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Notes -
Anti-'Israel-expanding-beyond-the-Green-Line' or anti-'Israel-existing-at-all'?
If those favouring a two-state solution were to tell those advocating an Arab-Palestine-from-the-river-to-the-sea, like the gay rights movement told the pedophiles, "You can't sit with us!", I would regard them with more sympathy.
I am referring to both the Golan Heights and the continued expansion of the Yellow line. As for me personally I favour a single-state solution with full democracy, along with some denazification efforts/war-crime prosecutions.
But either way, there's zero credibility in condemnations of wars of aggression for lebensraum that mysteriously pass over Israel, because that makes it clear that it isn't wars of aggression that you're objecting to but some secret other motive. "Wars of aggression are fine for me but not for thee" is not a particularly compelling message that will convince anyone to support your cause.
Both of which are outside of pre-1967 Israeli territory; the Green Line being the border of such with the West Bank and Gaza. Admittedly this doesn't address the Golan Heights; I apologise if I was less than clear.
As such a state would likely soon have an Arab population greater than its Jewish population, and as many of the Palestinian Arabs object to Jews existing as equals, I would judge a 'one-state solution' as being approximately as prudent as siting Doreen's Nursery next to Ed's Dingo Farm.
Of Hamas, right? (Padme, her face concerned!)
Do you know of any organisations condemning Israeli actions in Gaza/the West Bank/the Golan Heights who also explicitly reject Palestinian claims on pre-1967 Israeli territory? Such an organisation would have more credibility than one that equivocates whether, when they refer to 'occupied Palestine', they mean to include Tel Aviv, and has discovered no degree of anti-Semitism sufficient to draw a reaction of "You can't sit with us!".
It's not secret; I believe everyone is entitled to my opinion. I would prefer that no clay be taken by force of arms; however, if that option is unavailable, and one side or the other must gain from the conflict, I would prefer that the side gaining territory be the side that was minding its own damn business.
If Alicestan is invaded by Bobesia,
Borders return to status quo ante > Alicestan takes land from Bobesia >>> Bobesia takes land from Alicestan.
Yes, and Israel acquired that territory via force of arms. If Israel can do it, why not Russia? If Israel can do it, why can't China do the same to Taiwan?
Of course! But you'd also have to launch mass prosecutions for anyone in the Israeli government who supported the illegal settlements or the military action in Gaza. You'd also have to take every single Israeli who supported the ethnic cleansing of Gaza or otherwise held racist views towards the Palestinians and put them through some re-education, but if there's real accountability and progress I'm confident you could have peace between the two populations.
I don't care about pre-1967 Israeli territory - why do you think that the perpetrators of the Deir Yassin massacre should be rewarded? I was under the impression that you're opposed to taking territory through violence!
But we have a chance to simply undo the entire problem! A single state solution definitively repudiates the idea that claiming territory via force of arms is acceptable. Anything else sends the message that it is perfectly fine, and leaves you unable to condemn anything Russia, China or even North Korea decides it wants to do.
Because after the World Wars, we realised that industrial warfare was increasingly destructive and needed to be stopped. Undoing all previous land seizures would involve untangling a colossal rats'-nest of claims and counter-claims, many of which left few if any records; thus we drew a line in the sand at 1945: going forward, no nation would be allowed to take land from another by force of arms.
This left the question of European colonies, one of which was the British territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The United Nations passed a resolution dividing the territory into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an internationalised Jerusalem. The Jews were willing to accept this proposal; the Arabs rejected it, started a war intended to drive the Jews into the sea, and failed. (Had the Arabs accepted the proposal, there would be a Palestinian state consisting of the Gaza Strip extended northward along the coast to Ashdod and southward along the Egyptian border halfway to the Gulf of Aqaba, an expanded West Bank surrounding Jerusalem and connecting to Gaza at a quadripoint, an area on the northern coast and Lebanese border extending to Acre and Nazareth and connecting to the West Bank at a quadripoint, and an exclave at Jaffa. They would also have a slight majority of the land area north of the 31st parallel, south of which is the Negev desert.)
So your proposal would involve both sides receiving remedial 'things they should have learned in kindergarten' lessons? You are at least more reasonable than the Ideology Which Refuses To Be Named....
Because they didn't start the war.
If someone gains territory in a war that they started, that incentivises further aggression. If someone loses territory in a war that they started, however....
Unfortunately, it also leaves the Jewish people, with their long history of persecutions and expulsions, a minority in every state in the world, and thus making their survival (at least in the age of modern passport and immigration controls) dependent on whether the Nations are feeling generous that day; the example of the MS St Louis makes that a non-starter.
If other countries were to open their borders, a one-state solution might become feasible.
This is actually where I think the line should be drawn as well - which is one of the reasons why I reject the 1947 borders.
Yes, absolutely. I'm not sure what your dark intimations about some mysterious ideology are - this is the Motte, we can speak freely here!
The Deir Yassin massacre was noteworthy in large part because the village in question had signed a non-aggression pact with the zionist forces (Israel didn't exist yet so they can't really be called Israelis) - and they were ethnically cleansed, paraded about, raped and murdered so that the zionists could take their land via aggression.
Then you actually incentivise coming up with a pretext to further legitimise these conflicts or otherwise obscure the identity of who started them, which is a precedent wide open for abuse. Who started the war in Ukraine? Who started the US occupation of Afghanistan? Moreover, who started the current conflict in Gaza that Israel is using to claim territory? Where, exactly, do you draw the line? These are questions complicated enough that there is no real way to answer them consistently in a manner that actually disincentivises war for territory.
I mean, seeing how they treat the Palestinians I'm not terribly surprised that they have this long history of persecution and expulsion. But there is actually an answer to this - they should be moved to America, a country which seemingly absolutely loves them and without whose support the existence of modern day Israel would not be possible.
We would also have to reject the independence of India and most of Africa. Thus some concessions are made regarding the outlying non-self-governing territories of the European states.
I'm referring to the ideology commonly referred to its opponents as 'wokeness', or formerly as 'SJW', which believes, inter alia, that the Palestinians are Sacred Indigenous People Who By Definition Can Do No Wrong, and that the Israelis are Evil Colonisers To Whom Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened And Who Deserve Everything Bad That Happens To Them. (This ideology tends to reject, as described by Mr de Boer, any name applied to them.)
Your acknowledgement that the Palestinians as much as the Israelis need to learn to co-exist with people who aren't them would be quite rare in many universities.
I do not condone the killing of non-combatants, even if they are on the same side that started it. However, the Arab forces were not innocent in that regard.
Which is why, as a general principle, the best settlement is a return to status quo ante. Exceptions are made when that would leave someone without any territory.
Vladimir Putin, with the little green men in 2014 and the full-scale invasion in 2022, in the morning, at exactly 5 a. m.
The Taliban, by harbouring al-Qaida, and continuing to do so after the attacks of 11th September 2001.
The 'Islamic Resistance Movement' a. k. a. 'Hamas', 'Palestinian Islamic Jihad', and various other Palestinian groups, on 22nd Tishrei 5784 (7th October 2023).
But is that certain to remain the case? If it changes, and the Jews are no longer safe in America, where will they go then? What about those with less-than-immaculate pasts, or those who are likely to be unable to support themselves?
That is why the existence of a Jewish-majority state is seen as non-negotiable by so many. The events of the 1930s and 1940s made reliance on the good will of the Nations an extremely un-appealing proposition. (More information on this aspect can be found in the writings of Scott Aaronson.
I don't think that those situations are really comparable. An existing nation changing their head of state doesn't seem to me like it would set a precedent applicable here.
I am explicitly against wokeness and social justice politics - I think they were a bad move on the part of the left and made it less effective. My personal conspiracy theory is that it was imposed by bad actors to defang the OWS protests, but I have no evidence for it and it is explicitly just wishful thinking that I hope is true rather than any actually justified belief.
Not in my experience. A lot of people realise that there is a portion of the Israeli population who genuinely have nowhere else to go, despite the vast portions of the Israeli population that can just go back to Poland or France or whatever. Once you throw in real, muscular denazification efforts (i.e. prosecutions for anyone connected to war crimes, like whoever gave the order to bulldoze piles of civilian bodies to that soldier who killed himself) and efforts to achieve justice, I'm sure the Palestinians would welcome the remainder.
The village itself had actually made a peace deal - who cares what the "arab forces" had done in this specific context? By supporting the claiming of territory via acts like that massacre, you are actually condoning the killing of non-combatants. By supporting Israel's current genocidal efforts, you are supporting and condoning the killing of non-combatants like Hind Rajab or Mohammed Bhar.
I disagree - if you ignore the role that NATO expansion and the treatment of Russian-speakers after the Maidan you're not really painting an accurate picture of what happened. But that argument has been litigated elsewhere if you really want to get into it.
Incorrect - Israel had been bombing, blowing up and illegally settling Palestinian territory for quite some time beforehand.
"Less than immaculate pasts" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I honestly don't care that Ghislaine Maxwell or her compatriots aren't going to have a homeland of their own - prison or the bottom of the sea seems like a perfectly fine place for those like her with "non-immaculate pasts".
Then what a shame that this is what they have decided to do with their state - the existence of a German-majority state is seen as non-negotiable by a lot of Germans, but that doesn't mean Nazi Germany should have been allowed to mass-murder Jewish civilians. Maybe after Israel is wiped from the map they can try again somewhere else, and avoid practicing apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
"An existing nation changing their head of state" leaves the territory of that nation unchanged. The events to which I am referring involve land which was the territory of the United Kingdom/France/Portugal/&c. becoming not the territory of those nations.
The land between the Jordan and Mediterranean was, in 1945, British territory under a League of Nations mandate. The United Kingdom and the United Nations, along with the Jewish organisations, agreed to a plan for the disposition of that territory. At that point, the Palestinian Arabs had a legal claim to Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron. They did not have a legitimate claim to Tel Aviv or Haifa; those were British territory in the process of being transferred to Israel.
And I appreciate that you are more reasonable than them. That is what I was trying to convey; I apologise if I was unclear.
I doubt they would; there are many Palestinians who want the Jews either dead or living as second-class citizens, and are willing to pursue that by violence, and few who are willing to stop them. Furthermore, even assuming for the sake of argument that the Palestinian population were willing to extend Palestinian citizenship to some, or even most, formerly Israeli Jews, said population, as well as those living in HaGaluth, would be perpetually living with the implication that, if their gentile neighbours were to acquire a specimen of Apis mellifera in their haberdashery, their survival would be dependent on convincing the gentile majority in some other country that they 'deserve' to live more than said majority deserves not to be inconvenienced.
That argument could also support the claim that, by supporting the (Arabs') claiming of territory (the blue areas on this map) via acts like the Kfar Etzion massacre, one is also condoning the killing of non-combatants.
I do not condone every action of the State of Israel, merely its continued existence; nor do I oppose accountability for the individuals responsible for wrongdoing, merely the collective punishment of Israelis who did not participate. (Yes, I am aware that some Israeli actions could be classified under that heading; that does not mean that all Israelis are responsible. If a teacher holds an entire class back from recess because one student misbehaved, that does not justify suspending every teacher in the school.)
The NATO expansion doesn't signify; the decision of the Czech Republic/Poland/the Baltic states/&c. to pursue NATO membership was
none of Russia's business, and
being motivated by concern that Russia would be unwilling to accept its neighbours' unwillingness to jump when Russia said 'frog', turned out to be quite prescient.
I interpreted 'the current conflict in Gaza' in the narrower sense of the most recent campaign; the broader conflict was started by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967.
I'm not referring to Ghislaine Maxwell, I'm referring to someone with a thirty-year-old conviction for DUI, or a fist-fight, or shoplifting, or something of similar magnitude, often cited as a reason to refuse even very temporary entry by governments. I do not condone these things, but does a person who drinks and drives, or pilfers from a store, or punches someone he doesn't like, thus deserve to spend the rest of his life under the Sword of Damocles?
Also, what about the other category in that question?
And it is reasonable to want the people responsible held accountable. It is not reasonable to want a future Anne Frank held responsible, multiplied by six million.
And if Germans had been subjected to what Jews have been subjected to over the past two millennia, that might be, if not on the same plane, at least in the same airport.
In 1925, Jews were less than one percent of the population of Germany. Israel has more than twenty percent Arab citizens.
Germany wasn't 'wiped from the map' even after doing far worse than even the most extreme accusations of Israeli conduct.
Where? Where else should a Jewish-majority state be established, and what will become of the people currently living there? (If you can solve this, and establish such a state beforehand, I suspect you would get far more support for a single bi-national state in the former cis-Jordanian Mandate.)
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