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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
This topic perhaps more than others is impossible to find good analysis of. Could some of you help me understand the arguments around something?
I routinely see people call Gaza "an open air prison". But...isnt' Egypt participating in this open air imprisonment? Egypt has a border with Gaza. If the Israelis are imprisoning the Gazans, then aren't the Egyptians doing the same thing?
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
edit: I think my question was unclear here. I understand the obvious answers which are basically: Hamas/Gaza are terrorists. Of course Egypt doesn't want them. What I'm asking for is for somebody to steelman the liberal position that Gaza is an "open air prison" and that this is Israel's fault.
But...isnt' Egypt participating in this open air imprisonment?
Yes. And so what? Do you honestly think the Egyptians would still be blockading Gaza if not for Israel and its willful influence? Like what's your mental model of a hypothetical world where there is no Israel but still a Gaza like situation and Egypt. How and why do you figure the Egyptians would still try to blockade Gaza of their own independent will?
What you really seem to be doing here is trying desperately to downplay or remove Israeli agency and moral ownership of their own sippenhaft blockade. Because obviously it's kind of bad propaganda and morally difficult if you're unblinkingly honest about it. Israel isn't really doing what it's doing, others are too! Yes they are doing what they set out to do.
Let us consider the case of the Mavi Marmara aka the "Freedom Flotilla." (Side note: if you don't know what this is and have free time to kill I would advise to skim watch the raw video I provided or find a similar undoctored and uncut version of the original on the ground live broadcast. Come to your own conclusion before you read about it and get a narrative fed to you. You might run into moments where you will say "hey that's not so nice of those brownie muslamics" but they will be your own honest opinions. That's very precious.) One of the OG media blackpilling moments, for me. In it a flotilla of boats checked before hand for any weapons like guns tried to run through the blockade on Gaza to symbolically provide random supplies like children's books. The IDF intercepted with violent force and shot/executed 9 demonstrators. For the crime of independently exchanging goods freely among actors the Israeli state used lethal violent force. All well 13 years before current events.
Who forced Israel to do this? No one. It's a very obvious demonstration of a serious will to blockade and economically starve Gazans. Israel means to do what it is doing. Gaza is an open air blockaded prison because Israel and Israel alone is working hard and killing to make it that way.
If the Israelis are imprisoning the Gazans, then aren't the Egyptians doing the same thing?
Are the Egyptians the occupying power of Gaza? No, they're not. It's not their problem, Gaza are foreigners. If they were administrating military vs civilian laws in Gaza, overseeing policing and so on of Gaza, bombing power plants, then it would be their problem and their responsibility.
You're not in prison if your neighbour says 'trespassers will be shot'. You're in prison if the people in control of your land, Israel, use military occupation and various heavy-handed tactics such as a sea, air and land blockade, which they do. The Egyptians also have policies against trade with Gaza but they don't control its borders or territory!
And? We all acknowledge that Israel is blockading Gaza (with Egypt's cooperation). You can argue that constitutes an "occupation" if you like, but you were talking about administering laws and overseeing policing. Israel is not doing that in Gaza.
OK, administering laws is a bit of a whitewash, my error. If the Israelis don't like someone in Gaza, they'll drop a 1-tonne bomb on them, or reduce food, water and power supplies to the whole population as collective punishment. Or they'll shoot unarmed protestors several hundred metres within the fence. That's not quite what people mean by policing either, in a meaningful sense.
In other parts of the thread people are wondering why it's called an open-air prison...
Egypt had for a short period a democratically elected leadership who was closely allied with Hamas. They were deposed in coup in favor the current president Al-Sisi, a move that almost certainly was supported by both US and Israel. Egypt is also the 2nd biggest recipient of foreign military financing from the USA (after Israel of course), so whatever decision Egypt makes about Gaza will be in lockstep with the US. However there is also the added problem that Al-Sisi knows Hamas is allied with his biggest opponents. Egypt is possibly the country in the ME where Palestinians have the most popular support, so I highly doubt the population seeing them as "psycopaths" is a big reason for blockage.
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
and their political stooges in American government, naturally
Oh come on... You know perfectly well how much aid Israel gets and how much aid Palestine gets from the US. US officials will randomly go on bizarre outbursts about how their number 1 responsibility as secretary for state... is standing up for Israel. The US is 200% on Israel's side, they've got billions in munitions 'pre-supplied' for Israel to use in emergencies like this and more on the way.
but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth
but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth
Consensus-building much?
I did not suggest, sneakily or directly, that "we all know" this to be true, and I did not treat it as a given truth. I argued that it is true, complete with a couple of links to background context and further information, and then I suggested in essence that if people fail to understand this point, the mistakes of the past will be repeated in the future. That is not consensus-building, that is just making an argument.
The squad are also a very bad example. They folded like paper tigers when it came to re-electing Nancy Pelosi as House speaker. They could have used their leverage to secure medicare for all or do any number of things they stated they would do. They chose not to. They are completely in the DEM machine's pocket.
The official policy of the last two Democrat presidents of the US has been to fund Iran via "nuclear agreements" which results in funds directly flowing to Hamas and Hezbollah. It aint 6/430. It has been 1/1.
This narrative is awfully convenient from a pro-Israeli perspective, but if this was all motivated with holy war and religious bigotry, how come the Palestinian liberation movement was broadly secular before the 1980s? The leader of PFLP was after all a christian born Palestinian communist. And how come Israel had to help Hamas along in its infancy, to counter PLO? If this was all motivated by religious hatred, surely the islamist organizations would be at the forefront since the very beginning?
...how come the Palestinian liberation movement...
What does that matter to the Egyptians, Iranians, etc. who just need a convenient tool? What the Palestinians themselves think of all this is only marginally relevant, so long as they remain a functional tool. Israel's role in shaping that tool is also irrelevant; iron sharpens iron, and Hamas has shaped Israel as surely as Israel has shaped Hamas. But it is not Israel who ships arms into Palestine, not Israel who trains Hamas terrorists.
I am not "pro-Israeli" in any sense; as an American I am in fact deeply skeptical of Israel as a frankly unreliable ally. But this does not change the truth of the matter, which is that if Palestinians were not a convenient tool of anti-Israel Islamists (and, I suppose, the occasional secular anti-Semite) then the Palestinians would have no allies at all.
Egypt is a military dictatorship, which couped away the elected president Morsi a few years ago. Morsi was an Islamist, and very close to the Muslim Brothers.
Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, and as recent events showed, they had all the time to organize, and are doing a pretty good job in being a thorn in their enemies' side - which is these days mainly Israel.
If you were running Egypt, would you want to facilitate communication and transfer of persons and goods with a territory controlled by an organization with good ties to your main domestic opponent/enemy?
Are there international treaties that would in other instances require Israel to let any traffic cross it's borders with a nominally-independent Gaza? South Korea has a northern border that's even more fortified and doesn't get as much scrutiny. It's not like the average North Korean has free passage to China or Russia either. If a landlocked country decides to piss off it's neighbors, are they required to let any traffic through?
Gaza has a sea border, which does complicate the question, but also isn't generally recognized as an independent nation either.
Egypt
Egypt Egypt's argument is that it cannot open Rafah crossing unless the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas controls the crossing and international monitors are present. Egypt Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Hamas wants the border opened because it would represent Egyptian recognition of the group's control of Gaza. "Of course this is something we cannot do," he said, "because it would undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and consecrate the split between Gaza and the West Bank."[7]
According to Sharif Elmusa, Associate Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, Israel wants Gaza to fade into Egypt. Egyptian authorities are determined to avoid opening the Rafah crossing without ending the Israeli siege, which would ultimately serve Israel's goal of displacing the Gaza problem onto Egypt. Secondly it is Cairo's concern that under Hamas rule violence can spill into Sinai and threaten tourism, leaving Egypt vulnerable to US and Israeli accusations of ineffectively fighting terrorism.[230]
Following the events of the Gaza flotilla raid in May 2010, after Egypt opened its borders with Gaza, it was reported that former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was caught between the need to appease growing public anger at Israel's actions and the necessity of maintaining his close relationship with Israel. This friendship was needed to secure more than $2bn of American aid annually, money on which many analysts believe Mubarak's former regime depended.[104]
While Israel contends that the blockade is necessary to prevent smuggling of weapons into Gaza, Egypt argues that it is needed to prevent smuggling of them from Gaza into the Sinai.[231]
In the strict sense, of course, whether the statement "Gaza is an open air prison" is true or not is not affected by the status of Egypt; it would be perfectly possible for Gaza to be an open air prison with both Egyptian and Israeli wardens.
It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
“Because the Gazans are violent sociopaths” is the obvious answer. What I am asking is what the people who call Gaza an “open air prison” give as an answer.
What I am asking is what the people who call Gaza an “open air prison” give as an answer.
The Egyptians are not enforcing a naval blockade, nor are they the occupying power of Gaza, running it under their military law. You can choose not to trade with someone, that doesn't make them your prisoner. If you choose that they can't trade with anyone, then they are your prisoner.
I would agree with this statement and I am curious how someone can disagree with it using honest direct arguments.
Egyptian government has never amounted to much more than a small group of generals using the country as a milking cow. For close to half a century these generals have been propped up by American money and weapons and diplomatic support. America does this with the express intention of getting the generals to stop fighting Israel and cooperate on issues such as Gaza.
I would agree with this statement and I am curious how someone can disagree with it using honest direct arguments.
Prisons generally aren't defined in terms of ruining your border-crossing relations with your neighbors.
The Gaza Strip's land borders are closed because Hamas has been historically unable or unwilling to manage its relations with its only two proximal neighbors. For Israel, well, it should be obvious. For Egypt, this is partly due to ideological deviations, especially Hamas's and other related group's relations to either radical theological movements that likewise threatened the more secular dictatorships, or had too-close relations with other Palestinian groups who caused infamous troubles for others who let them in (i.e. Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait). Another part for Egypt is that consequences of a war, beyond losing money, include dealing with unwanted costs as ever since the Sinai return any scattering of the Gazans into the desert now means their desert, and their problem, and that Palestinian's reputation for countries that let them in is, well, earned. Given that the easiest way to limit the war potential of two million Gazans is to throttle the inputs that get in, the Palestinian policy has maneuvered Gaza into a position that it's in both their neighbor's interests to close the border.
But closing land borders itself is not a prison, because land borders are not obliged or even required to be there in the first place. A prison is not simply 'the neighbors won't let me in,' or even 'I can't walk across the border.' South Korea is not a prison just because it's a de facto island bordered by North Korea. Canada is not a prison if the border with the US shuts down. Landlocked countries may be economically dependent on others for maritime access, but they don't become prisons if others refuse. Islands are even less so, even though they have no land borders.
It's not the land dynamic that defines the Gaza Strip circumstances, it's the sea access. And there's a considerably different, albeit less pejorative, description of that: blockade.
This is exactly what I am talking about. It devolves into a silly and extremely dishonest game of definitions. See, it is not an open prison, it is just a double whammy tight "land border" with a "blockade" on the sea side. Just like what Canada and the US have! And then of course there is always the attempt to justify why Gazans deserve to be imprisoned in this totally-not-open-air-prison because they elected bad people.
So Israel forced those people (who aren't usually actually from Gaza, but typically from areas south of what is now Israel, and have families all over Israel and West Bank) to emigrate to refugee camps in Gaza. And then made their exit illegal and dependent on rarely obtained "permits" that they can get for sustained good behavior. And also convinced Egypt through a combination of US bribery and regime self-interest arguments, to do the same. And also destroyed their only airport and closed down the sea access as well because it is totally not a prison, see, they are just not allowed to leave.
The fact that there were extra steps and justifications to Gaza becoming an open air prison, doesn't change the fact that it is now an open air prison.
This is exactly what I am talking about. It devolves into a silly and extremely dishonest game of definitions.
Well, yes, using pejoratives with different meanings as motte-and-baily arguments is silly and dishonest. This is part of why the pro-Palestinians regularly shoot their cause in the foot by rhetorical over-reach.
You asked how someone could disagree with a pejorative using direct and honest argument. The most direct and honest argument is that the pejorative you use doesn't mean what you think it means if you think it accurately applies.
If you don't think it accurately applies, the charge of silly dishonesty may indeed apply, but not from the people point to word meaning.
See, it is not an open prison, it is just a double whammy tight "land border" with a "blockade" on the sea side. Just like what Canada and the US have!
This, however, would be dishonest, because this was not the point made. The point made wasn't Gaza and the other examples were alike- the point was that the reason they were not alike isn't the nature of the land boundary, but the sea boundary. There was even a specific word describing it that you seem disinclined to use.
Blockade. Which is a shame to neglect, because blockades are recognized as acts of war for a reason. Blockades can be tied to many ruinous impacts, acts of aggression, indiscriminate impacts, and so on. Not a nice word, blockade.
But... it doesn't work as well as the claim as 'prison', because it doesn't have the same connotations of total control of the individual that the word 'prison' does. Even as an act of war, a war is a conflict between two sides, which implicitly acknowledges mutual agency and even potentially appropriateness, whereas prisons can be argued to be unilateral impositions at no-fault of the subjected faction. If Israel is running a prison, the argument can be made that imprisonment is unjust, doesn't follow the principles of justice, and the entire project illegitimate. If Israel is acknowledged as running a blockade, the argument context shifts to having to explain why, which may end up conceding that the conditions that are acknowledged as occasionally justifying blockades- terrible as they are- apply.
So, of course, the pro-Palestinian narratives ignore the blockade, unless needed to be acknowledged in technical terms to maintain the prison metaphor.
So Israel forced those people (who aren't usually actually from Gaza, but typically from areas south of what is now Israel, and have families all over Israel and West Bank) to emigrate to refugee camps in Gaza.
The Arabs lost a war they intended to have existential stakes for the Israelis, yes. Multiple wars, even.
This does not make it a prison. It establishes it as a refugee camp.
And then made their exit illegal and dependent on rarely obtained "permits" that they can get for sustained good behavior.
The Gazans continued such attempts at war that uncontrolled access would have obvious and natural follow-on effects for continuing and expanding the war-potential, yes. There was a point where Gaza would- accurately- be described as occupied.
This does not make it a prison. This made it an occupation state, as long as the occupiers remain in place. Which stopped not-quite two decades ago.
And also convinced Egypt through a combination of US bribery and regime self-interest arguments, to do the same.
The Palestinians really mucked it up here, yes. Basic asymmetric conflict theory is to maintain your patron-networks and support zones without making yourself more trouble than you're worth. The Palestinians failed, both in their chosen alignments and in not enforcing displine on their movement / tolerating autonomous actors who threatened their backers. Making it in your mutually-hating neighbors' self-interest to cooperate against you is a terrible own-goal. (Or would it be dark-humor as own-gaol?)
Regardless, this (still) does not make it a prison. This makes it diplomatically isolated from its neighbors.
And also destroyed their only airport and closed down the sea access as well because it is totally not a prison, see, they are just not allowed to leave.
And here we go back to that there's a word for this that isn't prison: the word is blockade.
At no point in the summarization of several decades did you describe what- in any other context- would be recognized as not-a-prison. What you described was a refugee camp from the losing side of a war, that was subjected to an occupation state, which lost it's external patrons and made itself a security threat to all its neighbors, and which after being released from occupatation continued to allow violence until it was instead blockading.
None of this is nice. None of this is beneficient. But it is a much more honest and direct point than claiming the Gazans have been imprisoned.
The fact that there were extra steps and justifications to Gaza becoming an open air prison, doesn't change the fact that it is now an open air prison.
The point that it is not an open-air prison is what makes the claim a pejorative rather than a fact.
"Because Arab states taking in Palestinians and naturalizing them means Israel wins and ends international pressure for Palestinian statehood" (since, as with the Ostsiedler, they will cease to exist in the land from which they have left). Same reason since 1948.
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Notes -
This topic perhaps more than others is impossible to find good analysis of. Could some of you help me understand the arguments around something?
I routinely see people call Gaza "an open air prison". But...isnt' Egypt participating in this open air imprisonment? Egypt has a border with Gaza. If the Israelis are imprisoning the Gazans, then aren't the Egyptians doing the same thing?
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
edit: I think my question was unclear here. I understand the obvious answers which are basically: Hamas/Gaza are terrorists. Of course Egypt doesn't want them. What I'm asking for is for somebody to steelman the liberal position that Gaza is an "open air prison" and that this is Israel's fault.
Yes. And so what? Do you honestly think the Egyptians would still be blockading Gaza if not for Israel and its willful influence? Like what's your mental model of a hypothetical world where there is no Israel but still a Gaza like situation and Egypt. How and why do you figure the Egyptians would still try to blockade Gaza of their own independent will?
What you really seem to be doing here is trying desperately to downplay or remove Israeli agency and moral ownership of their own sippenhaft blockade. Because obviously it's kind of bad propaganda and morally difficult if you're unblinkingly honest about it. Israel isn't really doing what it's doing, others are too! Yes they are doing what they set out to do.
Let us consider the case of the Mavi Marmara aka the "Freedom Flotilla." (Side note: if you don't know what this is and have free time to kill I would advise to skim watch the raw video I provided or find a similar undoctored and uncut version of the original on the ground live broadcast. Come to your own conclusion before you read about it and get a narrative fed to you. You might run into moments where you will say "hey that's not so nice of those brownie muslamics" but they will be your own honest opinions. That's very precious.) One of the OG media blackpilling moments, for me. In it a flotilla of boats checked before hand for any weapons like guns tried to run through the blockade on Gaza to symbolically provide random supplies like children's books. The IDF intercepted with violent force and shot/executed 9 demonstrators. For the crime of independently exchanging goods freely among actors the Israeli state used lethal violent force. All well 13 years before current events.
Who forced Israel to do this? No one. It's a very obvious demonstration of a serious will to blockade and economically starve Gazans. Israel means to do what it is doing. Gaza is an open air blockaded prison because Israel and Israel alone is working hard and killing to make it that way.
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Are the Egyptians the occupying power of Gaza? No, they're not. It's not their problem, Gaza are foreigners. If they were administrating military vs civilian laws in Gaza, overseeing policing and so on of Gaza, bombing power plants, then it would be their problem and their responsibility.
You're not in prison if your neighbour says 'trespassers will be shot'. You're in prison if the people in control of your land, Israel, use military occupation and various heavy-handed tactics such as a sea, air and land blockade, which they do. The Egyptians also have policies against trade with Gaza but they don't control its borders or territory!
Israel isn't occupying Gaza either. They're occupying the West bank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories
And? We all acknowledge that Israel is blockading Gaza (with Egypt's cooperation). You can argue that constitutes an "occupation" if you like, but you were talking about administering laws and overseeing policing. Israel is not doing that in Gaza.
OK, administering laws is a bit of a whitewash, my error. If the Israelis don't like someone in Gaza, they'll drop a 1-tonne bomb on them, or reduce food, water and power supplies to the whole population as collective punishment. Or they'll shoot unarmed protestors several hundred metres within the fence. That's not quite what people mean by policing either, in a meaningful sense.
In other parts of the thread people are wondering why it's called an open-air prison...
Sure - but then we go back to the original question you were responding to. If Gaza is a prison, doesn't that make Egypt their co-jailors?
Who is the occupying power again? Not Egypt, Israel. Even the US state department admits this.
But again - Israel is not occupying Gaza in any sense that Egypt is not also doing so.
Israel is keeping their borders shut - so is Egypt.
Israel is restricting the flow of goods into Gaza - so is Egypt.
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Egypt had for a short period a democratically elected leadership who was closely allied with Hamas. They were deposed in coup in favor the current president Al-Sisi, a move that almost certainly was supported by both US and Israel. Egypt is also the 2nd biggest recipient of foreign military financing from the USA (after Israel of course), so whatever decision Egypt makes about Gaza will be in lockstep with the US. However there is also the added problem that Al-Sisi knows Hamas is allied with his biggest opponents. Egypt is possibly the country in the ME where Palestinians have the most popular support, so I highly doubt the population seeing them as "psycopaths" is a big reason for blockage.
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Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
Oh come on... You know perfectly well how much aid Israel gets and how much aid Palestine gets from the US. US officials will randomly go on bizarre outbursts about how their number 1 responsibility as secretary for state... is standing up for Israel. The US is 200% on Israel's side, they've got billions in munitions 'pre-supplied' for Israel to use in emergencies like this and more on the way.
Consensus-building much?
And yet powerful American politicians are clearly less than 100% on Israel's side.
I did not suggest, sneakily or directly, that "we all know" this to be true, and I did not treat it as a given truth. I argued that it is true, complete with a couple of links to background context and further information, and then I suggested in essence that if people fail to understand this point, the mistakes of the past will be repeated in the future. That is not consensus-building, that is just making an argument.
The squad are also a very bad example. They folded like paper tigers when it came to re-electing Nancy Pelosi as House speaker. They could have used their leverage to secure medicare for all or do any number of things they stated they would do. They chose not to. They are completely in the DEM machine's pocket.
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The squad is 6 people out of 430 members of one branch of the legislature. They're famous but not very powerful.
The official policy of the last two Democrat presidents of the US has been to fund Iran via "nuclear agreements" which results in funds directly flowing to Hamas and Hezbollah. It aint 6/430. It has been 1/1.
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This narrative is awfully convenient from a pro-Israeli perspective, but if this was all motivated with holy war and religious bigotry, how come the Palestinian liberation movement was broadly secular before the 1980s? The leader of PFLP was after all a christian born Palestinian communist. And how come Israel had to help Hamas along in its infancy, to counter PLO? If this was all motivated by religious hatred, surely the islamist organizations would be at the forefront since the very beginning?
http://web.archive.org/web/20090926212507/http:/online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html
What does that matter to the Egyptians, Iranians, etc. who just need a convenient tool? What the Palestinians themselves think of all this is only marginally relevant, so long as they remain a functional tool. Israel's role in shaping that tool is also irrelevant; iron sharpens iron, and Hamas has shaped Israel as surely as Israel has shaped Hamas. But it is not Israel who ships arms into Palestine, not Israel who trains Hamas terrorists.
I am not "pro-Israeli" in any sense; as an American I am in fact deeply skeptical of Israel as a frankly unreliable ally. But this does not change the truth of the matter, which is that if Palestinians were not a convenient tool of anti-Israel Islamists (and, I suppose, the occasional secular anti-Semite) then the Palestinians would have no allies at all.
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Egypt is a military dictatorship, which couped away the elected president Morsi a few years ago. Morsi was an Islamist, and very close to the Muslim Brothers.
Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brothers, and as recent events showed, they had all the time to organize, and are doing a pretty good job in being a thorn in their enemies' side - which is these days mainly Israel.
If you were running Egypt, would you want to facilitate communication and transfer of persons and goods with a territory controlled by an organization with good ties to your main domestic opponent/enemy?
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Are there international treaties that would in other instances require Israel to let any traffic cross it's borders with a nominally-independent Gaza? South Korea has a northern border that's even more fortified and doesn't get as much scrutiny. It's not like the average North Korean has free passage to China or Russia either. If a landlocked country decides to piss off it's neighbors, are they required to let any traffic through?
Gaza has a sea border, which does complicate the question, but also isn't generally recognized as an independent nation either.
This is quite a pointless line of questioning in this matter when
We are not talking about a landlocked country that has bad relations with its neighbors.
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Here's what Wikipedia says FWIW:
In the strict sense, of course, whether the statement "Gaza is an open air prison" is true or not is not affected by the status of Egypt; it would be perfectly possible for Gaza to be an open air prison with both Egyptian and Israeli wardens.
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It seems like what you are really asking is "why are people acting like this is solely an ethnic Jewish/Arab conflict when Egypt is at least partially cooperating with Israel against Gaza." Because all of your questions are easy things answer if ethnicity isn't the only lens you use to look at the conflict. Egypt and Israel would both rather not have this impoverished and violent population incorporated into or freely mingling with their own people, and they act accordingly.
“Because the Gazans are violent sociopaths” is the obvious answer. What I am asking is what the people who call Gaza an “open air prison” give as an answer.
The Egyptians are not enforcing a naval blockade, nor are they the occupying power of Gaza, running it under their military law. You can choose not to trade with someone, that doesn't make them your prisoner. If you choose that they can't trade with anyone, then they are your prisoner.
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I would agree with this statement and I am curious how someone can disagree with it using honest direct arguments.
Egyptian government has never amounted to much more than a small group of generals using the country as a milking cow. For close to half a century these generals have been propped up by American money and weapons and diplomatic support. America does this with the express intention of getting the generals to stop fighting Israel and cooperate on issues such as Gaza.
It is quite a simple explanation really.
Prisons generally aren't defined in terms of ruining your border-crossing relations with your neighbors.
The Gaza Strip's land borders are closed because Hamas has been historically unable or unwilling to manage its relations with its only two proximal neighbors. For Israel, well, it should be obvious. For Egypt, this is partly due to ideological deviations, especially Hamas's and other related group's relations to either radical theological movements that likewise threatened the more secular dictatorships, or had too-close relations with other Palestinian groups who caused infamous troubles for others who let them in (i.e. Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait). Another part for Egypt is that consequences of a war, beyond losing money, include dealing with unwanted costs as ever since the Sinai return any scattering of the Gazans into the desert now means their desert, and their problem, and that Palestinian's reputation for countries that let them in is, well, earned. Given that the easiest way to limit the war potential of two million Gazans is to throttle the inputs that get in, the Palestinian policy has maneuvered Gaza into a position that it's in both their neighbor's interests to close the border.
But closing land borders itself is not a prison, because land borders are not obliged or even required to be there in the first place. A prison is not simply 'the neighbors won't let me in,' or even 'I can't walk across the border.' South Korea is not a prison just because it's a de facto island bordered by North Korea. Canada is not a prison if the border with the US shuts down. Landlocked countries may be economically dependent on others for maritime access, but they don't become prisons if others refuse. Islands are even less so, even though they have no land borders.
It's not the land dynamic that defines the Gaza Strip circumstances, it's the sea access. And there's a considerably different, albeit less pejorative, description of that: blockade.
This is exactly what I am talking about. It devolves into a silly and extremely dishonest game of definitions. See, it is not an open prison, it is just a double whammy tight "land border" with a "blockade" on the sea side. Just like what Canada and the US have! And then of course there is always the attempt to justify why Gazans deserve to be imprisoned in this totally-not-open-air-prison because they elected bad people.
So Israel forced those people (who aren't usually actually from Gaza, but typically from areas south of what is now Israel, and have families all over Israel and West Bank) to emigrate to refugee camps in Gaza. And then made their exit illegal and dependent on rarely obtained "permits" that they can get for sustained good behavior. And also convinced Egypt through a combination of US bribery and regime self-interest arguments, to do the same. And also destroyed their only airport and closed down the sea access as well because it is totally not a prison, see, they are just not allowed to leave.
The fact that there were extra steps and justifications to Gaza becoming an open air prison, doesn't change the fact that it is now an open air prison.
Well, yes, using pejoratives with different meanings as motte-and-baily arguments is silly and dishonest. This is part of why the pro-Palestinians regularly shoot their cause in the foot by rhetorical over-reach.
You asked how someone could disagree with a pejorative using direct and honest argument. The most direct and honest argument is that the pejorative you use doesn't mean what you think it means if you think it accurately applies.
If you don't think it accurately applies, the charge of silly dishonesty may indeed apply, but not from the people point to word meaning.
This, however, would be dishonest, because this was not the point made. The point made wasn't Gaza and the other examples were alike- the point was that the reason they were not alike isn't the nature of the land boundary, but the sea boundary. There was even a specific word describing it that you seem disinclined to use.
Blockade. Which is a shame to neglect, because blockades are recognized as acts of war for a reason. Blockades can be tied to many ruinous impacts, acts of aggression, indiscriminate impacts, and so on. Not a nice word, blockade.
But... it doesn't work as well as the claim as 'prison', because it doesn't have the same connotations of total control of the individual that the word 'prison' does. Even as an act of war, a war is a conflict between two sides, which implicitly acknowledges mutual agency and even potentially appropriateness, whereas prisons can be argued to be unilateral impositions at no-fault of the subjected faction. If Israel is running a prison, the argument can be made that imprisonment is unjust, doesn't follow the principles of justice, and the entire project illegitimate. If Israel is acknowledged as running a blockade, the argument context shifts to having to explain why, which may end up conceding that the conditions that are acknowledged as occasionally justifying blockades- terrible as they are- apply.
So, of course, the pro-Palestinian narratives ignore the blockade, unless needed to be acknowledged in technical terms to maintain the prison metaphor.
The Arabs lost a war they intended to have existential stakes for the Israelis, yes. Multiple wars, even.
This does not make it a prison. It establishes it as a refugee camp.
The Gazans continued such attempts at war that uncontrolled access would have obvious and natural follow-on effects for continuing and expanding the war-potential, yes. There was a point where Gaza would- accurately- be described as occupied.
This does not make it a prison. This made it an occupation state, as long as the occupiers remain in place. Which stopped not-quite two decades ago.
The Palestinians really mucked it up here, yes. Basic asymmetric conflict theory is to maintain your patron-networks and support zones without making yourself more trouble than you're worth. The Palestinians failed, both in their chosen alignments and in not enforcing displine on their movement / tolerating autonomous actors who threatened their backers. Making it in your mutually-hating neighbors' self-interest to cooperate against you is a terrible own-goal. (Or would it be dark-humor as own-gaol?)
Regardless, this (still) does not make it a prison. This makes it diplomatically isolated from its neighbors.
And here we go back to that there's a word for this that isn't prison: the word is blockade.
At no point in the summarization of several decades did you describe what- in any other context- would be recognized as not-a-prison. What you described was a refugee camp from the losing side of a war, that was subjected to an occupation state, which lost it's external patrons and made itself a security threat to all its neighbors, and which after being released from occupatation continued to allow violence until it was instead blockading.
None of this is nice. None of this is beneficient. But it is a much more honest and direct point than claiming the Gazans have been imprisoned.
The point that it is not an open-air prison is what makes the claim a pejorative rather than a fact.
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"Because Arab states taking in Palestinians and naturalizing them means Israel wins and ends international pressure for Palestinian statehood" (since, as with the Ostsiedler, they will cease to exist in the land from which they have left). Same reason since 1948.
Arab states taking in Palestinians has also resulted in a number of civil conflicts, including the civil war in Lebanon and Black September in Jordan.
Yes, that’s certainly a very important secondary reason.
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They would either deny the question exists or allege Israeli pressure campaigns.
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