naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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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.
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
MaiqTheTrue 6mo ago
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?”
The answer is a bit glib, but "build a wall along the 1947 border and withdraw behind it, accept Palestinian sovereignty over the other half and UN authority over Jerusalem and two border quadripoints" would at least mean that the overwhelming majority of accusations against Israel would no longer have a leg to stand on.
The problem is that without military control over Golan/West Bank, Israel is an incredibly indefensible country. Israel's leaders understandably don't trust the "World opinion" from protecting them from real armies. This is a good primer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ulHDsnhh_Cc
Palestinians then spend some time obtaining weapons, blow up said wall, attack again, Israel fights back and either we're back where we started with Israel occupying large portions of territory or Israel loses and is destroyed. A two-state solution can't work because the Palestinian state is never going to let off warring with the Israeli one. A one-state democracy where all are equal can't work because as soon as the Palestinians vote themselves in control of it they kill all the Jews.
The 1947 border is even less easily defensible, and as was seen earlier with the celebrations of ‘75 years of occupation’ (not 56), the Palestinians don’t really care about the UN borders anyway. That is, after all, what “from the river to the sea” means.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
2rafa 6mo ago
Who cares what Palestinians themselves think? If the overwhelming public opinion worldwide is "they've been given what they deserve, the UN deal is literally the most fair deal they could get" and then Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission until they are willing to accept a peacekeeping mission with a High Representative with extraordinary powers like the one in BiH.
Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission
I don’t see why we can’t just fast forward to exactly that happening and the exact situation as today’s repeating itself except with vastly more casualties on the Israeli side, large numbers of people displaced by fighting, huge economic damage etc.
To put things in perspective there have been more drug deaths due to a poorly secured border and a few predatory jewish pharmacutical companies than there have been jewish deaths at the hands of Palestinians by a ridiculous factor. On top of that, prior to this event there were even more European deaths at the hands of Arab terrorists than there were jewish ones.
I think jews all around the world have a very keen understanding of exactly who is in and who is out. What you are supposed to do is apologize for your jewish privilege and do better. Accept more immigration, do more for assimilation and focus heavily on functional integration. Of course no one will do that when it's their own ingroup at stake. No one will entertain some well reasoned and rationalized argument regarding the benefits of integration, diversity and rehabilitation. Just look at the rhetoric, 'they are raping our women!'.
This is an open invitation to leverage every single anti-ethnocentric argument against jews. Never again will I have to entertain a Zionist, jew or otherwise, when they start whining about the far right or anything similar. Black on white crime in the US alone dwarfs this conflict. You have an enemy at the gates? Open up and apologize for having gates you racists.
Yeah. One year is 500 black on white murders. How many Israelis die annually due to a direct Palestinian act? 20? If we factor in rapes this isn't even close.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives. It's just contextualized as a national problem. A 'race issue'. If white people had only done more these white lives would not have been lost at the hands of blacks. Why can't jews just do that? Why do they have to be so ethnonationalist and hateful? We're all one race the human race. Say no to artificial borders and just let them in.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites? And, of course, there are all the black victims who are killed by black perpetrators. I assume you support a state-run military program to avenge those victims? (I kid, of course, since I actually assume that you don't).
But, of course, your entire premise is bogus, because we do have state-run programs to avenge murders, and other crimes, as incarceration numbers clearly show.
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine. You are only 'kidding' yourself by being this obtuse.
Now, did I answer your question or are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500? Or that Palestinians are raping as many jewish women as blacks rape white women?
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine
I don't understand the relevance, unless you think there is some sort of race war going on in the US.
are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500. I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
There's just as much a race war in the US as there is a Palestinian conflict. Either we are one race the human race with artificial borders or we are ethnic groups. I am not entertaining tactical nazism for jews only.
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500.
1200 in one anomaly year. It gets dwarfed by 3 average US years. We are still not counting the rapes.
I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
Except it's not. If the Israeli government was forcibly making Palestinians live within Israel whilst actively stoking pro-Palestinian grievance narratives I'm sure we could bump these numbers up. Which still leaves us with the drug epidemic. How many neighborhoods should the US turn into 'parking lots' because of the Sackler's?
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
The two state solution would never have worked. At most, there could be a 3 state solution, but that requires buy in, not just from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but also Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The latter 3 don't want anything to do with Palestinians because they are destabilizing economic black holes even when not in their own self governed areas. Not even to touch on the fact that the PLO sabotaged a real peace agreement when they had an ole liberal Ehud Barak to negotiate with.
The arabs could have taken a two state solution in the original partition - they decided to attack the new nation of Israel instead. They could have had two states in 2000 with Clinton helping - nope, turned that down. They could have elected someone to help them build Gaza into something great, nope elected literal Nazi sympathizers who want to do a genocide. I mean, at some point, what can you do?
See also: responses to the cutesy infographics about how Israelis are killing sooooo many more Palestinians. There is a huge difference, and it has something to do with the Iron Dome.
The pro-Palestine response is that Israel shouldn’t be there. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, and perhaps not in the Middle East at all. If they were to pack up and leave Jerusalem to its previous owners, Hamas would have no need to commit mass murders.
This is about as reasonable as the people suggesting Palestinians could avoid having their buildings flattened by taking the L and moving to Egypt. That is, it overlooks the strategic difficulty, let alone the ideological reasons to stay and fight it out.
If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response.
"We" did have a similar response. Many colonists considered the Native Americans to be so barbaric that they "forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity" and that "their total extirpation" would be "scarce sufficient attonement" [1].
Similar case in Ireland back when the Pale around Dublin was subject to raids from Gaelic war bands. The genocidal rhetoric toned down a lot post-Cromwell (though Social Darwinism reignited it amongst some important players).
As I understand it, the Comanche basically lived by the sword and died by the sword. Whatever we did to them, I am fairly sure that if the shoe was on the other foot it would not have been much better.
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Notes -
I've seen a few people wonder why some people support Palestine in this conflict. While videos like this one (which predates the current conflict) are undoubtedly propaganda, they do offer a window into the worldview of a person who supports Palestine.
I'm honestly a little conflicted about who I should support. I condemn the killing of civilians by Hamas last weekend, but then I see United Nations OCHA data like this, where it says that 3,208 Palestinian civilians have died from 2008 to 2020 (compared to 177 Israeli civilians over the same period), mostly from air-launched explosions. I see people talking about supporting "the Jewish state’s justified but often brutal response", which so far includes blowing up a Palestinian house full of civilians with no warning, killing those inside, blowing up marketplaces and mosques, and attacking the Jabalia refugee camp.
Wikipedia claims that 40% of male Palestinians have spent some time in an Israeli prison. I hear about Israel demolishing 55,000 Palestinian structures as of 2022. I remember that Gaza had been blockaded by Egypt and Israel since 2005, despite Israel supposedly backing out of Gaza.
Even if every example of Israelis killing Palestinian civilians was collateral damage or accident, even if we assume that the cameras showing Israeli brutality always start rolling at the perfect moment to make it look like unnecessary brutality on their part, it's obvious to me that Palestine won't be able to grow under its current conditions of occupation. If the United States supports Israel, then Israel will prevail and Palestine will lose little by little every year. It will be a slow motion catastrophe, and there is nothing Palestine can do about it.
Is national, regional and global stability worth anything to the Palestinian people under such conditions? No wonder people are posting music videos in this thread of Palestinians with pipe dreams of Russia becoming a global super power again, and supporting Palestine to spite the United States. They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy. Even if history remembers you as a monster, they will remember you.
I think at least for me, the question is “what exactly are the Jews supposed to do here?” People love to criticize, but I don’t think any other groups would have as measured a response as Israel has to a group of people living within a stone’s throw of their major cities having a stated aim to kill them and wipe them off the map, and who regularly target civilians with rockets and bombs and terrorist attacks. If the native tribes of North America were regularly launching missiles from their reservations, we’d probably have a very similar response. If they do all the things Palestinians regularly do from Gaza, there’d be a wall, guards, and everything else.
We’re not thinking that way because for most of us, warfare, especially warfare of this type hasn’t happened in our countries for almost a century. It’s pretty easy to sit back and arm chair quarterback when war is something you only know from movies and that being too restrained is free for me in the USA who doesn’t have do worry about anyone you know suffering the consequences. When it’s your city, your people, and so on, anyone would tend to err on the side of protecting their own.
The answer is a bit glib, but "build a wall along the 1947 border and withdraw behind it, accept Palestinian sovereignty over the other half and UN authority over Jerusalem and two border quadripoints" would at least mean that the overwhelming majority of accusations against Israel would no longer have a leg to stand on.
The problem is that without military control over Golan/West Bank, Israel is an incredibly indefensible country. Israel's leaders understandably don't trust the "World opinion" from protecting them from real armies. This is a good primer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ulHDsnhh_Cc
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Palestinians then spend some time obtaining weapons, blow up said wall, attack again, Israel fights back and either we're back where we started with Israel occupying large portions of territory or Israel loses and is destroyed. A two-state solution can't work because the Palestinian state is never going to let off warring with the Israeli one. A one-state democracy where all are equal can't work because as soon as the Palestinians vote themselves in control of it they kill all the Jews.
Well yeah, Israel is pretty much Fitzcarraldo. It should never have existed.
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The 1947 border is even less easily defensible, and as was seen earlier with the celebrations of ‘75 years of occupation’ (not 56), the Palestinians don’t really care about the UN borders anyway. That is, after all, what “from the river to the sea” means.
Who cares what Palestinians themselves think? If the overwhelming public opinion worldwide is "they've been given what they deserve, the UN deal is literally the most fair deal they could get" and then Palestinians democratically elect a government that claims the internationally recognized territory of Israel and tries to press the claim, Israel is free to pummel them into submission until they are willing to accept a peacekeeping mission with a High Representative with extraordinary powers like the one in BiH.
That's the current situation with cosmetic changes.
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I don’t see why we can’t just fast forward to exactly that happening and the exact situation as today’s repeating itself except with vastly more casualties on the Israeli side, large numbers of people displaced by fighting, huge economic damage etc.
Well, withdrawing from Palestine while immediately being replaced with a BiH-style peacekeeping force could work as well.
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To put things in perspective there have been more drug deaths due to a poorly secured border and a few predatory jewish pharmacutical companies than there have been jewish deaths at the hands of Palestinians by a ridiculous factor. On top of that, prior to this event there were even more European deaths at the hands of Arab terrorists than there were jewish ones.
I think jews all around the world have a very keen understanding of exactly who is in and who is out. What you are supposed to do is apologize for your jewish privilege and do better. Accept more immigration, do more for assimilation and focus heavily on functional integration. Of course no one will do that when it's their own ingroup at stake. No one will entertain some well reasoned and rationalized argument regarding the benefits of integration, diversity and rehabilitation. Just look at the rhetoric, 'they are raping our women!'.
This is an open invitation to leverage every single anti-ethnocentric argument against jews. Never again will I have to entertain a Zionist, jew or otherwise, when they start whining about the far right or anything similar. Black on white crime in the US alone dwarfs this conflict. You have an enemy at the gates? Open up and apologize for having gates you racists.
Does it?
Yeah. One year is 500 black on white murders. How many Israelis die annually due to a direct Palestinian act? 20? If we factor in rapes this isn't even close.
To put that in perspective there are no state run military programs that try to avenge the loss of white lives. It's just contextualized as a national problem. A 'race issue'. If white people had only done more these white lives would not have been lost at the hands of blacks. Why can't jews just do that? Why do they have to be so ethnonationalist and hateful? We're all one race the human race. Say no to artificial borders and just let them in.
The data clearly show that whites pose a much greater threat to white lives than do blacks. So, I assume you support a state-run military program against whites? And, of course, there are all the black victims who are killed by black perpetrators. I assume you support a state-run military program to avenge those victims? (I kid, of course, since I actually assume that you don't).
But, of course, your entire premise is bogus, because we do have state-run programs to avenge murders, and other crimes, as incarceration numbers clearly show.
No, just like Israel doesn't count the jews killed by other jews wrt the conflict with Palestine. You are only 'kidding' yourself by being this obtuse.
Now, did I answer your question or are you still going to pretend that 20 = 500? Or that Palestinians are raping as many jewish women as blacks rape white women?
I don't understand the relevance, unless you think there is some sort of race war going on in the US.
No, I but I am going to "pretend" that 1200>500. I am also going to "pretend" that 1200 people in a country of 10 million is equivalent to 42,000 in a country of 350 million.
There's just as much a race war in the US as there is a Palestinian conflict. Either we are one race the human race with artificial borders or we are ethnic groups. I am not entertaining tactical nazism for jews only.
1200 in one anomaly year. It gets dwarfed by 3 average US years. We are still not counting the rapes.
Except it's not. If the Israeli government was forcibly making Palestinians live within Israel whilst actively stoking pro-Palestinian grievance narratives I'm sure we could bump these numbers up. Which still leaves us with the drug epidemic. How many neighborhoods should the US turn into 'parking lots' because of the Sackler's?
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they could have genuinely pursued a two state solution instead of using hamas to cripple the idea of palestinian statehood.
The two state solution would never have worked. At most, there could be a 3 state solution, but that requires buy in, not just from Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, but also Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The latter 3 don't want anything to do with Palestinians because they are destabilizing economic black holes even when not in their own self governed areas. Not even to touch on the fact that the PLO sabotaged a real peace agreement when they had an ole liberal Ehud Barak to negotiate with.
HBD in action. No wants the Palestinians in Gaza since they as a group produce negative marginal value.
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The arabs could have taken a two state solution in the original partition - they decided to attack the new nation of Israel instead. They could have had two states in 2000 with Clinton helping - nope, turned that down. They could have elected someone to help them build Gaza into something great, nope elected literal Nazi sympathizers who want to do a genocide. I mean, at some point, what can you do?
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Israel tried for that multiple times, Palestine has turned it down every time.
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It looks like mostly peaceful protests against policy brutality to me.
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See also: responses to the cutesy infographics about how Israelis are killing sooooo many more Palestinians. There is a huge difference, and it has something to do with the Iron Dome.
The pro-Palestine response is that Israel shouldn’t be there. Not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, and perhaps not in the Middle East at all. If they were to pack up and leave Jerusalem to its previous owners, Hamas would have no need to commit mass murders.
This is about as reasonable as the people suggesting Palestinians could avoid having their buildings flattened by taking the L and moving to Egypt. That is, it overlooks the strategic difficulty, let alone the ideological reasons to stay and fight it out.
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"We" did have a similar response. Many colonists considered the Native Americans to be so barbaric that they "forfeited all claim to the rights of humanity" and that "their total extirpation" would be "scarce sufficient attonement" [1].
Similar case in Ireland back when the Pale around Dublin was subject to raids from Gaelic war bands. The genocidal rhetoric toned down a lot post-Cromwell (though Social Darwinism reignited it amongst some important players).
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The Comanche and Apache, at the very least, felt the same way about the Americans, and other tribes, and behaved accordingly.
As I understand it, the Comanche basically lived by the sword and died by the sword. Whatever we did to them, I am fairly sure that if the shoe was on the other foot it would not have been much better.
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