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Based on the steady torrent of Israel-Palestine threads, the general impression I get is that a majority of people here is quite solidly pro-Israel in this conflict. I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better; in particular, I wonder if there are arguments for the Israeli position in the current war that don't mostly rest on one of the following:
An arbitrary cutoff of historical reckoning either shortly before the most recent Hamas attack, or else somewhere in the early '90s following the general Western mode of thinking about other geopolitical conflicts. Unilaterally declaring all scores settled is not a persuasive or universalizable moral principle.
Invocation of inherent superior qualities of Israeli Jews relative to Palestinians, be it intelligence, education or general "civilizedness". You would almost certainly either need to cut out a very contrived set of conditions to make the principle only apply to this case, or accept some hypothetical corollary you probably don't want that involves similar abuse being heaped on morally/intellectually/civilizationally inferior people that you care about or feel kinship to.
The way I see it, the moral case for Palestine is pretty clear, and unlike some seem to assume does not require you to subscribe to a lot of oppressed-are-always-right slave morality (though you do need to stop short of maximally might-makes-right master morality). The present ruling population of Israel mostly moved to that territory in the late '40s, and from the start has continued violently expelling the ancestors of present Palestinians from their homes to acquire their land for themselves. I do not think that Palestinians' stupidity or backwardness or whatever are so great that they can't be afforded what we otherwise consider basic human rights to property and safety, even if the people who want to take those from them for themselves were all literal Von Neumanns.
I don't think that this original wrong has been made right to the Palestinians, and the argument that some Palestinians submitted and got to live better lives under the Israelis than they would have had in an independent Palestine does not morally convince me either. If Bill Gates steals the plots some rednecks built their houses on, builds a mansion in its place and then offers them lavish jobs as domestic servants, do the ones who don't accept forfeit their right to complain about the theft? Another counterargument seems to rest on something like statute of limitations (like, the Palestinians and Israelis alive nowadays are not the ones who got robbed and their robbers), which would be more persuasive if Israeli settlements were not still expanding, and there weren't still Palestinians who are quite directly being made to suffer at the hands of the Israeli men with guns for no other reason than that they do not accept the "become Bill Gates's domestic servant" deal. It seems pretty clear to me that there is no recourse left to the Palestinians who do not want to to take this deal that preserves their human dignity - their conquerors certainly won't hear them out themselves, and they are backed by the US machine which not only could produce a personal cruise missile for every Palestinian if it put its mind to it but also has enough intellectual and propaganda firepower that they could make even the Palestinians doubt that they are themselves humans with rights.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself, including ineffectual and vile acts of revenge such as murdering the women and children of those who wronged you. To claim otherwise, to me, seems to amount to claiming that you can be absolved for arbitrary wrongs if you just amass enough power to make effective resistance impossible, and I don't like that even before we start taking into the account that the targets of Hamas terror were intended and more often than not happy beneficiaries of the original wrongs committed. (If you have been driven out of your house and into a corner at gunpoint by the mafia, the mafia boss's kid stands by watching the show and mocking you, and, seeing an opening, you shoot the kid, I will find it hard to fault you for the murder even though the kid is technically innocent of the misfortunes that befell you and this did absolutely nothing to help your situation. As a bonus, the corrupt police (my country) is then called in to arrest you, after sharing a smoke with the mafiosi.)
Though I said that the moral case for Palestine is clear, this is emphatically not to say that I rule out the possibility of a clear moral case for Israel existing at the same time. "They're both justified to continue murdering each other" is a sad reality of a lot of tribal conflict. However, in this particular case, I actually do not even see that case, or at least what I have seen seems much weaker to me, given that Israelis still have the option to leave Israel at any time as a large part of the world would welcome them with open arms (while the anti-Palestinians like reiterating that not even other Muslim countries want to take in the Palestinians, as if that helps their case), and even though in some sense they would also then be "driven from their homes" it's not like they are usually unaware of those homes' provenance.
edit: Thanks for everyone's responses, there were certainly a lot of interesting points to think about there. I'm too overwhelmed with the volume to respond to everyone, though to the extent there were some overlaps between the points I would be grateful if you could check my answers to sibling posts.
I don't take super strong sides on the conflict. It seems to have been a game of tit for tat that the Palestinians have always kept playing despite being very bad at it.
This is not a reasonable summary of events. I'll give a slightly more broken down version from my understanding, if I got something wrong let me know and I'll probably update it:
I'm left thinking there isn't a clear "good team" here, the Palestinians did get screwed over but usually in ways where they were at least somewhat to blame. Israel's settlements in the west bank are really ridiculous and should probably be dismantled. It's true that Israel isn't giving Palestinians full autonomy in their region but this is understandable given than Palestinians are nearly constantly lobbing rockets at Israel. Israel seemed, at least before Oct 7th, to be willing to go down a de-escalatory path but the Palestinians Seem totally unwilling to walk that path instead harboring the delusion that they're going to some day expel all the Jews and take all the land.
Given this I will say I do mostly side with the Israelis. They're more western and seem to at least attempt to minimize their atrocities in a way that I don't expect the Palestinians to do. A war where Palestinians were wearing the shoes of the Israelis would be an actual Genocide.
This largely tracks with my understanding of the history of the region (plus a few new details), except:
My understanding was that the Arabs largely left voluntarily upon request by the surrounding Arab nations, who expected to wreak total destruction on those pesky so-called Israelis (in their opinion), and didn't want them to be in the crossfire. Possibly there was some small-scale local hostility and encouragement, but not anything that could be called a proper expulsion.
the willing flight narrative has been thoroughly taken apart by israel's "new historians". here's a thorough review of the historiography: https://www.zochrot.org/publication_articles/view/51011/en?Were_they_expelled
some other examples:
israel's secret campaign of poisoning arab wells, countenanced by david ben gurion
deir yassin massacre
benny morris, who certainly is no bleeding heart leftist: "In truth, however, the Jews committed far more atrocities than the Arabs and killed far more civilians and PoWs in deliberate acts of brutality in the course of 1948, and noted that only 6 out of 392 towns and villages that he examined were abandoned due to Arab orders
Israeli new historians, like all intellectual dissidents, use intellectual solidarity with the far enemy (Arabs in this case) as weapons to attack the proximate enemy (the established intellectual/political order of the current moment). Without mass annihilation of dissident intellectuals like what all communist and most fascist regime's did, these new waves ALWAYS cherry pick their data to support their arguments, because destroying the near enemy matters more. Note that Morris himself has recanted from his earlier 'Arabs have always been peaceful victims of my ancestors violence' following the second intifada: perhaps once the far enemy makes its intentions more clear it becomes unwise to continue advancing their cause.
I find it especially disingenuous to presume innocence in Arab intentions. Jewish cruelty has to transformed out of the fog of war, but Arab genocidal intentions are always downplayed. Azzam Pasha gleefully called for the genocide of Israel at 1948, and intellectuals sympathetic to palestine have to morph this somehow into Azzam being a pro peace champion of Palestinians, ignoring that the Arabs started the war and were busy trying establish success to divide up the spoils.
Israel is certainly no virtuous lamb innocent of sin, but the endless attempts to castigate Israel by ascribing unlimited moral virtue to explicitly genocidal Arabs is loathsome even to casual normies. For members of this board who have a few more brain cells than average (108 iq gang rise up!) the Palestinian cause is the meme of the bike guy tripping himself over.
benny morris changed his political views and said "transfer/expulsion is good actually", but he is still willing to call it such.
Why would I listen to him more than to British or American or Australian ‘anticolonialist’ historians who are also fundamentally ideologically motivated to hate civilization.
morris's view is basically the same as yours - Both sides did awful things, which is what happens in wars. The Arabs were the losing side and my view is that if people commit major mistakes in history they pay for them and perhaps that’s how it should work out. The Palestinians should have agreed to a two-state solution.
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Generally speaking once a historian/academic/intellectual exposes themselves a reflexive contrarian their opinions can be dismissed on first order principles for being intellectually disingenuous. After a certain point you will always see the same few names pop up as an appeal to intellectual authority, as if their name alone is enough to carry the weight of an argument. Chomsky is the top of my mind for this cadre of notables, but journalists such as Herman and Pilger are thrown about by tankies too. Once these names pop up uncritically as justification for a pet cause, they can be ignored.
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Benny and his fellow travelers are postmodernists that sought to subvert how reality itself is understood by spuriously dismissing countervailing evidence as 'biased' and spinning motivations out of fairy farts. That Benny adjusted his position after his pet palestinians turned out to be the violent assholes they always said they were is merely an inconvenient blip on his quest to tear down the oppressive political/academic climate preventing them from ascending to their natural state as intellectual gods to be feted by proles.
i don't know what postmodernism has to do with this. it seems entirely possible to determine what in fact happened in 1948, whether arabs left because arab leadership told them to leave, or because they were afraid of being massacred, or because they were forcefully expelled by jewish soldiers, or for any other reason. motivations are more nebulous but you can look into official idf documents (plan D) and what leaders such as ben gurion wrote.
Ideologically motivated historians have unearthed Azzam Pashas genocidal statements, Khaled Azm (president of Syria in 1949) said that the Arabs themselves exhorted the Palestinians to leave first, the Jordanian papers blamed Arab generals for making such declarations... all this evidence is dismissed by postmodernists because it is 'manipulated', with only Plan D (why D instead of earlier plans) being proof of the evil of Israel. I think it is far more likely that people panicked and left of their own volition in the face of an advancing enemy, like what is happening to Ukrainians and Masalit, than it is a deliberate strategy crafted by the adversary. A coincidental benefit, but hardly any more deliberate in intent compared to the more pressing objective of killing armed combatants.
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