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Why do you exclude South Africa-style reintegration? Eventually someone is going to realize that grotesque jihadi violence is counterproductive and that they would get way more stuff if they kept the Jews around to milk welfare out of.
They were getting welfare out of the international community via things like UNRWA regardless. I'm sure money will continue to roll in.
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Because everyone can look at South Africa to see just how well that goes.
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Scott once noticed that the best place in the middle east to be an Arab outside the oil rich states is Israel. Smart Palestinians should be arguing to the world that the just punishment for Israel's actions is that they must annex all of Gaza and the West Bank, make everyone living there full citizens of Israel and provide them with the same access to resources as they do to any other Israeli citizen right now.
Plus full democratic voting rights and there's a big enough bloc to enforce shit over a decent tenure.
Even Hamas would be able to likely keep operating as a guerilla movement and any attempts to oppress the Palestinian Arab population as a result of Hamas agitation would be looked at even more disfavorably than the status quo.
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Are you not aware that this has been the leftist demand the whole time? The problem is obvious. If Israel annexes the whole of mandate Palestine then the Jews will be a minority and swiftly have the mechanism of state turned on them. At best they would be Dhimmi in a shariah state subject to the abuses that have led to there being basically no jews anywhere else in the islamic world and with a reasonably high chance of being subject to massive pogroms that would make the holocaust seem loving by comparison.
I feel like pointing out that the major historical abuse that lead to the jews leaving the arab world was actually the creation of Israel. Even wikipedia makes it clear that there were plenty of jews living in the Arab world up until the creation of Israel, and the descendants of those populations are largely referred to as Mizrahim today. Some of the other "abuses", like the 1950s Baghdad bombings, were almost certainly committed by Israelis in order to encourage Iraqi jews to emigrate to Israel to boot.
They lived in those areas as a persecuted minorities under, ironically given the current accusations, appartide conditions. Subjected to additional taxes, exclusion from official positions, lesser status under the law and the occasional pogrom. There are some few contested incidents like the 1950s Baghdad bombings but many many more straightforward incidents like the Egyptian denationalization and mass asset seizures of jews across the region. The idea that the push factors compelling jews to move to Israel from the middle east were largely fabricated is ahistorical. Certainly Israel wanted to entice jews to move there and sure up their numbers but the woes of the jews across the region were very real.
I in no way meant to imply that life as a minority was a land of milk and honey for the jews in the arab world - but when they have spent over a thousand years suffering those abuses and managed to maintain their own cultural and ethnic identity during that time, you're being a bit misleading when you say that those abuses are why there aren't any jews left in the rest of the region.
It was those abuses plus finally having a place to go that emptied out the rest of the middle east. My point was to explain why Israelis would be unwilling to make themselves a minority in a single Palestinian state.
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If a domestic abuse victim moves out because they finally found a safe place to stay instead, it feels weird to say "well, they didn't leave because of the abuse".
I don't think that metaphor really applies. The last time I read about Jewish life in Islam-controlled nations it was about the Golden Age of the Jews, which took place in Islamic Spain (the abuse actually happened afterwards when the Catholics came and massacred them). I'm sure it wasn't all peachy all the time, but it can't have been that bad when they consider a portion of the time spent under Islamic rule a golden age.
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Right. So, rather the Americans should be telling Israelis to move to some corner of Montana and have at it. Because what's happening is not tenable by modern ethical standards, either lording it over a population in that way or having a state charter built on the lord.
Freddie de Boer has this as his preferred solution, but the 'well the Israelis should all become Americans' is a nice logical solution that's completely useless. It's just as unlikely as the right wing version of this ('give all the Palestinians Jordanian/Egyptian citizenship') - a solution you come up with when you realize that neither the Israelis nor Palestinians are going to give up anytime soon, but that you're ethically sensitive enough to still want a solution. But even if President Woke threatened Israel at gunpoint to concede to a maximalist version of the 2SS, we're just going to end up where we are now after the next attack from State-Palestine, whether or not the recognized government attacks, allows an attack, or is too weak to stop one. There's no point in any of this so long as a significant proportion of Palestinian society is willing to beat their own brains out on the border wall.
second best option: extract America from this eternal nonsense as much as possible.
Actually that's the first best option
Well that's fine, but I don't see how you end up anywhere but the exact situation as today, less some Israeli military hardware. Fine, so our hands are clean. If Israel can't fight without our support, they end up in 2rafa's 3rd resolution, which will collapse immediately on the next attack; if they can, maybe they just accept being a pariah and just go to war as they need to for their security, cut a deal with China or what have you. Doesn't seem likely to produce an ethical improvement outside of American feelings.
"outside American feelings."
As an American, that matters most. As much as extracting yourself from a brawl that will go on brawling with or without you. At least your hands are clean.
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If the Palestinians can give up on the pipe dream of driving the jews into the sea then a two or three state solution where both peoples prosper is totally possible. It's essentially the direction Trump's plan pushes things. What you're asking for is a near equivalent to demands all non-native americans leave turtle island and go back to the countries of their ethnic origin, justice by some tortured ethic but simply not going to happen and the sooner the fantasy is dispensed with the sooner real solutions can be tried.
I'm sorry, the Israelis are not going to lay down and let themselves all be killed or expelled from what they believe to be their homeland. If your plan is for them to do that then you need to come up with another plan.
There is no realistic two state solution that does not involve ethnic cleansing of Arabs and Jews both. The remaining areas allotted and allowed to Palestinians are so marginal and split up by settlers that there is no contiguous state possible without expelling large numbers of Jews. Otherwise a Palestinian state is unworkable and unviable, certainly not prosperous.
A one state solution is the only non-genocidal solution on offer. Recognize Palestine all they want, the West will lack the stomach to murder the Jewish settlers who drive wedges through any possible Palestine.
A one state solution is plainly genocidal, once you count up numbers and birthrates.
My impression was that the pure Jewish birth rate was actually stronger than the Israeli Arab birthrate these days, though then you zoom in closer and it gets into different categories of Jew, though then there's an intra Jewish genocide question, idk it all gets pretty complicated and I'm not sure what we're talking about at a certain point.
But there's no viable contiguous Palestinian state that can be drawn without evicting large numbers of Jews, who show no evidence of wanting to go peacefully. The resources and transit aren't there. You can make a retarded botched abortion of a statelet, but I'm not sure that will really solve the problem anymore.
So you're left with somebody getting kicked out of the place they live.
Doesn't matter, though, incorporate the Gazans and West Bank Palestinians and the equation shifts to their side completely.
I'm fairly sure the intended solution rhymes with "ass raves".
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The term for this when it's done as a deal and mutually agreed upon is population transfers and has been done successfully in the past in other contexts. Realistically there would be a Gaza and separate west bank state. The west bank would ideally just have jewish citizens if they don't want to transfer back to Israel although in practice I expect most of them to.
Where has it been done successfully and without significant atrocities performed?
People mostly point to Europe, while ignoring the significant violent ethnic cleansing operations against Germans et al post WWII, and the whole context of WWII preceding it, and the EU framework that followed. India-Pakistan certainly wasn't peacefully, and still not entirely successfully. So, where?
The partition of Czechoslovakia?
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For about as central an example as there could be Israel already executed a population transfer of their settlements in gaza, in your formulation would you refer to that as an ethnic cleansing? Perhaps but it does seem like this is a weaponization of the term to slime non-central examples with greater atrocities. Other exchanges include the Greco-Bulgarian, Greco-Turkish and Cyprus exchanges.
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Sure and that's reasonable. But the situation in the West Bank is also completely unique and completely untenable long term. If Israel could agree on some sort of border it would work better. But they want the land and not the people and most of the West Bank is essentially fully integrated into Israel ignoring the blobs of Palestinian towns throughout. If Israel drew a line and declared one part Palestine and one part Israel I think they'd get reasonable far many countries have disputed borders. But the West Bank is a millstone around their neck because they want the land but not the people and the occupation prevents them from being a normal country.
I agree that an enduring peace would require abandoning the settlements outside of the ones on the current 67 borders. But I will also point out that what you demand was on offer in 47 and rather than accept them the surrounding Arabs went to war with Israel and lost. It's kind of rich to attempt decades of war to deny an offered border, lose repeatedly, and then demand the original offer anyways. The Palestinians themselves have made no such offer and give every indication of denying one if it was offered without an "unlimited right of return" or a "just settlement of the right of return" which has never been defined and acts as a poison pill that sounds OK to the west but could easily expand to mean enough refugees are shipped into Israel proper to effectively make Israel a Muslim majority.
Setting aside the question of whether it was a smart decision to reject the partition plan, it's easy to see why they didn't view it as legitimate. Imagine if Mexican immigrants petitioned the UN to split the American Southwest into a new Hispanic state because they (illegally) immigrated there in sufficient numbers.
This is more similar to the hazy borders of Texas before it was inducted as a state in the US than Mexico trying to pull this on already established US territory. In fact the parallels are myriad and early mexico really did get screwed out of their territory after losing a war, remember the Alamo, to the American settlers. Imagine if now centuries later Mexico continued to dispute the territory and launched regular unguided rocket attacks at San Antonio. The mandate Palestine area was not a state before the fall of the Ottoman empire and had no real borders. After the fall the territory was rightfully British clay and the mandate policy gave the immigrant Jews a right to attempt to establish a state there. Was there lots of shenanigans coming from both of the budding nations? Absolutely, there were among the early Texans as well. Really the more I think of it Texas really is a pretty good analogy for Israeli history before around like 1960.
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That's why the West Bank is such a millstone though. They won it in war but now they need to either integrate it or give it up. Keeping it in limbo is the source of all their problems. If Israel could actually enunciate their borders they wouldn't need to negotiate or accept anything from the Palestinians at all. The haven't needed Syria to agree to them having the Golan Heights for example. Maintaining this quasi sovereignty indefinitely is the source of essentially all their problems both internal and external.
And now yes because of Hamas handing over anything is tricky. But they had decades where they could have handed whatever rump state they wanted to the PLO. And they wouldn't have needed their agreement anymore than they need Syria's for the Golan。
I agree it's a millstone but it's far from the source of all their problems which seem more centrally to be located in the surrounding population which has a persistent belief that if they just keep fighting eventually they will drive the Jews to the sea and have the whole of the region as a Palestinian state and is thus unwilling to continence any kind of long term peace that forecloses on that possibility.
If they enunciated some border, say a modest expansion over the green line to encompass the majority of the settlements clustered along that line then what are their policing positions in the west bank? The fear is that pulling out without a Palestinian partner would lead to a repeat of their pull out form gaza and that the west bank would immediately become a staging ground for attacks on Israel which would eventually trigger an invasion and we'd be back to square one.
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Handing over the territory without a deal might have ended up like Gaza (which is criticized even by pro-Pals as a way to freeze the peace process*). Worse maybe.
So we have to go back to why a deal didn't happen.
* Pretty damning when you think about it tbh.
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In the long term, is that distinct from (2)? IIRC South Africa has had long-term white emigration that at some point starts to look like the "suitcase" option there, or sometimes worse. There was even that drama earlier this year when the current US administration looked to consider it as ethnic-cleansing-adjacent.
White South Africans are still there, the boers are probably above replacement, the shrinking of the white population is mostly due to very high black population growth. And nobody really wants the whites to leave, either- they lay the golden egg for the ANC to then steal.
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I'm just glancing at numbers, but it looks like white emigration from South Africa is about 2% per year, as opposed to around 40% per year for the pieds-noirs during 2 years of "suitcase or the coffin". South African white emigration has been slow enough that fertility has kept their population pretty steady over the past few decades in spite of it.
Thanks for looking at the numbers. I guess I was extrapolating from Zimbabwe, which actually did see like 90% of the white population emigrate. Although the most recent stats I've seen actually show growth within the last couple years.
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Because that someone will just get killed and replaced with someone else who values killing Jews over everything else.
Actually that person, Marwhan Bargouti, is currently in an Israeli prison being repeatedly tortured. The Palestinians keep trying to get him released and think that he'd be the best possible leader (he convincingly clears every poll for preferred leader), which is presumably why the Israelis are trying to make sure he will never get out.
A brief googling indicates that he is clearly a terrorist and he is popular because of that plus the martyr status of being imprisoned.
If he was released and was a five in Gaza he's quickly be on a pike.
Damn that's funny, I did the same and it told me the exact opposite - a brief google, where you are given a curated selection of results designed to cater to your biases, is less than useless in the modern day when it comes to truth-finding. Why don't you do an actual investigation into the circumstances around his arrest and base your opinion on something substantial? Look, even if you do the research and still think he's a terrorist, discussions on these topics are better when you actually do the research and can make an informed contribution.
I mean, its an easy heuristic to read Wikipedia and realize that it represents the most far left case that can be plausibly levied under their rules.
Even so I was alone during 2nd intifada, it was a terrorist campaign supported by all the relevant Palestinian parties in government, so that necessarily includes him and Arafat. If you have a lexis media account you can probably make a better assessment using only transcripts from the trial and contemporaneous media accounts, although even then they were generally Palestinian -leaning, as we see with Arafat winning man of the year
No? I am a far leftist and this really isn't the case. Wikipedia is generally pro establishment, and that lines up with the left in some ways and not at all in others.
My condolences?
If you're going to claim that lets you call him a terrorist, you're going to have to admit that the entire Israeli government consists of terrorists as well. If you're willing to make that claim, fair enough, but otherwise it doesn't really mean anything at all - not that "terrorist" is a particularly meaningful political designation these days anyway.
*Alive
And Israeli leadership does not coordinate direct attacks on civilians. There was enough direct evidence to tie this particular fellow to 5 deaths directly.
If you are me, you think he is a terrorist because he and his minions are consistently too cowardly to wear uniforms.
Others might call his operations war activities. Sure, wear uniforms or you are just committing war crimes, again, with intentionality imputed to leadership.
If you think international law is a fiction, then he's just a loser who lost.
For a given value of leadership, sure. But Israeli leadership is such a vague term I don't think this is really worth litigating. SOMEONE gave the order to deploy those bombs shaped like toys in Lebanon, but whether they qualified as "Israeli Leadership" is a mystery to me.
In a courtcase that outside observers said was clearly biased. I don't think Trump is guilty of raping Jean Carrol even though a heavily politicised courtroom implied the opposite, and I apply a similar level of scrutiny here.
I'm sure the people who shot up Hind Rajab's car were wearing a uniform, but that doesn't really make my sympathise with them at all.
Are you aware of the context that this discussion is taking place in? Do you think that calling Marwhan a loser who lost is in any way a convincing refutation of the point being made? Yes, the person that wants peaceful co-existence rather than armed struggle is rotting in an Israeli prison in order to make sure there's no peaceful resolution. How is that in any way worth mocking? Was Gandhi a loser who lost when he was arrested for advocating peaceful resistance to the British?
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So they do have a Nelson Mandela?
Yes, Marwhan Bargouti has been referred to as the Palestinian Mandela for quite some time. The Israelis refuse to release him from prison and repeatedly torture him in order to make sure there's no peaceful resolution to the conflict beyond the extermination of the Palestinians (to the best of my understanding - maybe there's an alternative and more charitable explanation, but if there is I haven't found it).
You're just never going to drop the "Israel is committing genocide" thing, are you?
If the prosecutions go ahead and it is determined that the entire thing has been a misinformation campaign or other convincing evidence arises that it was all fake I'll absolutely drop it. But I've seen the videos and comments posted by IDF soldiers, and I've actually read some translated Israeli media - it'll take a vast amount of convincing evidence to make me change my mind, but if you've got it then please lay it on the table. I'd honestly love to be proven wrong and learn that the Hind Rajab and Mohamaed Bhar stories were just a bad dream, or that all those translated comments by Smotrich and Ben Gvir were lies - but I really don't think you actually have the evidence required.
The fact that individual civilians were killed in a conflict does not prove that said conflict was a genocide. Even the fact that individual soldiers committed war crimes during a conflict doesn't prove that said conflict was a genocide. Pro-Palestine activists think they're helping their case by claiming that every civilian death is evidence of genocidal intent on Israel's part. But because civilian deaths are a feature of every war (especially wars in densely populated urban centres; especially especially wars in densely populated urban centres in which belligerents deliberately hide among the civilian populace), all you're doing is collapsing the distinction between "genocide" and "urban conflict" by carelessly conflating the two. Twenty years ago, the word "racist" was a potent one indeed and people would react to the accusation with indignation: after a generation of woke people abusing it to refer to any behaviour they don't like (no matter how innocuous), there are now plenty of people who react to the word "racist" as if you'd called them a meany doo-doo head. Do you really think it's a sensible idea to do the same thing to the word "genocide"? Because that's the way it's headed. Do you want more genocide? Because that's how you get more genocide.
But all that's almost beside the point. I don't think you looked at the facts on the ground of the current conflict and dispassionately concluded that Israel is conducting a genocide. I strongly suspect that if I'd asked you the same question on October 6th 2023, I would've got much the same answer. You're citing examples of Israel killing civilians in the current conflict, not because they support your argument, but simply because of the availability heuristic. Israel was being accused of "genocide" from the morning of October 8th, 2023, before the war had even begun in earnest; a bunch of Hollywood celebrities signed an open letter condemning Israel's military action in Gaza as genocide in 2014; I'm sure I can go back to the 2000s, the 1990s, even further and see the same accusation lobbed against them time and time again. (The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on the topic bluntly states that Israel has faced this accusation without reprieve literally from the day of its founding.) You explicitly compared Israel to the Nazis and demanded the state be "denazified", but the difference is that the Holocaust actually saw a meaningful (and steep) decline in the global Jewish populace. Strange, isn't it, how the Israelis have been accused of genociding the Palestinians for the better part of a century, and yet the Palestinian population only ever increases over time? It's the Shepard tone of genocides — which is to say, not a genocide at all. How many genocides can you name in which the genocidaires came to a dead stop as soon as the people they were genociding agreed to release hostages?
You apparently expect me to simultaneously believe that the vastly technologically superior, limitlessly bloodthirsty and nuke-equipped Israel isn't pulling its punches and is in fact doing everything in its power to exterminate every last Palestinian from the face of the earth — and yet are somehow so incompetent that they've failed to wipe out a technologically inferior opponent who almost entirely reside right on its doorstep? I'm sorry, but I cannot believe both of these things. It is beyond me.
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