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No one is forcing Israel to occupy and encroach on land in the West Bank. If they don’t want to add the residents to their nation, then they can just stop occupying and dispossessing them.
I believe in the past you have claimed to be Irish. I might be misremembering. One way to gauge your moral intuition on this conflict is to imagine a scenario where the British decided to occupy Ireland tomorrow, dispossess them, ban them from traveling throughout the UK, steal their homes, and then fund chavs to settle in Irish towns, chavs who routinely harass them. Occasionally chavs will burn down an Irish home or kill random Irish civilians. The British in the UK press call anyone who opposes this a Anglophobic Brit-hater.
Or another scenario to imagine: “what if Iran took control of Israel?” You can imagine Persians confining 3 million Israelis to an occupied zone where they are periodically brutalized and dehumanized. How would you reply to this? Do you think the international Jewish community would accept this as “just part and parcel of living in a civilized world” or something?
It’s very easy to call things that challenge us “hatred”. It’s harder to put ourselves in the
shoessouls of the oppressed. If it were so easy to practice compassion for our enemies then we wouldn’t need a whole religion to compel humans to do it. As an Irishman I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.So, first of all, I am not Irish. I have some Irish ancestry. I also have English, Scandinavian, German, Jewish, and (according to a DNA test) North African ancestry. As I've said before, I am Jewish enough for the Nazis to have classified me as such in that thing that you say totally didn't happen but was good, but I am not Jewish enough to actually care about Jewish religion or culture or Israel per se. Sorry if that makes it harder to pin me down on my ethnic biases.
Now, the rest of your argument was entirely beside the point because you don't care about the West Bank any more than you care about Gaza. You care about Jews. That is the beginning and the end of it, that is your entire logos on the matter. Your sympathy for Palestinians is an affectation. If a portal to hell opened up and demons invaded Israel, you'd write verbose apologetics for the infernal cause. Absent Jews, obviously you'd be as anti-demon as you are anti-Muslim, but Jews therefore...
I do not believe Iranians or Palestinians are demons, of course. I actually have sympathy for Palestinians and the impossible position they are in, largely because of their leadership (but, it must be pointed out, because of what most of the Palestinian population believes). But to take your straws in order:
The West Bank settlers are awful, I think Israel should put an end to their activities, and other countries should rightfully pressure Israel to do this. That said, even under what passes for "international law," that land basically belongs to whoever can hold it, and "neighboring country encroaches on unincorporated territory and boots out the locals" is a tale as old as time. It's always miserable and tragic, but again, you don't care about the whom, only the who. If Israel did completely pull out of the West Bank and leave the Palestinians there alone, you'd still want Israel to get pushed into the sea by the rest of the Arabs and you'd argue about Gaza and Jordan and Egypt's grievances instead.
The history of Palestine is long and tragic, but it's not directly analogous to England and Ireland, except in the sense that they are inextricably mixed. Israel and Palestine have been mixed since ancient times, and I am no more impressed by Jews' Biblical claims to the land (I don't give a fuck if your holy book says you're rightfully entitled to this land because your ancestors lived here 2000 years ago) than I am by revisionist Palestinian claims that historical Israel never existed and that Palestinians have always had a national identity (they have not) or that Jews haven't been there for centuries.
But again, the historical comparisons are beside the point because I don't believe your "moral intuition" is based on sympathy for Palestinians. it is based on hatred of Jews. Not because this "challenges" us or because you are deeply concerned about the oppressed (in every other context you display nothing but disdain for oppression and social justice narratives). Yes, it's entirely proper to identify your argument as Jew-hatred. If it was anyone but Jews curb-stomping the Palestinians (like, say, the rest of the Arab world, as they have done repeatedly), yes, you'd shrug and say that's what that part of the world is like.
I must have confused the details of a conversation re: Ireland.
This is an ad hominem attack, and a confused one. It’s not clear what you intend by Jewish. Are you counting Neturei Karta? The Samaritans and Karaites? Ezra Koenig? Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal? If you mean “a system of beliefs and behavioral demands”, then there is nothing wrong with liking or disliking it based on its merits. I imagine you strongly dislike Salafism and Khameneism, or there is some ideology which you hate out of an impartial consideration. Do you mean the system of codified rulings considered normative among Rabbinical Judaism as practiced today? I think you got upset when I made a post a while back which specifically analyzed the moral code as taught among Orthodox Judaism.
This is not how the international community has ruled when they have come together at the UN. It seems you’re suggesting that international law is illegitimate. That’s unfortunate. Do you believe moral law is illegitimate? Why shouldn’t the international community come together to enjoin a minimum of rights and obligations?
How so?
When you’re living around everyone with a similar identity, there is no reason to distinguish (say) “Palestinian” from those living in the border regions of Lebanon. The Irish did not have a national identity until the 1800s.
Yes, the Sephardic Jews lived peacefully in Palestine for a long time. They were 2.5% of Palestine in 1800! Surely this doesn’t mean they deserve to inherit the whole thing though, right?
There's nothing confusing about it. Unlike you, I am not confused about your past statements. You attack Jews regularly. You have made it very clear that you do not like Jews. You do not like the Jewish religion and you do not like the Jewish people. You criticize Israel in an unprincipled manner, by which I mean you criticize Israel in a way that only applies to Israel (unlike leftist critics who criticize Israel because they have a general oppressed/oppressor model, or sometimes a general antipathy for all things Western, with which they associate Israel), because it is by proxy attacking Jews. I'm not going to pretend we're talking about the finer points of rabbinical Judaism or Samaritans or Karaites. Nor am I "upset" about this, any more than I was "upset" about your specious analysis of Orthodox Judaism.
I am calling it out, however, because it's annoying. (I suppose in that sense, "annoyed" is kind of like being "upset"). I am not going to argue about the history because as much as I find the history of the region quite interesting and endlessly convoluted (having read a number of books by Israeli histories, of both the Zionist and New Historian school, by Palestinian historians, largely of the Edward Said school, and by Western historians both from a pro- and anti-Israel perspective), I know when I engage with you, I am not engaging with someone interested in history, in justice, or in discerning truth and nuance, I'm engaging with someone whose core motivation is animus towards Jews, and thus everything you write on the subject is an argument-as-soldier. I can't change your mind, and you're allowed to hate Jews. But I'm not indulging the pretense that this is a discussion about international law or concern for Palestinians.
“You are hateful and motivated by hate” is the same old anti-Western argument that has been weaponized against Americans for 60 years now. It’s a stale, tired, and debunked anti-Christian canard. It’s been used by Marxists, Soviets, the racially-aggrieved, you name it. In recent years it has been rehashed by the pro-Israel mouthpieces who whisper in Trump’s ear. It is a laser-guided munition aimed directly at the Western Christian soul and its beautiful guilt-prone culture. And we are over it. No one buys it anymore. The guilt-tripwire has been illuminated and darkness will not overpower the Light.
As there is evidently nothing useful I can say to someone insistent on reading everything through the lens of pure hatred, I will only point you to the words of someone more Jewish than you, who has more experience in Israel. Feel free to call him an antisemite. This is from Moshe Ya'alon, the Minister of Defense in the 33rd and 34th Governments of Israel, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs in the 32nd Government, and the 17th Chief of the General Staff of the IDF:
There is no correlation between what I said and what you said. Nothing I said has anything to do with hatred of America, hatred of the West, or hatred of Christians.
Jewish supremacists exist and there is plenty to criticize Israel about.
Nonetheless, I repeat and assert my point: you do not care about Palestinians. You are not motivated by humanitarian concerns for Palestinians. You are not motivated by concerns that Israel's government is not as moral and democratic as it should be. You are motivated by hatred of Jews, which you express in many threads, even threads having nothing to do with Israel or Palestinians. This you have not and will not deny, you will only keep attempting to divert the issue with counter-accusations, such as trying to find some identity politic label to affix onto me that you think will be rhetorically effective. But prove me wrong and state unambiguously that you are not an anti-Semite and you do not hate Jews. I will state unambiguously that you are wrong and I do not hate America, the West, or Christians.
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