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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.

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I'm trying to imagine how we'd behave if every Mexican was actually really angry about white settlement of the Americas. Lets say hostilities between Mexicans and the rest of the US never subsided, and Texas and California were disputed states with constant violent flare-ups. Life in Texas and California dragged behind quality of life in the rest of the US and Mexicans living in those territories were pretty miserable and Mexican terrorism and US heavy-handed response was a fact of life.

Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough. To put the numbers in Israel proportions, this would be up to 160 million Mexicans in the global diaspora potentially settling the entire US.

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of how Texas and California were litigated, I don't see the US capitulating to terms like that. If Mexicans were engaging in cross-border terrorism against civilian targets I can see the chances going from vanishingly improbable to fucking never.

This seems to be the position Israel is in.

Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough.

In fairness Mexico only had those territories formally for around 15 years and only had a few thousand settlers across them (many of them likely descended at least partially from European settlers themselves). The Palestinians have much longer ties to their homeland and were more recently displaced, within living memory of many people. Like you say though, Israel will assuredly not agree to their maximalist demands and is unlikely to care much about their history one way or the other in the face of terrorism.

On the other hand, Native American peoples (including, say, Mexicans?) have an ancestral claim to North America that goes back many thousands of years. Perhaps hundreds of thousands while USians barely have any by contrast.

while USians

We're to be referred to as Americans, thank you.

I prefer Estadounidenses. Because I love bilingual puns.

Yeah that's probably a good analogy.