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I assume you are jewish.
If you missed it there are strict rules of warfare that have been a part of western civilization for a long time. Catholicism has a view of war that is completely incompatible with the jewish view of war. Might is right with ethnic cleansing has not been applied in Europe.
The French on Haiti didn't want their land back. The Boer didn't want to live in a Bantu state. The occupation isn't long term sustainable and will fall apart. Palestinians have effectively ensured Israel is in a permanent state of crisis with an unsolvable public relations crisis.
This is the definition of an ad hominem. Even if he were Jewish, "Your opinion is invalid because Jew" isn't acceptable.
You've been warned and banned repeatedly because of your antagonistic obsession with Jews. As we are obligated to repeat over and over, you can hate whomever you want, but your posting needs to follow the rules.
Banned for two days, but next time you are looking at a longer term ban.
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Citation very much needed.
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I am not Jewish, and my argument would remain the same whether or not I was or wasn't.
I am Chinese.
The Chinese pushed out the Westerners and the Japanese not through impassioned appeals to international law or anti-colonial agitation, but through the barrel of a gun.
Similarly, the Chinese have taken the territories of Tibet and Turkestan for her own against the wishes of the people who live there, with the barrels of guns. If you have enough of them, any occupation is tenable.
I see no reason why the Israelis can't do the same.
There are 250 Chinese for each Tibetan, there are more Palestinians than jews. Also there aren't large Tibetan nations surrounding China.
China didn't defeat its occupants in a big battle, they made occupying China unfeasible in the long run. That is what the Palestinians are doing.
And the Palestinians are, for the most part, impoverished uneducated lumpenproles who live off foreign aid and jihadist payments. Arab armies are jokes and failures. Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran have been bombed to oblivion. Who is going to come to the Palestinian's aid now? Turkey?
The Israelis don't want to leave Israel. They don't want to leave it so much that they basically stole themselves nukes so that they'd never be coerced to do so. If the Palestinians are competing on who can make the other's situation shittier faster, then they'll lose that competition. If Israel has to choose between becoming an illiberal pariah state like North Korea or its nonexistence it will go for the former every time.
If it gets so desperate as to reach that point, why wouldn't they just murder every Palestinian and dare the international community to do anything about it?
Why are you so certain that their willpower to remain will give up before the Palestinians will?
Just chiming in to say that I have a very similar opinion as you and it disturbs me a little how similar our opinions are.
Israel is always contentious topic, but repeatedly whenever antisemitism-du-jour or unpopularity of how Israel-US relations are among the western world is brought up my reaction is always "obviously?"
What Israel is, is an ethnostate with religious and political mandate to entrench itself in a land surrounded by their religious enemies, full of people that have been historically persecuted on an industrial scale (the exact scale is apparently a hot topic of debate in some circles), and have managed to secure themselves power, a modern military, and alliance with a hyperpower.
What did people think was going to happen if their civilians got shot up and kidnapped?
You look at the countries surrounding Israel and they're generally not very well run. How much of this is down to Mossad/US efforts is up for debate, also, but Arab governance today just generally isn't great. The Chinese attitude is pragmatic; it comes into the mind of the Chinese that if they were in a modal Arab nation that wanted to wipe out Israel for realsies, they would conduct themselves in a very different way after one or two costly failures.
What Israel has done is demonstrate power and capability and networks. They've burned a lot of political credibility to do it, and I'm not sure how popular Bibi is within Israel these days.
The greater problem with the conflict is that everyone looks bad; Arab leaders are caught in a weird catch-22 as always where they need to placate the more card-carrying Muslim extremists within their tribes to maintain political power but are also aware that the further down that path they tread the less likelihood of them being able to function as a country. I believe American hate for Israel is just an ingrained pathology of supporting the underdog, and anger at the use of American resources to support a country they don't really care that much about and personally see no benefit from supporting. The American argument for strong allies in the ME has deteriorated with the tidal wave of oil fracking, and even enforcement of the petrodollar has imploded with oil being now traded in other currencies.
And there's also no way of extricating Israel from this conflict or de-escalating relatively peacefully in a way that either side can accept. Maybe Bibi is aware that America's sufferance for Israeli dalliances will end; America will be happy to keep selling them weapons and infosharing with Mossad, but politically the younger generation getting into politics and the increased irrelevance of traditional American media structures may spell a lapse in Jewish influence on American populism. They'll be fighting over the ME forever, even if America ends up having nothing to do with it.
Hollywood was one of the key structures of Jewish soft power and one of America's most widely exported methods of cultural agitprop; I don't know if anyone's noticed but they're not doing too hot recently. Silicon Valley is American, yes, but a larger and larger share of corporate tech CEOs are looking quite non-Jewish recently.
If the Chinese were in the position of the Arabs they'd form an Arab United Front in 1948 (which, to the credit, the Arabs did try, but the coalition was nowhere near as large as it could have been) and prevented the creation of an Israeli state from the outset. When presented with the horrible atrocities and butcher's bill, they'd say 'send in the next wave'. They wouldn't stop until the Americans and Soviets threatened to intervene and they'd draw up on the armistice lines and actually make peace.
The Japanese did way, way, way worse to the Chinese than the Arabs did to the Israelis, and yet in the modern day they do business with them.
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This isn't actually a choice. Becoming an "illiberal pariah state" is not a long-term stable situation - you can't run a first world economy with Israel's geography while completely cut off from all international trade and support. Take away all the direct and indirect support provided by America, as well as the support provided by diaspora jews (part of becoming a pariah state means that remittances and other sources of funding/support will go away too), and you're looking at a country with a very limited lifespan.
One of the targets of Iran's strikes against Israel was the diamond exchange - the diamond exchange is one of Israel's most profitable trades, despite the fact that they don't actually have any diamond mines in the country. How long is that going to last when Israel is cut off from international trade flows? How long is their tech sector going to last when all foreign investment is pulled? Israel does not have the population demographics or material resources required to sustain themselves when completely cut off from the rest of the world (to say nothing of what their internal politics will look like when the orthodox are forced to work and join the army). Don't forget that the majority of Israelis have the ability to simply fuck off back to their actual home country - and when faced with a choice between grinding poverty in a pariah state and living a first world lifestyle back in the west I think a portion of them will simply leave.
Pariah Israel would simply be a last, desperate grasp before the entire project is swept away into the dustbin of history, and if there's any hope for survival for Israel it means not ending up as a universally despised and hated ethnostate.
Your assumptions are simply incorrect.
Sure, many would leave. But there is a sincere core of Zionists who believe that Israel was promised to them by their God and they will stay there to the bitter end. They will eat rocks and dust and do what they must before they let the Palestinians win. A impoverished state with nuclear weapons and arms - not that it would ever get that desperate - will never fall. The Arab leadership very well know where those warheads are aimed at.
The fantasy of the Israeli state dissolving itself after sufficient isolation is simply that. The onus is on YOU to convince me that it is the case. Just stating it as a matter of fact does not make it so. It is the Palestinian project that looks like it is on the verge of collapse, at this very moment. With no geopolitical sponsor, how could it hope to continue on in any relevant form?
And is that enough to maintain Israel as it is currently constituted? Does it include the Orthodox population of useless eaters/religious scholars? Being willing to fight on to the bitter end just means that the end will be bitter, not that it never comes.
Did South Africa have nuclear weapons? I'm sure the leadership of all the black nations around them knew where those warheads were aimed at. How effectively did they prevent the fall of South Africa's apartheid regime? I'm confident they'll be just as effective at protecting the Israeli apartheid regime as they were in the past.
Fantasy? No, it is simply the most likely course of action based on historical trends. Pariah ethnostates that become liabilities for their imperial sponsors tend not to have particularly long lifespans, historically. Modern states with modern militaries are dependent upon a vast web of interconnected supply chains that simply cannot be replaced with domestic production. Where will Pariah Israel acquire the petroleum that their military needs to run? Where will Pariah Israel get the advanced electronics and armaments required to maintain their qualitative edge? Where will Pariah Israel get the vast amounts of funding that they use to support and maintain their society (someone has to pay for all those orthodox scholars)?
The reason I believe Israel would fall after becoming a pariah state is that there are several huge inflows of capital and materiel from abroad that are currently required to maintain the country in the face of tremendous opposition, and there's no viable domestic replacement for them in the hypothetical future of a Pariah Israel.
I think I can roughly guess your political leanings and positions on this matter: and rather than go into detail into hypotheticals that I don't care to argue, I'd just say that eighty years of failure and defeat, with Israel consistently prevailing over great numbers and further entrenching itself does not make me believe it will inevitably fall. In fact, it is the opposite.
You want to wishcast the fate of European African regimes onto Israel. Understandable. But you do not admit the possibility that the natives are simply destroyed. That they are exiled forever from their homelands with no recourse or restitution. That the arc of history does not turn towards justice, but in fact, the opposite. What makes you believe that the Palestinians will remain relevant in a decade, much less a century, for these historical trends to play out? For that is the null hypothesis, for so many destroyed peoples denied homeland and evicted by the militarily superior.
If the Jews lose Israel and Jerusalem, who is to say that the Palestinians will have it? They, who have proven to have no talent for military or diplomacy or government?
I reject your narrative of history. I predict that the Palestinian people will come to the same end as the Rohingya and the Uyghers, the Kurds and literally every Amerindian - nations without states. Crushed. Obliterated. And only university students will care. And I assert this with the same confidence and lack of evidence as you give me.
I've openly stated my political leanings on the motte in several places - but if you can guess, please do so because I've been called both left and right depending on the day and it'd be nice for someone to be able to correctly identify where I sit on the spectrum.
So if you saw an elite athlete who had been performing excellently for several decades start to falter, would you claim that his fourty years of active athleticism is a compelling argument against the idea that he would grow old and frail? After all, he had 40 years of strength and prevailing over great opposition - why would a few gray hairs and injuries be a sign that he was failing?
Wishcast? I'm not sure what you mean by that. What I'm actually doing is comparing the trajectory of nations in similar situations throughout history - and there's actually quite a lot of examples. The Crusader Kingdom of Outremer is an even more apt comparison, complete with the useless scholars that require a lot of material support.
No? My actual assumption was that the wiping out of the Palestinians would be what was responsible for Israel becoming a pariah state. Committing genocide (and there's no way you can spin 'the natives are simply destroyed' as non-genocidal) would absolutely be enough to mark Israel as a pariah state and get them cut off from the rest of the world.
But more fundamentally to my point... it doesn't matter if the Palestinians are there or not - Israel is unable to support itself over the long term without extensive inflows of capital and materiel from the external world, and when those flows are shut off the resource limits available to them will exacerbate internal stresses and conflicts.
You're not alone - the first lesson of history, after all, is that nobody learns anything from history. But more importantly, what you're tossing out and ignoring from my post are the hard resource limits that international ostracization would place upon Israel. There are serious material concerns which would place hard limits on the ability of Israel to maintain their military effectiveness in the face of a global boycott and abandonment.
Do you know how much food Israel imports? Do you know what kind of other agricultural-based technology they import in order to farm their particular environment? Do you know how much energy they import, or how much of their tech sector is dependent upon foreign investment? How does Israel maintain their military edge when completely cut off from the supply chains required to make their technology work? These are all incredibly serious questions relating to the future of Israel which you have just completely ignored, seemingly because you do not think that there are any lessons to be learned from history.
It is admittedly very hard to provide evidence for exactly how a society breaks down in a hypothetical future world - but honestly, I think you actually have a bit more confidence than me. I'm calling back to history and comparable events in order to buttress my arguments, while you're simply asserting that history has nothing to teach because the Israelis would be much better at genocide than other people, which involves flying much further out from any available evidence than I would on here.
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