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The Palestinians have every right to fight back when their land is being stolen. Do you not think Ukraine has killed people in its counter offensive?
They lost the war, vae victis. If they want to keep fighting, Israel has every reason to keep killing them.
A lot of these people were born after the war. Punishing them for the sins of their ancestors feels wrong. I wish there was an Arab country willing to take them in. Then I would feel comfortable letting the ones who refuse to leave suffer in poverty.
What punishment? Their ancestors lost the land, now they don't get said land; they had no independent claim to it. If they want to take the land their ancestors lost, Israel has every reason to keep killing them.
You make a good point.
The issue isn't simply that they don't have access to other land. As I understand, the issue is that the only land they have access to isn't actually governed by them, and they're limited in what they're allowed to do. Like, they can't receive packages without going through a long waiting period as it's inspected by the Israeli officials.
I don't know how much of their poor standard of living is due to not having statehood and how much is due to just them being bad at building a society. I'm not even arguing for any specific policy. I just mean that I feel sorry for them, and I have a moral impulse to help them, which I acknowledge.
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Ukraine had eminently good game-theoretic reasons to resist, because if countries only claimed to be willing to resist with force invasions by (maybe) superior powers, and then gave up the moment the odds were stacked against them, then they wouldn't last as countries very long, not even the Pax Americana can save them all.
Once you're past that, then it's time to consider alternatives, especially when continued resistance is nigh suicidal.
For what it's worth, I'm 50:50 on whether it's worth it for Ukraine to keep fighting with a maximal war goal, instead of accepting the annexation of its eastern fringes in a white peace.
As for Hamas, buddy just give up already, before you're dead, preferably.
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Do Algonquin natives have a right to shoot up Americans and Canadians for colonialism?
That's what the French and Indian war was. If there had been continued resistance, terrorism, and guerrilla fighting by the Native Tribes after the 19th century. Which year would it have gone from righteous to not righteous? 1935? 1970? 2001?
It becomes terrorism after the treaty is signed ending the war. If descendants of the Natives want to call those treaties unfair and demand reparations, I think they have a right to peacefully protest for it, and situationally I might even support their cause. They don’t have a right to commit violence.
Similarly, Arabs don’t have a right to start armed conflicts, and they’re in the wrong when they do so.
"Arabs don't have a right to start armed conflicts" seems like quite the broad claim. Could you explain your reasoning? Did Saudi Arabia not have a right to provide aid and intelligence to fight against ISIS?
As for the treaties, that bypasses a perceived issue of state vs non-state status. Lots of the people in question aren't meaningfully bound by a treaty, because they're from a different tribe, because their tribe wasn't organized enough to sign one, etc. Is a miqmaq obligated by a treaty signed by cherokee and anishinaabe? Presumably not, based on our understanding of how these work.
To be clear, no one has the right to start armed conflicts. ISIS started the fight, Saudi Arabia is justified in fighting an aggressor.
That's a fair point, and I would have to do a fair amount more thinking to come to what I would consider a fair belief about when natives are allowed to use violence to fight back vs not. But in any case, I don't think there's any reasonable justification where Palestinians can shoot up music festivals. At the very least, Palestininian leadership should make some clear demands from Israel and only start shooting after Israel says no, instead of just rejecting every Israeli deal as not good enough without making counter offers.
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Yes, and in the example of the settlement of the Americas, almost all of “Western civilization”, even as authors sometimes romanticized native life, was on the general side of the colonizers and settlers. The point is that when it’s your family being raped, murdered and/or scalped, the noble savage of the plains rhetoric dies quickly. Israel is in the same place. The Palestinians have a ‘right’ to defend themselves, but exercising that right will only tighten the noose.
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What does it mean for land to be stolen in this context? We don't have any agreed upon system for deciding what country owns any given land in Israel or Palestine.
The Israeli settlers that have been demolishing churches and mosques in the past months while beating locals, stealing the cattle and raising their houses are clearly stealing land. The people who are defending the place they grew up clearly have a right to fight back.
This is the first I'm hearing about this. Where is that happening?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/4/israeli-settlers-storm-al-aqsa-mosque-complex-on-fifth-day-of-sukkot
The fight started a few days ago with a storming of one of Islams main holy sites.
The fact that the Al Aqsa mosque is even still standing is an extraordinary testament to Israeli tolerance. In the inverse situation, the Arabs certainly wouldn’t have left a rebuilt temple standing.
Not completely genoicding them and slowly pushing them out is apparently tolerance...
Everything's relative. If you can't do better than both sides here, the question is: which one do you like more? I know which one I like more.
I like the one that wants arabs to stay in their homeland. I don't like the one that pushes migrants into Europe while demolishing churches. Israel has stood against the interests of Europe in every conflict destablizing Syria to flood Europe with migrants, fighting to create weak arab states (aka more migrants). I can't see why I would prefer anti Christian Israel to the many Christian Palestinians who want to live in their village.
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The Ukranians have the right to fight back, not because their land was once stolen, but because their land was very recently stolen. The further back in time you go, the less your right to push back becomes, if Finland today attacked Russia to try and recover Karelia (this happened around the same time as the creation of Israel) people's sympathies for them would be nowhere near the level they have for Ukraine, and rightfully so.
Indeed, even in western countries like the UK, there are laws on Presciptive Easement where if someone uses a piece of land openly for some use for 20 years they do not own, eventually the government recognizes their claim on the land and hands it to them if the original owner tries to complain, and there are good reasons why such laws exist.
In Israel's case the land theft happened so far back and they have done so much to transform it that what exists now is nothing like what existed in 1950 (on the Israeli side at least), so they have a claim to keep it. And no, I don't expect "if you steal land you will be given 75 years (a lifetime) of hell, after which you'll be allowed to keep the land" to be much less of a deterrent/cause more moral hazard than "if you steal land you'll be given perpetual hell" in stopping people from stealing land.
Putting a statute of limitations on revanchism is a good idea, but not one very compatible with the establishment of the State of Israel in the first place.
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how does that work with Azerbaijan fighting for the land which independent country of Azerbaijan never controlled prior to 2023/2020?
Armenia put up a pretty big fight back in 2020, but then saw they were going to lose and their cause was a no hoper and bowed out with minimal losses. They absolutely have the right to try and fight and also the right to try and convince the rest of the world to support them, but recognized a lost cause when they saw one (unlike the Palestinians) after they were unable to muster up large amounts of international aid unlike Ukraine. I would be a lot less dismissive of an Armenian counteroffensive say around 2030 if they can put it together than I am of Hamas's usual shenanigans.
Armenia correctly made the decision to reset, recuperate and perhaps try again later, which is something the Palestinians would be wise to do too (and the strength difference between Israel/Palestine is like an order of magnitude bigger than the strength difference between Azerbaijan/Armenia, which should give the Palestinians extra cause to pause and reconsider, but we all know that likely won't happen).
Just because something is morally right doesn't mean it is logically right and vice versa. It's important to consider both of them when deciding your actions, and Hamas attacking Israel is so so logically wrong you need a mountain of "morally right" on your side for it to be a good thing in sum, and they don't have that.
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Both sides ethnically cleansed each other on that land decades ago (and before that, too), and Armenia is a major ally of the US’ second largest geopolitical foe. Armenia is in many ways closer to Hamas (and not just for ethnat reasons) in that they fucked around and found out, even though (unlike Zionists) Karabakh Armenians could likely have lived a perfectly fine existence under Azeri rule if they hadn’t agitated from the 80s onward.
given long story of mutual pogroms it seems unlikely
The return to violence towards the end of the USSR was because of Armenian agitation. You can try counterfactuals and they’re not invalid, but I’m unsure that ethnic cleansing was in any way inevitable on the Azeri side if the Armenians had played ball.
Yes, I know - Armenia invaded and run round of expulsions after USSR has fallen. Maybe thing would be idyllic otherwise but it seems unlikely to me.
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So they have a right to fight back against recent settlements.
Also, Gaza is under an illegal blockade, which they have every right to fight back against. Israel is a legitimate military target. They kill Palestinians, they have many Palestinians in torture camps. Israel continuous to destroy their farmland, steal their cattle, harass Palestinians and Palestinians are regularly killed by Israel.
So the jewish claim that Israel is their land is completely bogus after 2000 years?
Given what they do with what they manage to get: I am not surprised that it is under blockade, legal or otherwise (note that any effective blockade needs support also from Egypt)
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Sure, the attacks yesterday were by and large not done against recently settled land in the West bank, it was on land Israel has settled for many decades now.
Sure, but Israeli civilians are not a legitimate military target, and what we saw yesterday was by and large indiscriminatory killing. It wasn't even "we wanted to kill enemy combatants and these civilians were collateral damage" like Israel says to justify its civilian killing, it was straight up "lets kill party goers because they are there", that's at least a few degrees worse.
Yes, absolutely, that still does not give you the right to wantonly go out with the intent to kill civilians, desecrate their bodies and then parade them around. There are things worse than death, and Hamas put them on display yesterday.
I freely admit Israel doesn't care about Palestinian civilians and accepts their deaths a collateral damage, valuing their lives at near 0, but what Hamas did yesterday goes a few steps beyond that, what they did actively put a negative value on Israeli civilian lives.
Interesting parallel to be drawn there with the idea that Ukraine should be more free to attack Russia proper instead of battering themselves against the prepared lines in the Donbass area -- Hamas clearly considers themselves at war with Israel proper, and I guess are acting accordingly. (apparently committing some war crimes in the process, which I expect will come back to haunt them -- but in terms of the armoured vehicles and such they've been attacking I don't think they can be faulted for not being strictly selective about where those are located.
Ukraine ‘could’ attack Russia proper (and obviously has in a very limited way), but it’s a fair restriction with donated munitions and the strategic value of an attack on Russia given asymmetric factors, nukes etc is questionable.
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could you please use 'internationally recognized territory of Russia' instead.
Wat? Why?
"Russia proper" is ambiguous, it could also mean one wants to "decolonize" Russia, splitting it and "Russia proper" being the largest chunk (by population)
I think my meaning was quite clear.
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