israel doesnt get to say it has a right to defend itself/right to exist when its defense now and existence in the first place is a function of the displacement of that population.
Which was 70 fucking years ago! Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself. After a certain point, the borders are the borders, and you can’t just point to territorial wars from decades past as justification for not recognizing its nationhood.
Israel was founded by the foreign seizure of already settled lands. Observe in the “1947 U.N. Palestine Plan” UN is the subject and Palestine is quite literally objectified.
Which is the story of all nations, actually. How many times has Europe been conquered by other empires and dictatorships? How many native populations have been been displaced by colonialism?
I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the bloody history of how our each of our nations have been founded. No matter what soil you stand on, it was subjugated by somebody else.
Entire terrorist groups have been founded on the idea of some territorial subjugation from the 1800s gives them the right to enact violence on the nations of today. So, I don’t subscribe to this idea that we should point to the actions of 70 years ago as justification for wars or terrorism or rejecting the sovereignty of a nation.
Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself.
Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?
Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?
Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?
Which part? The strip of land west of Israel that was involved in the latest terrorist attacks, or the other strip of land east of Israel? Which one is Palestine? Because it can’t be both. And Palestine didn’t even agree to both when it had the chance in 1947.
And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country, if they want to lay claim to both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All they have to do is march their army in the West Bank, cross Israel, and arrive at the Gaza Strip. (Insert Gru four-panel here.)
It’s also too bad the PLO/PLA is too in bed with terrorist groups to have a standing army that would be involved in defense, instead of bombing citizens partying at a music festival.
Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?
In our bloody history of war over the past several thousand years, I can’t recall a war that didn’t involve starving children, homelessness, the death of civilians (accidental or otherwise), and all of the other horrors that it entails. War sucks, and it’s especially brutal on the defensive side.
Having said all of that, Israel certainly needs to calm down its hard-on for atrocities and police its own warcriming. Israel had some sympathy with the catalyst of the war (the music festival bombing), and quickly lost all of that when it decided to go gung-ho on the whole Gaza populace.
Though, it is especially unfortunate that one side chooses to hide behind terrorism, instead of clearly identifying military over citizens. Maybe if the PLO didn’t embrace terrorism, their citizens wouldn’t be in this dangerous spot.
And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country
I… what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
So… getting away from the back and forth, I have a feeling that the underlying thing you’re saying, that Hamas is a violent terroristic organization and they shouldn’t have killed or raped all those people at the music festival, I agree with completely. Where it breaks down for me is:
Likud has been helping Hamas defeat their less-violent domestic opposition, and elevating the most violent and unreasonable element in Palestinian politics, for years now. Which kinda makes it weird for them to all of a sudden get upset that the Palestinians are acting violent and unreasonable. It’s like picking the worst and most dangerous dog to take home to your family, then torturing it on purpose because it’s a “bad dog,” and then blaming someone else when it mauls one of your children, and saying everyone needs to put you in charge and never question you so you can protect everyone against these dogs and keep torturing the dogs. To me, that shit means you should never be in charge of anything again and should maybe be brought up on charges both for what happened to the dog and what happened to your kid.
Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.
To me, no one should get raped at the music festival and no one should watch their children starve. Both of those seem like straightforward things to believe. Anyone on either side who’s for a realistic path for peace is the the ally, and anyone on either side who’s justifying atrocities is the enemy (as you seemed to do for deliberately starving children – saying that it happens by accident sometimes, as a way of excusing Israel doing it on purpose, is deliberately missing the point of what I was saying I think.)
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges, and find some people whose solution to “they did an atrocity to us” is something other than “Let’s do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it’ll show them not to do that again.”
(* “them” being very loosely defined and including a whole bunch of innocent people)
I… what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
You seem to miss my point: A single country cannot be composed of two completely separate regions, because they cannot defend both regions, especially when trying to defend against their aggressor would involve marching across said aggressor’s territory. There’s only a few solutions to this problem:
Turn both regions into their own countries.
Have a military impressive enough to defend both regions. Only the US and British get to do that with their extra colonies, and even then, there’s enough of an argument to give those back or at least turn them into their own states with better representation.
Somehow conquer an area between the two regions, which is laughably unrealistic, considering Israel (or the US) are not going to just let them do that.
Let the problem fester for 70 years until Israel gets tired of their shit and “solves” the problem their own way. Which is how we got here.
Likud has been helping Hamas defeat their less-violent domestic opposition, and elevating the most violent and unreasonable element in Palestinian politics, for years now. Which kinda makes it weird for them to all of a sudden get upset that the Palestinians are acting violent and unreasonable. It’s like picking the worst and most dangerous dog to take home to your family, then torturing it on purpose because it’s a “bad dog,” and then blaming someone else when it mauls one of your children, and saying everyone needs to put you in charge and never question you so you can protect everyone against these dogs and keep torturing the dogs. To me, that shit means you should never be in charge of anything again and should maybe be brought up on charges both for what happened to the dog and what happened to your kid.
Perhaps Palestine shouldn’t let foreign powers influence them and clean up their terrorist elements, instead of promoting them.
I’m not saying what Likud is doing is right, but right-wing fuckheads are going to do what right-wing fuckheads do the world over. See also: Nixon and the Korean War peace talks, Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan and Iran-Contra, the Bushes and all of their wars, Trump and Afghanistan (or about a million other things), the Tories and their numerous sudden resignations, Putin and every other right-wing leader in Europe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges
Seems fine to me, but you and I know that’s not going to happen.
and find some people whose solution to “they did an atrocity to us” is something other than “Let’s do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it’ll show them not to do that again.”
I see this more of “let’s completely annex Gaza Strip, so that it’s ours and we get to clean up the area and flush out terrorists ourselves”. At that point, if some terrorist group in Gaza Strip decides to bomb another target in Israel, it’s entirely Israel’s problem and they alone get to deal with it. Because Palestine sure as fuck isn’t handling it now.
It’s a shit solution, because war always is a shit solution. And again, Israel needs to calm the fuck down with their civilian causalities. But, it is a solution. With an ending. It ends. No more 70 years of debate about Middle East peace talks or whether Gaza Strip is a nation or a part of Palestine or is in this lawless, terrorist-filled region of an in-between state.
I mean, let’s look at the US and their wars of aggression against terrorism. They’ve had a pretty fucking terrible track record, but during the time the US occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, they were better countries than what they were before or afterward. Iraq had free elections. Afghanistan was undergoing a feminist movement. But, the Iraqi military ran like cowards when ISIS invaded, and Trump sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban. I think if the US thought of them as a stepping stone towards allies in the Middle East (like Israel), and less like these short-term military projects, we might still have these countries in their more progressive states.
But, hey, I’ve already acknowledged that it’s a shitty solution, and we’re a couple of intelligent people, so instead of “finding some people” for this solution, which is what we’ve been doing for the past 70 years, let’s just talk about what the solution should be. What’s really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I’ve lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn’t Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It’s been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You’ve been talking about this “realistic path for peace”, right? What’s that path look like?
Let the problem fester for 70 years until Israel gets tired of their shit and “solves” the problem their own way. Which is how we got here.
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the “stronger” party in the situation, when their “solution” is some kind of rampant injustice.
Like if the US lost patience with Israel’s current government, and got a coalition together, landed UN troops in the West Bank with the support of the whole rest of the world to deport all the settlers back inside the 1993 borders (summarily executing any of them that tried to resist the deportation, and just leaving them dead in the street), and hauled away Netanyahu and half his cabinet to the Hague to stand trial (alongside, yes, Hamas leadership who’s guilty of much more numerically minor atrocities), you would never accept that that’s justified because they’re “solving the problem.” Even though that’s a lot milder and more measured than what Israel is currently doing to “solve” – i.e. just carpet-bombing the country and causing a man-made catastrophe of famine destruction that’s killing innocent people on an industrial scale.
Any violence Hamas has done to innocent Israelis, the IDF has done to innocent Palestinians ten times over.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
But, hey, I’ve already acknowledged that it’s a shitty solution, and we’re a couple of intelligent people, so instead of “finding some people” for this solution, which is what we’ve been doing for the past 70 years, let’s just talk about what the solution should be. What’s really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I’ve lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn’t Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It’s been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You’ve been talking about this “realistic path for peace”, right? What’s that path look like?
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don’t think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide – so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn’t just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then – sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop, and then two, we have to try to address the root causes that are leading to the killing, and come up with something that is livable.
Ben-Gurion actually touched on this exact point, as far as root causes:
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the “stronger” party in the situation, when their “solution” is some kind of rampant injustice.
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
you would never accept that that’s justified because they’re “solving the problem.”
Because that sort of “justice” is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don’t have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don’t think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide – so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn’t just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then – sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop,
I think the problem is that they’ve been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there’s a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I’m against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I’ll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn’t need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it’s Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn’t, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don’t even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they’ve held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn’t currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it’s still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because “our God is not theirs”.
Because the world is filled with nuance and shitty solutions.
I defend that Israel is a country, and don’t defend arguments based on ancient grudges from decades past. I’m not even defending what Israel is currently doing, but what solutions do you think they should be doing in response to a terrorist attack? (Which was the last straw in a series of terrorist attacks.)
Last straw my left nut, this is merely the latest in a series of campaigns committed by both sides in this 80 year mutually-retributive open warfare. “Last straw” he says. This “last straw” is just the next straw- the next provoked “justification” for the next wave of seizure and occupation of every other house on the block, by way of outright murder and starvation and any other means necessary (read: slow-roll ethnic cleansing by way of genocide).
As for what the secular and interested nation of israel- the supposed “Land of the Jews”- should do? They should start, if they were actually motivated by the spirit and not by lucre, by opening the Torah and observing the wisdom from Exodus: An eye for an eye means to restrict compensation/retribution to the exact nature of the loss, and I invite you to figure some of the many nuanced ways that could apply here. They could stop pretending they are the sole victims and not-at-all perpetrators. They could find peace with their neighbors, they could stop murdering and harassing and starving and raping and kidnapping and torturing and pulling their land from their cold, dead hands as was, in point of fact, the ultimate intention of the other atrocities, despite so much peaceful rhetoric. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
An excellent first step would be calling a truce. An excellent next step would be deposing the current bloody-minded ruling party. An excellent third step would be to make amends and disburse reparations, starting with the schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure they have destroyed, fourth ceding the gradually encroached (to the point of the article) territory. I’m willing to bet for my own (admittedly useless) part that the peoples of Palestine and israel would settle at this point for the two state solution if it meant a lasting peace- if ever two leading parties were morally sane enough to propose it to each other in good faith and bold enough to resist outside pressures against it, “river to sea” notwithstanding. USA & Co. could still keep its slice of Suez pie, even.
Christ, can you imagine it? Jews and Arabs living side-by-side in peace and harmony, except actually, and that across the entire region?
I’m willing to bet for my own (admittedly useless) part that the peoples of Palestine and israel would settle at this point for the two state solution if it meant a lasting peace
You mean the Oslo Accords? Remind me again who fucked that one up?
I seem to recall hardliner elements of both plo and israel being very much involved in fucking that up, to the tune of the mass shooting at the cave of the patriarchs, and israeli militants’ assassination of pm rabin, as well as suicide bombings from jihadists and a general feeling among palestinian militant groups that palestine had no real hand in the negotiation feeding a resentment against the proposed peace; however, since the oslo accords did not at all recognize the palestinian state it is emphatically not what I meant by “two state solution.”
Which was 70 fucking years ago! Israel absolutely gets to say it has the right to defend itself. After a certain point, the borders are the borders, and you can’t just point to territorial wars from decades past as justification for not recognizing its nationhood.
Which is the story of all nations, actually. How many times has Europe been conquered by other empires and dictatorships? How many native populations have been been displaced by colonialism?
I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s the bloody history of how our each of our nations have been founded. No matter what soil you stand on, it was subjugated by somebody else.
Entire terrorist groups have been founded on the idea of some territorial subjugation from the 1800s gives them the right to enact violence on the nations of today. So, I don’t subscribe to this idea that we should point to the actions of 70 years ago as justification for wars or terrorism or rejecting the sovereignty of a nation.
Quick question, does Palestine get to say it has the right to defend itself?
Follow-up, is starving Palestinian children part of what you would claim is Israel defending itself? Or is that something Israel doesn’t have a right to do?
Which part? The strip of land west of Israel that was involved in the latest terrorist attacks, or the other strip of land east of Israel? Which one is Palestine? Because it can’t be both. And Palestine didn’t even agree to both when it had the chance in 1947.
And yes, it does have the right to defend itself. Perhaps they should send their armies into Gaza Strip to defend their country, if they want to lay claim to both the West Bank and Gaza Strip. All they have to do is march their army in the West Bank, cross Israel, and arrive at the Gaza Strip. (Insert Gru four-panel here.)
It’s also too bad the PLO/PLA is too in bed with terrorist groups to have a standing army that would be involved in defense, instead of bombing citizens partying at a music festival.
In our bloody history of war over the past several thousand years, I can’t recall a war that didn’t involve starving children, homelessness, the death of civilians (accidental or otherwise), and all of the other horrors that it entails. War sucks, and it’s especially brutal on the defensive side.
Having said all of that, Israel certainly needs to calm down its hard-on for atrocities and police its own warcriming. Israel had some sympathy with the catalyst of the war (the music festival bombing), and quickly lost all of that when it decided to go gung-ho on the whole Gaza populace.
Though, it is especially unfortunate that one side chooses to hide behind terrorism, instead of clearly identifying military over citizens. Maybe if the PLO didn’t embrace terrorism, their citizens wouldn’t be in this dangerous spot.
I… what? March them across the intervening Israeli territory, so they can engage with the IDF once they arrive in the Gaza strip? Something tells me that wouldn’t be the totally logical and good successful step you seem to be suggesting it would be.
So… getting away from the back and forth, I have a feeling that the underlying thing you’re saying, that Hamas is a violent terroristic organization and they shouldn’t have killed or raped all those people at the music festival, I agree with completely. Where it breaks down for me is:
To me, no one should get raped at the music festival and no one should watch their children starve. Both of those seem like straightforward things to believe. Anyone on either side who’s for a realistic path for peace is the the ally, and anyone on either side who’s justifying atrocities is the enemy (as you seemed to do for deliberately starving children – saying that it happens by accident sometimes, as a way of excusing Israel doing it on purpose, is deliberately missing the point of what I was saying I think.)
I think Hamas leadership and Likud are both guilty of perpetuating the conflict and killing the innocent, and a good solution would be to get the lot of them out of government, bring them up on charges, and find some people whose solution to “they did an atrocity to us” is something other than “Let’s do an atrocity to them*! It is justified and will totally fix things because it’ll show them not to do that again.”
(* “them” being very loosely defined and including a whole bunch of innocent people)
You seem to miss my point: A single country cannot be composed of two completely separate regions, because they cannot defend both regions, especially when trying to defend against their aggressor would involve marching across said aggressor’s territory. There’s only a few solutions to this problem:
Perhaps Palestine shouldn’t let foreign powers influence them and clean up their terrorist elements, instead of promoting them.
I’m not saying what Likud is doing is right, but right-wing fuckheads are going to do what right-wing fuckheads do the world over. See also: Nixon and the Korean War peace talks, Reagan and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan and Iran-Contra, the Bushes and all of their wars, Trump and Afghanistan (or about a million other things), the Tories and their numerous sudden resignations, Putin and every other right-wing leader in Europe and beyond, etc., etc., etc.
Is that before or after war was declared? I would expect peacetime and wartime numbers to be different, and separated.
Seems fine to me, but you and I know that’s not going to happen.
I see this more of “let’s completely annex Gaza Strip, so that it’s ours and we get to clean up the area and flush out terrorists ourselves”. At that point, if some terrorist group in Gaza Strip decides to bomb another target in Israel, it’s entirely Israel’s problem and they alone get to deal with it. Because Palestine sure as fuck isn’t handling it now.
It’s a shit solution, because war always is a shit solution. And again, Israel needs to calm the fuck down with their civilian causalities. But, it is a solution. With an ending. It ends. No more 70 years of debate about Middle East peace talks or whether Gaza Strip is a nation or a part of Palestine or is in this lawless, terrorist-filled region of an in-between state.
I mean, let’s look at the US and their wars of aggression against terrorism. They’ve had a pretty fucking terrible track record, but during the time the US occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, they were better countries than what they were before or afterward. Iraq had free elections. Afghanistan was undergoing a feminist movement. But, the Iraqi military ran like cowards when ISIS invaded, and Trump sold out Afghanistan to the Taliban. I think if the US thought of them as a stepping stone towards allies in the Middle East (like Israel), and less like these short-term military projects, we might still have these countries in their more progressive states.
But, hey, I’ve already acknowledged that it’s a shitty solution, and we’re a couple of intelligent people, so instead of “finding some people” for this solution, which is what we’ve been doing for the past 70 years, let’s just talk about what the solution should be. What’s really the solution here?
Peace talks? How many are we up to now? I’ve lost count.
Getting rid of Hamas? How do we do that? Why isn’t Palestine themselves capable of getting rid of Hamas? After all, they claim to be the owners of the Gaza Strip, so what the fuck are they doing about it? It’s been 70 years. How long do we have to wait?
What else? You’ve been talking about this “realistic path for peace”, right? What’s that path look like?
See this is the kind of thing you only ever hear from the “stronger” party in the situation, when their “solution” is some kind of rampant injustice.
Like if the US lost patience with Israel’s current government, and got a coalition together, landed UN troops in the West Bank with the support of the whole rest of the world to deport all the settlers back inside the 1993 borders (summarily executing any of them that tried to resist the deportation, and just leaving them dead in the street), and hauled away Netanyahu and half his cabinet to the Hague to stand trial (alongside, yes, Hamas leadership who’s guilty of much more numerically minor atrocities), you would never accept that that’s justified because they’re “solving the problem.” Even though that’s a lot milder and more measured than what Israel is currently doing to “solve” – i.e. just carpet-bombing the country and causing a man-made catastrophe of famine destruction that’s killing innocent people on an industrial scale.
This is a really good question. Here’s a comparison showing injuries alongside deaths, here’s a comprehensive breakdown of deaths up until the beginning of the current “war,” and here’s a breakdown for the current conflict itself.
Honestly, in my mind, it has to start with the US stopping providing cover for Israel at the UN. I don’t think anyone would say that Hamas should be able to kill innocent people and anyone should let it slide – so when Israel kills innocent people or breaks international law in some other way, it shouldn’t just be let to slide either. Let the UN enact actual solutions, then – sanctions, military action, legal action against leaders who commit war crimes. Both sides are killing innocents, though not in equal numbers. One, that has to stop, and then two, we have to try to address the root causes that are leading to the killing, and come up with something that is livable.
Ben-Gurion actually touched on this exact point, as far as root causes:
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
Unfortunately, in matters of war, the one with the stronger army wins.
Because that sort of “justice” is only half of the problem. The other half, the harder half, is nation-building, solving for the power vacuums they just created, and making sure the peace is maintained. This is the part that the US keeps screwing up, because elections are a thing and people don’t have the patience for problems that take a decade+ to solve.
I think the problem is that they’ve been doing this sort of thing for so long that it has fatigued the world in general. The fact that Israel declared war on Gaza is new, which is why there’s a lot of protests and attention, but all of the conflict before that has been same repetitive violence for decades. Palestine even had a chance with the Oslo Accords, but Hamas fucked that up soon after.
The UN is not exactly the bastion of justice, either, especially when the usual powers hold veto power (the US included/especially).
Which is precisely the kind of ancient hatred I’m against here. Israel is a county, and Palestinians need to accept that. The sooner they do that, the sooner the rest of the world would accept Palestine as a country. (One country, not this ridiculous two sets of landmasses. I’ll even accept two countries there.) Yeah, I know, they used to be bigger before the formation of Israel, but that identity doesn’t need to serve as their identity as a people. Hamas has does more harm for the public image of Palestine than anything else, even as a minority of the population. This is why even small elements of terrorism needs to be squashed, by the host country or by other countries as necessary, as soon as they form.
I mean, if we really want to point at the root cause here, it’s Jerusalem. Arabs had it, then they didn’t, then they did, crusade after crusade after crusade to take over Jerusalem from the Jews, then the Muslims, then the Jews again. Hell, I don’t even care if Israel or Palestine or the old-pre-1947 version of Palestine is owned by the Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Jedis, Pastafarians, Satanists, or whoever. I just care that Israel is the latest to hold it, they’ve held it for decades, and they have a fairly stable government and culture.
If the religious over there are going to continue to believe that this holy place needs to be held by whatever culture doesn’t currently hold it, then there is absolutely no hope for them. Religion has a bad habit of clinging to ancient hatred for millennia, as long as it’s still written down, and as long as people still recite it. They will never heal because “our God is not theirs”.
If it isn’t right, why are you defending it? “It’s always been done this way” is no excuse for continuing to commit an act that you admit isn’t right.
Because the world is filled with nuance and shitty solutions.
I defend that Israel is a country, and don’t defend arguments based on ancient grudges from decades past. I’m not even defending what Israel is currently doing, but what solutions do you think they should be doing in response to a terrorist attack? (Which was the last straw in a series of terrorist attacks.)
Last straw my left nut, this is merely the latest in a series of campaigns committed by both sides in this 80 year mutually-retributive open warfare. “Last straw” he says. This “last straw” is just the next straw- the next provoked “justification” for the next wave of seizure and occupation of every other house on the block, by way of outright murder and starvation and any other means necessary (read: slow-roll ethnic cleansing by way of genocide).
As for what the secular and interested nation of israel- the supposed “Land of the Jews”- should do? They should start, if they were actually motivated by the spirit and not by lucre, by opening the Torah and observing the wisdom from Exodus: An eye for an eye means to restrict compensation/retribution to the exact nature of the loss, and I invite you to figure some of the many nuanced ways that could apply here. They could stop pretending they are the sole victims and not-at-all perpetrators. They could find peace with their neighbors, they could stop murdering and harassing and starving and raping and kidnapping and torturing and pulling their land from their cold, dead hands as was, in point of fact, the ultimate intention of the other atrocities, despite so much peaceful rhetoric. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
An excellent first step would be calling a truce. An excellent next step would be deposing the current bloody-minded ruling party. An excellent third step would be to make amends and disburse reparations, starting with the schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure they have destroyed, fourth ceding the gradually encroached (to the point of the article) territory. I’m willing to bet for my own (admittedly useless) part that the peoples of Palestine and israel would settle at this point for the two state solution if it meant a lasting peace- if ever two leading parties were morally sane enough to propose it to each other in good faith and bold enough to resist outside pressures against it, “river to sea” notwithstanding. USA & Co. could still keep its slice of Suez pie, even.
Christ, can you imagine it? Jews and Arabs living side-by-side in peace and harmony, except actually, and that across the entire region?
You mean the Oslo Accords? Remind me again who fucked that one up?
I seem to recall hardliner elements of both plo and israel being very much involved in fucking that up, to the tune of the mass shooting at the cave of the patriarchs, and israeli militants’ assassination of pm rabin, as well as suicide bombings from jihadists and a general feeling among palestinian militant groups that palestine had no real hand in the negotiation feeding a resentment against the proposed peace; however, since the oslo accords did not at all recognize the palestinian state it is emphatically not what I meant by “two state solution.”
remember now?