naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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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.
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis.
You could say the exact same thing in the other direction. Women getting run over by bulldozers. Villages demolished. Spraying pesticide that drifts onto their farmland. Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in... There are people downthread suggesting that the West Bank just build itself up economically like Singapore - a pretty laughable suggestion given the state of affairs on the ground:
Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Gaza dropped 23 percent between 1994 and 2016 in real dollars.
This does not happen even in communist regimes, only areas with intense political suppression. And then there's killing:
Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded with excessive lethal force to weekly demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side that took place for much of 2018 and 2019.[497] Snipers killed, according to OCHA, 214 Palestinian demonstrators, many of them more than one hundred meters away, and injured by live fire more than 8,000 more, including 156 whose limbs had to be amputated.[498] As a UN Commission of Inquiry put it, Israeli forces shot at “unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are.”
Why do you think there are so many young men who are extremely angry with Israel, to the point where they're happy to kidnap and kill Israeli civilians? Because in many real ways it is an open-air prison, where they're intensely suppressed, humiliated and occasionally shot at.
I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect. That would be my MENA policy for the West. But I'm disturbed by all the people who are astonished by Palestinian bloodlust and concluding that they're just innately savage and backwards, without bothering to inquire into why they're so angry. And then accusing pro-Palestinian people of being biased! They've probably scrolled through some of these enormously long webpages with 865 footnotes full of stories of houses getting demolished, farmland getting seized, endless military law, torture and so on. It's very understandable why people are pro-Palestinian if they put 'Israeli atrocities' into a search engine, just as it's understandable why people are pro-Israel if they watch certain TV channels or newspapers.
This kind of repression is not coming out of nowhere. Israel represses Gaza because if they don't, Gaza will use literally everything it can to kill Israelis.
You have to take the analysis back a step further - why does this cycle of repression and violence continue? Because Israel wants to exist and Gaza does not want Israel to exist. Without resolving that fundamental tension, letting up on the repression of Gaza does not reduce the violence, it increases it.
Israel wants to expand, into Palestine and in other directions. They do not want Gaza to exist. Hence settlements contra the internationally agreed borders (making new 'facts on the ground'), hence land confiscation... Palestine also wants to expand and wants to get rid of Israel, yet they lack the power to do so. Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
You see a bear mauling a badger and your sympathy is with the bear, who's existence is being threatened by a badger? The badger got in two or three hits while the bear was sleeping and this is international news (admittedly it is at least novel and exciting). But the bear's surely going to maul the badger even harder in response. The overall trend will remain, just as it has for the last fifty+ years.
Well, sympathy shouldn't be the basis for foreign policy. Israel has the power to inflict their will, in large part thanks to tireless US assistance. We should at least be somewhat objective with what's going on and not pretend that Israel faces any present existential threat from Palestine. The statelet facing existential threat is on the other side of the conflict.
If Hamas had agreed to those borders you might have a point. But they haven't. "From the river to the sea" is their refrain. Tel Aviv is an infringement of their claims just as much as the newest settlement is.
If there is to be peace, both sides need to come to the table and compromise. Hamas does not want to compromise. Thus, no peace.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Note where I say 'Sympathy shouldn't be the basis of foreign policy' and 'I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect.'
You are the one who wants to support a strong power bullying a weak one. My position is that the strong are doing fine on their own, they don't need any help doing what they're doing. You can't repress people and then act shocked when they repress you back.
Hamas does not want to compromise.
Israel derails the farcical 'US-mediated' peace process at every opportunity. Who would compromise with people who have no intention of following through on their commitments, in a process overseen by a judge who's sleeping with one of the parties?
Ron Pundak, Israeli negotiator: "The traditional approach of the [U.S.] State Department . . . was to adopt the position of the Israeli Prime Minister. This was demonstrated most extremely during the Netanyahu government, when the American government seemed sometimes to be working for the Israeli Prime Minister, as it tried to convince (and pressure) the Palestinian side to accept Israeli offers. This American tendency was also evident during Barak's tenure.
The Israelis make insulting offers where they retain control over Palestinian water, airspace, borders and prevent the Palestinians having an army and then say 'oh well we tried, the Palestinians just aren't interested in negotiations'.
Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's former foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later told an interviewer, "If I were a Palestinian I would have rejected Camp David, as well.
Between the start of the Oslo peace process in September 1993 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada seven years later, Israel confiscated more than forty thousand acres of Palestinian land, built 250 miles of bypass and security roads, established thirty new settlements, and increased the settler population in the West Bank and Gaza by almost one hundred thousand, which effectively doubled that population
I'm not a Palestinian leader, how should I know? I suggest that if even Israeli leaders like Ben-Ami wouldn't have accepted the terms they were offering, then they weren't negotiating in good faith.
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Notes -
Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks? I'm not talking Biden type people on the Left, but DSA type leftists who support "The Squad". They are more or less saying that Israel deserved this. I really don't understand how you can see a bunch of men slaughter innocent civilians at a music festival, kill innocent civilians just going about their day, capture women and children as hostages, and parade dead bodies around on trucks and upload it to social media and not have sympathy for Israelis. Yet these people are more or less saying Israel deserved this and the real victims of this will be Palestine.
I don't think this is a strawman either. If you go on reddit or Twitter you will see this sentiment. I guess this is the inevitable outcome of the oppressor/oppressed decolonize framework so many of them have adopted. This is pretty blackpilling for me because I would have thought an action like this could shake them out of their biased worldview, but this has actually seemed to do the opposite and make them hate Israel more. It's also pretty unfortunate we have to share a country with these kinds of people and they can vote. I'm not saying you need to love Israel and can't be critical of it, but what happened is to me pretty obviously evil and barbaric, and a lot of people are making excuses for it.
You could say the exact same thing in the other direction. Women getting run over by bulldozers. Villages demolished. Spraying pesticide that drifts onto their farmland. Preventing 'dual-use' equipment like X-ray machines to be brought into the West Bank. Sabotaging the economy of the West bank by bombing power plants, constraining trade into and out of the region, restricting quantities of industrial fuel brought in... There are people downthread suggesting that the West Bank just build itself up economically like Singapore - a pretty laughable suggestion given the state of affairs on the ground:
This does not happen even in communist regimes, only areas with intense political suppression. And then there's killing:
Why do you think there are so many young men who are extremely angry with Israel, to the point where they're happy to kidnap and kill Israeli civilians? Because in many real ways it is an open-air prison, where they're intensely suppressed, humiliated and occasionally shot at.
I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect. That would be my MENA policy for the West. But I'm disturbed by all the people who are astonished by Palestinian bloodlust and concluding that they're just innately savage and backwards, without bothering to inquire into why they're so angry. And then accusing pro-Palestinian people of being biased! They've probably scrolled through some of these enormously long webpages with 865 footnotes full of stories of houses getting demolished, farmland getting seized, endless military law, torture and so on. It's very understandable why people are pro-Palestinian if they put 'Israeli atrocities' into a search engine, just as it's understandable why people are pro-Israel if they watch certain TV channels or newspapers.
This kind of repression is not coming out of nowhere. Israel represses Gaza because if they don't, Gaza will use literally everything it can to kill Israelis.
You have to take the analysis back a step further - why does this cycle of repression and violence continue? Because Israel wants to exist and Gaza does not want Israel to exist. Without resolving that fundamental tension, letting up on the repression of Gaza does not reduce the violence, it increases it.
Israel wants to expand, into Palestine and in other directions. They do not want Gaza to exist. Hence settlements contra the internationally agreed borders (making new 'facts on the ground'), hence land confiscation... Palestine also wants to expand and wants to get rid of Israel, yet they lack the power to do so. Look at who has been expanding and who has been contracting - why should anyone feel sympathy for the growing nuclear power of $54,000 GDP per capita, vs the declining semi-recognized state <$2000 GDP per capita?
You see a bear mauling a badger and your sympathy is with the bear, who's existence is being threatened by a badger? The badger got in two or three hits while the bear was sleeping and this is international news (admittedly it is at least novel and exciting). But the bear's surely going to maul the badger even harder in response. The overall trend will remain, just as it has for the last fifty+ years.
Well, sympathy shouldn't be the basis for foreign policy. Israel has the power to inflict their will, in large part thanks to tireless US assistance. We should at least be somewhat objective with what's going on and not pretend that Israel faces any present existential threat from Palestine. The statelet facing existential threat is on the other side of the conflict.
If Hamas had agreed to those borders you might have a point. But they haven't. "From the river to the sea" is their refrain. Tel Aviv is an infringement of their claims just as much as the newest settlement is.
If there is to be peace, both sides need to come to the table and compromise. Hamas does not want to compromise. Thus, no peace.
Your argument boils down to we should take Palestine's side because they have been losing the conflict. That's silly. Sometimes the good guys win.
Note where I say 'Sympathy shouldn't be the basis of foreign policy' and 'I favour doing nothing, leaving things be, benign neglect.'
You are the one who wants to support a strong power bullying a weak one. My position is that the strong are doing fine on their own, they don't need any help doing what they're doing. You can't repress people and then act shocked when they repress you back.
Israel derails the farcical 'US-mediated' peace process at every opportunity. Who would compromise with people who have no intention of following through on their commitments, in a process overseen by a judge who's sleeping with one of the parties?
The Israelis make insulting offers where they retain control over Palestinian water, airspace, borders and prevent the Palestinians having an army and then say 'oh well we tried, the Palestinians just aren't interested in negotiations'.
What are the concessions that Israel could make that would end the conflict?
I'm not a Palestinian leader, how should I know? I suggest that if even Israeli leaders like Ben-Ami wouldn't have accepted the terms they were offering, then they weren't negotiating in good faith.
You could listen to what the Palestinians clearly and repeatedly say on the subject.
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