Kamala Harris DNC Speech: Watch It For Yourself
Screen grab from Fox 5 DC coverage of the 2024 DNC
On the final night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris capped of a tumultuous 31 days since President Joe Biden announced he would not be seeking re-election by accepting her party’s nomination to replace him.
Watch the full, unedited speech here:
Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday, using the most consequential speech of her political career to cast herself as an avatar of America’s middle class and an avenue to usher the country away from the abrasive style of politics embraced by Republican nominee Donald Trump.
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“Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past,” she said in a speech that reflected on her unexpected journey to the top of her party and to the cusp of becoming the nation’s first female president. “A chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”Vice President Kamala Harris caps the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 22 with an acceptance speech as the party’s presidential nominee. (Video: The Washington Post)
Harris delivered a withering critique of Trump while also making several appeals to bipartisanship and patriotism during her speech, combating efforts by Trump and his allies to brand her as radical or somehow foreign. As she spoke, a packed, jubilant crowd of supporters clapped and waved American flags. Many were wearing white, the color associated with the suffragist movement. More than 100,000 red, white and blue balloons dropped at the end of her speech.The celebratory moment marked how quickly Democrats’ fortunes have changed over the past two months, in which the party agonized over a disastrous debate performance by President Joe Biden, endured weeks of public infighting over his candidacy and then swiftly united behind Harris after Biden dropped out on July 21. The fast-moving turn of events has injected a fresh wave of energy and enthusiasm into the Democratic Party but has also left some voters with a sense of uncertainty about Harris.
Thoughts on the convention:
The Harris campaign has a level of energy and enthusiasm that we haven’t seen since 2008 Obama. This has taken me, and I think most of America’s pundit class by surprise but of course in hindsight it shouldn’t have; The flip side of fear and dread of Trump is the joy and optimism of his opposite.
…
Someone shrewdly decided that the theme of joy and hope and patriotism would resonate and draw a sharp contrast to the theme of decline and fear and hatred in the GOP.
…
I’m seeing the passing of one generation of leadership to a new one, and the differences seem striking. The old institutional types like Biden and Schumer and Feinstein, with their fixation on norms and bipartisan comity are giving way to a crop who are more confrontational and more willing to fight to win.
…
The Republicans really do seem to be cornered and without an angle of attack. Not that they can’t win, because they certainly can, but they appear to have hit their hard ceiling, and have no coherent message that could possibly sway anyone who isn’t already angry and aggrieved.
I think that in 2016 Trump’s rise was a sort of Rorschach test for American media, where they projected their own desires onto him – He was Donald The Dove to Hillary The Hawk, he was the tribune of a new working class revolt, he was the outsider bringing fresh new ideas yadda yadda argle bargle. We heard all sorts of stuff about Curtis Yarvin and the groypers and intellectuals like Patrick Deneen telling us that liberal democracy has failed and dictatorship is the shiny new thing that all the kids are talking about.
But none of that works anymore- he is a completely and totally known quantity and is just a standard issue authoritarian demagogue using racial and cultural grievance to gain power.
The Republicans can win this election, but I firmly believe that the Authoritarian Moment has passed.Report
I have to admit that, as a cynical political viewer, I found the convention very solid and bordering on moving at odd moments. The roll call/DJ blast was a fresh twist that I thought landed well. I feel like the amped up patriotism was very appropriate and I’m amused at how little caterwauling it’s prompted from the usual suspects. The pitch was mostly excellent and the smooth operation of everything felt deeply reassuring.
Harris herself turned in a rock solid performance capping off a stream of excellent performances. Conventions inevitably produce a glow in the hearts of their dedicated partisans but I must confess I felt moved more than usual by this one. Competence porn? Maybe just because they tonally tacked in a very centrist direction without crossing over into right wing territory? I don’t know what it is but I liked it.Report
I think it went very well. Tone was generally right, and most importantly everything seemed normal in a way that contrasted sharply and in a good way with what the GOP did. The entire situation looks and I think objectively is far better than a mere 6-8 weeks ago.
My only Debbie Downer comment is that latest polling has Harris ahead in national polling by less than Biden or Clinton in the same time period. It also has PA as a toss up and WI and MI within margin of error. That’s still an improvement but the campaign really needs to go out and get aggressive over the next 2 months. It’s far from over and complacency has a way of working in MAGAs favor.Report
I agree, but even your downer comment has an upside- I don’t get the vibe that anyone on the left or Dems in general thinks the current numbers are worth resting on ones laurels over.
They seemed punchy at the convention and have run a pretty assertive campaign so I would presume that Harris’ team is going to continue going on the offensive going forward. So long as the numbers keep improving then I’m content- it’s not a terrible place to be right now and it’s a worlds’ worth of difference from before.Report
Fingers crossed!Report
I think it is pretty astonishing how will the transition has worked out so far in generating massive enthusiasm and love when it could have easily been a completely despondent mess.Report
I wish the lesson that the Democrats, and really both parties, would take away from this is that if you want enthusiasm around your campaign, you have to start it reasonably close to the election. Being in perma-campaign mode, or even in campaign mode a year prior to the election, just causes everyone to get really bored with it all.
As with many things (wine, cheese, our use of butter, the service industry, trains), we should be more French about our elections.Report
Agree 100%. There’s no reason for all this over 18 months.Report
I would love to have Parliamentary style campaigns which are 4-6 weeks long like they have in Europe. Unfortunately, that would completely require rewriting our political system to allow for snap elections instead of fixed ones (we should probably be parliamentary anyway and have multi-member districts. We also need stronger political parties that allow them to basically state “here is your candidate”
Also I haven’t been able to figure out how to make it work without running afoul of the First Amendment.Report
A time limited campaign law would definitely go against the First Amendment.Report
The thing is, while it has legal elements, a lot of it is cultural. New Zealanders just would tolerate campaigns as long as yours.
I also think your primaries are a big part of the problem, they take months to run, and that necessarily extends campaigning.Report
Primaries are a good thing or a bad thing. The good part is that they are very Democratic. Parties don’t get to tell people “hey, here is your candidate for this district/riding/etc.” The bad thing is the neverending campaigns.Report
Put it this way, without primaries, you don’t get AOC deciding to knock on doors and challenge and succeed against a House Democrat. We are better off with her than Joe Crowley. Sorry Joe.Report
Assuming you meant “just would not”.Report
Further-
The highly anticipated Palestinian protests seem to have fizzled; I haven’t seen a good explanation why. Not only weren’t there riots, there were hardly any news headlines about them at all. Its like they have disappeared from the news cycle entirely.Report
The Pro-Palestinian folks had low four-figures show up instead of low five-figures (like they threatened).
I think that they can henceforth be dismissed, the same way that the “Defund” people can be dismissed.Report
NPR had a whole segment last night about how there hasn’t been a Muslim person address the convention in decades, and that there was a Jewish family that spoke about how their son was captured and is being held by Hamas. The entire tone of the article was “how come the jews get to speak but we can’t”.
I’m kinda thinking the DNC’s response would be “because we couldn’t trust you not to say something stupid that would cause people to vote for Trump”, although that was not stated directly.Report
That’s obviously wrong. There was Barack Obama.Report
They can shut down the site for the weekend, you win the comments.Report
A monumental effort, a generational comment! Scholars of snark will study it for hours to come! Well done!Report
I think I have to agree with Jaybird here. Once again internet sound and fury turns into meatspace teapot tempestry.Report
i agreeReport
For all the talk about how Israel is at war with Gaza, protesting amounts to supporting Hamas. College students may use fuzzy thinking to avoid that understanding but most people don’t.
I would also say the liberal news doesn’t want to give them a voice to try to derail Harris.Report
Protesting amounts to supporting Hamas.
This is childish, Bush-era “with us or against us” rhetoric that would have been laughed off this blog a decade ago. You can support a ceasefire, and you can support an end to the occupation, without being a supporter of Hamas. Does this mean that you and Hamas have some aligned goals? Sure, but that doesn’t mean you support them. To argue that because we have some shared goals is tantamount to supporting them leads to the sort of reductio that even my 4 year old could avoid.
On the other hand, supporting Israel’s war, as they carry out a genocide (as recognized by pretty much every expert on the subject by now, including at least some from Israel) is unquestionably therefore support for genocide. In this case, even if you share a goal — say, getting rid of Hamas — you can criticize what they’re doing, proving both that it’s possible to be critical of them and not pro-Hamas, and that to continue to support what they’re actually doing is in fact to be pro-genocide.
I remain shocked at how many people here, and even some former people here who should absolutely know better, have no qualms about being on the side of genocide.Report
I remain shocked at how many people here, and even some former people here who should absolutely know better, have no qualms about being on the side of genocide.
This works better when you don’t open with something like “This is childish, Bush-era “with us or against us” rhetoric that would have been laughed off this blog a decade ago.”Report
I figured you, in particular, would say this. Think of it in reverse: if I were to support this war from the Palestinian perspective, that would in fact be to support Hamas (or at least, one of the other militant groups in Gaza, which is pretty much the same thing).
Now, you might argue that to support the IDF is not to support their carrying out genocide, but this would be equivalent to saying that to support Hamas is not in fact to support their terrorism. I think even Dark Matter would think “support Hamas but not terrorism” was ridiculous.Report
The I/P conflict challenges us to be able to hold several things to be true at once.
That Israel has a right to exist free from attack;
That the Palestinians have a right to a homeland and self determination;
That the Likudniks and settlers and Netanyahu are willing to wage a full genocidal campaign against the Palestinians;
That Hamas is willing to wage a full genocidal campaign against the Israelis;
That there exist Palestinians who favor peaceful coexistence with Israel;
That there exist Israelis who favor peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians;
These statements are all true. None of them contradict each other, none of them make the various actions legitimate or justified.
There is yet another statement that is true:
That the various regional powers- the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians- have come to a de facto recognition of the state of Israel, and in fact it was the prospect of this that triggered the 10/7 attack.
Both Hamas and Likud are perversely working together to avoid any sort of peace, wedded to the bizarre fantasy of total victory.
There is one more statement that is also true:
That the United States has very little leverage to bring peace to the region.
We can exert some pressure, and use our military aid as a cudgel but it could serve to only make the IDF more determined to strike harder while they still have the advantage; And it could only embolden Hamas and Iran to be more belligerent.
And we can’t change the mindset of Likud and Hamas to accept the idea of a partial victory.
This is why the conflict shouldn’t really be a partisan issue here in the States because it is one area where Harris and Trump have very little ability to control things.Report
I can’t speak for him but my read of Chris’ comments is that he would indeed dispute Israel’s right to exist, at least as currently constituted (that being an expressly ethnic homeland), and that he would do the same against any similar entity.Report
Chris seems to ignore the fact that the Palestinians aren’t using ANC rhetoric but some particular ethnic and religious activities. I find it is the typical Further Left aversion to Jewish self-determination when they call all gaga over other movements,.Report
I think the problem with the Palestinians and really the Pro-Palestinian movement in general is that they are allowing the lunatics to be in charge. In fairness to the Palestinians, their lunatics on the ground are murderous extremists who are willing to use a lot of violence. I
n the United States and elsewhere, the Pro-Palestinian movement reminds me a lot of the Irish Americans who just loved egging on the IRA in their most stringent behavior. I keep getting assured that there is a spectrum of belief but the nobody seems to want to make the “Israel is an ipso facto illegitimate settler colonial white supremacist capitalist patriarchal state” faction shut up.Report
You are, I would like to gently note, discussing the Palestinians in terms only of the minority of them who live in Gaza rather than the majority of them who live in the territories.Report
I don’t think a Palestinian living in the West Bank would earn themselves any favors if they point out that maybe the Palestinian movement made a lot of dumb choices during it’s existence.Report
Sure, and why would they? To what end? Doesn’t change the fact that the West Bank Palestinians haven’t let themselves be governed by lunatics for quite some time now. Corrupt? sure; scholeric, Probably, Democratic? Not since 2007. But lunatic? No. Not for quite some time now.Report
I am much less tolerant of the various hidebound behavior tolerated among the Palestinians and other Muslims. I see no reason why Jews should be expected to give complete and true respect while getting at best grudging respect in return. I do not like that any-Semitism is treated as a tolerated hatred because most anti-Semites will never meet a real Jew. It is vile.Report
This is very well put Chip and I agree with it entirely.Report
I am not sure with the last two sentences in your first paragraph. Let us start with the Israelis. My read of the situation is basically that the average Israeli in Greenline Israel is just fed up with the Palestinians and sees Palestinian leadership as either monstrous in the form of Hamas or utterly incapable of saying yes to any offer. The entire experience from the failure of Camp David onward seems to have basically decreased Israeli belief in even a cold peace with the Palestinians. October 7th was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
As for the Palestinians, from what I can see, they seem utterly unable to get over “Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial state.” Everything they argue inside would be Palestine and outside it is written from this perspective. They seem to want revenge for the wrongs they believed they suffered since 1881 rather than doing anything positive and constructive. Their allies in the West and among Muslims are egging them on in this.
I can find lots of books from Diaspora Jews telling Israeli Jews to be sensible, totally against Israeli Jews and wishing to throw half the world’s Jews under a bus (these Jews are traitors), or egging them on in their worse. I can’t find anything where an alleged Palestinian ally tells the Palestinians to be sensible and realize the Jews aren’t going away.
Either the Palestinians and their are very good at hiding their dirty laundry and internal disagreements or they don’t exist. Everything I see in public suggests that they are stuck in the “woe is us/the Palestinians and the only way to true justice is to totally dismantle Israel” phase.Report
Maybe Israel should stop _currently acting_ like one, then, and stop stealing land _right now_?
I don’t see any evidence they don’t want revenge for wrongs they suffered this year: https://www.timesofisrael.com/government-panel-greenlights-nearly-3500-new-west-bank-homes/
It is nearly delusional how everyone person seems to talk about how Palestine cannot ‘get over’ things _are literally still happening to them_.
LeeEsq, solemnly, to a man on the ground: Revenge against your attacker is not the way, you need to let it go and move on with your life. You cannot change the past.
Palestine: You can see the guy is still standing there kicking me, right?
LeeEsq: You must move past the harms that you claim were done to you 32 seconds ago, and forgive, and realize you both need to live in peace.
Israel: *kicks man on ground again*
Palestine: *ineffectually throws a punch, which Israel’s iron dome deflect*
LeeEsq: Stop it! Holding grudges is not the way, Palestine. Let it go! It’s over! What happened 3 seconds ago is not important.Report
Well, I have turned from being vaguely pro-Israel to being vaguely “both sides can go to Hell”.
You know how my main take on the Palestinians was that they dismantled greenhouses to take the pipes and make missiles with them and how that was the sort of society that sort of needed to be destroyed?
Back in July, there was footage going around of Israeli soldiers destroying an ultrasound machine in one of the hospitals they were wandering through.
Hey, I understand that wars involve killing and the best way to find yourself in a war is to start one. The October 7th kinetic incident struck me as a catastrophic success on the part of the Palestinians and, yep, Israel came down on them pretty g-darn hard.
There were arguments over whether the Israelis killed too many people in the process of freeing hostages and I thought that those arguments were very dumb.
But the stuff that gets me to say “hell with both of them” is stuff like Israel destroying ultrasound machines and smashing teacups and the like.
If this were about getting the hostages back or whatever, hey. You can’t make an omelet. But destroying teacups? That’s some serious “put the Palestinians in their place” energy and say what you will about the greenhouses, at least the pipes were repurposed into something else. The ultrasound machine was just smashed.
But when it comes to “genocide”, part of the problem is the problem of war in the first place. Was the Civil War a genocide? Imagine someone from the South describing it as such. It sounds almost silly, doesn’t it?
Nope. It was about preserving the Union and, yes, Slavery. Calling it “genocide” is missing the point of a lot of the other dynamics going on.
So, too, with Gaza.
The big problem is that if there’s a ceasefire again tomorrow, I’m pretty sure that the ceasefire will be broken (again) before October 7th rolls around again.
But, hey. Maybe the Palestinians will finally get lucky enough to have Egypt and Iran and everybody else in the region to help and we can finally have that whole “One State” thing happen and we can say “well, you have to understand” about that newer pile of bodies instead of using words like “genocide”.Report
JB: stuff like Israel destroying ultrasound machines and smashing teacups and the like.
Stuff like that happens in every war. The question is what happens after the war ends? Is there legal machinery to evaluate that soldiers did crimes and should be held accountable?
For example we ran a prison camp in Iraq where people were tortured. Soldiers did time over that and there were various other punishments.
That’s a world away from the high command planning the mass death of civilians with that not only being legal but your own civilians dancing in the streets in support.Report
I’m not talking “legally”, Dark.
I’m talking about stuff like “a culture that revels in going into an empty house, finding a tea set in the cupboard, and smashing the tea cups on the ground”.
The whole “deliberate destruction of something beautiful” thing. “We don’t know that the Israelis won’t put those soldiers on trial!” is a nice thought, I guess, but I’m still in a place where I’m seeing that not only did they do this, they filmed it. Not only did they film it, they posted it for clout.Report
Jaybird: “Not only did they film it, they posted it”
This is very similar to us with Iraq.
Jaybird: The whole “deliberate destruction of something beautiful” thing.
The “beauty” of Gaza is undermined by their whole “No Israel No Jews” thing and their support for murdering their way to that goal.
Since the militants aren’t separate from the civilians, lots and lots of civilian stuff is being treated as being militant or potentially militant.Report
I’m not sure comparisons to Iraq serve to help the Israelis cause.Report
Never in the annals of war as such an atrocity committed as soldiers smashing a tea set. The world should never forgive such an atrocity.
I swear things that are considered normal in every other war gets millions of people hyperventilating beyond belief if Israel is involved. I wonder why.Report
It’s not merely the smashing of something beautiful.
It’s the filming it.
It’s the posting it to the internet for clout IN THE EXPECTATION THAT CLOUT WILL BE RECEIVED.
People die in war and it’s awful.
But the reason that I saw the Palestinian culture as something that needed to be replaced wasn’t the whole “but they kill Jews sometimes” thing but it was the “they dismantled greenhouses to make missiles” thing.
So, too, here. You want to kill Palestinians on the way to releasing hostages? Hey. “Don’t take hostages.”
You want to tell Palestinians that they don’t get to have nice tea sets?
Buy your own freakin’ weapons.Report
Truly, IDF soldiers smashing a tea cup has been the worst atrocity in war ever photographed, filmed, and posted to the Internet. Sarcasm.Report
Do you want to know why people are calling Israel an apartheid state?
It’s not because they kill people in war.
It’s not even because war crimes happen.
It’s because of the whole thing where they feel that the Philistines don’t deserve nice things to the point where it’s fine to destroy them.
“Why do people see Israel as an apartheid state?”, you can wonder aloud in the next day or so.
And I can point to the smashing of tea cups and posting the smashing of the tea cups to social media in an effort to get clout.
And you can explain that smashing tea cups isn’t that bad, all things considered, as if the question was whether smashing tea cups was worse than any other number of things that happen in war… instead of why people see Israel as an apartheid state.Report
I find it odd we’re talking about ultrasound machines and not the stuff that happened two months ago.
You know, where ten soldiers were caught, on video, holding shields to help hide the very obvious rape of a Palestinian prisoner by each other. And this isn’t some dubious allegation…there’s very clear video of it happening and the prisoner ended up in the hospital with very serious injuries, there’s not really a lot of debate over the facts. At minimum, every single soldier standing there helping shield things is an deliberate _accomplice_ to rape.
And the IDF, to its credit, is investigating. And I’m not going to try to act extremely outraged, this stuff sometimes happens in a war.
But, the actual thing people should notice: Israeli’s far-rigth rioted over charging these soldiers, storming a military base.
And this rape was defended in the Knesset by Likud members, saying it’s perfectly fine to do _anything_ to them if they’re Hamas militants.
I think a lot of people here do not quite understand how deeply sick Israeli society is, how weirdly poisoned they are by decades of dehumanizing Palestinians because they need some sort of moral justification for what they have been doing.
…but anyway, if we’re talking about ‘places where Israel has gone too far’, how about: Two months ago, had a political discussions about whether it is fine to rape enemy soldiers.Report
Yeah, this is why I backed away from my general support of Israel several decades ago. There’s no real solution. Both sides are entrenched and cannot see that the other side has some arguments worth merit, dehumanizes the opposition, etc. Israel has come full circle in some ways.Report
Well, you’re halfway there, at least.
Maybe at some point you’ll ask yourself ‘Wait, what if Israel stopped trying to steal Palestinian land constantly with new settlements and _actually_ withdraw from it all, including from border and air control, not just pretend withdraw like they did in Gaza? How long would the anger at Israel actually last?’
Asserting that a group of people who were very seriously harmed in 1948 and have constantly been harmed since by land theft and unlawful detentions and randomly shot and humiliated in the streets should somehow ‘stop being irrational’ is nonsense.
Israel needs to stop doing what it is doing, period. It’s illegal, it’s unethical, it’s immoral, and it constantly makes things worse for them.
If they do stop, and Palestinians remain irrational after it stops, that is entirely different discussion, but the person who beat someone else senseless and has continued to kick them and steal stuff from them while they are on the ground doesn’t get to complain that that person is irrationally angry at them. (And no, it doesn’t matter that people who look like that person assaulted their parents.)
And third parties shouldn’t be walking up and be complaining that one of them is kicking someone on the ground, but the person on the ground sometimes manages to get a punch in, and thus ‘everyone is irrationally violent here, there is no solution’.Report
I’m not intimately familiar with all the various gov’t relations between the us and Israel, but assume it’s complex. Depending upon how much we need them, I’d vote for a “screw it, you’re on your own”. position, but I don’t have to get elected either.Report
If even critics are coming out and saying “these things happen in war” and “they’re investigating”, then there’s a lot of cover room for Israel Enthusiasts to explain how it’s not that bad.
When it comes to going into a hospital and destroying an ultrasound machine or going into an evacuated home and finding a beautiful tea set and smashing it, Israel Enthusiasts are stuck saying that worse things happen in war all the time.
The criticism that “Israel is acting like an apartheid state!” isn’t found in searching ambulances for bomb belts and only finding a few.
It’s found in “they’re destroying beautiful things because they belong to the less powerful outgroup”.Report
I wasn’t pointing out that it happened. I was pointing out the response Israel had to ‘discovering’ it happened. Specifically, the far-right Likud immediate defended such behavior and riot to protect the soldiers. I don’t mean ‘some of them’, I mean ‘actual political leadership’.
Incidentally, ‘discovering’ is actually a bit absurd…there have been very well documented evidence of sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees for decades. This is just an example that got caught on video because it happened outside at a detention center because Israeli soldiers could not delay their hatred and rapey-ness to long enough to get the victim inside, I guess.
Dark Matter just mentioned the torture the US did, which I remind people that our government attempted to defend by defining it not as torture, by pretending it was really important, and by having the CIA instead of soldiers (who have very clear training about war crimes) do it, and eventually charged some people.
You know what didn’t happen in the US, even in the completely deranged post-9/11 universe of ‘We can do anything?’ We didn’t defend ramming brooms inside people’s anuses. Did any soldiers do that? I don’t know, I don’t think so, I hope not, but maybe. But we sure as hell wouldn’t have rioted in the streets if someone had gotten charged with it. We wouldn’t have had people defending that in Congress.
When I say Israel society is sick, people need to understand I’m talking about N*zi Germany sick. I’m not saying their actions are comparable, at least not yet, but their belief in the humanity of the outgroup are. They have managed to nearly _completely_ dehumanize Palestinians.
And a lot of Americans have fallen for it, fallen for the propaganda that the situation is exactly the other way around, that Palestinians hate Jews for no reason, instead of them quite sanely hating a state that is doing _this_ to them.
…why do you think _that’s_ the example of them acting like an apartheid state?
Wouldn’t ‘They have set up armed and defended-by-soldiers enclaves inside the legal borders of Palestine that only Israelis are allowed to live in and shop in and enter at all’ be much better evidence of apartheid? That’s pretty much textbook apartheid, that’s the origin of the term apartheid, ‘apartness’, where Black South Africans were segregated into their own areas and forbidden to come into the white ones.Report
I’ve argued with Palestinian Enthusiasts in the past who have screamed that Israel is delaying ambulances by searching them and that’s a war crime.
Then I do stuff like ask “why are they searching the ambulances?” and that usually gets some variant of mumbling, arguments that it doesn’t matter why they’re searching it, or, occasionally, an admission that they’re searching for bomb belts *BUT*! THEY ONLY FOUND A COUPLE!!!
Which, as arguments go, strikes me as pretty obviously bad.
Seriously, these are arguments that I have had and so they stick with me.
The example of the tea cups is probably one of the most striking examples of bad action that I’ve seen. Based in nothing but hatred of the idea of Philistines having nice things. (Remember the 1997 movie “Rosewood”? I remember Ebert talking about the scene where one of the white folks in town complains about one of the black people owning a piano. The man complaining can’t play the piano, mind… he just hated the idea of a black guy owning one.)
Things happen in war. Bad things. It sucks. While there’s no foolproof way to stay out of war, a very good thing to avoid is “trying to start one”.
October 7th? Yeah, well. Even the most fervent Palestinian Enthusiasts pointed out that Hamas was trying to get Israel to respond harshly.
Well, Hamas got what they wanted, I guess.
Pictures of Israeli soldiers destroying an ultrasound machine then posted to social media for clout. Pictures of Israeli soldiers destroying fine china by smashing it on the floor and posting it to social media for clout.
The only possible defenses that you can give for such wanton acts are “well, it’s not an *ATROCITY* atrocity!”
Yeah. It’s more grousing that a Philistine has fine china, reminiscent of an establishing monologue in a John Singleton movie that would come across as laughably ham-handed IF IT WEREN’T POSTED TO SOCIAL MEDIA BY THE SOLDIERS THEMSELVES.Report
Hey, here’s a fun question: Why would Palestinian ambulances be entering Israel?
Oh, they wouldn’t? Of course not.
Then what was Hamas hypothetically trying to blow up?
Israeli soldiers at checkpoints? But…wait, why are there checkpoint in Palestine to start with? Except to…search people so they can’t…attack checkpoints…wait, no.
Or, wait, are the soldiers there to defend illegal settlements? That’s actually it.
This is the whole ‘resisting illegal arrest’, times a billions. ‘We have to do really bad things to you because you will not accept our illegal authority, and the things you do in response to your illegal authority turn around and justify our reaction.’.
This is sorta the root problem of everything happening there: Absolutely none of it would be a problem if Israel would just get the hell out of Palestine. Hamas would just be reduce to lobbing rockets, which are nearly completely inefficient. (And, as I pointed out, Hamas would not have popular support for doing that long.)
And before anyone says ‘They’d do more 10/7’, I remind everyone that a huge chunk of soldiers were withdrawn from the Gaza border to go maintain order in the West Bank. That’s the only reason that worked.
Israel actually has more than enough military to defend its _actual borders_, what it doesn’t have to enough military to defend is the huge deliberate zig-zag of settlements and checkpoints it subjects Palestinians to _within_ Palestine.Report
Yeah, that’s another thing that they do. Thanks.Report
DavidTC: propaganda that the situation is exactly the other way around, that Palestinians hate Jews for no reason, instead of them quite sanely hating a state that is doing _this_ to them.
The entire “No Israel No Jews” plan, long predates what the West views as the occupation.
Having dialed it up to 11 before the occupation, it’s a non-sequitur to claim the occupation is at fault.
For that matter, the various peace agreements have failed because Israel won’t accept an Israel-destroying “Right to Return”.
DavidTC: That’s pretty much textbook apartheid
Yes. And it’s why Israel should stop with those sorts of “settlements”. However imho them stopping won’t bring peace because it has little to do with the underlying conflict.
DavidTC: but their belief in the humanity of the outgroup are. They have managed to nearly _completely_ dehumanize Palestinians.
They view various groups of Palestinians (including the bulk of Gaza) as Nazis. As people who are genocidally opposed to Jews being alive (or at least alive there). As the kind of people who will kill every Jew they can get their hands on.
The problem is this rep is well earned and even boldly proclaimed.Report
Yeah, it dates all the way back to the time that a bunch of Jews forced them move, at gunpoint, so those Jews could take part of the area and proclaim a ‘democracy’ that only had the right sort of voters in it.
But we’re not supposed to talk about that, we’re supposed to pretend Palestinians should have gotten over that, you’ve specifically said that, so it’s reallly weird to use things that were said back then as a justification for _Israeli’s_ action.
Either the entire context counts, or it doesn’t, and we should just include, I dunno, five years, I say, randomly picking a number. And for five years, Israel has constantly illegally blockaded something it claims is an independent nation (Gaza) which is an act of war, and stolen land for an occupied territory (West Bank) at gunpoint in violation of international law.
Eventually resulting in a war. (Which, because somehow this has to be said every time, _also_ committed war crimes.)
You have inhaled the propaganda entirely, where the problem is Hamas and Hamas has a problem with Israel existing at all. Maybe they actually do, I’m sure they’ve even said that at some point. But they are a militia, they take somewhat extreme positions.
But in actual reality, the only reason Hamas has any _support_ is because of the behavior of Israel inside of Palestine against Palestinians. All Israel has to do is actually give up Palestine, which would completely uncut 99% of the opposition to Israel by Palestinians.
You keep talking about how irrational it is to want to recover land stolen 70 years ago, and _you are right_. Bet that _isn’t_ what Palestinians are pissed about. They’re pissed because Israel literally stole their house two years ago, after years of illegal settlers harrassing them with the help of the IDF. And incidentally shot their brother and his wife as part of that.
Hell, if I were they, I’d be indescribably angry at an occupying force making me jump though insane amount of hoops just to move around in my own country…Palestinians often have to get to checkpoint at five in the morning just to _get to their jobs_.
And that’s the West Bank. In Gaza, they have to cope with near starvation because Israel won’t let them actually set up any industry or farming due to the blockage
That’s what norm Palestinians are actually pissed at Israel about. The direct impact of Israel on their daily lives. Trying to recover land in Israel is just a rallying cry, it’s not anything they expect to happen, and they would not continue some sort of hypothetical war with Israel to get that if Israel leaves them alone.
And, no, what Israel did in Gaza doesn’t count as a withdrawal…the fact they no longer had any people on the ground doesn’t change the fact they completely controlled every aspect of it, including entrances and exits and shipping. That actually made things in Gaza much worse, but even if it hypothetically hadn’t, it doesn’t change the fact Gazans also consider the West Bank part of the same county (Cause it is) and will, rather obviously, not stop while _that_ is occupied.
However, giving up Palestine is the one thing that, politically, Israel is completely unable to do because the far-right party has, for _decades_, been asserting that eventually all that land will belong to Israel. (And everyone else got the hint when the prime minister who made motions towards that got assassinated)Report
“But they are a militia, they take somewhat extreme positions.”
Heh!Report
The peace proposals keep falling apart because they don’t give back land stolen 70 years ago.
Go look up the Palestinian peace proposal in 2000, which was the closest we’ve gotten to peace.
To deal with the Right to Return, Israel would take back 150k people per year forever. Ergo Israel will be slowly destroyed over the course of decades.
Trying to claim the Palestinians are willing to make peace without an Israel-destroying RoR doesn’t match the peace negotiations, the official statements, the charters, and so on.
At some point we need to admit that they mean what they say and negotiate for.Report
The Right of Return is much stickier than Jerusalem. The Palestinians can’t or won’t give it up because of a variety of reasons both sympathetic and not. Obviously Israel like any other country is not going to agree to destroy itself. Israel as the Jewish state is probably even less prone to that than other countries.
The problem is that if we admit that, it means that there is no solution. Attempts at getting the Palestinians to be sensible about this have not worked. They have basically made it the foundation of their demands in the same way that people in other mass population movements have stopped. Greeks aren’t demanding their property on Asia Minor back, India-Pakistan-Bangladesh population exchange is generally similarly settled. German communities form Eastern Europe are permanently gone. However, the decision of other Arab nations to keep the Palestinians as permanent refugees and tell them for decades that the only solution is to destroy Israel has led to this.Report
The solution is the UN and Arab countries stop claiming/treating them as refugees and then in two or three generations this will be a dead issue.
Right now the Palestinians are strongly enabled by the rest of the world. Hamas is both the government of Gaza and not responsible for the welfare of it’s people because the UN does that.
We have a UN agency whose job in practice is to keep the conflict going. They teach that the RoR is a real thing and their mandate is to care for the “refugees” until it’s resolved.
I like to assume good intensions but this concept seems an effort to prevent Israel from existing and keep the conflict going.Report
Yeah, we just need to change the Arab countries.Report
That isn’t going to happen and stop treating the Palestinians as refugees is different than giving them citizenship.Report
Hey, how much do you think the Germans would be okay with losing parts of their country _in the present_ to the same people who took it after WWII? If Poland constantly took new parts of Germany, moved soldiers in, evicted everyone and build new housing for Poles?
Do you think that not only would they be upset about the _current_ theft, they might also still be talking about when this _started_?
“Wow, Germany sure is holding on to their grudges about the land I took decades ago.” I say, as I literally take more of their land at that exact moment. “How irrational!”
I would like a _single_ person in this discussion to actually address this very obvious point, that wounds do not and cannot heal until the _actual injury stops being repeated over and over_, and it’s incredibly telling how none of you will.Report
DavidTC: I would like a _single_ person in this discussion to actually address this very obvious point
My way to “address” your obvious point is point out that it doesn’t match what the Palestinians themselves have claimed. Nor does it match the charters, nor the peace negotiations.
If your claims are correct, then why are the settlements not such a big deal in the peace negotiations but an Israel-destroying right to return is worth walking away from the table over?Report
What do you mean, if my claims are correct? What part of my statement is disputable? I pointed out what was happening and how it differed from post-war Germany losing territory, and posed a hypothetical about how the German people would feel about that. There were no ‘claims’ in it except ‘settlements still exist and are still currently being created’, and unless you think they’ve somehow permanently stopped sometime between the last announcement in March and now, none of that can be wrong.
The peace process literally is based around the settlements first being barred from added, then removed, and then no longer able to happen because Israel doesn’t control Palestine anymore.
That is how every peace process have literally started as a concept. It’s not a ‘big issue’ because it is literally _the_ entire premise, from start to end. (This is why Israel doesn’t propose any peace settlements any more, or work with anyone trying to create them, because that would literally be the first order of business, and Israel cannot stop doing that.)
Oh, so now they’re just _constantly_ doing that, huh? The only supposed ‘example’ of that is Arafat in 2000, Israel hasn’t even bothered to have peace talks since then.
You have, and I almost could add this to any post by anyone here on this topic, ingested Israeli propaganda on this. So, some facts:
Accepting a limited right of return would not have, at any point, destroyed ‘Israel’. It wouldn’t have even meaningfully changed the demographics of Israel. The only thing Arafat actually wanted was the right of return to Jerusalem. That was the thing he wanted, but, of course, this ‘peace deal was something worked out entirely between the US and Israel with Arafat being given the finished product and having basically no input on it’
Meanwhile, the deal thrown in front of Arafat didn’t even include _compensation_ for Palestinians who had been removed. It sorta handwaves that as something that could be done later. Is your argument that Palestinians shouldn’t even get that? You know, a thing that actually could _end_ this, if Palestinians were actually _paid_ for the land they were forced out of at gunpoint? It would certainly make things look more legitimate, wouldn’t it? But Israel won’t even do that.
In fact, that peace treaty had a _lot- of the things that Palestinians were demanding to be done put off until being figured out later, and everything Israel wanted (Which included annexing huge settlements, aka, formalizing Israeli’s land theft, and a completely demilitarized Palestinian state that Israel basically ruled) done immediately.
Please note this was seven years after Oslo, which had done the same thing: Had the Palestinians make a bunch of compromises in return for figuring stuff out in the future, whereas Israel got everything it wanted.
That is how every treaty offered by Israel has been. Some major concession on the part of Palestine, some very minor one on the part of Israel, and a promise that the important stuff will be done later. That last thing never actually happens, because the next step is yet another treaty where Israel demands more stuff.Report
What part of my statement is disputable?
The idea that RoR isn’t the cornerstone of the problem and the conflict.
The only supposed ‘example’ of that is Arafat in 2000,
When I read wiki on the RoR, the peace process, and the conflict, I see it spelled out repeatedly that the RoR is the cornerstone of the Palestinian demands. I also see that in the charters.
Accepting a limited right of return would not have, at any point, destroyed ‘Israel’.
150k per year forever means Israel is destroyed as a Jewish state over the next several decades.
For all the happy talk about how it wouldn’t be used and how it would be discouraged, 150k/year was the actual black letter definition of “limited” from the Palestinian point of view.
The only thing Arafat actually wanted was the right of return to Jerusalem.
That spin doesn’t match the Palestinian proposal.
a thing that actually could _end_ this, if Palestinians were actually _paid_ for the land they were forced out of
I see no evidence the Palestinians have ever made this proposal. If it’d work then that’s great. However you are assuming they’re not serious about RoR.
If you’re correct then the settlements and so on are the root of the problem and all we need is for Israel to pull out and that would be that.
However I see a ton of evidence that says they are extremely serious about getting an Israel-destroying RoR.
If that’s where their heads are at, then peace is impossible. That explains why there was no peace before the settlements existed which was the first 40 years or so. That also explains their charters, wiki’s various statements, and so on.
I’m not looking at Israeli propaganda. I’m looking at Palestinian charters and proposals and even behavior.
For example Hamas doesn’t make any distinction between “settler in an area that should be ours” and “Jew in an area that will eventually be Jewish”. Those villages they wiped out weren’t in disputed territory.Report
Jaybird: It’s found in “they’re destroying beautiful things because they belong to the less powerful outgroup”.
The army isn’t there destroying things because they’re less powerful. The army is there because they support a genocidal terror group.
Supporting a genocidal terror group means you can’t have nice things. That’s part of the whole “let’s have a brutal war in my back yard” package.Report
I wouldn’t go so far to say as the Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas. Hamas is the type of group that you really can’t refuse because they have no issues killing you.Report
LeeEsq: I wouldn’t go so far to say as the Palestinians in Gaza support Hamas.
They don’t support Hamas’ corruption and brutality on it’s own people.
They overwhelmingly support the “Right to Return” which puts them on a path to supporting “No Jews” which they also support.
The only way to make that happen is war+genocide+terrorism. Arguably Hamas did 10-7 to become more popular.Report
Put differently, the parts of Hamas that we-the-West view as extremely ugly are also the parts that gets them viewed as “representing legitimate Palestinian political aims”.
Any group that attempts to “non-violently” destroy Israel is going to encounter a total lack of Jewish cooperation and Jewish State violence. For example the Gaza peace marches of 2018, i.e. “The Great March of Return”.
So yes, I think it’s fair to say the people of Gaza support Hamas in this context.Report
“If you support Hamas, you deserve to have your tea set smashed on the floor. This house is in Gaza. It has a tea set. Therefore…”
I don’t think that there’s anything that you can say that will get me to agree that Palestinian tea sets should be thrown onto the floor.
If we want to discuss whether people in war ought to be shot, I’m sure we’ll have some parts of that that we agree on and some parts where we disagree.
If we want to discuss whether it’s okay to shoot someone in an apartment where a hostage is being held, we can have conversations about the circumstances under which that’s perfectly fine and conversations about the parts that are more in a grey area.
But the whole “tea set in a house that was left behind in an evacuated part of town post-bombing should be smashed on the floor thing because the owners of the house supported Hamas, probably” thing?
Well, again: I don’t think that there’s anything that you can say that will get me to agree that Palestinian tea sets should be thrown onto the floor.Report
Both sides do it (however, one side does it to themselves, their own infrastructure, the women and children of their enemies, etc. and the other one does it to tea sets).Report
I’m not saying “now I prefer the Palestinians”, Pinky.Report
Of course not – they may have broken tea cups as well, and you can’t go around supporting people who would do that!Report
No, it was the whole “dismantling greenhouses and making missiles out of the pipes” that got me to somewhere around “hell, no” with them.Report
There are a lot of parallels between what the Israeli settlers and government are doing to the Palestinians and hypothetical scenarios certain brands of conservatives will use to justify the 2nd Amendment.
One doesn’t have to particularly like or respect the Palestinians to see that.Report
It would be nice if the critics of Israel can actually provide a clear and realistic instructions on what Israel should do and take reality rather than idealism into consideration. What should israel do if Hamas is going to remain Hamas and the other faction of Palestinian leadership ineffective in the extrem with everybody being unwilling to tell confront them in anyway. What should Israel do?
It would be nice if Jews could get instruction on what to do in an increasingly hostile world besides keep on engaging in the multicultural ecumenical cargo cult. What is clear to me in the past several years is that nobody is that most people are interested in a direct confrontation with the anti-Semites of the world. It does not matter whether the anti-Semite is on the left or right, is white or of color, Christian, Muslim or anything else, or male or female. Nobody wants to confront them because they are so numerous and found in all coalitions everywhere. I am very interested in lots of direct confrontations with anti-Semites of all types though.Report
If you are in a position where you have to kill Palestinians, don’t do it in such a way that presents identically to racists trying to put a minority group back in their proper place.
Like, don’t act like whites in Apartheid South Africa.
Don’t act like whites in the Jim Crow South.
Seriously, Israel could argue quite well that they’re fighting back against an intractable group of terrorists who want nothing more than the destruction of a peaceful and civilized people if the Israeli soldiers did not film themselves destroying ultrasound machines and posting the footage to social media for clout.
“If you’re doing a search of a house and you find a lady’s négligée in a drawer of the bedroom you’re searching, don’t hold it up for the camera, laugh, and then rip it in half.”
“You’re an anti-semite! Why oh why are we so put upon? Why will no one confront this awful anti-semitism?”Report
I really have no idea why people expect Jews in general and Israelis in particular to be freaking saints compared to every other persecuted group on the planet. Despite the Shoah happening, Jews are supposed to take the rhetoric of people calling for our complete destruction and everything we built with perfect calm and not take it seriously.Report
Lee, I’m not one of those people who is saying “Don’t you think it’s hypocritical for your people to go through a Holocaust and then not use rubber bullets?”
“I’m saying *DON’T ACT LIKE WHITES IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA*.”
And your response is that I’m expecting you to act like saints?
Keep this in mind the next time you’re compared to Apartheid South Africa so you’re not confused about where the critic is coming from.
Maybe you’ll be able to say something like “Hey, nobody’s perfect” instead of “what? whatever do you mean?”
And *THEN* you can wonder aloud why the intersectional left doesn’t give Jews more support even though Jews were really supportive for something that happened back in the 90s.Report
Israel could annex and fortify all of the defensible territory immediately bulging from the green line, renounce forever all disputed claims east, and shoot any Palestinian man, woman, or child that comes within 1000 yards of the barricades. That is definitely not the behavior of saints, but the whole thing would be over as an issue. No, maybe not for grievance studies professors and their gentle students who write dissertations on the colonial settler origins of traffic signals. But as a political flashpoint that ever bleeds into the mainstream, normie debate? Gone.Report
I agree that Israel can and should do that. That’s what Israel did with the Gaza Strip after the withdrawal from Gaza. I think the arguments is that Israel’s hard border/defense with Gaza turns it into an open air prison. Never mind the rocket launches and later 10/7.
It will be the same thing with the West Bank. Israel’s defenses/hard border would be denounced as creating a gigantic open air prison and not good enough. The lack of a signed agreement would mean it is not a real withdrawal and Palestine really isn’t free even if they have an army, government, and international diplomatic relationships.
I’m with Pinky on this and I usually disagree with Pinky a lot. The entire burden is placed on Israel, and to the lesser extent Jews globally, and we have to be the sane and reasonable ones. The enemies of Israel and the Jews just get to go on and on. It is exhausting. They never stop.Report
If you mean, “go back to the 1967 borders” then the problems are…
1) It wasn’t defendable then.
2) It hasn’t been politically possible for decades. Even the extreme peace types in Israel know they need a land swap because some of those settlements are too large to destroy.
If Israel tries to do this unilaterally, then by definition they draw borders without Palestinian input. That also means “to benefit themselves”.Report
No, 1967 is never happening, it would be some approximation of the 2000 Camp David proposals but without the land swaps, so a more generous version to Israel than what they were apparently willing to accept and which they believed was, and I see no reason why wouldn’t be, defensible. See also my comment to Pinky. There is no adversary in the ME capable of taking Israeli territory.Report
Well, the Sanity Express doesn’t make a lot of stops between Tel Aviv and Mumbai, if you get my meaning. If anyone’s going to do anything reasonable in the Middle East, it’s probably going to be Israel. Also, to the extent that the rest of the world doesn’t like you and you think they’re persuadable, you want to be as saintly as possible. And I don’t think any of us give deliberately bad or immoral advice for any country. I’ve never read a comment about how now would be the perfect time to wipe out the Kurds.Report
You’re absolutely right about the sanity express as far as it goes, but this is where Tel Aviv is at risk of falling off the train. Look around the region. Egypt is stuck in a post failure of the Arab Spring stand off between the military and it’s own Islamist movements. Iraq is still and will for the foreseeable future remain neutered as a regional power by the US invasion and its aftermath. Jordan’s monarchy is in a state of never ending acrobatics to cling to power and legitimacy. Syria, Lebanon, and Libya are all mired in civil wars and political paralysis. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are distracted by their proxy wars with Iran.
Yet Israel still looks at the situation as if the tanks could come rolling over the border at any moment rather than an opportunity to impose a finality on extremely favorable terms.Report
I’ve said multiple times at OT what I’d do in their shoes.Report
It’d be nice if you didn’t pretend those instructions have not been very clearly given. But here are the instructions again:
Withdraw all settlements immediately from the West Bank. ‘Legal’, or otherwise. And, while we’re at it, Israel doesn’t get to tear those down like they did in Gaza. They can take down Jewish Temples, that’s fine, but all houses and infrastructure and everything remain…you _built it illegally in another country_, it’s theirs.
Withdraw the IDF as much as possible from the West Bank. Remove all checkpoints. I will compromise and allow them to remain at the borders for now, but Israel is going to have to realize that border defense happens _inside your country_, you don’t get to set up outposts in the country you’re holding off. If they feel some Israeli inhabitants are too close to the border and indefensible, it is up to _them_ to move father back. Borders don’t move because you built houses up to them. But, that can be a process.
What’s going to have to happen next is a new election there to replace the compromised puppet government, which needs to happen anyway. If the IDF can control itself and be helpful, I have no objection to them maintaining the peace before and during that, but it not, request UN peacekeepers. Or Jordanian security forces.
There needs to be a timeline for making sure the IDF doesn’t have a single person in the country. Say, one year. If the West Bank cannot function at that point, and needs some sort of outside help, literally anyone else should be providing it.
All this West Bank stuff should actually happen independent of the war, because that is not where the war is.
Ending the war is more complicated, but Israel could always say ‘The war is over in exchange for the hostages’, and really hasn’t said that…they always demand Hamas surrender on top of that. Now, Hamas leaders did commit war crimes by kidnapping civilians, and Israel _could_ hypothetically complain to the Hague about that, but it would be rather hilarious. The actual end of this is the Hamas leadership getting away with all their stuff, which sounds bad until you realize exactly how much Israeli leadership has gotten away with things, then it’s, like, eh. Often the worst people get to walk away without accountability.
I am not sure this would actually work in Gaza, but the interesting part of this is you can free the West Bank by itself and that almost immediately undercuts Hamas’s position in Gaza.
Please acknowledge your receipt of these instructions so we don’t have to do this again.Report
I think he meant “clear and realistic instructions on what Israel should do” that *wouldn’t* get them killed.Report
This is what I meant. I do not get the logic of the Pro-Palestinian advocates at all. A lot of the arguments of the most extreme ones seem to require Israel to be both an unstoppable monstrous beast eternally threatening the Palestinian peoples and simultaneous weak enough push overs that the world can force all the 7.2 million Jews in Israel out without much effort at all. This doesn’t make sense.
Likewise, Jews in general and Israel in particular are given a big list of requirements and all of these have to be done first. The requirements on Muslims and Palestinians is nothing. They just get to raise their fists in defiance forever, no matter what happens.Report
So the children of Abraham have to follow a stricter law than their neighbors to hold onto their land. Yeah, I read that once.Report
They’re all “children of Abraham.”Report
He meant children in a biological sense rather than a theological sense in this case.Report
Call me Ishmael.Report
It’s not hard to put myself in the place of the Palestinians and try to think “What would my opinion of Israel be?”
It’s not hard to put myself in the place of the Israelis and try to think “What would my opinion of the Gaza be?”
And whenever I do that, I tend to think that this shit ends only one way and the best course of action is to figure out how to kick the can down the road again for another few decades.Report
Likewise. Except that I really don’t care about the can. Not my monkey, not my circus, etc. I think the best the US can do is stay out of it.Report
War is an amazingly blunt and destructive tool.
By throwing out the rules for war, Hamas (and by extension Gaza) have made the war much more blunt and much more destructive.
If you’re going to use a hospital as a military base, you’re opening the door for scared hostile armed brutal people to go through.
The same thing holds true for using individual homes and having those same brutal people do house by house searches for booby traps and hostile soldiers.
Those tea cups are in the middle of a battlefield. They aren’t supposed to be deliberately smashed, that’s a problem. But them being in the middle of a battlefield is a much larger problem.Report
If the tea cups were collateral damage as part of a campaign, I would understand that, hey. You can’t make an omelet.
But this is going into the house, finding the tea cups, and then destroying them deliberately, filming it, then posting the footage to social media for clout.
But we’re back to “I don’t think that there’s anything that you can say that will get me to agree that Palestinian tea sets should be thrown onto the floor.”
You still haven’t.Report
“Should be”?
No. Of course not.
Lots of stuff happens in a war that shouldn’t happen. It’s expected.
Opening the door to war is opening the door to a ton of savage brutal instincts. It’s why we try to keep that door closed.
If you want to condemn Israel over broken teacups you’re able to set the bar at that level, and as you pointed out it’s bsdi.
I’m more concerned about percentage of population they control ending up dead. If they sink to Hamas levels then we’ll see a lot more than we have.Report
If you want to condemn Israel over broken teacups you’re able to set the bar at that level, and as you pointed out it’s bsdi.
I’ve stated my problem multiple times. Here, I’ll copy and paste it again:
This is going into the house, finding the tea cups, and then destroying them deliberately, filming it, then posting the footage to social media for clout.
That’s a different category of uncivilized.
Hey, people die in war, after all. Children sometimes die in war. It’s why war should be avoided and it’s very stupid to try to start one.
But the difference between fighting back and putting the Palestinians back in their place is where the line is drawn for me.
“NO NO NO! YOU SHOULD DRAW IT HERE INSTEAD!”, you can shout.
Sure. Whtvs.Report
“what should the Israelis do”
1) watch “Platoon”
2) don’t be like those guysReport
Chris: You can support a ceasefire
Define, “ceasefire”. If that means “Hamas surrenders and let’s Israel take over Gaza” then I’m all in favor.
If it means “Israel leaves and pretends Hamas won’t rearm and do 10-7 again” then I foresee problems. The first problem being that Gaza currently sucks and only way to prevent Hamas from rearming will have the side effect of keeping it sucking.
Chris: supporting Israel’s war, as they carry out a genocide (as recognized by pretty much every expert on the subject by now,
What is going on is a brutal war, with Hamas claiming that everyone who dies is a targeted civilian. If Hamas is correct then yes, it’s genocide.
However as far as I can tell, Israel thinks it’s a defensive war with Hamas deliberately getting it’s own people killed by it’s use of human shields.
Chris: being on the side of genocide.
As far as I can tell, the numbers suggest brutal war but not genocide. The fog of war prevents us from knowing how many militants are being killed compared to how many civilians.
A lot of the genocidal claims seem hysteria. For example the UN claimed “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians would die if Israel attacked Rafah. After the attack, wiki claims about a thousand. Hamas seems to be claiming about 900.
When I listen to Arabic media, they talk about “Israel’s war on Gaza” as though there is no such thing as Hamas and Israel is at war with the civilian population. That mindset means the war is genocide, but it ignores Hamas is a thing.Report
Lots of Western Pro-Palestinian activists also seem to want to pretend that Hamas doesn’t exist and 10/7 never happened.Report
My impression is Hamas is viewed as a natural extension of the Palestinians political desires. That’s not wrong, but the result is Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas is putting Palestinian society through a wood chipper.Report
Has it ever occurred to everybody that one reason why the I/P conflict is in standstill because the Palestinians and other Muslims by and large seem to be stuck in their desire to completely destroy Israel and the woe is me phase? I keep encountering books from the Palestinian standpoint like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Colonizing-Palestine-Palestinian-Stanford-Societies/dp/1503602702/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FOGT9INJNV0V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.uwaLkzOH8NpVtSvwOC9k6Lz90nGYteq3-wLkVCqV6Ks.soXwsIBhjSSkvAXTVoh5Y7ETbgMdpWUCpV8gWZbxxac&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+zionist+left+and+the+nakba&qid=1724514894&s=books&sprefix=the+zionist+left+and+the+nakba%2Cstripbooks%2C130&sr=1-1&asin=1503602702&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1
They can’t seem to get over the Israel is an “illegitimate settler-colonial state” and we won’t be happy until the entire world agrees with us on this. Everything about Palestinian rights has to be argued from this standpoint whether by a Palestinian or one of their advocates. Even the Palestinians seem to think that punishing every Israeli is more important than getting statehood.Report
If Israel doesn’t want to be seen as an illegitimate settler-colonial state, it really shouldn’t act like a particularly petty settler-colonial state.
“Why are they giving Israel this criticism?”, you can wonder.
Then folks can post evidence.
Then you can dismiss the evidence and ask the question again, as if no one had even considered answering it because it so self-evidently has no answers.Report
By existing, the Further Left believes that Israel is a settler-colonial state and will you stop this. Your type of rhetoric is annoying to people who might even agree with you.Report
The fact that the further left is stupid does not make any and all criticisms against Israel illegitimate, and that includes the criticisms that they’re acting like a particularly petty settler-colonial state.Report
Jaybird: they’re acting like a particularly petty settler-colonial state.
That statement means different things to different people.
To the West, that means the taking over one house at a time thing and the settlements.
To the Arabs, that means the existence of Israel. They view all of Israel, every inch of it, as a colonial project. Various official documents spell that out including both the PLO’s and Hamas’ charter.
This difference is why imho the settlements don’t help but they also don’t matter. They’re going to be terrorized no matter what they do. Various groups will try to implement “No Jews”.
And one of the massive problems is if the Arabs are going to be genocidally unhappy no matter what Israel does, then they might as well be unhappy with less.Report
I think there are positive signs that Arabs and some other Muslims are softening a lot on this and learning to live at least grudgingly with Israel. Hamas and plenty of others are still fanatics but it isn’t all of them.Report
To me, it means “destroying an unattended ultrasound machine in an abandoned hospital”.Report
LOL, you think, it’s _Palestine_ that is stopping Israel from taking over Gaza and the West Bank?
Do you actually think Palestinians would object?
They wouldn’t, in fact, they’d laugh and agree to it. It’s called the One State solution. This is because Palestinians actually understand why Israel hasn’t taken all of Palestine in one of the innumerable times they’ve had the chance (Including the literal formation): At some point, Israel would have to explain why they weren’t letting these new Israelis vote.
It’s the same reason Israel builds ‘settlements’ in the West Bank instead of just annexing parts of it that might have Arabs in it that demand the right to continue to live there and be citizens of Israel(1). It’s because Israel is willing to be a Democracy as long as only the right sort of people are voting.
That’s literally why they had to drive Palestinians out of their territory before declaring ‘independence’ to start with, after all. To make sure the people voting would vote _the right way_.
1) Except East Jerusalem, which they have annexed back in 1980 and…for some reason don’t let Arab residents vote in national elections, despite them being _supposedly_ Israeli citizens living in what is now supposedly Israel.
It’s like if the US annexed Puerto Rico or the Philippines, and instead of just not letting them vote in national elections (Which itself is very shameful, and we’ve mostly admitted that.), we only let _white people_ there vote.
They’re sorta showing their whole ass on that ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ thing, aren’t they? Making it extremely clear that they are only a democracy insomuch as the people vote the way they want.
And, hell, they aren’t even at risk of losing a Jewish majority there…they’re just at risk of losing the far-right majority.Report
DavidTC: East Jerusalem, which they have annexed back in 1980 and…for some reason don’t let Arab residents vote in national elections
You’re going to have to source that. I failed to find it.
DavidTC: LOL, you think, it’s _Palestine_ that is stopping Israel from taking over Gaza and the West Bank? Do you actually think Palestinians would object?
I think the various “resistance” groups aren’t fighting to become minorities in a Jewish state. I also think Israel wouldn’t have a fun time in Gaza (and by extension, the West Bank) dealing with terror groups.Report
I think they fizzled because most people on the Democratic side realize that beating Trump and the Republican in the election is the most important thing right now. The fact that the most strident Pro-Palestinian activists are in control and are demanding things that are beyond the pale of American politics is also turning many liberals and moderates sympathetic to them off.
Look at the arguments over the proposed speech. Not only did the Pro-Palestinian speeches refuse to outright support Kamala Harris but they couldn’t do simple things like outright condemn Hamas and insisting on comparing the Hamas prisoners in Israel to the hostages of Hamas. Rep. Talib said she planned to ruin the atmosphere and State Rep Romman referred to a place in Green Line Israel as part of Palestine. This is simply beyond acceptable. The Israeli-American couple was willing to play by the rules of the DNC and the Pro-Palestinian protestors could not. In fact the reaction to Harris’ speech by the Pro-Palestinian speakers is that calling Hamas murderous thugs was wrong because Hamas is Palestinian liberation.Report
I also think that the issue has a very low salience for most Americans because of our inability to grasp complex foreign problems which lack an easily defined good and bad guy side.
In addition, the protesters aren’t able to condense their message into anything coherent, whereas like Saul mentions below, Harris was able to take the wind out of their sails by her simple two part statement affirming both Israel’s and the Palestinian’s right to a homeland. She presents a very small front for attack.Report
The Pro-Palestinian protestors are basically trapped in Further Left and academic activist talk that will go way beyond the heads of even most politically engaged Americans let alone low information ones. There was something about letting “Gaza be the spark that destroys the American Empire.” Not only do most Americans refer to the United States or see it as an empire, they wouldn’t understand the comparison at all. I think basically that enough of them see “No Israel, No Jews” as the only just solution that they can’t create a coherent message that doesn’t look delusional at best.Report
In terms of Israel/Gaza:
Kamala Harris said exactly what needs to be said to please various factions in the Democratic Party (meaning peoplen who will actually vote Democratic as opposed to being leftists merely glomped onto the Democratic Party by lazy media). She acknowledged Hamas start October 7th and that Hamas are nothing more than murderous thugs. She acknowledged that Israel exists and is not going away no matter what anyone desires and she also acknowledged that the Palestinians have a right to state hood and are being punished too much for Hamas’ actions. She did this very well.
About the only people who dislike it are ideologues on either side who want to chant from the river to the sea.Report
I’ve said before the reality is that this is a bottom tier issue for the American voter. It can easily be navigated by saying exactly the kind of things Harris said, to the extent anything has to be said at all.Report
Foreign policy is generally a low-tier issue (though plenty of foreign policy does have domestic side effects) even in the stupid NY Times focus poll with young undecided voters, the one guy who called Israel’s actions genocidal wrote that his most important concern was inflation.Report
Well said Saul.Report
Someone needs to check and correct the headline. It currently reads “Kalama Harris DNC Speech: Watch It For Yourself.” Pretty sure that’s not how she spells her name.Report
Behold!Report
Comedy Monday, Rich Lowry thinks Trump can win on “character” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/opinion/advice-for-trump-win.htmlReport
It’s been interesting seeing the reactions to this – a quick way to see who bothers to read more than a headline before posting about it.Report