israel’s annexation of the West Bank in 1980 (I think Sheikh Jarrah is in there).
Big picture Israel’s Jews have their finger on the scale of justice and there are efforts to have “Jewification” of parts of the West Bank that the Palestinians want for their future country. None of which changes that this shouldn’t be a really big deal on an international stage… nor that if I have to pick a place in the ME to live as a minority, the obvious place is Israel because all the others are a lot worse.
Hamas. You’ve pointed out that they’re the legit government of Gaza, I’ve agreed.
Insane is the right word. I don’t see a lot of difference between Mexico deliberately going to war with the US and Gaza going to war with Israel. It’s a mismatch.Report
Yeah, the thing about torture? Pretty much every country that does it denies it, and when it comes to light, it gets criticized pretty strongly.
You’re trying to be a very strange argument of ‘It is suspicious we only criticize Israel’ for bad behavior, but you just keep ignoring two things:
a) Israel is _openly_ doing a bunch of shit we don’t allow. Countries can hide a lot of things, often stuff doesn’t come to light until later. They lie about torture, they lie about gassing civilians, etc. You know what is obvious? Launching missiles and flattening buildings in another country!
b) Israel is only able to do what it is doing with the support of the US, as an _ally_ of the US.
c) We actually do criticize and pressure other countries for this. When Russia annexed Crimea, pretty sure we criticized it for that.
Many other countries are too powerful or too strategic to do this with, witness China. We know they have what are essentially slaves, but…can’t do a lot about it, relations have to stay mostly normal. But we, at minimum, don’t give China an army!
And the argument is that we literally should not be friendly with an ethnostate, a state that _requires_ the suppression of racial and religious groups to hold a majority. It’s 2020. We didn’t even allow that in South Africa in the 80s!
You are entirely right that Israel is being treated differently than other countries…but it’s the exact _opposite_ of what you claim. The US has spent decades bending over backwards to ignore the fact Israel is the sort of state it would normally oppose, or at least hold at a _distance_. Somewhere between Turkey and the UAE. A state that we’d be friendly with, but keep constant pressure on to become better.
Instead, we give it our full support. Not only that, we give it so much support they can just blatantly shoot missiles at people.
The US is actually the reason that other countries keep their war crimes _secret_. Israel barely even makes up excuses at this point.
Gaza is not ‘threatening to go to war’ with Israel. The government seizing land from a neighboring country _is_ starting a war, so if there’s anyone starting a war, it’s Israel.
Gaza merely is unable to respond with a full war.Report
War is indeed obvious and when you have an openly genocidal group which is launching terror attacks against a civilian population, it’s expected you’ll go to war. Normal countries go to war over this sort of thing.
Our aid to Israel is less than 1% of their GDP. My strong expectation is that, since normal democratic countries would never tolerate their civilian populations being terrorized, that Israel would go to war regardless of our aid.
We’re in the middle of a quasi-cold war with Russia.
The example you need is the US refusing to support one of our close allies for acting against terrorists. I don’t recall us saying something like: “You French need to allow your civilians to be murdered and terrorized by Islamic Fundamentalists because of they are poor and you are rich”.
Or even “Islamists in another country are upset your courts are allowing you to [insult Islam]. You need to overrule your courts, the attackers in Charlie Hebdo were correct”.
The word “_requires_” is doing a lot of heavy lifting; You’re assuming “all of Palestine” is naturally one country. The most powerful group flatly refuses the Islamic Theocracy which the others want to the point of civil war and succession.
If you’re insisting the only ethical outcome is for them to allow/join an Islamic Theocracy, then you need to reevaluate your chain of reasoning.
They shoot missiles at Islamic Terrorists, exactly like we’re doing in Pakistan.
The argument here can be summed up as, “Even though we shoot Islamic Terrorists in other countries because we want to be safe, Jews shouldn’t be able to do that”.
The seizing of that piece of land happened in 1967 and it was annexed in 1980. Further yes, Gaza threatened to go to war if that court made its judgement before it started firing rockets.
Stripped of emotion, what we have now a protest (or war) that a Jewish court of law claims to have jurisdiction and is going to rule that anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing is illegal. Granted, that’s not a good summation of people’s feelings. Way too many people have an intense emotional feeling that [their group] should own [specific land]. Given that they’re starting with their conclusion in terms of what is acceptable, there is no process that will be acceptable other than [my side wins]. I think…
1) It’s appropriate to encourage Israel to just set borders and be done with it. When they set borders, we’re going to see a lot of screaming that they’re taking the best stuff for themselves and we’ll see another war.
2) It’s grotesquely inappropriate to insist they need to let their civilians be murdered and/or terrorized by Islamic Terrorists. Knocking down buildings related to Hamas and even killing the odd human shield is ok and expected.
3) It’s absurd to insist Hamas is going to be appeased into peace. They stay in power by stirring things up with Israel. If it’s not one lightning rod they’ll find another.
4) It’s inappropriate for us to tell the Israeli government that an Israeli court can’t be allowed to rule in a certain way because it will upset the Islamic Terrorists.
5) Like most countries, Israel is an ethno-state. Just like France is very concerned about promoting the French language and making sure they help the French culture, Israel is concerned about helping Jewish-ism.Report
One side is using genocidal rhetoric.
The other side is, literally, committing genocide via ethnic cleansing. And also, incidentally, _using the same rhetoric_.
Let me quote a very important Israeli politician, Ayelet Shaked: And in our war this is sevenfold more correct, because the enemy soldiers hide out among the population, and it is only through its support that they can fight. Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.
The current governing party in Israel _rejects a Palestine state_.
“The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.”
“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration, and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel’s existence, security and national needs.”
The difference, again, is that one side is actually able to put these policies into action.
_I’m_ not the one assuming that. I just pointed out that _Likud_ assumes that.
And, again, Israel literally attempted to claim the entire Palestine Mandate when it was founded. How _exactly_ was their ethnostate going to work at that point? Oh, yes, by driving out enough Palestinians from all of the Palestine Mandate into Egypt and Jordan (And Lebanon, some.).
This failed (resulting in decades of whining about how those countries won’t let those refugees in, like it’s somehow worse to reject refugees than to make them refugeees to start with.), and resulted in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively.
Plus: This is, again, you randomly picking and choosing whatever situation makes Israel come out looking the best. Now you’re trying to claim Palestine _isn’t_ part of Israel. While you have stood there and argued that Israel courts have jurisidiction over East Jerusalem, aka, part of Palestine! Well…if they do…then why can’t the residents there vote in Israel? (Answer: They plus current Israeli Arabs would outnumber Jewish people.)
You want to flip it around and argue they aren’t part of Israel, then you have to stand there and talk about how Israel sent troups into a neighboring country to seize land, which really really looks like a very obvious act of war. And for civilian use, that’s a straight up war crime, you can’t do that. (You can, of course, seize land from countries you’re at war with, but you can’t settle there!)
There’s a reason that you, and Israel itself, won’t pick _either_ a two-state solution or a one-state solution: Because the actual desired outcome by Israel (Or, at least, the ruling party) is Israel ends up with the _entire_ area of land previously called Palestine, the area they tried to start with, and that requires ethnic cleansing of enough of the inconvenient majority of people living in that land who are not Jewish.
Israel has made this repeatedly clear, it’s literally the founding principle of the country, right there in their declaration of independence, and they have _constantly_ acted as if they mean it! Everyone else keeps talking about how the UN partitioned the country to start with (Which Israel never accepted) or the 1967 borders, which Israel won’t commit to. Israel…does not think that. Israel says it owns Palestine.
But the Western media is _really good_ at not actually talking about that, really good at not talking about the fact that Israel not only thinks Palestine shouldn’t exist, but appears to think it _doesn’t_ exist, while repeated over and over the fact that Hamas thinks Israel should not exist. And implying that means they think Jews should not exist, which is…not what Hamas says.
You can easily ‘get rid of Israel’, acheving all of Hamas’ goals, by simply _letting everyone currently under Israel control vote in a free election_. That’s all you have to do, and Israel is gone. Poof.
You can’t, however, achieve Israel’s goals without ethnic cleansing of some sort. And I say that as if it’s a hypothetical…it’s actually a current, decade-long process.
Their GDP? What? You realize their _entire_ military spending is only 4% of their GDP, right? Israel military spending is 19$ billion a year. The US is, at minumum, $3 billion of that, and we just bumped it up to 3.8 billion.
I say ‘at minimum’ because there is a _lot_ of very complicated things set up to obscure additional funding, like we’ve given them a huge amount of ‘loans’ we’ve forgive, or the weird fact we have setup a system to allow people to give tax-deductiable donations to fund Israel, which doesn’t exist for other countries, and at least a billion dollars a year flow to Israel that way. (Of which $350 million or whatever of that _should be_ our tax money.) And even more obscure and odder things.
Their entire government spending is only about $150 billion. So, yeah, I think knocking out what is probably close to $5 billion would indeed be noticable.
And you keep repeating the word ‘terrorist’ like it means anything. PLease define terrorism?
In my book, it’s ‘achieving political goals not via politics, but by threatening the population into being forced to do those goals’.
Which makes BOTH SIDES terrorists. Israel is explictly trying to influce Palestine politics, trying to threaten the population with death until thye remove Hamas, which, I must point out, actually won the elections there. Normally we call that an attempted coup.
This is because ‘terrorism’ is generally a bullshit term, just used to describe whatever force is weakest that America doesn’t like.
What is happening in Palestine is a RESISTENCE MOVEMENT OF AN OCCUPIED PEOPLE. It’s what they all look like! Yeah, they hide in the population. Yeah, they, with their shitty weapons and undisciplined troups, often make attacks of opprotunity against whatever they can manage to hit.
Tell me, do you feel the same way about the French resistence? They literally had assassination squads to kill civilian collaborators with the Nazis.
‘The odd human shield’ is bullshit.
Here, since you have apparently decided that all teenages are terrorists:
https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/babies/
You are acting like this is any sort of symeterical war. No. This is Israel flattening Palestine and Palestine _occassionally_ getting in a hit.
You realize the _Israeli_ government had, in fact, collapsed repeated, the prime minister under inditement for corruption, massive protests are _currently_ happening against him…and then Israel decided to seize this land?
It’s not _Hamas_ that’s getting propped up by this recent thing. It’s Likud and Netanyahu.
No, but it’s approriate to tell them not to do that because it’s a literal war crime.
The difference is that most (In fact, almost all) people in the territory France thinks it owns are, in fact, French. And thus they can operate by democracy.
Most people in the territory Israel thinks it owns are not, in fact, Jewish. And thus they cannot operate by democracy.
In fact, not only are they systematically making sure that Palestinians don’t become Israelis under a single country, (while refusing to give up those Palestine’s territory), they also are, at this point, repressing the vote of Arab Israelis. As in, actual Arab citizens of Israel.
Why? Because enough Israeli Jews are no longer quite on board with how Israel operates that if you add them _to_ the Arab citizens, it challenges the entire system:
https://www.nif.org/press-releases/likud-voter-suppression-tactics-targeting-arab-citizens-challenged-by-israeli-civil-society-organizations/Report
I suppose calling Mahmoud Abbas was expected but he has little to no power over Hamas. That’s one of the issues with resolving the entire conflict. You can expect the Israeli Prime Minister to have enough power to bring Israel under control but with the Palestinians to many people have veto power over the entire process.Report
Gotta say, when the protesters in the US start acting like this, my sympathies are stroked for Team Evil instead of Team Good.
Maybe it’s old footage. Maybe it’s about something else. Maybe one of the bagel people used a slur.Report
Here’s another example that makes me think “no theory of mind”.Report
The Pro-Palestinian allies always say that they are protesting Israel and not Jews but they can’t seem to resist targetting Jewish spaces when they protest despite arguing streneously that they aren’t anti-Semitic. This is why many Jews don’t quite believe that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism line.Report
It kinda gives the game away.
I mean, if *I* wanted to argue that Ethnostates had no place in the current year, I’d try to refrain from attacking Jewish people in non-Jewish places and screaming about it being related to Jewishness.
That sort of makes the whole “We created Israel so we could have a country of last resort” argument that much more persuasive even to people who have swallowed the whole “ethnostates have no place in the current year” argument.
(That said, if I wanted an ethnostate in the current year, I also wouldn’t do quite so many things that could easily be analogized to South Africa in 1986.)Report
I have Jewish friends who patronize those restaurants and were terrorized by the sudden sense of exposure and targeting solely for their Jewishness and ironically, the ones I know aren’t particularly fond of Likud, or even very hawkish.
But I guess that shows how even in a supposedly secular place like America, ethnic hatred is never far below the surface and only takes a spark to ignite; I’m thinking of the attacks against Asians recently where people who thought they were safely assimilated suddenly realized they weren’t as safe as they thought. Or my Muslim friend who tells me that whenever he hears of some mass shooting, all he can do is pray that the shooter doesn’t have an Arabic sounding name.Report
Nearly every Jewish person I’m friends through Facebook, whether I know them IRL or not, immediately took up Israel’s cause in this flare up unless they were hardcore anti-Zionists already. Like I repeat, Western anti-Zionists and critics of Israel do not seem to understand why Israel is important because they think of Jews as wealthy privileged white people and they can’t quite imagine the more devote Muslims among the Palestinians wanting a really close relationship between Islam and the state. So they imagine it as something like the West where Muslim holidays guide the calendar but nobody really takes it that seriously rather than the West where they really did close everything on Sunday whether you were Christian or not.Report
Did…um…anyone actually watch this video?
Because it doesn’t show what the description says. I won’t say the bagel place _wasn’t_ attacked but…it actually seems fine when the camera pans across it. Maybe it was attacked later?
But what this video shows is two people confronting a pro-Palestine match, one of those guys starts attacking people, and it turns into a brawl.
I’m not saying that’s all that happened, but describing this as ‘attacking a bagel shop’ is completely absurd, unless something happened outside this video. This isn’t even in front of the bagel shop, this is next door to it in front of a Panda Express.Report
There were several incidents:
A noisy protest on La Cienega, where protesters used the word “Jews”, not “Israelis”; this one led to shouting led to scuffling;
A door shattered at a kosher restaurant out in Sherman Oaks;
An Orthodox man being chased by protesters down Fairfax;
These neighborhoods are all linked as places popular with Jewish people; Not Israeli expats or Israeli tourists, but Americans, Angelenos who were born and raised here who are Jewish; Fairfax especially is a street where you routinely see Orthodox people walking and signs in Hebrew.
So it wasn’t like running into some Jewish people was like a big coincidence. They were targeted.Report
Yeah, my argument was not ‘This sort of thing does not happen’. My argument was ‘This video literally does not show what is being described.’
And _actual_ things that are happening, like what Jaybird linked to which sounds pretty damn bad, probably means people shouldn’t just be making stuff up about bagel shops. It sorta minimizes the actual things, makes them very easy to dismiss as _also_ being lies.Report
My impression was the Jewish guy swung on the pro-Pal protester.Report
Yeah. While holding the fricken flag of Israel. That’s what the white thing with the blue lines on it is, it’s hard to tell, but that’s Israel’s flag. Nice image there, real helpful to the cause, dude. Literally punching people with the flag.
Like…this confrontation doesn’t actually mean anything, in any real sense. It doesn’t seem to be any targetted thing at all…as Zazzy said, the protest was almost certainly coming from the Israeli embassy, and ran across some people upset at it and _one_ person started swinging. And it was quickly ended by the police.
What annoyed me about it is blatant lying about what was going on, by the guy who posed it. A conflict that literally had the Israeli supporter acting bad (Which, again, says nothing about the relative positions of anything) was turned into an example of antisemitism somehow!
Which completely undermines _actual_ antisemitism. Which is _actually_ happening right now, and needs to be dealt with, pretty quickly.Report
Oh, we’re deep into BSDI.
232 people will killed in the recent conflict including 60+ children.
If the numbers work like with previous conflicts, 90% of the adults will be men, 50% of the children too young to hold a gun will be male.
My expectation is a lot of the children will be 15+ year old males, maybe even 90%.
All that suggests about 80% of the dead are militants. Now this is assuming this conflict wasn’t more indiscriminate than normal and as far as I know sex ratios of the dead haven’t been announced.
Similarly the same years-ago article which talked about AP’s offices being shared by Hamas talked about how AP would be ordered to turn off their cameras with militants were taken into a hospital, they’re only allowed to record civilians.Report
“Right near the UES…”
Sure… it’s in a giant neighborhood adjacent to another giant neighborhood…
“Walking distance to Park East Synagogue…”
16 blocks… approximately .75 miles…
“Other Jewish institutions…”
Which ones? I mean, it’s NYC… there are Jewish institutions everywhere.
The framing of that video seems pretty intentionally misleading and inflamatory.
ETA: This was likely spillover from the protest outside the Israeli Consulate, located at 43rd and 2nd, about 1/3 mile away.Report
“Mostly peaceful interaction”Report
My new crank theory is that any future negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians should involve Japan, South Korea, or, if the People’s Republic of China can be temporarily sensible, Taiwan. These are three democratic states without ethnic, ideological, or religious stakes to any side to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This might make them more neutral arbeiters and more immune to emotional lobbying from either side. They have the emotional distance necessary.Report
That’s not actually a bad idea. Too bad we have to look to Asia to find countries that would fit that bill.Report
well if you want someone to insert themselves into the fray it should be groups with no connection to the fray. send in the jains!Report
Just running through a scenario or two in my head, I’m guessing that South Korea will say “why not split off from Palestine and let them be their own country? Like a North Korea or something? Just harden your border between you and them.”
That’s just a guess, though.Report
If you enjoy op-ed headlines as much as I do, you will *LOVE* this one!
Report
Response to DavidTC. This has gotten long. I’m going to spit it in half and post it here to give more width.
Let’s ignore rhetoric and look at numbers.
20% of Israel’s citizens are Arabs. It used to be claimed they have more rights than Arabs in Muslims countries.
0% of Gaza’s citizens are Jews. Everyone, including themselves, expects them to kill every Jew they get their hands on.
Our current example of “ethnic cleansing” is a court case that has been banging around in the Israeli courts since 1978(?). For perspective when the Jews lost that same land the “ethnic cleansing” was started and over in 1948.
Now we could look at other things, targeting of civilians, use of terror, but I don’t feel like putting up a wall of text showcasing Hamas tries to live up to their genocidal charter. Israel’s “genocide” seems to be a combo of human shields getting in the way and Hamas mislabeling militants as civilians.
And don’t forget the Jews. You know, the ones forced out of their Arabic homes? Or was it somehow more ethical for the Arabic states to create Jewish refugees?
The idea that they’d be less genocidal and more responsible if they had real power is how we ended up with Hamas running Gaza. They have seemed to be determined to show that they’ll “put their policies into action” to the limits of their power.
Yes, the current gov of Israel doesn’t want to repeat the Gaza experiment (and yes, envisions Jewification of sensitive land). Previous governments have attempted to make peace which presumably would have resulted in a Palestinian state. Arafat walking away from the table in 2000 without making a counter offer convinced many Jews there was no point in even attempting peace.
It’s been 21 years, Arafat is dead, maybe it’s time to try again. Without Hamas’ terror attack + the war, Israel’s Arabic political party would have joined the government, so maybe progress.
In terms of “putting their policies into action”, Israel’s attempts at Jewification which has people spun up, is a 43 year old court case which attempts to undo Jewish ethnic cleansing. That seems pretty civilized.
If you need to point to 80+ year old rhetoric then you don’t have a strong case. In effect you’re assuming all of Israel+Palestine is really Palestine and the ethical outcome is Jews need to be part of an Islamic Republic.
You’re playing fast and loose with the definition of “Palestine” and “part of Palestine”. The area in which Israel claims Israeli law applies is an area which used to be part of Palestine and is now part of Israel. Israel annexed it in 1980. They have not annexed all of Palestine and don’t intend to.
Now the lack of defined/recognized borders is a problem. Israel has been trying to get the Palestinians to agree to boarders and the Palestinians are still stuck insisting there can’t be a Jewish state, which I gather you are too.
I think a 2 or 3 state solution is needed because the divisions are too deep.
Presumably Israel will have to set its boarders without Palestinian input. That will be very ugly.Report
2nd comment in mod.Report
Freed.Report
No, only you expect that, because you’ve internalized decades of propaganda.
The reason that 0% of Gaza’s citizens are Jews is that _Israel lets the Jews out of Gaza_. They didn’t get killed. Israel, in many cases, actually _paid_ them to join it, with promises of housing, as it is desperately attempting to bolster the percentage of Jews in its own population.
I have no idea how to respond to propaganda driven that deep into someone’s head, but, again, Hamas is not genocidal. It does not behave in any manner that could be described as genocidal.
Arafat walked away because he demanded a right of return of Palestinian refugees, and couldn’t get it. That was pretty much it. That was the most important thing to Palestinians back then, and it arguably is still today. The fact that it got dismissed out of hand (And still is) meant there really was no way to move forward.
Or, to put it another way: The failure to solve the problem is basically due to the fact that Israel wants to be an ethnostate, and thus _cannot_ accept the return of Arabs and remain a democracy. Well…not with its current borders…it could have if it had stuck its 1948 borders. But not anymore.
Israel could have, of course, set up a state with strong constitutional protections for minorities, keeping a Jewish right of return for foreign Jews (As is literally the premise of Zionism.), and all sorts of things, and tried that…I don’t know if that could have worked in 2000, but working towards a one-state solution could have, hypothetically, actually worked. If Palestine agree to respect the rights of the Jewish minority, and create structures to do that, and Israel agreed to slowly integrate Palestinians as citizens…that could have moved forward. (Probably wouldn’t work now, Israel has basically lost any goodwill it had.)
Israel probably should have done this to start with. In _1948_. There are plenty of examples of countries with strong protections of minorities…hell, they could have modeled something on the UK and created two countries inside one nation.
Or, alternately, it could have accepted much smaller borders, but Israel has some far-right religious fanatics demanding the entire area…some of them want to invade fricking Jordan and take that ‘back’ too! So that was out.
I thought you said you _weren’t_ being racist.
The actions of other countries do not, in any manner at all, reflect on Palestine or Palestinians.
By ‘sensitive land’, you presumable mean ‘the entirety of Palestine’.
Uh, no. That isn’t a good description of what happened at all. Moreover, you do understand this is just _the most recent_ example, right?
Maybe read up on things a little? Here: https://www.btselem.org/settlements
“At present, settlements cover 538,130 dunams – almost 10% of the West Bank. Their regional councils control another 1,650,370 dunams, including vast open areas that have not been attached to any particular settlement. This brings the total area under the direct control of settlements to 40% of the West Bank, and 63% of Area C.”
“In practice, however, it treats the settlements established throughout Area C as extensions of its sovereign territory and has virtually eliminated the distinction for Israeli citizens – while concentrating the Palestinian population in 165 disconnected “islands” (Areas A and B)”
That’s right, the West Bank is a series of 165 disconnected islands, with ‘settlements’ blocking travel between them. And outside the actual settlements, huge sections of the West Bank are under the control of these (completely illegal) Israeli regional councils and Palestinians can’t do things there, like build.
Meanwhile, the entity of section C has basically been annexed and operates as if it was Israel, even the parts _not_ under these regional councils. Section C, for the record, is 61% of the West Bank.
This is, and again I repeat myself, because Israel is trying to steal the entire West Bank. They have basically given up on Gaza at this point…they wanted it at one time, but no more. But they still want the West Bank.
Israel actually _has_ annexed all of Palestine, in a way. They specifically removed the UN partition plan borders from their declaration of independence, and don’t have any borders in it…which honestly is incredibly odd for a country created in the middle of another country.
They just sorta backed down on that when they couldn’t force enough Arabs into Egypt or Jordan, and rewound themselves, claiming the UN borders were what it meant all along. And then promptly claimed all the land seized during that fighting, which…if that wasn’t Israel to start with, is illegal under international law. (And this _isn’t_ the occupied territory, that’s part of Israel proper.)
Although that raises a whole host of issues because _almost all the fighting_ that Israel did with other countries were _outside its own borders_, which…makes it somewhat odd. Who declares where their country is and then fights a war outside it? It’s kinda funny how everyone claims a bunch of surrounding countries invaded _Israel_ if that land wasn’t Israel!
But, I don’t know what logic this is. “This territory was stolen before this point, so that’s fine?”
Incidentally, this neighborhood is Jerusalem. That’s what was ‘annexed’ in the 80s. It’s not supposed to be part of Israel _or_ Palestine, it’s supposed to be a special international enclave. Which Israel not only refuses to set up, but now claims to own all of. (I guess, to be fair, Palestine has never set it up either, but…they don’t really have the power to do that.)
That’s what set everything off. Not just stealing land, which Israel does all the time. But continually stealing _more_ of Jerusalem. Because, of course, they want to keep it.
There never is going to be a two-state solution, there are too many parts of Israel that want all that territory, and whenever they’re in power, they will push to seize more.
What _is_ going to happen is that Israelis, long disillusioned with the far-right constantly creating conflict by attempting to expand, will eventually cross a threshold and do something a bit more permanent, like implement Arab right of return, and, bam, the far-right manifest destiny fanatics will never hold power again.
Hopefully, the Arab Israelis and the moderate Jews will manage to live together, and at some point I expect a hand will be reached out to expand not just territory, but citizenship, to Palestinians.
It already has done that. It just keeps _moving_ them.Report
You respond with facts that counter what I’m saying. Hamas living peacefully with Jews in territory it controls. Hamas not targeting civilians. That would be direct evidence.
Alternatively, you can argue indirectly, i.e. if Hamas were really genocidal they’d be doing “X” and they’re not. So basically you’d have to argue the suicide bombs targeting civilians ending had nothing to do with Israel turning Gaza into a prison camp.
You can also question whether my underlying facts are correct. “Openly genocidal” is a conclusion, am I wrong about their rhetoric, actions or charter? Is it “propaganda” that their charter is Na.zi level anti-Semitic and openly calls for genocide?
Now just saying “they don’t have the power to commit genocide” doesn’t work if I’m saying they’re as genocidal as they can be within the limits of their power.
Fully agreed. Note however this is a “one state” or “no Jewish state” idea.
The way forward is we treat this like we did Poland, which also had its borders seriously moved at the same time and which created more refugees. The refugees, or at a minimum their children, become members of whatever state/location they’re in. You don’t have a right to return when it’s across country borders. This was something that was invented in the Israeli conflict with the idea that Israel will be destroyed in a few years.
It’s an insane idea that has worked out poorly. My children’s lives would be very different if they were in a refugee camp waiting for Russia to give up the parts of Poland that they took after WW2.
The likely outcome is we’d discover the Constitution is just a piece of paper while the Koran is the word of God.
The Arabs in the ME at that time engaged in serious ethnic cleansing. So Israel is going to be a haven to Jews even though they’re a minority and the Arabs want to do anti-Jew ethnic cleansing? This does not seem workable.
The Jews you’re insisting should have set themselves up as a minority had been the victims of persecution up to and including the holocaust. While the holocaust was European, the bulk of the Jews in Israel were there because of Arabic ethnic cleansing. Antisemitism was, and is, the rocket-fuel behind the creation of Israel.
I am pointing out that you’re expecting Israel to live by very different rules than the rest of the ME countries. All of these countries did the same thing at the same time.
Even the (very one sided) Trump peace plan had a lot fewer than that. More reasonably, some of the more blocking settlements will have to be bulldozed and the settlers removed like they were in Gaza in a two-state peace plan.
Or alternatively, the Palestinians could drop the “absolutely no Jews” concept and accept some Jews as minority citizens. Presumably that would require laws that prevent them from being outright killed and so on. If that’s unthinkable, then maybe they shouldn’t be wearing the white hat?
“Supposed to be” meaning Israel and Palestine have agreed to this in a peace treaty? If that’s not the case then it’s “suggested to be”.
It would make things a lot cleaner if Israel would set borders and live with them. Also agreed, the right wing of Israel really doesn’t want that to happen, they want this slow motion shifting of population.
This is a huge reason why imho the Palestinians should have accepted even a bad peace deal decades ago. They’d have more land now, the borders would have been set years ago, and the refugees would have been allowed to get on with their lives.
And I owe you a post from the other half.Report
I love the weird reality-warping bubble you have, where there are Jewish people randomly trying to buy land in Palestine.
All Israeli movement into the West Bank is sponsored by far-right religious settlement organizations attempting to claim parts of Palestine. Literally all of it. The articles about the current conflict literally talk about that…the Jewish people with the supposed right of return _sold_ their supposed ownership _decades_ ago, and the people being moved in are being moved there (and paid to move there) by these far-right religious groups, who are, again, very explicitly try to claim those parts of Palestine. All these settlements are very well defended by Israeli troops.
There are no Jews that just randomly want to live in the West Bank. That want to just buy a random house and live there. Now, you can argue that’s because they wouldn’t be safe, and you’re probably right, and that’s bad.
But…you do understand that countries don’t actually have to allow people to immigrate, right? Countries have an obligation to not mistreat _residents_, regardless of the country of origin, but no obligation to allow _new_ residents from other countries. (Outside of a few specific emergency situations.) Like, this is a weird idea _even if_ the premise was true.
People don’t even get this right if they buy a house in said country! I can’t buy a house in China and demand China let me reside there. Not even if I buy it from some refugee from China who has a right to return there.
And I certainly don’t have a right to move there with the explicit stated intent, and clear history, of America _seizing_ that land with the justification that an American lives there, and proclaiming it part of America!
Now, all this does get somewhat muddled once you introduce a right of return, but, as I said, having that only operate on one side is manifestly unfair.
Moreover, the right of return is operating (And intended to operate) as a way for Israel to claim more land, in a feedback loop. Of course West Bank and Jeruselum Palestinians will not accept Israel settlers as that is literally how their country is being stolen, and their lack of acceptance and violence in response to that justifies more and more security presence until Israel annexes the land completely.
And unlike anything else in the conflict, defenders of Israel really cannot justify any part of this, as it is a very clear violation of international law and the sacred trust that Israel is supposed to be holding over an Occupied Territory, and in fact makes Israel and Israeli Jews less secure, occupying a frcking foreign country and all.
Which is why they have to pretend it’s simple ‘property disputes’, and ignore the fact it is, at this point, almost the entirety of the cause of anger on the Palestine side. (Well, that and Israeli police often being out of control and randomly shooting people…something Americans have, uh…really no grounds to say anything about.) Because, again, a rather significant portion of their government believes they have some sort of manifest destiny to own all of Palestine. And apparently the Golan Heights too!
LOL. There are laws against killing anyone in Palestine.
You really have internalized ‘Palestinians are killing Jews’, haven’t you? Would you like to _guess_ how many Jews have been killed in Palestine? Maybe you should guess that, and then google it. But I’ll tel you. It’s been 52. In a decade.
Wait, no, I’m lying. That’s the total amount of Jewish civilians killed _period_, not just in Palestine.
The total amount of Jews killed within Palestine in recent decades appears to be…uh…none? Like, I literally can’t find one. Mostly because, again, they literally don’t live there outside of armed compounds, and are protected anywhere they go, often on streets kept clear off Palestinians. (And, yes, this lack is due to ethnic cleansing decades ago by a different country, but…the fact that was a war crime doesn’t magically recreate Jewish residents of Palestine.)
For example of such a compound, Sheikh Jarrah, at one point during all this, had protests happening right outside the neighborhood, and there a deliberately provocative table was set up by a far-right Israeli political party (In, again, _another country_. Why were they operating in another country at all? Because they don’t think it’s a different country.), which at some point erupted into rock-throwing, with some injuries, but no deaths. That’s…about as close as I can fine.
Oh, wait, there actually has been a Jewish civilian death from local Jewish-Arab violence during this recent stuff. In Lod, violence sprung up between the Jewish and Arab population, and a man got hit with a brick and did, and and synagoges were firebombed, resulting eventually in Israeli curfew…wait a second. That’s in Israel, doh!
Ya know…it actually is starting to sound like _Israel_ is more out of control than Palestine at this point. Seriously, if you want Arab-Jewish violence, look _there_. Most of it started by Arabs, but…a not-insignificant portion is started by Jewish far-right mobs.
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And that is because, and this is something I really should have pointed out from the start: I know people won’t listen to Palestinian voices in this, but try listing to _Israeli_ voices. Hell, listen to _Jewish_ Israeli voices, many of whom have been sharply critical of Israeli’s actions for years.
The Israeli government has been, for quite some time, controlled by far-right religious extremists (Or, at least, they are the swing vote, so have to be pandered to with settlements) that demand Israel encompass all of Palestine, and propped up by the US far-right religious conservatives who want Israel to have the same thing for entirely different reasons.
And every conception of what is going on there that Americans have is filtered through those two groups.
Go ask the _Israelis_ what is going on. Like, look at their _internal_ politics.Report
Yes. It’s normally expected that we let religious nuts do their thing as long as it’s not violent, here that’s created more problems than normal.
Palestine and Israel both officially claim that land.
I think it’s reasonable for Israel to take a dim view towards anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing.
I think it’s reasonable to disallow foreign immigration (as you pointed out just now, normal countries can do that) or the “right of return” (especially for descendants) from a country’s creation.
That results in “one side unfairness”, but I can’t disagree with either of the previous two statements.
Sounds like what we did with Texas. I’m not sure where “rights” come into play here. We’re talking about country creation and borders; No one has the “right” to create a country, the creation of every county is a crime.
I probably should have said something other than “laws”. To be fair it’s a lot more reasonable to picture Jews living in the WB than it is Gaza… but I’m not sure “more reasonable” is “reasonable”. It’s easier to picture Israel just bulldozing some settlements.
The settler movement is definitely a problem and impedes peace efforts. I could put up a brick of text but will largely just agree with you. Now “more out of control than Palestine” is doubtful. Israel’s political factions don’t typically shoot at each other.
Even if we want to ignore that, I’d say there is wide spread agreement on what a two-state peace agreement would look like and the Palestinians are further away than Israel from accepting that.Report
Yes, and Israel won it in a war of conquest. You don’t get to keep territory you keep in a war of conquest. (Or, actually, any war.)
There’s a fundamental difference with the creation of the Republican of Texas: After it was created, all the people living in it were Texas citizens. (Well, except slaves, but that’s a whole _different_ problem.) And, thus, American citizens when Texas joined. In fact, plenty of them still live there, called Tejanos, the native _Mexican_ population of Texas.
This was possible because the Texas Revolution was actually what the people of Texas wanted. The majority of Texas citizens were actually Anglos, called Texians, to distinguish them from Tejanos. When they declared independence from Mexico, it was a majority-supported decision of the free population. (I am, again, ignoring slavery here.)
No revolution is really democratic. You can’t hold votes for something that is inherently illegal, you can’t check what the majority want in advance.
But AFTERWARDS, that’s the test: Did you do something that the _majority_ of the population wanted? If you did, you can freely treat everyone as a citizen, like Texas did.
If the majority of the population _doesn’t_ want your government, you have to create a repressive illiberal system of government where certain groups aren’t allowed citizenship, like Israel. (Or just a completely repressive government, like the Soviets.)
So, I guess what you’re comparing to is a hypothetical where enough Jews moved to Palestine that Israeli could actually exist as a Jewish majority government over all of it? And thus had been that way from the start? Would I have a problem with that? Well, not really. I don’t particularly like the idea of basically moving on top of a people and hijacking the entire country by sheer numbers, but…it would be an entirely different situation than this.
But that isn’t this situation. The situation here is that a big part of Israeli politics has a large fanatical devotion to the idea of getting all of Israel, _and_ that such a thing cannot possibly be a democracy due to the sheer numbers of Arabs and how they outnumber Jews in the area. Which basically by definition requires ethnic cleansing to solve. (Or, I guess, they could switch to some _non_-democratic system of government.)
No, the Palestinians aren’t father away. Israel is just really really good at _claming_ they’re trying for peace. As I have pointed out repeatedly, the people who keep provoking the conflict is, in fact, Israel. That’s not some sort of subjective claim, Israel is the only entity that keeps doing things (the settlements) that can’t possibly be described as needed or part of a security effort or a reaction to what the other side does or some sort of war effoer. And…is also explicitly illegal under international law.
Everything else Israel does, and everything that the various Palestinian groups do, can be vaguely justified in some manner, and we can argue history forever or who is doing what for what reason. Palestines protest something, Israeli police react, Hamas reacts to that police violence, Israel reacts to that. Whatever.
But the Israeli government is just, very blatantly, doing something that is not allowed to happen, under any possible understanding of the law or the responsibilities Israel has as an occupier of territory. Something very illegal that causes _immense_ backlash, and has in fact been the cause of the massive protests that were the escalation points for the past _several_ escalations.
You can’t just handwave settlements like they are some small part of this, some minor wrong that Israel is doing. This is literally the flashpoint, the cause of everything. And the Israel government is doing it on purpose, because, as people have pointed out, mysteriously these flareups start up everything Netanyahu or Likud’s hold on power gets weak.
OTOH, this recent flareup just, finally, failed to work. They just lost the government, two days ago! Netanyahu will soon be out of office and probably is going to jail. The war with Gaza, notably, delayed things, and the new guys were operating under a strict time limit to form a government, but they were able to do it.
But on the third hand, the new Prime Minister is even more far-right, doesn’t support Palestinian statehood at all, supports annexing all of the West Bank…which…I’m not sure where he _thinks_ the people there will go, but…like, basically, he’s a far-right lunatic.
But the thing is: He’s a lunatic in a very unstable coalition which not only includes left Israeli parties, but an _Arab_ Israeli party for the first time. So he won’t actually be able to do any of that at all. Or…probably, do anything. But…if nothing is happening, settlements will basically stop, which means things automatically will get better.
What is probably going to happen is this government really only last long enough to screw up the Likud+Netanyahu center-right to far-right hegomony that Israeli politics have been stuck under for a decade, and then collapse. We’ll see what happens then.Report
(Going to move some responses from the other post to here to balance space).
You keep claiming that, but history disagrees with you.
Or you can split the country into parts, like Yugoslavia (1992), South Sudan (2011), Cyprus (1974), Czechoslovakia (1993), Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan (from Russia in 1918), 15 Countries (USSR 1991), and so on.
The two-state solution wasn’t invented for Israel.
Strongly depends on what peace looks like. If “peace” means, “no Jews in the ME” or “Israel isn’t a Jewish state” (largely the same thing), then yes, Israel is far from peace. If “peace” means, “two states with defined borders living in peace next to each other”, then it’s the Palestinians.
Arafat walked away from peace in 2000 without making any counter offers. The problem went beyond where the borders were drawn since he could have proposed changes.
Sure, let’s check Turkey. The word “genocide” was invented to describe Turkey’s actions in 1915-1917 (parts continued to 1929) against a non-Islamic minority (not Jewish) and earlier you claimed Israel’s start was in the 1920’s. Same era has “courts did not enforce the property rights that non-Muslims were granted on paper” which might be a concern.
If the government is helping the people engage in forced Islamification, that’s a problem. The larger problem is large numbers of people want that. That was a problem then and it still is now.
You’re right in Turkey wasn’t engaged in overt anti-Jewish ethnic cleansing at that moment in time. However Zionism was a big thing because the Jews thought their recently genocidal government couldn’t be trusted.
The top 5 countries we give money to are Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Are you claiming we shouldn’t be giving money to any of them, are you claiming the other four have a better human rights record, or do human rights only matter if the country is Jewish?
We have a lot of influence. We could use it better. Many of the suggestions on what we should make happen are not based on reality. Ending the occupation of Gaza would be hard since there are no troops there and if Israel stops maintaining its walls there are mass murderers trying to get out.
In theory Israel unilaterally ends the occupation of the 92% of the West Bank they offered to give back (presumably less now but whatever) and hands it over like they did with Gaza. This would make Israel take the people living on whatever land it takes. The peace plan envisioned a 15-year transition period to get rid of the settlements but whatever.
Presumably Palestine instantly becomes a corrupt dictatorship and/or an Islamic Theocracy. Israel unilaterally implementing a “peace plan” is also going to mean “Israel keeping various holy sites without Palestinian agreement”. Ergo the Palestinians will be deeply unhappy about the land they lost and maybe even insisting on another war to fix things.
And then we’re over the edge of the universe. Does Palestine look more like Jordan or Gaza? The Palestinians could easily end up a lot poorer, a lot less free, and a lot less stable.
That is one heck of a roll of the dice to insist on when you have no skin in the game.
There is a serious Motte-and-bailey fallacy here. The Motte is “the only ethical way forward is to end the occupation (of the West Bank)”. No one really disagrees with the ethics, it just seems risky. The Bailey is “the only ethical way forward is to end the occupation (of all of historical Palestine)”. That is where we get “the right of return” which means “Jews must accept being minorities in an (antisemitic) Islamic State”.
Lots of Westerners back the Motte and don’t understand there is a Bailey. They think that if Israel just treats the Palestinians better there will be peace. Lots of Palestinians back the Bailey and don’t understand there is a Motte. This is why peace plans fall apart.Report
But…you do understand that countries don’t actually have to allow people to immigrate, right?
When Herr Trumpler was building a wall, there were a lot of discussions over whether open borders was the only moral position.
It’s weird how that conversation has sort of evaporated.Report
So? That moral argument doesn’t change anything under international law. Countries can have a right to do things that are immoral. Countries do not have to allow immigration.
(Well, actually, we do have an exception here of requiring them to allow in refugees, but that’s not relevant here. Excuse me for not carefully caveating every random thing.)
Moreover…What Israel is doing obviously _isn’t_ open borders. It’s literally the opposite, it’s drawing borders inside another country, which makes _more_ actual total miles of borders that people cannot cross freely!Report
I only bring it up because I suspect that when “the only moral position” evaporates when the balance of power shifts, that “the only moral position” was, in fact, a member of a group of other, similarly, moral positions.Report
Considering the weirdness of nationalism and identity politics in MENA, everything gets very complicated. You have distinct national identities like Palestinians nationalism, Egyptian nationalism, and Algerian nationalism but you also have Arab nationalism in general and idea that there should be at least inter country competition among the Arab countries. There is also a strong religious element in place as Islamic theocratic politics is at least plurality popular in many Muslim majority countries with non-Muslims ending up with a deal with the devil bargain. Either you support the local despot for some measure of protection and secularism or you support democracy but risk the local flavor of Islamists winning elections and treating you as just sort of being there at best or persecuting you at worse.
People sympathetic to the Palestinians in the West seem to believe that but for Israel, the Palestinians would be immune to a lot of the political craziness and bad options that plagued the rest of the Middle East. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence for this. The best, and I think most likely option, is that Palestine ends up something like Lebanon, Jordan, or Tunisia. Not a democracy but the leadership tends to be venally corrupt then wack a doo insane like Ba’athists in Syria and Iraq.
I think that chances are that even without Israel, the entire Middle East including Palestine is going to be a very hostile place for the Jews. They will be the others of both the Arab nationalists because both the Christians and Muslims Arabs can agree that they hate them and the Islamists for on occasion reminding them that all this heavily Islamic political imagery is really quite alienating.
If the Pro-Palestinian factions believe that this is still a better outcome because the Jews can survive dispossession easier than the Palestinians than they should at least come out and say so. Instead, they don’t and do this weird look the other way and ignore this type thing.Report
Most no-Israel ways forward probably end up with a lot more antisemitism in Palestine than the ME in general.
For example: If the Jews lost the war of 1948, will Palestine really be ok with Jews there in large enough numbers that the UN thought they should get a country? Would the Palestinians have a strong tolerance for minorities who want their holy land?Report
That’s what I wrote. I think No Israel means No Jews in the Middle East for the most part. Maybe that would be a better timeline because Jews are used to being dispossessed but I wish the Pro-Palestinian side would embrace a more realistic counter-factual rather than their Fantasy Palestine.Report
Use words that mean what you say. By ‘dispossession’, you mean ethnic cleansing.
And most of us ‘Pro-Palestinian’ people don’t believe Israel can survive what it is if it continues along its path and _doesn’t_ ethnically cleanse Palestinian Arabs. It basically has to. (I say, pretending it isn’t already happening at a low grade.)
Or, at some point, the scales will tip, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of Jews.
I.e., the current path Israel is on is going to result in the ethnic cleansing of _someone_. And thus it is a BAD PATH. It isn’t ‘better’ if Israel wins and ethnically cleanses the Palestinians.
The only way to possible divert this path is to try to divert it as soon as possible, aka, now, by Israeli basically immediately doing a lot of things. Removing settlements, stopping blockades, working to create some international body to administer Jerusalem so they stop fighting over that, and discussing reasonable permanent borders that don’t attempt to crush the Palestinians.
This _might_ be enough to stop the hostilities. It _might_ stop the danger that Zionism has moronically placed a vast amount of the Jewish people into.
The problem, of course, is a lot of people assume a) Israel will win (Which I am not sure of), and b) ethnic cleansing against Palestinians doesn’t actually count (Which I seriously disagree with.).Report
Wars move boarders. The default is NOT that the Palestinians, having lost two wars, keep all of their land and Israel is committing war crimes for existing because Jews aren’t supposed to exist.
The Jews won’t willingly let an openly genocidal Islamic Theocratic state be installed. I don’t see why we should expect them to.
So if we cut our aid, the assumption should be that Israel will cut their military by a quarter or more? They don’t have any potential military needs that would cause them to change their budget so military spending is shielded?
This is why we have dictionaries. Quoting that: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
If you find yourself redefining terms so that your side doesn’t look so bad or so that both sides are equal, then you’re not looking at the situation coldly.
Yes, the French resistance used terrorism against collaborators. They also did other things that are serious violations of the rules of war like wear the other side’s uniforms and hide in civilian populations. So if the French resistance opened fire on Nazis from a civilian crowd and the Nazis fired back and killed civilians, then those deaths are the fault of the resistance.
Hamas openly targets civilians on a regular basis. Ergo the word “terrorist” fits very nicely and I’m trying to use it correctly.
Israel is… what? Far as I can tell they don’t target civilians. In order to call Israel’s regular wars with Hamas “illegal” you’d need to claim Israel doesn’t have a right to go to war when it’s civilian population is being terrorized.
It is possible to root for the terrorists and claim their cause is just. There are TV shows which do a good job.
However, the word “terrorist” has a meaning and Hamas fits it while Israel does not.
There’s a wall of text in the wiki on this. Or better yet, let’s quote DavidTC: “Yeah, they hide in the population.”
Serious question: What is “end the occupation of Gaza” defined as here?
Israel could withdraw it’s troops from Gaza… oh wait, it did that. Israel can’t open it’s boarders, we let normal countries build walls and Hamas targets civilians. It could end the embargo, but that was also in the response to terrorism.
Does Israel need to tolerate it’s civilians being subjected to terror attacks? If so, is that because it’s ok to do that to Jews?
Does Israel need to withdraw from all of the land that Hamas claims is Palestine, i.e. all the land that any of the Jews have taken since the 1920’s?
Am I missing an option?Report
The default is that countries that lose war do indeed keep all their land. It is actually a war crime to take land from them. The person who wins has to occupy them and rebuild a government, and hand it back to them. That is why Iraqis are in charge of Iraq and Germans in charge of Germany, etc, etc.
More to the point…didn’t Israel win _all_ of Palestine in those wars? Why is it only taking _parts_ of the country? Oh, that’s right, if it took the entire thing, it would have nowhere to put the Palestinians and would have to integrate them as citizens, aka, let them vote.
And again, as I’ve already addressed, this is a lie. Palestine has never been at war with Israel. Palestine as any sort of legal entity didn’t even _exist_ during the ‘first war’. The British dissolved the Mandate literally right before that, so I guess, legally, there was no government _at all_ (?) besides Israel just trying to shove Palestinians into neighboring countries and random groups of them fighting back until surrounding countries stepped in and said ‘Uh, no. You cannot force something like 3/4ths of Palestinians into us and take all their land’.
As for the Six-Day War, while the PLO _technically_ existed in 1967, it had absolutely nothing to do with the Six-Day War…I won’t pretend the PLO hadn’t been fighting with Israel ever since its creation a few years earlier, but the Six-Day War was was not, in any manner, with the PLO. That war, again, was between Eygpt+Jordon+Syria vs. Israel. Israel, as part of that war, seized all of Palestine and parts of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. And notice this started by Israel literally invading Egypt…so basically you’re saying ‘Not only should countries be able to take land they seize in a war, but they should be able to take it _even if they start that war_’.
The current government of Palestine, of course, is called the Palestine Authority, and as far as I can tell has literally never lost any territory in a ‘war’, unless you want to call Israel just walking into the West Bank and taking territory ‘a war’.
Perhaps if Israel had, at any point in time, stopped trying to take their land, they wouldn’t _be_ ‘genocidal’. Except…they aren’t genocidal. This is just words you hear, repeatedly, to describe them, but that is not how they act.
Also…a minority of people do not get to demand that certain people do not vote solely because they will not like the resulting government. That is, literally, apartheid.
So…marching into another country and gunpoint and taking things from civilians isn’t ‘targeting civilians’? You don’t really need to kill them when you can just take all their stuff, I guess.
What about marching into a holy site and shooting rubber bullets at civilians?
That was what Hamas actually started launching the rockets over: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/thousands-pack-al-aqsa-mosque-protest-palestinian-evictions-jerusalem-2021-05-07/
“The Hamas ultimatum followed the latest clashes around the [al-Aqsa] compound on Monday that left over 300 injured. The latest violence came after Israeli police stormed the compound early on Monday firing stun grenades and tear gas and clashing with Palestinians inside following days of worsening clashes.”
Let’s look at this for a second. Israeli police are not really supposed to be in charge of that compound. They control who goes in and out, but the al-Aqsa compound is under control of an entity called ‘Islamic Waqf’ (Basically a charitable trust for holy sites) under Palestine-Jordan, although Israeli police are ‘permitted to patrol and search the area’. But…Israeli police aren’t supposed to be doing crowd control like that. It’s a holy site, it’s controlled by religious leaders at the holy site itself.
This is an incredibly delicate area. The Second Intifada is literally referred to as the al-Aqsa Intifada because it started because Ariel Sharon visited there with hundreds of riot police in 2000. This is actually what sunk the Camp David accords, not just that event, but control _of_ that site is a very contentious issue, where basically Israel is permitted to stand around and not do anything.
Note this already was a flashpoint, because far-right Jewish settlers keep inexplicably being allowed to enter by Israeli police (Who are _normally_ pretty good at spotting Jews vs. Muslims) and opening praying until they get arrested…or not arrested, sometimes.
And no one asks ‘Why were Israeli police even massed there to fight with?’. Answer: They wanted to fight. They could have just withdrawn…there were literally no people who needed protecting _from_ the protestors within the compound. But they didn’t.
And then the police _entered_ the mosque, something that literally hasn’t happened since 1967.
See, and you don’t know any of this. Because the Western media starts at ‘rocket attacks that must have no reason besides a real estate dispute’ and not ‘Israel is doing incredibly dangerous and provocative shit on purpose’. Because, as I have mentioned, the Israeli government has _repeatedly_ collapsed, and it _still_ doesn’t have a government, and the prime minister is under indictment. Boy, this war sure is distracting, isn’t it?
But, anyway, see below, because…there’s plenty of evidence that the missiles Israel is firing at Gaza are not ‘hitting civilians near militants’…there’s basically no evidence Israel is firing at militants at all.
No, the blockade was in response to the election of Hamas, not any terrorist activity. And one of the first things _Hamas_ did was agree to a six-month ceasefire if Israel would release the embargo commercial shipping on into Gaza. A ceasefire which it kept. Until the six months were up, and Israel hadn’t complied.
But, let’s rewind a bit. All of this seems to be operating on the assumption that Hamas attacks Israel willy-nilly. Except..when was the last time Hamas injured an Israeli civilian before these recent events? Because I’ve been talking about those events and how they were caused by Israel, but let’s rewind, maybe only this time it was Israel, right? Hamas is killing Israeli civilians all the time, right? So let’s check.
Well, one person in Israel was killed by Hamas in 2018, although technically he was a Palestinian living in Israel. Those 2018 increased rocket attacks were in response to…Israel sneaking over the border into Gaza and murdering 6 members of Hamas. Huh. I thought they had withdrawn from Gaza?
Now, I’m being specific about Hamas for a reason. Because the PLJ did fire some rockets and injure some civilians in 2019, in response to…a drone string of one of their leaders in Gaza…wait a second. What exactly _does_ ‘withdraw from Gaza’ mean? Now I’m asking. Is bombing a country and sneaking in to assassinate people a ‘withdrawal’?
Anyway, Hamas, as far as I can figure out, has not killed or injured an Israeli civilian between their ceasefire in 2014 and the recent events which started about a year ago and, as I mentioned, are being incited entirely by Israel. (Mostly because the prime minister is under inditement, and Israeli voters are very unhappy, and he needs a distraction.) Israel who does things, people protest, someone eventually throws rocks, Israel responsed by very violently cracking down on protests (For added bonus points, do it at holy sites.), eventually Hamas starts shooting, and this allows Israel to do whatever it wants…because the Western world’s video cameras do not start rolling until Hamas’s rocket attacks.
You keep saying Hamas wants to ‘kill Jews’? Why don’t you find a single instance of Hamas just attacking Israel IN A WAY THAT WILL HARM IT (No, it knows background levels of rocket attacks will not, thanks to Israel’s defenses and Hamas generally not aiming them at populated area.) with no justification since taking power in Gaza in 2005? There is a _reason_ Hamas escalates. Pretty much always.
The theory must be that Hamas is not allowed to do _anything_ in response to Israel’s behavior, ever, or they’re the villain.
Disappearing into the population is not the same as the ‘human shields’ claim (Which is a specific war crime.), which is the claim they fire from inhabited locations deliberately. Which is something that doesn’t happen. Here: https://www.hrw.org/report/2010/04/11/turning-blind-eye/impunity-laws-war-violations-during-gaza-war
In fact, as that report points out, Israel actually doesn’t seem to be aiming at, or possibly doesn’t even know where, rocket attacks are coming from, and is literally just firing blindly. There’s absolutely no evidence that it is aiming at any militants at all.
(Note that report also criticizes Palestine and Hamas, but not for human shields, only for firing indiscriminately ALSO. Because that was back _when_ Hamas just fired indiscriminately. Hamas has gotten a lot better. Israel has gotten worse.)
The West Bank isn’t under Hamas control.
Seizing territory, like Israel did, is an act of war.
Why is Israel going to war with the West Bank? Your logic just justified a war with Gaza, not the West Bank. No one’s shooting any missiles from the West Bank.
Before you answer, you should be aware that Israel has explicitly stated that it considered the West Bank and Gaza two different entities.
Hamas has already stated it will recognize the 1967 borders.Report
See American Republican Party restricting the vote of Black and Brown People for an analogy.Report
Germany lost land in both WW1 and 2. Iraq vs Iran was notable in they fought over land but ended with the original borders just because that’s where the armies were.
If memory serves, the wars between states Europe in the last century were; WW1, WW2, Yugoslavia’s wars, Russa vs Ukraine, & Turkey vs Greece (Cypress). In all of those land changed hands. The conflict has to be pretty small for borders to not change and even that’s not a certainty.
For the same reason why Russia didn’t take all of Poland nor have Poland take all of Germany. Or Russia didn’t take all of the Ukraine.
Should? I’m simply pointing out that wars change borders. This is a fact, and facts are stubborn things.
If we want to dive into “should”, then we have dueling narratives and reasonable people can disagree on which country “should” own a piece of land. Those disagreements can create wars, and war is normally pretty disruptive and evil.
The US’s claim to Texas seems stronger than Israel’s claim to pieces of the West Bank, but I’m not sure what ethical principal I could use to differentiate between them and I also don’t know who we’d expect to enforce this.
Antisemitism is the rocket fuel behind the creation of Israel. Europe’s put tens of thousands of Jews in Israel. Those tens of thousands carved out a tiny country. Then all of the surrounding Arabic states engaged in ethnic cleansing and forced their Jews to flee to Israel which greatly swelled its population.
This is why I like the two-state solution. We have one set of people dead set on a Jewish state. We have another set of people dead set on an Islamic state.
Yes. When Saddam’s army went into Kuwait and stole everything from the street-signs on up, they were committing various war crimes but not that. However Israel doesn’t want anything in Gaza. If we’re talking about Israel’s existence, then most countries are forgiven the crime of their existence.
That link is a mess (because the situation is a mess). We have a lot of people unhappy in general because of the court, leading to riots and disorder, leading to police action, etc. Now the root of all this is pretty clearly, “how dare those houses change hands”. I’ll grant that we may also have politicians and police behaving badly.
Having said that, launching terror attacks against a million(ish) civilians brands Hamas as the villain in this drama.
We had the AP squeaking that when their building was leveled, then it turned out it was publicly known they were sharing space with Hamas. We also have those curiously lopsided gender death tolls.
Hamas is a terror group. It won the election in 2006, in the previous 6 years Israel had 136 bombings. I don’t feel like crunching numbers to get the exact body count, but surely hundreds. Winning the election makes it the government, which means it gets gov resources. This seems a problem on the face of it.
After the election (where it most certainly didn’t run on going to war with Israel), it was asked to declare it was no longer a terror group and had transformed itself into a political party. It offered a truce, Israel didn’t think it was a good idea to let an unreformed terror group to gain a lot more power and didn’t accept.
Gaza is basically a prison. Hamas and its fellows turned to rockets because their suicide bombers kept getting blown up at the gates. We had tunnel warfare but although that’s worked occasionally Israel has basically stopped that too.
Then after the Gaza war of 2008 the number of bombings in Israel went down a lot.
So basically yes, they were killing Israeli civilians all the time until Gaza was totally sealed off and even after that Israel still had to go in and show it could still kill people in the Gaza war. If you have a mass murderer in Prison, you don’t get to claim he’s not a mass murderer anymore because he hasn’t killed all that many people since he’s been put in Prison.
There are million(ish) people who live within range of Hamas rockets. Every time the air raid siren goes off they have seconds to get to a bomb shelter.
Normal political entities manage to do “something” without needing to murder hundreds of people in bombings or terrorize 6+ digits of people. We would treat BLM very differently if it was launching thousands of get-to-shelter-or die terror attacks against 12% of the country.
Far as I can tell, the land was seized in the war of 1967… which we’re still (stupidly) sorting out. Might be a good idea to make peace one of these days.
So it wants to pretend it lost only one war and not two? That’s nice. How about the right to return? Is it giving up that too?Report
The _Israeli government_ removed the (very few) Jewish settlements from Gaza before Hamas took over. There were no Jews outside those settlements, there hadn’t been for a long time, because the Israel government offered them houses in Israel. It is impossible for Hamas to have harmed Jewish civilian any territory it has controlled, because there has literally never been Jewish civilians living in any territory Hamas controls. At least not that I am aware of.
You realize that suicide bombings have nothing to do with genocide, right? It’s terrorism is used again civilians, but genocide and terrorism are not even vaguely the same thing. (In case you’re not paying attention, suicide bombings also stopped a decade ago.)
Genocide is attempting to wipe out ‘a people’. Hamas has _said_ things that are genocidal about both Jews and Israel (Both of which could count as ‘a people’). I admit that. Although I will point out that Israel politicians have said the same thing. As I quoted elsewhere. Both sides have urged the complete destruction of each other in genocidal rhetoric! This is really bad.
But as for actions, Hamas has never done anything that comes anyway close to genocide. You can’t genocide a people with suicide bombers or rockets. The grand total of people killed by Hamas is…wait, let’s expand that out to the grand total of civilian killed by _any_ Palestinian action (By Hamas or not) since the creation of Hamas in 1989. This, according to Isreal, is 1,043 Israeli civilians, most killed in 2008-ish. The population of Israel is nine million, although we should probably only count the Jewish people in that, so about seven million. That’s 0.014% of the population killed in 30 years. That’s…not how genocides work. That’s just murder…and a war crime when done deliberately, of which many of those were.
But you know who _have_ done actions that could be described as genocidal? Or at least as ethnic cleansing, which is a step _towards_ genocide. That’s right, Israel. Cutting off food and power to civilians is at least a precursor crime. That’s how most genocide is done. I know the most famous genocide, the Holocaust, wasn’t happening fast enough ‘naturally’ so the Nazis had to start doing actual systematic murder, but a lot of genocides are just natural deaths due to mass relocation into camps, death marches, and slowly staving them and killing them with disease, or some combination thereof. The Cambodian genocide was like 40% starvation and disease, 60% direct execution. Whereas the Armenian genocide was almost all forcible relocations and very little actual executions. (As Turkey will point out in trying to defend it.)
LOL. So you’re justifying Israel’s behavior using what the SOVIET UNION did, rather illegally, in an attempt to place more of Europe under its influence? Some of it as part of ethnic cleansing. Cool. What other countries do you think should behave like the Soviet Union?
But technically speaking, Poland did not ‘lose’ that land in the war, or have anything done against its will. Poland AGREED to that change, which was the only way it was legal. Of course, when I say ‘Poland’, I mean ‘The Soviet-operated Polish puppet-goverment’, but nevertheless, there is a signed document that the Polish People’s Republic agreed to altering that country’s borders. Same with East Germany, who ‘willingly’ gave land to Poland. So, no, no one lost any land ‘in the war’. They lost the land after, when the Soviet Union controlled various Occupied Territories and was _supposed_ to be a caretaker. (You know, like Israel is supposed to be for Palestine.)
But here’s where your analogy sorta breaks down:
Polish refugees WERE, in fact, allowed to return to their land after the war even when those lands were now part of another country. In fact, almost all refugees in those areas were DEPORTED back to when they had come from at the end of the war, meaning they returned whether or not they wanted it!
Now, a lot of them _didn’t_ want to, and in fact managed to escape and end up somewhere as, as being under the control of the Soviet Union sucked. In fact, some of them had _fled_ the Soviet Union’s attempted ethnic cleansing earlier, before the Nazis. But legally, yet, a Pole who had lived in a part of Poland that became part of Lithuania did have the legal right to return to their home, and be a Lithuanian!
You know, the exact thing that Palestinians refugees can’t do. They can’t return to their house, and now be an Israeli.
Now, Germany refugees weren’t allowed to return to what-had-been-Germany-but-was-now-Poland. The Soviets didn’t allow that…mostly because the Soviet Union embarked on ethnic cleansing there! And MURDERED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE. (Which we didn’t care about, because they were Germans.)
Is _that_ the example you’re trying to use to justify Israel’s action? A _different_ example of ethnic cleansing? What?
Here’s something I want to suggest: WE SHOULD NOT GIVE FOREIGN AID TO COUNTRIES OPERATING LIKE THE TOTALITARIAN EXPANSIONIST SOVIET UNION.
Wow. Weird for me to have to say that.
No. Google the word Aliyah, and you will find where Jewish immigrants to Mandate Palestine (And whatever it was called under the Ottoman Empire before that.) came from. It’s pretty well documented by the Zionist movement itself. Checking that entire list, it seems the only notable example of Middle East immigrants were ~12% of immigrants in the Fourth Aliyah were from Asia, so about 8000?
Now, there actually were Jewish people in Israel before that…about 25,000 of them in 1890, pre-Zionism. As best anyone can tell. Who were utterly swamped by the total number of immigrants, as the total population of Jews at the moment of creation of Isreal numbered somewhere in the mid-600,000s, IIRC. And even those 25,000 existing Jews weren’t refugees from ethnic cleaning, as far as anyone can tell, mostly because the Ottoman Empire was, of course, a Muslim country.
The massive immigration from Muslim countries came _after_ the creation of Israel. And plenty of that was from rising anti-Semitism in those places, sure. Although note that not only did plenty of Jews just think they’d be better there and moved there without any pressure at all, but plenty of them were just paid to move, in an attempt to boast the Jewish population. It wasn’t _all_ anti-Semitism.
And…look, I know I’m sounding close to justifying anti-Semitism, but a bunch of Jews had just literally moved to a nearby country and killed and dislocated a bunch of Muslims. It’s all well and good to say those countries shouldn’t mistreat Jews, but…you’re standing there talking about Muslim countries treat Jews as if that reflects on how we should understand Palestinians, so maybe pause and think about how Zionism made Jews look from a Muslim perspective.
And then ask yourself: Which side started this? Which side decided to carve out a Jewish homeland in the middle of place that had been under Muslim control for literally 14 centuries, and then under Christian control for ~four centuries before that?
In an alternate universe where we are seventy years into WWII, where Japan has held the western coast of Canada for all that time and embarked on displacing Canadians into America, wedging them into a small area next to the American border…how exactly is the US treating Japanese-Americans citizens?
It would be bad. It would be unfair. It would be incredibly racist.
It also would have a pretty obvious cause.
Large numbers should create corner cases. The level of antisemitism in the ME is so high ethnic cleansing is normal and expected. Even with that, Iran has 8k or more Jews. Iraq has a handful after decades of vile repression.
Gaza is run by people whose charter is extreme even by ME standards and which openly calls for genocide. Even though they’re next door to millions of Jews, they have (afaict) zero. Afaict they don’t even have any Jews working there, or volunteering there. No humanitarian bleeding hearts, no mixed marriages, no scumbags profiting on the situation. No one.
So the best explanation is Israel gives out free housing? It has nothing to do with the terrorists running the Camp who don’t view Jewish civilians as civilians?
The appropriate comparison would be the Israel gov writing genocide into the Constitution and proclaiming it’s how things will be. Further, Israel has the power to commit Genocide. They have Arabs living in their territory and they could kill everyone in Gaza.
They run out of resources with just mass murder and terrorism, and now that Gaza is a prison they can’t even commit mass murder. Adjusted for population they’ve committed multiple 911s so there’s that. They’ve never had the power to kill enough Jews that it would count as genocide.
But I see no evidence to suggest they’re not serious.
There is a vast difference between “cutting off food” and “cutting off some types of food”. The number of people who have starved is roughly zero. The number of people getting foreign food assistance has increased. This reasoning here is “the other side must be as bad as the one I support”.
100% of the large wars in Europe moved borders, and some of the smaller wars in Europe also moved borders. If we switch to other places, we see the same pattern. Wars move borders. That’s especially true for wars fought over land.
You mean “Poland’s puppet government which was run by the USSR and despised by its people ‘agreed'”. Considering how many times you’ve tried to differentiate the Palestinian people from the governments that were in charge, this is a thin reed.
I am not trying to “justify” those actions. I am pointing out that this has happened a lot in history, even more recently than Israel, and its only Israel where we’re obsessed with “undoing” the crimes of its creation. It’s especially only Israel where we insist that the grandson of a victim is still a victim.
Very few countries are pure of these sorts of things. The American Indians were here before we were, we’re not going to give them back all of the land we took.
Why is the child and grandchild of a “Palestinian refugee” a “Palestinian refugee”? Everyone who owned and lost land during the war of 1948 is probably dead. Why are these people unable to get on with their lives while the people in every other conflict have?
So: When Israel mistreats Palestinians it’s a multigenerational crime that can’t be forgiven, but when Arabs mistreat Jews it’s “you need to understand”.
Ethically these situations aren’t comparable. The Jews in other countries are not Israelis. They’re not engaged in terrorism or mass murder much less trying to destroy a country. There are no wars going on much less wars of survival of the country.
Blaming Israelis for creating Israel is like blaming George Washington (etc) for creating the United States. It’s true on some level but it doesn’t go anywhere. I’m also not good with blaming the Jews for antisemitism much less their own ethnic cleansing(s) (which are a huge part of all this).
If peace with a Jewish state is unthinkable, then the Palestinians can expect their current situation to continue. This is where we get the phrase “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
The first Arabic country to make peace with Israel was Egypt in 1979 (their leader was assassinated because of this). The wars of 1948 and 1967 both happened in the context of “everyone trying to kill them”. Arguably Egypt wouldn’t have made peace if Israel didn’t have something to give back.
And none of this helps the Palestinians because if Israel “returns the land it took”, then there is no Israel.
That works as a one sentence summation.
This does not explain why Arafat walked away in 2000. You were right when you said it was because of the right of return.
And if the core problem is the “right of return”, i.e. the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then it doesn’t matter what Israel does, they’re never going to make the Palestinians happy. It’s painful but Israel has shown it can stand up to it’s settler movement if peace is on the table. Absent that, if nothing will make the Palestinians happy, then they might as well be unhappy with less.
Even the Trump peace plan didn’t have Israel taking everything. I assume bulldozing some settlements is possible if peace is offered.
Now there’s also, Israel takes what it wants, puts up walls, bulldozes some settlements, withdrawals turtle like into it’s shell, and let’s the Palestinians do whatever they want with what’s left. If they want to Gaza-like go to war every few years then that happens.
IDK whether that would be less ugly than the current situation.Report
Yes, I meant that, as I literally clarified that immediately? What? I pointed out that what had happened would have been illegal under international law except for that thin veil of legality.
How you think this justifies Israel committing the _same_ war crimes, this time _without_ even that same veil, I cannot understand.
Yes, we certainly never tried to stop the…actions of the Soviet Union…?
Wait, I mean…there certainly was no attempt to allow East Germany refugees to return to the unified Germany? Wait, yeah there were.
What are you even trying to say? We, as in the Western world, actually _did_ have a pretty problem with the actions of the Soviet Union, and _did_ undo a lot of what happened around it. It just happened 35 years ago, or, actually, a lot of it happened earlier.
I don’t think you’re even sure what you’re arguing anymore, but no, we didn’t see the need to rearrange parts of Poland to fix things…pretty much everyone is happy with the current situation. This is because they are, you know, living in actual free countries instead of Occupied Territories. Governments operated by the consent of the governed. Unlike, say, Palestinians.
You keep trying to imagine the problem is the creation of Israel, and that’s what made everyone hate it forever. No.
The problem is that it is operating something that is _either_ an oppressive occupation that is not following the laws of war (Which it is, legally), or an oppressive Apartheid regime (Which is what you seem to be arguing it is, although you don’t seem to realize that.), which it is doing because it literally cannot operate as the premise it was founded under, a Jewish democracy that consists of all of Mandate Palestine. As such a thing is impossible.
Maybe do not start countries in places where you do not have a majority to make it the sort of country you demand it to be!
No, but we are going to give them citizenship in this country (Or, rather, we did.), and somewhere to live, control over their own territory to some level, and in fact support them in many ways, because of what we did to them was actually a really bad thing.
You do understand that, if we were treating Native Americans _now_ like we treated them in 1850 or whenever, that people _would_ actually complain, right? That the world has moved _past_ that sort of thing being acceptable?
It isn’t some weird antisemitic selective vision to notice Israel is doing really shitty things the world doesn’t allow people to do _anymore_.
Likewise, again, Israel is _supported by the US_. Which means we are endorsing what it does. There’s a reason we’re talking about it, and not, say, China’s current ethnic cleansing and arguable genocide of the Uyghur. Because, 1) we actually are about that too, you’re just not paying attention, and 2) There’s very little we can do about the actions of China.
The best explanation is that Jews a) do not want to live in what you yourself just called a ‘camp’, b) are allowed to leave, and c) have a place to go?
Why are you pretending this is complicated? The people currently _in_ Gaza often don’t want to live in Gaza! Needed supplies are blockaded from it, it goes without power for days at a time, and a neighboring country keeps leveling buildings in it! Why would Jews want to live there?!
What isn’t also complicated is that Hamas has literally nothing to do with the lack of Jews in Gaza, as they literally didn’t exist until 1987. Go ahead, guess what percentage of Gaza was Jewish in 1987?
Hey, didn’t you just argue that other countries shouldn’t be generalizing to their own Jews what Israel has done? Maybe you shouldn’t generalize to Palestinians the ethnic cleansing that _Eygpt_ and _Jordon_ did.
You: Israel is willing to give up a lot of things, but it’s certainly not going to operate as a democracy!
Again: Maybe do not start countries in places where you do not have a majority to make it the sort of country you demand it to be!
I don’t know what the damn solution is there, but Israel doesn’t get to just keep _harming_ the Palestinian people forever because its creation was stupid and couldn’t work.
Yeah, why are the Israelis demanding a right of return to…wait, sorry, you meant that question only for the side that _doesn’t_ currently have that right. Gotcha.
It’s because they don’t have a working country to live in, as the neighboring country refuses to cease its occupation and has control of it?
You know, fun fact: We’ve never offered to give the Palestinians an area of this country. We could, we could pick some fairly empty area, some ocean access, and carve out a chunk of the US as a new country. Or we could offer them citizenship and housing within the US.
We have not done this.
And yes, other Arab nations haven’t either (Well, not all of them.), but it seems rather odd to pretend that’s the Palestinian’s fault.
No wars going on?
First, there literally _were_ wars going on. With Israel and three Arab countries.
Second, Arab countries were having tons of Palestinian refugees dumped on them. Not a war, but a rather serious issue.
Third, please Google ‘Lavon Affair. (And the Baghdad bombings, although that is disputed, and I don’t really want to get into trying to argue the claims.)
Zionists were _everywhere_ in the Middle East at that time. It wasn’t just some random country, far away. And, yes, there _also_ was newfound Arab nationalism, also. I won’t deny that didn’t lead to antisemitism, and some of that lead to ethnic cleansing. But, let’s pause for a second, and look at this ethnic cleansing. There’s a really weird problem for a lot of claims that Arab nations were doing ethnic cleansings of Jews. They were doing that, don’t get me wrong but there’s a large problem with the narrative:
It turns out that a lot of Arab nations were _trying to block Jews from leaving them_, at least for a time. They were somewhat antisemitic, but explicitly _didn’t_ try to ethnic cleanse Jews out. (And, no, they weren’t killing the Jews instead.)
Meanwhile Israel _was trying to make it happen_. That’s right, Israel was trying to get Jews to come to it, often to the point of…not really caring what said Jews thought. Just have governments sorta say ‘More to Israel’. Hell, Britain (At Israel’s urging) negotiated with Iraq in order to _have it send a specific number of Jews to Israel_…and tried to have it take Palestinians in return. It agreed to do the first but not the second.
Why? Because both Arab nations and Israel were well aware that Israel did not have enough Jews to operate a Jewish democracy, and didn’t want them to get more. What do you call ethnic cleansing when you do it on your own ethnicity in another country, to get them to move to where you are?
Kinda awkward there for the narrative.
And, yes, there was just outright ethnic cleansing, with countries publicly expelling Jews. However, this appears to be _completely_ in line with what Israel wanted! (Well, I guess they weren’t happy about the property seized.) Israel, at its formation, was operating a _massive_ plan to get Jews to move from everywhere else to it!
So, at some point, you have to ask: Does a country that encouraged a huge population displacement to happen get to turn around decades later and assert that was it ethnic cleansing that its own people were a victim of?
Again, I don’t dispute that a lot of that was unwilling on the part of Jews, and it wasn’t _entirely_ the result of Israeli policy. There was rising antisemitism, both from the actions of Israeli and Arab nationalism. But Israel is complicit in a lot of that, and, also, you may have noticed from the proposed Palestinian exchange, equally trying to move inconvenient people around!
I also should point out…we actually are talking about Israeli’s treatment toward Palestinians, who don’t really have any blame for any of this.
Incidentally, if you want to see how much immigration happened _without_ any real level of antisemitism in Arab countries, check Turkey, which basically had no real level in that time period. Seriously, Turkey immediately was supportive of Israel, and it was treating Jews exceptionally well at the time. It did bow to other Arab nation’s pressure to stop Jews from leaving for just a few months, and then said ‘Nah’, and recognized Israel and let Jew leave. And like 40% of Turkish Jews left, from 1948-1951.
Now you’re exporting your ‘no one ever really starves’ to other countries.
As I repeatedly said when we were talking about the US, ‘starvation’ is not the problem, _malnutrition_ is. Malnutrition often causes death, not by starving to death, but other things, like heart failure. Any idiot can get enough empty calories not to die, what they can’t get is vitamins and protein and carbohydrates required to keep their body functioning and repaired.
LOL. ‘Eygpt wouldn’t make peace until Israel agreed to give back land it had recently stolen. This is somehow a negative asperation on Eygpt!’
All the countries involved in the war Israel started made peace with Israel as soon as Israel agreed to give back their land.
It is possible to argue that parts of Palestine are trying to destroy Israel. I disagree this is meaningful, or that this is important when Israel is trying to do the same thing and actually _can_, but we can argue all day over that.
But what we can’t argue over is the idea that any other country wants to destroy Israel. Or, at least, has ever acted to do so.
Israel has been the aggressor in _literally every war_ it was in except the Yom Kippur War, and that was started by Egypt and Syria in an attempt to get back _their_ land which Israel had not returned.
It is amazing how a country that has only ever been attacked once, for a pretty good reason, has managed to embed ‘everyone is trying to kill it’ deep into your head.
In fact, if Israel wants to stop the rockets from Lebanon (Which is really operating as a proxy for Syria), it could give back Syria’s land, too.
Kinda weird that the only _outside_ place the rocket attacks are coming from is a place under the control of the only other country that Israel has occupied, huh? Eygpt, Jordon, neither of them are firing rockets.
The discussion currently being had is really about what _America_ should do. Like, none of us are Israelis that I am aware of, we cannot directly cause Israel to do anything.
What we can do is tell the US government to put pressure on Israel, probably by threatening to withhold funding conditional on settlements being stopped, and eventually dismantled.
Since we are talking about hard truths, the hard truth is that _without_ the support of the US, Israel is in a lot of trouble. Not really because of Palestine, but because without us standing behind them, glaring at their enemies, they are surrounded by and at the mercy of people they have spent decades pissing off. Now, again, I don’t think they _are_ facing an existential threat, but I do think they would have to _adjust_ a lot of the shit they’ve been doing, and probably, at minimum, give back all the Golan Heights to Syria and make peace there.
But they won’t risk that…if we condition our support on no settlements, there will be no settlements. If we condition our support on them carefully documenting and proving their airstrikes are hitting military targets and trying to avoid civilian casualties, they will do that. If we demand that _we_ get put in charge of the sea blockade instead of them, so we can administer them fairly, they will do that.
This might be a good deal easier with the new government in Israel. I don’t know.
It’s really weird how everyone appears to have forgotten _we_ are the 800-pound gorilla in the room, who is currently supporting Israel regardless of anything they do, despite the fact we could reel them in a _second_ with the threat of withdrawing our support if they don’t stop.
We do it with literally any other country. We condition our support on all sorts of random things. We just ‘forget’ we can do it with Israel because far-right Christian groups love the idea of Israel in a war, that’s how you get the end times, you know. (Plus, it’s against the Muslims!)
What we do _after_ that, I don’t know.Report
“Justifies”? I’m pointing out the world handled the situation very differently, and the victim’s grandchildren didn’t have their lives damaged.
Yes I do. Subtract antisemitism and Israel is great by ME standards.
That doesn’t mean you’re wrong about Israel’s various crimes over the history of it’s existence; However there are vast differences in what we expect Jews to do and how we deal with their crimes and the others. Israel creates refugees in the context of war and country creation and it’s a crime that echoes through the generations but all the ME countries engage in ethnic cleansing and it’s “you need to understand”.
Various ME strongmen get less outrage and UN attention from using war gases on tens of thousands of their governed than Israel does by defending it’s people from terrorists or having it’s courts rule on landlord disputes.
Israel from 1948 to 1967 didn’t have this issue and the world (especially the ME) treated it worse. Further, excluding Israel, the ME countries are dictatorships and/or priests-in-charge.
It is odd to single out the most ethical and most free country in the region and insist that it’s behavior needs to change when it’s neighbor is murdering hundreds of thousands of it’s own citizens. The groups we back in Syria are committing war crimes.
I could put up a wall of text about each of those countries, but my summation is that if I needed one to pick to live as a minority, I’d pick Israel because it’s the most free, least repressive, and least dangerous.
Hamas didn’t invent antisemitism in 1987. The ME average level of antisemitism is so high ethnic cleansing is expected. In Gaza, Hamas copied the ideals of Mein Kampf into their charter and it makes them popular enough to be elected. It’s correct to point out that Hamas didn’t clear Gaza of Jews. It’s probably less correct to say they have nothing to do with why Jews don’t go into Gaza without an army.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on whether committing mass murder, mass terrorism, having a founding document which reads like Mein Kampf and openly supporting genocide means you should be taken seriously about supporting genocide. Even if you’re right the bar really should be set at “all they want to do is lots of ethnic cleansing”.
Let’s apply this ethics in other situations and see if you’re still good with it. Assume South Africa has a race war and the US has no troops there. Is it ok and expected for our states to brutalize our Black citizens because their race is the same as one of the sides? How about years after the war has ended, would it still be ok for us to be brutalizing our own citizens because of their race?
So they just had brutally nasty repression (Iraq’s included calling on it’s Arabic citizens to “join the feast” and making Jews wear yellow stars) but didn’t want them to join Israel? Good to hear that doesn’t count as “ethnic cleansing” when it’s done to Jews.
Depends. Israel should have defined borders (I’ve said this). It’s hard or impossible to make peace with the Palestinians if they defined “occupied lands” as “all of Israel”.
A lot of those shitty things come down to “treating Gaza like it’s run by potential mass murderers”, “wanting to keep some of the land they won in a war”, and not wanting the West Bank to put together a Gaza2.
If it’s true then yes. Presumably Israel isn’t setting policy in Iraq and crimes are inflicted on individuals. If you’re beating someone up because of their race then the moral responsibility is yours and they’re still a victim.
However their grandchildren aren’t. We have people who weren’t alive in 1967 who are claiming “their” houses were taken. The vast bulk of Palestinian suffering was not what Israel did but the reaction to it. The big stand out being rounded up, put into camps, and forced to put their lives on hold until Israel is destroyed.
If the reasoning is “I need to get that house back because it’s important that Jews not be there”, then I have no sympathy. My family had a home in 1967. I have no clue who currently owns it or whether it still exists. We’ve changed homes more than 25 times since then (my parents have 12 grandchildren and it adds up). If it has burned down in 1967 because of arson, it’d have no effect on any of us now. If the city had been bombed to the ground in 1967, my Dad would have moved but my kids would be unaffected now.
We’ll have to agree to disagree on all whether all of Israel’s neighbors rejecting the UN peace plan in 1948 and going to war over the existence of a Jewish state was an effort to destroy it.Report
Response in mod, but I’ve no clue why since the other one posted fine.Report