Aapje58
7hr ago
Your intuition is correct that it is outlandish to think the Germans could make millions of bodies from these camps just disappear, they couldn't and they didn't.
Yet very large numbers of Jews did not return after WW 2, so where did they go, if they were not murdered?
Aapje58
8hr ago
But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side.
They weren't. One of the first death camps was in Brandenburg, to the west of Berlin. This was part of Aktion T4, the precursor to the Holocaust, where mental patients were killed (and they later extended Aktion T4 to Jews on a small scale, until they later scaled up massively as part of a new program). At that location, they experimented with carbon monoxide gassings in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. They closed that facility after complaints by the locals about the smoke.
There is no official document about why they chose Poland for most of the large scale program, but you only have to look at a map to see that Poland is an obvious choice if you want to do it outside of Germany, but within easy reach of Berlin. The Netherlands, Belgium or France are also close to Germany, but on the side of Germany that is far away from the capital.
I suspect that they preferred a foreign country, and especially an Eastern-European country because it is much easier to get things done if you are not beholden to an established bureaucratic system, and a populace that is used to appealing to that system. The idea was to establish a new nation in Eastern Europe, so then there effectively were no existing rules holding them back.
Aapje58
17hr ago
But evidence shows they weren't on some mission to "kill all the Jews" and there was no such policy.
What evidence shows this?
And does the testimony of Felix Landau, Erwin Bingel, Petras Zelionka, Halina Jankoska and Edward Anders, who recounted the shooting of Jews, not count as evidence? Do you deny that this testimony exists?
And what about the testimony of Siegfried Schuchardt, Julius Bauer and Wilhelm Findeisen, about the use of gas vans by Einsatzgruppen to murder Jews?
Aapje58
17hr ago
I do believe they were herded into gas chambers and probably more or less knew what was going on.
So how do you explain testimony from survivors of Auschwitz where they tell very consistent stories about how they had no clue that the fires they saw in the distance were crematoria, and that they didn't understand what the Kapos meant when they whispered things to them like "You’re young and healthy!" and "everyone is healthy" ? In hindsight, they understood that these were instructions on what to say (or not say) to the sorting officer who would decide who would go to the work camps or to the gas chambers.
What motivation would these people have to lie (consistently) or what mechanism would result in them coming to believe a false story, very quickly after liberation?
To believe that the arriving prisoners could identify the gas chambers for what they were, you need to go a lot further than to believe that the prisoners knew that Auschwitz was (in part) an extermination camp, which already contradicts the testimony, but you also need to believe that they knew the manner of execution (even though using gas for executions was novel at the time), and that they either knew that the gassing would happen straight after arrival or somehow be able to recognize that a fake shower room is not a shower room.
I believe that SS's claim is that these people starved to death because logistics broke down late in the war and they didn't get sufficient food.
What I want him to explain is why prisoners of war didn't suffer similarly high casualty rates (or vice versa, why Jews didn't have much lower casualty rates like the prisoners of war), because if the cause was a shortage of food, rather than deliberate actions to cause Jews to die, then one would expect similar food shortages for all prisoners and thus similar casualty rates.
Furthermore, his narrative would logically mean that almost all of these deaths would have happened very late in the war, because it would be absurd to argue that the Nazis fought for years without enough food. So then the Nazis would suddenly end up with huge piles of bodies. We know that these were not found by the liberating soldiers. They found very limited numbers of dead bodies at the camps, not millions of them.
So I want SS to explain how the Nazis were able to make those bodies disappear, and how such a solution is possible logistically. Because the way I see it, this would require a narrative that is way more unbelievable than that the Nazis murdered the Jews and cremated the bodies, over a much longer period of time.
I don't believe that the Jews that just arrived were aware of the procedure at the camp, and I have explained extensively why I believe that this is the case. If you want to argue with someone who accepts the claim that they knew this, then you need to find someone else to argue with.
It is claimed that no more than 2-4 Germans guarded the entire extermination operation at Birkenau
This is an utterly deceptive way to frame it. So deceptive in fact, that I have a hard time believing that you are making this argument in good faith. Again, the size of the actual security force was way bigger than this, consisting mostly of Trawniki and Kapo 'volunteers' (who in reality were heavily coerced, as doing this job greatly increased their chance of survival or of living longer).
Given your clear interest in the extermination camps, I find it just about impossible to believe that you have not heard of the Trawniki and Kapos.
Let me be absolutely clear. The story you are countering here is not the actual mainstream claim. It is highly distorted in a way that makes it seem way less feasible.
The question is why would a group of thousands of people achieve this level of group coordination in achieving their own execution
You are just begging the question here. It has not been established that they knew that that they were getting executed, nor have you established that they got anywhere close to the 'up to' amount you claimed when operating normally and it has not even been established that they ever hit that figure. It could be like one of these 'up to' figures that you see in advertising, and that is only possible in conditions that are perfect in every way.
The number of people that were actually put in the gas chamber was one of the few things that the Nazis did not actually seem to keep records of, so who knows how many people were actually in there on average? But again my question is why you think that this even matters?
Also, this narrative you keep pushing that merely walking into a room and getting pushed further and further into the wall or others, by people pushing into you, is actually some sort of North Korean coordinated mass event, is beyond absurd. That is not coordination in any way, but pure reaction.
Anyway, if you want to prove that historians make up all kinds of details, or accept claims from witnesses that are likely to be false, etc, etc; then it's not like this is the smoking gun you need. There are examples aplenty. But that kind of general criticism of history as a profession, doesn't actually do anything to prove that your narrative is better than the official one, because your narrative would suffer from the same kind of criticisms of the evidence you use, that has been presented by historians.
There is no room for guards inside the building to manage a panicking crowd
You have some really strange ideas. A crowd that is sufficiently densely packed is obviously going to control itself, because the people have no autonomous control over their movement.
Yet at the same time it's even less plausible that this crowd behavior reliably and routinely emerged, many times on a daily basis without fail, when the crowd knew they were cramming themselves inside their execution chambers.
Again, this is because you ignore that these people had already been crammed into overcrowded box cars. So the people who resisted going into those crowded box cars, had already been beaten and perhaps killed days ago, or even earlier. So why do you assume that people who had already accepted overcrowding, would suddenly not accept that anymore?
Again, your story is build on ignoring the immense weaknesses of your narrative, and making assumptions that you absolutely cannot prove.
If any Jews were hesitant to walk inside the gas chamber any guard would be in a very confined space with 2,000 people- machine gun or not would not be able to manage a riot if the crowd rushed the exit.
Your narrative makes zero sense again. Earlier you argued that simply entering through a supposedly small entrance would itself be a huge hindrance to getting in at a somewhat decent pace, but now these people could somehow rush out with such speed that they would overwhelm the guards. You are not applying consistent logic.
And again, you have not established at all that there was a decent chance of panic or revolt.
You cannot imagine a scenario where these people thought that they were actually getting showered, and would finally get food, shelter, and a chance to lie down, after a brutal trip. But you can only imagine a scenario where these people could somehow magically tell that an execution was about to happen, and they would somehow suddenly revolt after missing out on opportunity after opportunity to revolt in ways that would have a better chance of success; or would panic despite there not really being a more important reason to panic than earlier on.
One of these scenarios makes a whole lot more sense, and it is not the one you believe.
It takes a long time and requires everyone's cooperation. A couple of people panicking could stall or derail the entire operation.
They had a bunch of aggressive guards exactly to hurry people along, and to pull people out of the line who caused an issue, 'convincing' these people to be more cooperative, or alternatively, to take a little rest until their dead body was taken away.
What is your claim anyway? That gas chambers are impossible because getting people inside them takes too long? You do realize that they could just make the next group wait at the railway station, and could even leave entire trains parked without letting people out? The Nazis had transit/buffer camps, so it's not like they had to let the Jews go free if there was insufficient capacity to gas all of them right away. It just meant that the Holocaust took them longer.
Treblinka was supposed to by run by something like a couple dozen Germans...
Is this a joke? Surely you must know that the Germans were outnumbered by the Trawniki. And then you had the Kapos, prisoners who had security duties. The actual security force was way bigger than the Germans who were present.
I have explained why the Germans would not design an execution system that so heavily relied on the perfect cooperation of large crowds of people.
A big mistake you make is that you seem to believe that the Nazis made a plan on paper and that it is unbelievable that this plan would work out perfectly.
But in reality, they experimented with a lot of solutions, where most of these failed to do what they wanted. So they made all kinds of evolutionary steps along the way. Going from shootings to exhaust fumes, to poison gas, to odorless poison gas (hint: that was to reduce/prevent panic). Similarly, they changed the gas chamber designs along the way. Surely they also simply looked at what security detail was sufficient, and brought enough people.
The very nature of evolutionary solutions is that they can easily go against what common sense tells you should work, and that they can be very efficient, being just good enough to work, without being overengineered.
But many users here do not find that explanation believable because the Jews would have been able to see through the ruse.
Yes, based on 20/20 hindsight.
But put yourself into the shoes of a Jew of the time, being fed propaganda about relocations/forced labor, which is perfectly believable in itself because the Nazis employed a lot of forced labor of even their fellow Aryans. Then surely there were all kinds of rumors floating around, but lots of those rumors would be wrong, and even those with an element of truth would suffer from the Chinese whispers' distortions that completely distorts rumors that start out true. It would have been common sense to assume that the more extreme rumors are nonsense. And then the Jews would mostly be transported to a transit camp at first, which would be a lot closer to the places of origin of the Jews. So the archetypal camp that people would be most familiar with, would be a camp that did not feature gas chambers, and that was unpleasant, but generally survivable.
For example, Westerbork was in The Netherlands, so Dutch people would be familiar with that camp in all sorts of ways, like delivering goods there, or passing by. Prisoners in the camp would even send letters to other Dutch people. Yet how do you imagine that Dutch people would get information about Sobibor or Auschwitz? Dutch people would not make deliveries to those camps, would not pass by on their way to work, would not go there on holiday, would not get letters from prisoners at these camps, etc. Back then, travel was highly restricted, requiring permits, so it was not like people could go without permission. And why would the Nazis ever give permission all but those who were actually needed to run the camp, which would be a small group of German soldiers, picked for being amoral bastards, and the rest would all be locals.
I have failed to see an explanation why the Jews would quickly come to the realization upon arrival at an extermination camp that they would be gassed there, rather than believe that this is a work camp (which Auschwitz actually was for some of the Jews that arrived there). Don't forget that a whole bunch of Jews actually had the experience of traveling from a transit camp to a work camp. If they had revolted thinking that they arrived at an extermination camp, they would have done something very stupid.
Don't forget that rejecting the idea that the Jews believed in the ruse, and that they would have panicked/resisted, is utterly inconsistent with the fact that Jews had many an opportunity to resist/panic way before arriving at the concentration camp. For example, they could have attacked the police/gestapo with a knife upon their arrest. And the ones that provably showed up for transport voluntarily, could have gone into hiding/fled/etc instead of showing up. And they could have organized a revolt in the transit camp. And they could have panicked/revolted when brought to the railway station at the transit camp.
But apparently it is not at all unbelievable that they didn't revolt/panic at any of these moments, but that they didn't revolt/panic at the entrance of the gas chamber, which was designed to not look like a gas chamber, is somehow unbelievable.
So the narrative that the Jews knew that they would be killed, and that they would become non-compliant because of that, requires you to either reason away all kinds of facts that are very inconvenient for that narrative, or to believe in an epiphany-narrative, where people collectively go from not knowing something, to being sure about it, in the space of a few hours or even minutes, and without seeing any slamdunk evidence.
Aapje58
1d ago
It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.
First of all, I have no idea whether your 'it is claimed' actually reflects strongly held beliefs by historians. And my strongly held belief is that lots of historians take bad estimates by eye witnesses as gospel, or simply copy claims by other historians, no matter how weakly supported that claim is, or they just make stuff up that sounds good to them. There is a reason why a lot of sensible people try to validate historical records through practical methods.
Anyway, because of this, the more specific historical claims get, the more likely that they are wrong. And historical records get more believable the more independent evidence there is, and the more we stick to more generic claims. For example, I am a lot more confident that the Battle of Actium happened, than that the claimed number of ships and men are correct.
So my belief that the Holocaust happened and involved intentional mass murder and gas chambers is not based on a specific figure being correct that is allegedly being claimed, but because there is a lot of evidence all pointing in the same direction, supporting a much more generic claim, that is thus not dependent on a single data point being true. Your narrative that these people died due to food shortages and the like, does not merely require you to reason away the gas chambers, but also gas vans, the development of an odorless Zyklon-variant, the mass executions behind the Eastern Front, various experiments in clinics/camps early on, etc. Essentially, there is a very clear progression in the methods used, and a lot of independent evidence, which adds a lot of credibility to the claim that there was a plan to annihilate the Jews.
In contrast, your narrative of deaths due to chaos near the war's end, completely fails to explain such things as why such a small fraction of deported Jews survived, versus prisoners of war. Because if the Jews were not targeted but just victims of chaos, then logically, that chaos should impact all prisoners somewhat equally. And your narrative requires you to explain why there weren't a ton of bodies lying about. Because how does it make sense for there being mass starvation late in the war due to chaos, but for the Nazis to then still be able to neatly dispose of almost all of the bodies? And with immense speed, since it the deaths would occur over a much smaller period than in the Holocaust narrative.
Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.
According to your own image, 2000 people is actually quite possible if you have 30% children in the mix. You provide no reason why 30% children is the upper limit. In fact, we have records for a transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults. That is less than 2000 people, but I have no clue whether the figure of 2000 is supposed to actually have been reached, or whether it is a calculation.
You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.
Again, according to this reasoning it would be impossible for people to be pressed to death at a festival/stadium, because people would panic and press back again the people applying pressure. Yet we know for a fact that people get pressed to death in such circumstances, and that survivors report panic, but are unable to push back. So your narrative goes against established facts on how people behave.
You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers
I indeed think that it is quite plausible that malnourished, dehydrated people who had just suffered from horrible conditions during a long transport, and who know that they get beaten if they do not comply, act in a docile manner.
I am saying they would not have cooperated like that.
How could you know? Do you have experience being a person with 1940's Jewish culture, who has experienced a long train ride in a packed box car, and has been beaten by Nazis or has seen his fellows get beaten by the Nazis? Or are you just projecting your modern beliefs on the past?
It's my opinion that projecting modern beliefs on the past, rather than actually understanding how people of the time thought, is a huge cause for false beliefs of history.
But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed
I never claimed that there was no panic, or that the Jews knew that they would be killed before the Zyklon-B was administered. At that point the doors would be closed.
What I am claiming is that your narrative that panic must have happened at the moment and to such an extent that it would have prevented the people from being packed tight is being disproved by the fact that people do end up packed tight and unable to resist this, at festival/stadium tragedies where people get pressed to death.
not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.
You completely ignore that the Nazis scaled up their operations gradually. So your narrative that they gambled that thousands of people would revolt, does not match the historic record, where they experimented and learned what worked, and thus could simply scale down their security to a level that was sufficient, based on experience.
And it is a fact that occasionally, the Nazis did not actually know what security was sufficient, like at Sobibor, where there was a semi-successful revolt (but again, this was planned).
The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.
Yes, it is truly damning for the Holocaust narrative that there is no video where the Nazis demonstrate exactly how the gas chambers work. It's not like they had a policy of keeping it a secret, with them using code words, destroying the evidence, etc. And all the witnesses who gave testimony shortly after the war were obviously all coerced into making that testimony, even though there is a total lack of evidence for that coercion happening. It's utterly believable for there not to be a whole bunch of Nazis who would complain about that coercion if it had happened.
Aapje58
2d ago
Thousands go in, no one comes out, do the guards just tell everyone else they were loaded into buses in back and sent to another camp?
You do know that Auschwitz consisted of about 40 camps? So it would indeed be perfectly plausible for them to be marched to a different (sub-)camp, potentially quite a bit away. And the Nazis would obviously not be worried about making them do quite a long march.
And why do you think that it would make sense for people to be brought out of the showers back to the railway station? Why would they leave again, right after arriving?
Just the first of many logistical problems that make this obviously implausible.)
Do you have any actually convincing problems, that are not simply because you don't understand that these camps consist of separate areas with a purpose (and indeed, separate sub-camps also with a different purpose), and people would not come back to places like the railway station unless they were leaving?
Aapje58
2d ago
but there was found to be a significant psychological effect on the soldiers doing the killings.
And the Jews also had a tendency to run away. Early on in the war, Jews fleeing further to the East was considered a benefit by at least one Ensatzgruppe leader, but I think that once they recognized that the war was not going well, they put more emphasis on killing the Jews quickly, rather than 'we'll get to it.'
Aapje58
2d ago
Getting that many people into these narrow entrances to stand with extremely high density in these small rooms requires military-discipline level of coordination by the victims.
Ehhh, no. They could just make them walk in and then once the natural density has been reached, push more people in, and those people will push the people who are already inside, etc. This is also what they do for Japanese trains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
What part of this requires military discipline? Do you imagine that the Jews marched in, in formation, and they took specific designated spots? What discipline is required to move when you get pushed?
For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end. I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.
So if it turns out that claim is false (which it is) then mainstream historians are categorically unable to answer those other questions with respect to the Holy 6 million.
It seems to me that this is actually your problem if you reject the gas chambers, since then you need to account for where all those people went that provably disappeared. Where is your explanation?
Just like it actually seems to be you for whom the 6 million is Holy and it somehow matters if the actual number is 3 million, and those people where mostly executed by firing squads or gassed in trucks and box cars (but not gas chambers that looked like showers).
The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming, but you seem to believe that you merely need to prove one part wrong and then suddenly all that evidence will disappear.
Of course if someone doesn't cooperate digging, you shoot him and it's a little inconvenient.
I don't understand your logic here. You seem to claim that when people are forced to dig their own grave, then any resistance is going to be individual and can be dealt with easily due to that. But when people are merely asked to walk into a room, then that would somehow set off a coordinated riot. Why? How?
Note that this doesn't make much sense anyway, since the separation of the Jews into workers and those who got sent to the gas chambers, would be a much more logical place to riot, when you have not just strength of numbers, but the most healthy & strong Jews would still be present. Women, children, the elderly and the ill would be over-represented in the group being sent to the gas chamber.
A full-blown riot of a thousand people is a massive security threat to what is supposed to be a top-secret operation.
Which is why Sobibor was razed to the ground after the revolt. That was actually a carefully planned operation though, not a riot. And the workers of Sobibor were much more suitable for a revolt, being mostly healthy adults.
You have failed to explain why the Nazis would be particularly afraid of a riot by starved Jews who had been forced to stand for an average of 4 days, where many of those Jews would be women, children and the elderly, and where those Jews would have no particular reason to revolt then as they would not know the procedure at the camp (in fact, their previous 'arrive at a concentration camp' experience would have been at a non-extermination camp, so if anything they would assume that this is another camp where they would stay for a while).
That's why the shower room cover story is so important. Such a sensitive task would not have, by design, fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims.
Cooperation of the Jews with the Nazis has been documented every step of the way, so why would it be notable, or a weak spot in the narrative for that to also have happened at the extermination camps? The notable situations are when there was a revolt (Warsaw & Sobibor). And those were planned, not spontaneous.
Your narrative greatly suffers from double standards anyway. The Nazis also gassed some Jews in box cars. And Jews were packed tightly in box cars for transport. Yet you don't question the official story that has Jews being packed tight in the box cars for transport or for gassing, but suddenly when the Jews were packed tight in a gas chamber that looks like a shower, this required military discipline. Yet apparently no military discipline was required to be packed tight in box cars? And it was not logical for the Jews to revolt when being packed tight in the box cars, but somehow when being led to the showers, it is so unbelievable that they would not resist, that this supposedly undermines the entire narrative.
Aapje58
2d ago
To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response.
No, defiance. Which makes it even less likely, because defiance requires being an asshat just out of spite, usually at the expense of yourself. And anyone who was so inclined had plenty of chances to do so earlier, and would have not been on the train.
Heroism requires that there is at least a slight chance of success, which there isn't really, with a single person acting alone.
Aapje58
2d ago
From an alternative perspective: it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower. That is a very dumb belief;
Is it really dumb to believe that people believe in dumb ideas? Don't you see people all around you that do so? Why would the Jews of the past be immune to wishful thinking and the like?
Note that information spread much more difficult in the past, and there especially was much less hard evidence (photo, video, etc) in the first place, and the hard evidence there was could not just be put on the internet in one location, where others could then see on the other side of the world. It's not like today where the media (and often by extension governments) are increasingly upset that their ability to control public perception is much less than in the past. For it to be very dumb to think that shower rooms that look like shower rooms, are not actually shower rooms, one would need more than just a general idea that people were killed, and even more than an idea that gas was used, but to have an understanding of the procedure. Otherwise they could very easily see this as just a precursor to being placed in a concentration camp (where disease risk is very real, of course), not as the actual killing procedure.
Imagine that those gas chambers actually did exist as claimed. Then how do you reckon that people that were being transported in from very far away, would come to know how the procedure was done?
lacks every shred of contemporary documentary and physical evidence that ought to exist if it were true.
So where did all the Jews go from countries that kept very accurate record about their population? And are all of the witnesses who gave testimony about the Holocaust part of a big conspiracy? What is your position even? That there was mass murder, but not with gas? Or do you deny mass killings in general?
a very high confidence in an event that would constitute an outlier among historical outliers
But the Jews are historic outliers! Throughout the ages they have faced persecution like no other race. And historically their culture was not one of fighting back or establishing their own country, but accepting oppression, fleeing, etc. The Nazis took advantage of this by establishing Judenräte and Jewish leaders were all too eager to participate in this, based on the idea that working with the Nazis would cause them to be nicer.
Where most people would figure out after a persecution or two that they might need their own country under their own rule, the Jews clearly didn't think this way for a very long time.
That said, this culture was already in the process of changing at the time, which is why what would later become Israel was already in the making when WW2 started. However, the Jews that moved to Mandatory Palestine would actually remove Jews with a willingness to fight back from the Diaspora, so the remaining Jews would be less prone to fight back, if anything.
Israel does not have racial policies.
This is false, see the Nation-State Bill, as well as the conscription laws. I already referred to both, so you should have been aware.
You completely invented this, out of nothing, and you pretend this is "obvious".
Surely you must be aware that my interpretations of these laws are hardly unique, so claiming that I invented them out of nothing, truly puts you beyond all ability to reason with. If you were to merely argue that one interpretation was wrong, there would be room for debate, but you are simply in full denial if you refuse to admit the obvious truth that my interpretation is a common one that you can even find on the most mainstream of sites like Wikipedia.
No, much more diverse actually. Which you would have known if you knew anything about Israel beyond a bunch of fourth-party packaged woke slogans, but you don't, do you?
I never addressed which country is more diverse and it matters nothing to my argument, or yours. I think that hurling personal insults that make any form of sense works better than what you just did.
They do [have civil marriage]. Ask me how I know? That's how I got married.
Did you get a civil marriage within Israel or did you get married outside of Israel and then got your marriage legalized? Because the latter is the common escape route, but is not an actual civil marriage performed by Israel.
Or did you get a 'couplehood union,' which is not a marriage?
Again, you didn't even try.
I did read up on the law before responding. So you are telling falsehoods based on false assumptions. Why don't you stick to the facts, rather than make stuff up?
Syria is at war with Israel, and repeatedly refused to sign a peace treaty. When you start a war and lose it, that's what happens.
This is false. I know, because I live in a country that 'won' a war and then had to give back the land that was gained. The idea that you can always just take land if you have the ability to do so, is not supported by international law or historic precedent.
Also, the idea that it's justified and no big deal when you go to war just because a peace treaty hasn't been signed is just trying to win a debate on a technicality, but is strongly at odds with reality. Do you think that if North Korea would attack the South, Western nations would shrug their shoulders since the countries are technically still at war?
"Tired" is not as strong an argument as you may think it is.
It is tired when the claim of double standards is never applied consistently or logically.
Israel has been and continues to be attacked by Arabs - from Hamas to Iran to Husites to Hezbollah to others. All those people eventually find out the dear and grave costs of such actions.
And vice versa as well. Again, you are so biased that you fail to apply your arguments to both sides.
If the inequality consists of having less chance to be murdered by other Arabs, then I don't see it as a huge problem, and neither see the Israeli Arabs.
I think that this inequality increases the abuse of Arabs by the IDF, by removing people from the IDF whose innate racism (that we all have to some extent) cannot be as easily be used to justify abuse as non-Arabs.
Nobody "drew them together" to Gaza and they resist all efforts to relocate them anywhere
They are being driven together right now and there are Israeli laws that restrict their ability to migrate to Israel, in cases where Jews would be permitted to immigrate (a racial policy!).
But I guess that what you mean is that they resist effort to ethnically cleanse them.
And their population grows by 2% every year, which is faster than Israeli population (1.5% a year). That's some shitty cleansing.
I never claimed that Israel was (effective at) ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in the past. You keep making stuff up that I never said.
I say they do not exist, what existed in Gaza was completely autonomous self-rule by Gazans
So Gazans had autonomy over the sea exit and could freely get on a boat and travel away, with no interference by Israel, and boats from other nations could freely travel to Gaza with no interference?
And the only thing that was asked from them is to please stop trying to murder us.
Resistance against an oppressor is legitimate. Of course, violence against civilians is not, but you've already demonstrated that you have no concern for that, given that you refuse to condemn Israeli violence against civilians.
And it is a lie that the only thing that was asked of them was not to murder Israelis. What was asked was to accept permanent oppression. Of course you can live in your alternative reality where Palestinians resist because they just want to drink Jewish blood, not because of a desire for freedom, but I think that it is telling that you never argue that Israeli's would accept it peacefully if they would have to live like you think is suitable for the Palestinians. Because of course they wouldn't, as they already demonstrated when they chose terrorism in the early days before the actual founding of Israel, even though they had it far better than the Palestinians already.
Not "all", but 80 to 90 percent. Look up any poll on support of Hamas.
The idea that people who support an organisation are 100% in agreement with the goals of that organisation is the kind of strawmanning that seems out of place here. It is commonly used in politics to accuse supporters of a politician or cause of being guilty or whatever they supposedly support. However, what they supposedly support differs per accuser, which makes it clear that it is just a straw man and not true. It being untrue completely undermines your reasoning.
Secondly, your figures seem to be wrong: https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/997
Ultimately, I don't care much for the current hateful feelings among Palestinians or Israelis, because if you actually want peace, you cannot take these as a given anyway, but have to change them. The only alternative is ethnic cleansing or worse. But it is not realistic to suggest a peace based on Israel's boot forever stomping on the Palestinians face.
Aapje58
20d ago
First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places.
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day.
Yeah, just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid. Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people, establishing a racial hierarchy, where other races were tolerated at best, with far lesser rights. Non-Jews are not treated as first-class citizens in Israel. So the goal was to create a racially pure society where the only equals that white people met would be other whites.
Note that this is not the same as a racially pure country, where only one race is tolerated in the country. Slave-era US states also had the goal of a racially pure society, but were obviously far from a single-race state.
And South Africa did its best to ensure racial purity by intermarriage laws. While Israel doesn't go as far, they do not have civil marriage, and all marriages must happen under religious laws that restrict intermarriage. And religion is of course very strongly linked to race.
It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks.
No, you are torturing the definition of race. Greek citizenship is based on whether the person is legally living there, not their race. Greek nationality law does have a provision to expedite the naturalization of 'ethnic Greeks' according to Wikipedia, but that merely requires the person to have a parent or grandparent that was born a Greek national. So their legal definition of ethnic Greek does not seem to be actually ethnic. It doesn't matter if that parent or grandparent is ethnically Greek, Albanian, Roma, Jewish, etc, as long as they were born a legal Greek citizen.
This is different from Israel, where they will let in Jews who have been in the diaspora for very many generations, but not people who were actually born in the territory of current Israel, but that fled during the 1948 Palestine war.
except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation.
All these 'insane and impossible standards' are only insane and impossible if you consider the goal of a racially defined state that gets to steal land from people to be legitimate. For example, it's basic international law that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes after a conflict, but in the case of Israel this is somehow suddenly completely unreasonable.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking, just like the international community is totally fine with Russia taking territory. Only Israel gets criticized, you see. No one is funding Ukraine so it can defend itself.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim. That way you don't actually have to defend the behavior, which is often indefensible.
Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else
False. Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
But most discrimination happens through laws that are ostensibly neutral, but applied unequally. For example, the law on removing the citizenship for 'acts of terror' is not applied equally to Jewish terrorists. In fact, Israeli soldiers have been known to just let Jews commit terrorist attacks: https://www.btselem.org/node/216862
So if an Arab commits a terror attack, he can lose his citizenship and be kicked out. If a Jew does so, the Israeli military is there to make sure that the terrorist doesn't get hurt. Very considerate.
You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions
So when Hitler was using ghettos to isolate the Jews from support by non-Jews and to make it easy for him to implement his final solution, he was actually accidentally protecting the Jews by putting them into the ghetto?
An interesting take on history to be sure.
In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Anyway, my claim is not that the Israeli leadership has a singular goal. They have more and less radical elements. Some want mere ghettos, some want ethnic cleansing and a few seem to want a genocide. None seem to want a viable Palestinian state (or states).
if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves [...] that's a ghetto, bad thing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto. Setting up a straw man where you, without any evidence, claim that I would call a free Palestinian state a ghetto is not a basis for a debate.
And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. [...] . Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead.
You are treating a diverse group of people as a single hive mind, which is just another form of strawmanning. I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews. I find it extremely unlikely that is the case. But please provide the proof if you have any.
Just the usual billion dollars a year of international aid adds up over time
Not really when the 'grass gets mowed' every so often and everything that is build up is razed to the ground. And then there are all the restrictions that mean that they simply can't use the money to build a solid economy. From my perspective, all that aid just goes into a black hole.
Note that Israel has now been systematically destroying Gaza, so it takes enormous resources just to build back housing, hospitals, schools, etc. So even getting back to a aid-dependent economy with basic needs being met, will requires enormous investments.
I'm not sure how much Israel would contribute
You really think that after just razing most of Gaza to the ground, they will spend a lot of money to rebuild it???
Was my "several hours later" link broken? Ongoing attacks are very good evidence that attacks will be ongoing; that's not a matter of trust or distrust, just inductive reasoning.
It is very obvious that there is a conflict happening where both parties distrust each other immensely and use violence against each other. You keep spending effort to prove this (albeit in a rather biased way), as if it is in doubt and as if scoring brownie points about this matters if the goal is actual peace.
You undermine your own point with your 'inductive reasoning,' because if you limit yourself to extrapolating short term trends then your fantasy that a unilateral surrender is a reasonable thing to demand and would solve the problem is absurd. Because inductive reasoning would not make one conclude that the Palestinians would give up violence, especially when an oppressive regime governs them. And inductive reasoning would not lead one to conclude that Israel would suddenly change course and allow the Palestinians to actually build up a proper economy.
Is there an issue with hyperlinks here? I'm not sure you read mine, and I can't even see yours.
I put two hyperlinks in my previous post, and I can see yours.
This is the sort of thing that requires a source.
That's an unreasonable request when it is a pattern of behavior that goes back a long time. Besides, modern search engines are fully enshittified now, so finding proper evidence has gotten ever harder.
Or is it that you're under the impression that insults are appropriate on TheMotte but sources are not? The opposite is true.
It is a criticism of your beliefs, which is not a personal insult, unless you believe that I may not dismiss your beliefs.
Ultimately, the idea that all Palestinians can suddenly be made to no longer be violent, is absurd. It either requires the belief that the Palestinians are a hive mind, or that Hamas or whomever have a perfect way of controlling the behavior of every person. If your solutions are build on such absurd beliefs, then I cannot take them seriously.
Note that it is just as absurd to think that Israeli settlers and Israeli soldiers can be made to suddenly stop using unjustified violence against Palestinians.
I'd hoped you would find it valuable to learn that you were so wrong about Gazan overpopulation
Sorry for not fisking your entire comment. After all, even if you were right on this point, it still would not actually disprove my claims, that merely require that overpopulation exists, not a specific cause. But you are wrong:
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/g-s1-59633/gaza-buffer-zone-israel-military
And note that I never claimed that this is the only reason for overpopulation.
Aapje58
20d ago
It would have to start the same way Dresden's and Tokyo's and Hiroshima's economic recovery did: by surrendering to the vastly militarily superior opponent.
And then what? Do you believe that Israel would then come in with a Marshall Plan, like the US did after WW 2? The big issue for decades has been that Israel does not trust the Palestinians to build up an economy and not use those resources to attack Israel. Israel's policy has always been to attack innocent Palestinians and destroy their property, when even relatively minor attacks happened. That is not how you get peace, but rather, how you get a forever war, where each new generation learns that there is no hope of a good life by doing the regular things to achieve that (getting an education and investing in companies).
The childish fantasy that each and every Palestinian would magically and suddenly stop believing in violence as a solution is not a way out of the conflict. It is as realistic as thinking that Israeli settlers would suddenly stop using violence against Palestinians, which Israel also has never been able to stop (but refuses to admit to that, because then it would expose their hypocrisy). So a total surrender, whatever that even means in the chaos that is Gaza, where central control surely doesn't exist anymore, will just lead to new forms of oppression of the Palestinians, that will inevitably cause people to rebel against that oppression with violence.
Fact is that the PA has been collaborating with Israel for a very long time, and Israel had (and still has) a perfect opportunity to gradually reduce restrictions on the West Bank, to actually give Palestinians a way out, by showing that there is an opportunity to build up a prosperous Palestinian state. However, instead, Israel is treating the PA like the Judenrat where the PA is supposed to keep the Palestinians compliant, while their land is getting taken from them, and they are being kept in a closed off ghetto with no prospect of building up anything.
The fact that Israel even threats Palestinian Israeli's as second-class citizens and that Israel is explicitly society that is only supposed to serve one race shows that there is inherently no desire to allow Palestinians to co-exist on an equal level. If you see Israel for what it is, a society that aims to be racially pure, then it is absolutely no surprise that the only solutions that it is willing to accept are permanent ghetto's, ethnic cleansing and solutions of that kind, and not a reasonable solution for the Palestinians (whether that is their own state, equal rights within Israel, or whatever).
Aapje58
21d ago
Toilet wine is not agriculture. It's a mere conversion of one food stuff to another, and doesn't produce nutrients. Toilet wine is made from food given to the prisoners by the guards, so it's a very poor argument in the context of food self-sufficiency of Gaza.
Keep in mind that Gaza is a desert region, so farming there is not easy. Especially since Gaza lies at the sea, so you have salt-water intrusion into the ground water. And the various disruptive behaviors of the Israeli settlers and government goes back for decades, which makes it a lot harder to farm. The area is also heavily overpopulated, in part due to the Israeli policy of taking ever more land from the Palestinians. The population density of Gaza is slightly smaller than of Hong Kong, so it is effectively a city state. It is not reasonable to expect much agriculture with that level of population density.
Gaza seems to have been a total economic basketcase going back decades.
Do you really think that it is reasonable to expect anything else given the conditions during those decades? For example, Israel never allowed Gaza to build a harbor so they could trade with other nations. If you were in charge in Gaza, how would you create a healthy economy?
Aapje58
23d ago
Not so much anymore since the mass destruction of buildings and orchards, and the intentional destruction of water sources.
Your comment is as ridiculous as wondering why a prisoner who is locked in a cell requires food being brought in, and can't just grow his own food, when any attempt to create a mini-farm, would be destroyed by the guards.
Where do you get that claim from, that the narrative says that they communicated through mind reading?
It's pretty obvious that orders can be given in person, with no records being kept.
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