naraburns nihil supernum
6mo 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.
Before, during and after the 1947–1949 war, hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed. Geographic names throughout the country were erased and replaced with Hebrew names, sometimes derivatives of the historical Palestinian nomenclature, and sometimes new inventions. Numerous non-Jewish historical sites were destroyed, not just during the wars, but in a subsequent process over a number of decades. For example, over 80% of Palestinian village mosques have been destroyed, and artefacts have been removed from museums and archives.
You shouldn't be able to get away with this sort of thing right in the middle of the 20th century. After that, it's no wonder if there are Palestinians who will never accept Israel, and I also think Israel doesn't really have a leg to stand on to negotiate, as it's not really a legitimate state, just a top-down imposition.
Debating this elsewhere, some reactions were "Oh, but the Arabs wouldn't accept the partition plan", but why should they, why does the UN have the right to just impose that on them? Actually, the UN involvement just makes Israel seem like another High Modernist fuck up, another of the numerous errors of the first half of the 20th century.
Addressing something Ike Saul said below:
I don’t view Israelis and Brits as colonizers any more than the Assyrians or the Babylonians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Egyptians or the Ottomans who all battled over the same strip of land from as early as 800 years before Jesus’s time until now. The Jews who founded Israel just happened to have won the last big battle for it.
No, I am not moved by appeals to ancient history. That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
Also, you can't have your high officials expressing themselves like the guy above and like this:
Gallant said that he had ordered “a complete siege of the Gaza Strip,” which is home to 2.2 million Palestinians, nearly half of them children. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” he said. “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
Netanyahu:
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
You can't talk like this and then pretend you're the civilized party here! Though of course, looking at the so-called developed nations, especially America, maybe they don't talk like this, but they sure behave like it, so maybe there actually are no or few civilizations around.
But that doesn't make me think Israel is legitimate, it just makes me think the developed world is fake too.
It was almost inconceivable that this wasteland had been made by Jews, that my people and my religion could have created something so ungodly. I did not recognise myself in this mirror. Jews—like Mel Brooks, like Franz Kafka, like Albert Einstein, like Bruno Schulz, like Woody Allen, like the Coen brothers, like Walter Benjamin, like me. People with sexual hangups and a good sense of humour. Bookish men with overbearing mothers. Latkes and lokshen pudding. Candles on a Friday night. Jews, the guilty conscience of Europe, the bearers of messianic hope through every generation—reduced to this.
American support for an ethno-nationalist state can't last. All it takes is a sufficiently left-wing administration coming around to undo this by simply withdrawing support, which could easily happen in the next few decades.
Apologies if this is too much heat, but looking at the circumstances of Israel's founding, Israel genuinely just seems to me to be an injustice. Maybe Israel could have happened legitimately if they hadn't been in such a hurry, and maybe the hurry could have been excused because of the Holocaust, but not to the point that you pull a Nakba.
EDIT: And of course, Hamas' attacks were barbarous, but that doesn't really conjure up legitimacy for the state of Israel. Why should they?
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
You can't talk like this and then pretend you're the civilized party here! Though of course, looking at the so-called developed nations, especially America, maybe they don't talk like this, but they sure behave like it, so maybe there actually are no or few civilizations around.
I agree it sounds menacing but I parse that as: the strong don't get surprised by a devastating terrorist attack Hamas has been planning for 2 and a half years almost in the open and then get sucked basically irrecoverably into an invasion of Gaza that causes enormous collateral damage on both sides that will skyrocket animosity and anger for decades to come.
They obviously failed at this "strong" ideal here but IMO, part of security and stability means convincing criminals and terrorists that it's futile to even try to do bad things.
Debating this elsewhere, some reactions were "Oh, but the Arabs wouldn't accept the partition plan", but why should they, why does the UN have the right to just impose that on them?
The UN didn't. The British did, both as the internationally recognised rulers of Mandate Palestine, and by virtue of having (if we could be bothered, which in the post-WW2 environment we couldn't) sufficient men, ships and guns to determine the outcome. The legal status of the 1947 partition plan was that it was non-binding advice (it was a General Assembly resolution, and only the Security Council can issue binding resolutions and only under specific circumstances) to the British. When Israel's Arab neighbours (most of which were nominally British allies) rejected the plan, the British government declined to enforce it and we basically bugged out and let the Jews and Arabs fight.
Debating this elsewhere, some reactions were "Oh, but the Arabs wouldn't accept the partition plan", but why should they, why does the UN have the right to just impose that on them? Actually, the UN involvement just makes Israel seem like another High Modernist fuck up, another of the numerous errors of the first half of the 20th century.
The British had control of the territory, but had decided to step out and leave it to be governed by the people who lived there - fair enough, right?
But of course some of the people who lived there were Jews and some of them were Arabs. So the partition plan was an attempt to ensure that British withdrawal would not result in war and ethnic cleansing.
The Arabs refused to accept it, so we got war and ethnic cleansing. Their only problem with that was that they were on the losing side.
What do you suggest should have been done instead of the partition plan? Just step out and let the chips fall where they may? The result would have been the same.
What do you suggest should have been done instead of the partition plan?
Give the Jewish people Alaska, or something, and let them do their "right of return" thing there?
I can see their side of things on a lot of issues there, but I dare you to look me in the eye and say that they picked a reasonable location for "the only place in the world where it's safe to be a Jew".
That's an argument against the Jews moving to Israel. By the time of the partition plan, they had already moved there. The partition was an attempt to deal with that reality.
Now, the Jews could indeed have not moved to Palestine, that's absolutely true. But I do not believe for a second if they had not done so that they would have been granted a homeland in Alaska.
For pretty much the same reason that the US has not given Alaska to the Kurds or to the Roma or to any other people group. Countries typically make decisions in their own interests. It's in America's interests to maintain ownership of Alaska.
This is true in Palestine as well. The British Empire shrank significantly in the postwar period as Britain decided that maintaining the Empire had become too costly. British rule didn't end as a favour to the Jews, they would have pulled out regardless.
The formation of Israel was borne out of Jewish agency, not the gift of western powers. For that reason it's not really accurate to say that any coalition "gave" them Palestine. Yes there was a partition plan, but that plan was rejected by the Arab side who immediately started a war to take over the whole territory, so it's not like everyone said "Oh well, the UN decided, we better let it happen then".
If the Jews were to have a nation in Alaska, they would have needed to create it themselves - just as they created Israel in our reality. Realistically, this is always going to mean fighting whoever else thinks they have a claim. In the case of Israel it was Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In the alternate reality it would have been the USA. I think they made the right choice.
That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
I think the history of peaceful resolutions to conflicts (of which there are not many) is that the stopping point has to be now. You can't go back and re-litigate what happened 50 years ago or 20 or even 5. And this has problems of course. People who had their loved ones killed recently will not be ready to let it go. But if you want peace then you have to work on an agreement from where things are now.
Whether Israel should have been created after WW2 is irrelevant. Whether Israel should have been building new settlements or blockading Gaza is irrelevant. Whether surrounding nations should have attacked Israel in 1967 is irrelevant. Those things happened and are part of history. For a peaceful settlement enough people have to be willing to ignore that and negotiate based on what today looks like and on what they want tomorrow to look like.
Clearly that won't happen any time soon. Tensions are running too high. But at some point if there is to be a real long lasting peace deal (and that is by no means certain), then at some point in the future Israelis are going to have to get past the deaths that occurred at the weekend and Palestinians will have to get past the deaths happening now.
For Northern Ireland, they didn't try to roll back the clock to a prior point, the agreement is based upon agreeing that Northern Ireland is currently British, that this can change in the future with the democratic assent of the people and that individuals can be British citizens, Irish citizens or both. There is a lot more to it, but those are the main points that addressed what Nationalists wanted (to be Irish, for Northern Ireland to be able to be part of Ireland) and Unionists wanted (that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that they are and will remain British citizens).
As much as you have to learn history to not repeat it, sometimes that history will cause you to repeat it, if you cannot learn to let go of its emotional hold on your decision making. When it comes to deaths and hurt and war, if you want to create a peaceful outcome for the future, remember what happened, learn from it, let it inform you, but don't let it rule you.
And that is tough. It's especially tough if you have lost someone personally. It is hard to decouple when your father was killed by the IRA or your brother was shot by the UVF. Many Israelis and Palestinians will be out for blood to pay for the lives of their kin, that's an entirely normal human reaction, no matter who is to blame for the initial set of events which led us here.
No, I am not moved by appeals to ancient history. That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
They should have handled the situation differently back then, do anything other than the Nakba, but the way they acted shows they don't respect anything but their own power. Reading up more about the history, I'm just against Zionism as it was practiced, the people actually living there weren't liking it, and I really dislike that a displaced people could just decide to pass the buck on and displace other people, particularly when the ones doing the displacing are supposed to be civilized.
Either pack up and leave, or adopt a semi-pacifist policy towards Gaza: beef up the defenses around it, but there is to be no retaliation.
Even in the 70s the US was doing things in Vietnam that would be much more scandalous if it did today. There's been a lot of moral progress since the end of WW2 and I have trouble judging Israel's current population for things most of them had no hand in.
It sounds like your point boils down to: truly enlightened people would accept the sins of the past and surrender the place to the Palestinians and make a new life elsewhere. That sounds like a great standard but I don't think any people on Earth would rise to it.
(For a phantasmagoric twist, it would be nice if Palestinians were so touched by the offer that they offered to pack up instead and both sides had a eureka moment and moved towards a single state peace)
The question is not about the legitimacy of Israel. Israel was founded on blood like any other state in the world. Before that the territory was british, and before that it was ottoman (turkish) for centuries. So do you think Turkey was the legitimate owner of this territory? Anyway they didn't get it peacefully from the crusaders, who took it by force from the arabs. Those arabs took it by force from the byzantine empire. I don't think I need to continue.
Nowadays, Israel is a strong state and a nuclear power. Perhaps it has no right to exist but it will exist anyway. The earlier you accept it, the earlier a more acceptable solution than this awful status quo can be found.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
distic 6mo ago
Anyway they didn't get it peacefully from the crusaders
That's because they got it from the Mamluks, who got it from the Ayyubids, who got it from the crusaders. The sands of the Levant have been watered by a lot of blood.
Nothing wrong with having your own country with ethnic preference for your kin and discrimination against non-kin, strong border walls, and brutality against foreign intruders.
The issue is when Israeli/Israel supporters tell us we can't have it in our own country.
For example the ADL as highlighted by Carlson.
It's not the police brutality, the bombing of innocent civilians, the colonization... it's the hypocrisy.
Well, it wasn't clear from my comment but the brutality and the settlements are not necessary for Israel to exist, so they aren't justified at all. I mean, if you are searching for a peaceful solution and not to justify your own crimes.
Out of hate, perhaps? Or as a revenge? I'm pretty sure raping women is useless for the freedom of palestinians, it does not prevent hamas to do it. People do not always act in their best interests... if they did, there would be no suicide terror attack
My hypothesis for suicide attacks is that they would be a way to manage mental illness in the Middle-East.
While in the US disturbed, isolated teenagers may become fodder for gun control fed conspiracies, in the Middle-East they could serve as a tribute to the local islamists.
While the family may not necessarily approve of the insurgents' actions, giving away their failson would be better than any other family member or other forms of extortions.
If they do approve of the insurgency, then it may be the most effective way a particularly defective family member may contribute to it.
If the Arab states somehow really managed to unite, crush Israel, send the Jews packing and establish a river-to-sea Palestine, I have a distinct feeling that many people who believe that the "right of conquest" can actually be used as a justification for anything would suddenly no longer see it that way.
The question by CrashedPsychonaut was why the UN were in any way justified to authorize a partition and the simple answer is that they were and are not. But if you deny this „top-down imposition“, and you can’t rely on a hegemon to keep the status quo as the British are leaving, you will instead have a bottom-up solution: civil war.
I don’t think you understand the sheer elegance of the position. From the pov of some uninvolved party, it doesn’t matter who wins, it’s just about solving the problem. Coase theorem really. Just assign it to whoever holds it and defends it, no one has to do anything, and all aboard for the pareto optimum.
And I have a feeling that many people who have been crying about human rights violations Israel is perpetrating on Palestinians would range from absolutely blind to triumphant over human rights violations occurring in that scenario. Arguments are soldiers, what else is new?
Personally, I really do feel that the Arab nations are not civilized, so they play by different rules. It ticks me off more when a nation pretends to be of a superior sort, but then not actually live up to the supposed superiority.
Not really. He's just asking them to be honest. If Israel wants to become a blood-drenched Bronze Age state in response to their environment, they can. But if they do decide to take that path then they should be honest and open about it.
There is a possibility for something truly great that would shock the world here: do nothing. Just beef up defenses around Gaza so they don't catch them with their pants down again, but actually demonstrate what the high road looks like. Perhaps some will claim they have taken the high road many times, but I'm not so convinced.
Locking Gaza down is probably the right tactical decision (urban warfare sucks, urban warfare against military willing to used ununiformed and armed troops alongside an armed civilian populace that hates you sucks even more), but it's not politically viable (there's no appetite among the Israeli population nor the IDF would accept orders that don't cost enemies blood; until the hostages are returned or known dead kinetic actions are going to take too high a priority) and more importantly it doesn't really work over the long term.
Beefing up defenses around and boxing in Gaza still gets you kilodeaths among Gazans, they're just going to die to less kinetic means, and be more photogenic (and often even more innocent!) victims. Gaza just doesn't have the infrastructure to maintain consistent food, water, medicine, and power, Hamas isn't interested in developing that infrastructure, no other nearby country is interested in doing so (or can be trusted to do so without providing combat or dual-use materials), Israel can not maintain connection into the country without presenting new vulnerabilities. You're either kicking the can down the road until another high-profile civilian hostage crisis shows up, or somewhere in May of next year international pressure (correctly!) notices that you're basically starving hundreds of young children a day.
It's wild that water pipes are now dual-use technology. There's promotional video the Gazans put out themselves of them digging up functional water/sewer pipe infrastructure and fashioning them into rockets that are then fired into Israel. What on Earth can you do with such a deranged culture? The Gazans hate Israelis more than they love water, and they're getting exactly what they want.
It does seem to me that Israel is going to try to use this incident to fully remove Palestinian from Israel forever. That’s actually the 4-D chess thing where Israel new of the attack and let it happen.
Honestly most of the regimes in the area probably want the issue settled and won’t care that much. The Saudis want to be friends for geopolitical aims. The Iranians if I had to guess don’t give a shit about Hamas other than they want to use them to prevent Arab-Israel friendship.
So where do the 2 million Gazans go? Mass emigration is essentially impossible. No one wants these people. Genocide is even more unlikely as it would result in the withdrawal of U.S. support and, probably, the end of the Israeli state in the following decades.
Honestly not a clue. I mean they are like a hot potato no one wants them. Probably most likely is refugee camp in Egypt. Then they are stuck with them.
However many Palestinians survive the months long siege and bombardment and ground invasion will have to be dealt with somehow, and it sure won’t be by letting them roam through Israel. Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan don’t want them either.
I’ve got a pretty healthy skepticism for any theory which relies on that level of “4-D chess.” Israel doesn’t appear to have needed a manufactured consensus to get Gaza to this point; the cost-benefit is all wrong even before asking if there’s a simpler explanation.
I am willing to bet that Israel does not go further than this in an ethnic cleansing of the strip. Military action yes, continued blockade yes, targeted killings of civilians, no.
More concretely, my wager is they are asking civilians to clear out of North Gaza because they plan to occupy it and root out and destroy all of the tunnels and hopefully destroy supply caches and find hostages and treat everyone who gets in the way as Hamas. I expect they would leave when this mission is accomplished.
Zionists were only given the territory of Palestine as a nation (rather than a home for a small segment of Jewry) because of the abundance of terrorist attacks that Zionists committed against the British, in some cases slaughtering civil servants and kidnapping politicians, in one case blowing up a boat of 250 Jewish refugees as a false flag (the refugee ship Patria). Once they secured the nation of Israel for themselves, they used brutal terrorism and psychological warfare on the Palestinians to get them to flee. They killed innocents in a village called Deir Yassin, audio recorded their cries for help, and then drove loud “sound trucks” around Palestinian villages which played the cries of women and children while threatening nuclear warfare and poison gas attacks —
The Jews, too, used Deir Yassin's memory effectively, both against the Irgun and Stern Gang and against the Arabs. Jacques de Reznier of the International Red Cross said, "News of Deir Yassin promoted a widespread terror which the Jews always skillfully maintained. "The Jews used Deir Yassin extensively in their psychological warfare campaigns designed to make the Arabs quit their lands. Horror recordings and sound trucks accompanied Jewish attacks. “Shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wails of sirens and the clangs of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic, 'Remember Deir Yassin' and 'Save your souls, all ye faithful! Flee for your lives! The Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons! Run for your lives in the name of Allah!"
There's a debate on whether Deir Yassin was really a 'massacre'. both the Jews and Arabs trumpeted up the atrocities, the Jews to encourage other Arabs to flee, the Arabs to encourage other Arabs to stand and fight. the Jews turned out to be correct.
Every group in Palestine had cause for spreading the atrocity narrative. The Irgun and Lehi wished to frighten the Arabs into leaving Palestine; the Arabs wished to provoke an international response; the Haganah wished to tarnish the Irgun and Lehi; and the Arabs wished to malign both the Jews and their cause.
Hazem Nuseibeh, the news editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service at the time of the attack, gave an interview to the BBC in 1998. He spoke about a discussion he had with Hussayn Khalidi, the deputy chairman of the Higher Arab Executive in Jerusalem, shortly after the killings: "I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story. He said, 'We must make the most of this.' So he wrote a press release, stating that at Deir Yassin, children were murdered, pregnant women were raped, all sorts of atrocities."
Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun at the time of the attack, though not present at the village, wrote in 1977: The enemy propaganda was designed to besmirch our name. In the result it helped us. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah, was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the main road; and their fall, together with the capture of al-Qastal by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces. Not what happened at Deir Yassin, but what was invented about Deir Yassin, helped to carve the way to our decisive victories on the battlefield ... The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.
In that unsearchable 270 page master’s thesis from the ‘70s, what page is your quote from? Did you just happen to stumble upon this, and read it at your leisure?
It is searchable for me on iOS. Actually it was a top search when I plugged in “Zionist terrorism Israel”, because I wanted to understand how the early Zionists used terrorism and whether it was comparable to Hamas actions. I realized that some American gentile’s military thesis from the 70s is almost certainly less biased than the leading Israeli or Palestinian histories, so why not read it? It’s all cited anyway. My passage is from page 81.
And yes I read most of it, it’s legitimately interesting, would recommend
You’ve just now looked up the ‘48 war, then came up with a bunch of quotes to support your new-found opinion that just happens to mirror the same talking points as every other pro-Hamas person in the world? Is that supposed to be believable?
That actually is the truth yeah, I didn't have a particularly strong opinion on this, though I suppose I was never pro-Israel. I'm not pro-Hamas either, although, to be fair, I don't know who has the moral authority to actually punish them. Possibly only the Palestinians themselves. Reading up more on the history of Zionism prior to the partition, I'm increasingly of the view this was a bad idea. Two of the quotes came from The Intercept article I linked to, Netanyahu's from this thread, and the Sam Kriss article I read months ago when it came out.
Frankly, I don’t believe you. You’ve already stated that you think Israel “should never have existed”, and that we should “forgive Hitler” - whatever forgiveness to a dead man even means. Maybe he should apologize first. Of course, I have no way to prove that one way or another.
But if you really are new to the subject, I ask you to consider: before 1947, Jews were spread out all over mandatory Palestine. In Hebron, in east Jerusalem, in Kfar Etzion in Samaria. After 1949, every place conquered by the Jordanians and Egyptians - formerly mandatory Palestine - suddenly became judenfrei. The Jews were all mysteriously gone. On the other side of the armistice line, there still existed a mixed population. In fact, this happened all over the Middle East, where Jewish communities would suddenly vanish from Muslim countries. So tell me, please, why do you think these countries have any right to exist? They also have their own sectarian violence going on until today, of course, where minorities have not been totally wiped out yet.
(That article is awful, by the way. The kind of foreign misunderstanding that’s close to getting it, but then misses the mark so widely it almost makes me want to defend the government I was just protesting against. He actually thinks anyone wants to shut down electricity on Shabbat? Jesus, how about shutting up?)
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Notes -
So I looked up more on this Nakba:
You shouldn't be able to get away with this sort of thing right in the middle of the 20th century. After that, it's no wonder if there are Palestinians who will never accept Israel, and I also think Israel doesn't really have a leg to stand on to negotiate, as it's not really a legitimate state, just a top-down imposition.
Debating this elsewhere, some reactions were "Oh, but the Arabs wouldn't accept the partition plan", but why should they, why does the UN have the right to just impose that on them? Actually, the UN involvement just makes Israel seem like another High Modernist fuck up, another of the numerous errors of the first half of the 20th century.
Addressing something Ike Saul said below:
No, I am not moved by appeals to ancient history. That cycle has to end at some point, and the end of WW II seems like a good stopping point for that sort of shenanigan.
Also, you can't have your high officials expressing themselves like the guy above and like this:
Netanyahu:
You can't talk like this and then pretend you're the civilized party here! Though of course, looking at the so-called developed nations, especially America, maybe they don't talk like this, but they sure behave like it, so maybe there actually are no or few civilizations around.
But that doesn't make me think Israel is legitimate, it just makes me think the developed world is fake too.
Sam Kriss had a great article on Israel from some time ago:
American support for an ethno-nationalist state can't last. All it takes is a sufficiently left-wing administration coming around to undo this by simply withdrawing support, which could easily happen in the next few decades.
Apologies if this is too much heat, but looking at the circumstances of Israel's founding, Israel genuinely just seems to me to be an injustice. Maybe Israel could have happened legitimately if they hadn't been in such a hurry, and maybe the hurry could have been excused because of the Holocaust, but not to the point that you pull a Nakba.
EDIT: And of course, Hamas' attacks were barbarous, but that doesn't really conjure up legitimacy for the state of Israel. Why should they?
I agree it sounds menacing but I parse that as: the strong don't get surprised by a devastating terrorist attack Hamas has been planning for 2 and a half years almost in the open and then get sucked basically irrecoverably into an invasion of Gaza that causes enormous collateral damage on both sides that will skyrocket animosity and anger for decades to come.
They obviously failed at this "strong" ideal here but IMO, part of security and stability means convincing criminals and terrorists that it's futile to even try to do bad things.
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The UN didn't. The British did, both as the internationally recognised rulers of Mandate Palestine, and by virtue of having (if we could be bothered, which in the post-WW2 environment we couldn't) sufficient men, ships and guns to determine the outcome. The legal status of the 1947 partition plan was that it was non-binding advice (it was a General Assembly resolution, and only the Security Council can issue binding resolutions and only under specific circumstances) to the British. When Israel's Arab neighbours (most of which were nominally British allies) rejected the plan, the British government declined to enforce it and we basically bugged out and let the Jews and Arabs fight.
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The British had control of the territory, but had decided to step out and leave it to be governed by the people who lived there - fair enough, right?
But of course some of the people who lived there were Jews and some of them were Arabs. So the partition plan was an attempt to ensure that British withdrawal would not result in war and ethnic cleansing.
The Arabs refused to accept it, so we got war and ethnic cleansing. Their only problem with that was that they were on the losing side.
What do you suggest should have been done instead of the partition plan? Just step out and let the chips fall where they may? The result would have been the same.
Give the Jewish people Alaska, or something, and let them do their "right of return" thing there?
I can see their side of things on a lot of issues there, but I dare you to look me in the eye and say that they picked a reasonable location for "the only place in the world where it's safe to be a Jew".
Should've been part of Germany, if anything; they were the ones that started the shit that go-round.
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That's an argument against the Jews moving to Israel. By the time of the partition plan, they had already moved there. The partition was an attempt to deal with that reality.
Now, the Jews could indeed have not moved to Palestine, that's absolutely true. But I do not believe for a second if they had not done so that they would have been granted a homeland in Alaska.
Why? It's a marginal state controlled by the same coalition that gave them Palestine.
For pretty much the same reason that the US has not given Alaska to the Kurds or to the Roma or to any other people group. Countries typically make decisions in their own interests. It's in America's interests to maintain ownership of Alaska.
This is true in Palestine as well. The British Empire shrank significantly in the postwar period as Britain decided that maintaining the Empire had become too costly. British rule didn't end as a favour to the Jews, they would have pulled out regardless.
The formation of Israel was borne out of Jewish agency, not the gift of western powers. For that reason it's not really accurate to say that any coalition "gave" them Palestine. Yes there was a partition plan, but that plan was rejected by the Arab side who immediately started a war to take over the whole territory, so it's not like everyone said "Oh well, the UN decided, we better let it happen then".
If the Jews were to have a nation in Alaska, they would have needed to create it themselves - just as they created Israel in our reality. Realistically, this is always going to mean fighting whoever else thinks they have a claim. In the case of Israel it was Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. In the alternate reality it would have been the USA. I think they made the right choice.
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I think the history of peaceful resolutions to conflicts (of which there are not many) is that the stopping point has to be now. You can't go back and re-litigate what happened 50 years ago or 20 or even 5. And this has problems of course. People who had their loved ones killed recently will not be ready to let it go. But if you want peace then you have to work on an agreement from where things are now.
Whether Israel should have been created after WW2 is irrelevant. Whether Israel should have been building new settlements or blockading Gaza is irrelevant. Whether surrounding nations should have attacked Israel in 1967 is irrelevant. Those things happened and are part of history. For a peaceful settlement enough people have to be willing to ignore that and negotiate based on what today looks like and on what they want tomorrow to look like.
Clearly that won't happen any time soon. Tensions are running too high. But at some point if there is to be a real long lasting peace deal (and that is by no means certain), then at some point in the future Israelis are going to have to get past the deaths that occurred at the weekend and Palestinians will have to get past the deaths happening now.
For Northern Ireland, they didn't try to roll back the clock to a prior point, the agreement is based upon agreeing that Northern Ireland is currently British, that this can change in the future with the democratic assent of the people and that individuals can be British citizens, Irish citizens or both. There is a lot more to it, but those are the main points that addressed what Nationalists wanted (to be Irish, for Northern Ireland to be able to be part of Ireland) and Unionists wanted (that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and that they are and will remain British citizens).
As much as you have to learn history to not repeat it, sometimes that history will cause you to repeat it, if you cannot learn to let go of its emotional hold on your decision making. When it comes to deaths and hurt and war, if you want to create a peaceful outcome for the future, remember what happened, learn from it, let it inform you, but don't let it rule you.
And that is tough. It's especially tough if you have lost someone personally. It is hard to decouple when your father was killed by the IRA or your brother was shot by the UVF. Many Israelis and Palestinians will be out for blood to pay for the lives of their kin, that's an entirely normal human reaction, no matter who is to blame for the initial set of events which led us here.
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What does this mean? The Jews in 2023 should just pack up and leave Israel for other countries because WW2 was supposed to be the end of these shenanigans? Why can't you say this to Palestinians?
(I agree stuff like "it's time to be cruel" isn't a good look)
They should have handled the situation differently back then, do anything other than the Nakba, but the way they acted shows they don't respect anything but their own power. Reading up more about the history, I'm just against Zionism as it was practiced, the people actually living there weren't liking it, and I really dislike that a displaced people could just decide to pass the buck on and displace other people, particularly when the ones doing the displacing are supposed to be civilized.
Either pack up and leave, or adopt a semi-pacifist policy towards Gaza: beef up the defenses around it, but there is to be no retaliation.
Even in the 70s the US was doing things in Vietnam that would be much more scandalous if it did today. There's been a lot of moral progress since the end of WW2 and I have trouble judging Israel's current population for things most of them had no hand in.
It sounds like your point boils down to: truly enlightened people would accept the sins of the past and surrender the place to the Palestinians and make a new life elsewhere. That sounds like a great standard but I don't think any people on Earth would rise to it.
(For a phantasmagoric twist, it would be nice if Palestinians were so touched by the offer that they offered to pack up instead and both sides had a eureka moment and moved towards a single state peace)
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The question is not about the legitimacy of Israel. Israel was founded on blood like any other state in the world. Before that the territory was british, and before that it was ottoman (turkish) for centuries. So do you think Turkey was the legitimate owner of this territory? Anyway they didn't get it peacefully from the crusaders, who took it by force from the arabs. Those arabs took it by force from the byzantine empire. I don't think I need to continue.
Nowadays, Israel is a strong state and a nuclear power. Perhaps it has no right to exist but it will exist anyway. The earlier you accept it, the earlier a more acceptable solution than this awful status quo can be found.
That's because they got it from the Mamluks, who got it from the Ayyubids, who got it from the crusaders. The sands of the Levant have been watered by a lot of blood.
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Nothing wrong with having your own country with ethnic preference for your kin and discrimination against non-kin, strong border walls, and brutality against foreign intruders. The issue is when Israeli/Israel supporters tell us we can't have it in our own country. For example the ADL as highlighted by Carlson. It's not the police brutality, the bombing of innocent civilians, the colonization... it's the hypocrisy.
Well, it wasn't clear from my comment but the brutality and the settlements are not necessary for Israel to exist, so they aren't justified at all. I mean, if you are searching for a peaceful solution and not to justify your own crimes.
Are you sure about that? They may be the most pragmatic solution after all. Why do you think they're doing it if they're not necessary?
Out of hate, perhaps? Or as a revenge? I'm pretty sure raping women is useless for the freedom of palestinians, it does not prevent hamas to do it. People do not always act in their best interests... if they did, there would be no suicide terror attack
My hypothesis for suicide attacks is that they would be a way to manage mental illness in the Middle-East.
While in the US disturbed, isolated teenagers may become fodder for gun control fed conspiracies, in the Middle-East they could serve as a tribute to the local islamists. While the family may not necessarily approve of the insurgents' actions, giving away their failson would be better than any other family member or other forms of extortions. If they do approve of the insurgency, then it may be the most effective way a particularly defective family member may contribute to it.
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Because the alternative was what happened: The right of conquest.
If the Arab states somehow really managed to unite, crush Israel, send the Jews packing and establish a river-to-sea Palestine, I have a distinct feeling that many people who believe that the "right of conquest" can actually be used as a justification for anything would suddenly no longer see it that way.
The question by CrashedPsychonaut was why the UN were in any way justified to authorize a partition and the simple answer is that they were and are not. But if you deny this „top-down imposition“, and you can’t rely on a hegemon to keep the status quo as the British are leaving, you will instead have a bottom-up solution: civil war.
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I don’t think you understand the sheer elegance of the position. From the pov of some uninvolved party, it doesn’t matter who wins, it’s just about solving the problem. Coase theorem really. Just assign it to whoever holds it and defends it, no one has to do anything, and all aboard for the pareto optimum.
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And I have a feeling that many people who have been crying about human rights violations Israel is perpetrating on Palestinians would range from absolutely blind to triumphant over human rights violations occurring in that scenario. Arguments are soldiers, what else is new?
Personally, I really do feel that the Arab nations are not civilized, so they play by different rules. It ticks me off more when a nation pretends to be of a superior sort, but then not actually live up to the supposed superiority.
At which point you're insisting Israel behave according to Marquis de Queensbury rules in a street fight. It makes no sense.
Not really. He's just asking them to be honest. If Israel wants to become a blood-drenched Bronze Age state in response to their environment, they can. But if they do decide to take that path then they should be honest and open about it.
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I think it’s still very unclear what Israel is going to do, honestly.
There is a possibility for something truly great that would shock the world here: do nothing. Just beef up defenses around Gaza so they don't catch them with their pants down again, but actually demonstrate what the high road looks like. Perhaps some will claim they have taken the high road many times, but I'm not so convinced.
Locking Gaza down is probably the right tactical decision (urban warfare sucks, urban warfare against military willing to used ununiformed and armed troops alongside an armed civilian populace that hates you sucks even more), but it's not politically viable (there's no appetite among the Israeli population nor the IDF would accept orders that don't cost enemies blood; until the hostages are returned or known dead kinetic actions are going to take too high a priority) and more importantly it doesn't really work over the long term.
Beefing up defenses around and boxing in Gaza still gets you kilodeaths among Gazans, they're just going to die to less kinetic means, and be more photogenic (and often even more innocent!) victims. Gaza just doesn't have the infrastructure to maintain consistent food, water, medicine, and power, Hamas isn't interested in developing that infrastructure, no other nearby country is interested in doing so (or can be trusted to do so without providing combat or dual-use materials), Israel can not maintain connection into the country without presenting new vulnerabilities. You're either kicking the can down the road until another high-profile civilian hostage crisis shows up, or somewhere in May of next year international pressure (correctly!) notices that you're basically starving hundreds of young children a day.
It's wild that water pipes are now dual-use technology. There's promotional video the Gazans put out themselves of them digging up functional water/sewer pipe infrastructure and fashioning them into rockets that are then fired into Israel. What on Earth can you do with such a deranged culture? The Gazans hate Israelis more than they love water, and they're getting exactly what they want.
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Is it? They’re going to invade and set up a puppet government.
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It does seem to me that Israel is going to try to use this incident to fully remove Palestinian from Israel forever. That’s actually the 4-D chess thing where Israel new of the attack and let it happen.
Honestly most of the regimes in the area probably want the issue settled and won’t care that much. The Saudis want to be friends for geopolitical aims. The Iranians if I had to guess don’t give a shit about Hamas other than they want to use them to prevent Arab-Israel friendship.
So where do the 2 million Gazans go? Mass emigration is essentially impossible. No one wants these people. Genocide is even more unlikely as it would result in the withdrawal of U.S. support and, probably, the end of the Israeli state in the following decades.
Honestly not a clue. I mean they are like a hot potato no one wants them. Probably most likely is refugee camp in Egypt. Then they are stuck with them.
Egypt won’t let them in.
However many Palestinians survive the months long siege and bombardment and ground invasion will have to be dealt with somehow, and it sure won’t be by letting them roam through Israel. Lebanon and Egypt and Jordan don’t want them either.
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Want to bet?
I’ve got a pretty healthy skepticism for any theory which relies on that level of “4-D chess.” Israel doesn’t appear to have needed a manufactured consensus to get Gaza to this point; the cost-benefit is all wrong even before asking if there’s a simpler explanation.
I am willing to bet that Israel does not go further than this in an ethnic cleansing of the strip. Military action yes, continued blockade yes, targeted killings of civilians, no.
More concretely, my wager is they are asking civilians to clear out of North Gaza because they plan to occupy it and root out and destroy all of the tunnels and hopefully destroy supply caches and find hostages and treat everyone who gets in the way as Hamas. I expect they would leave when this mission is accomplished.
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Sorry misworded. I don’t think they played 4-D chess and were just confused. I do think they met try to push for expulsion now.
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I was just reading an interesting paper last night about Zionist terrorism in the lead-up to the founding of Israel:
Zionist Terrorism and the Establishment of Israel (pdf warning)
Zionists were only given the territory of Palestine as a nation (rather than a home for a small segment of Jewry) because of the abundance of terrorist attacks that Zionists committed against the British, in some cases slaughtering civil servants and kidnapping politicians, in one case blowing up a boat of 250 Jewish refugees as a false flag (the refugee ship Patria). Once they secured the nation of Israel for themselves, they used brutal terrorism and psychological warfare on the Palestinians to get them to flee. They killed innocents in a village called Deir Yassin, audio recorded their cries for help, and then drove loud “sound trucks” around Palestinian villages which played the cries of women and children while threatening nuclear warfare and poison gas attacks —
There's a debate on whether Deir Yassin was really a 'massacre'. both the Jews and Arabs trumpeted up the atrocities, the Jews to encourage other Arabs to flee, the Arabs to encourage other Arabs to stand and fight. the Jews turned out to be correct.
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In that unsearchable 270 page master’s thesis from the ‘70s, what page is your quote from? Did you just happen to stumble upon this, and read it at your leisure?
It is searchable for me on iOS. Actually it was a top search when I plugged in “Zionist terrorism Israel”, because I wanted to understand how the early Zionists used terrorism and whether it was comparable to Hamas actions. I realized that some American gentile’s military thesis from the 70s is almost certainly less biased than the leading Israeli or Palestinian histories, so why not read it? It’s all cited anyway. My passage is from page 81.
And yes I read most of it, it’s legitimately interesting, would recommend
Very impressive, honestly.
So what is your position re: group responsibility? Are the Israelis of the time, or even today, accountable for the alleged actions of a few?
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Re your comment “it has to stop somewhere” why not today as opposed to 70 years ago?
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You’ve just now looked up the ‘48 war, then came up with a bunch of quotes to support your new-found opinion that just happens to mirror the same talking points as every other pro-Hamas person in the world? Is that supposed to be believable?
That actually is the truth yeah, I didn't have a particularly strong opinion on this, though I suppose I was never pro-Israel. I'm not pro-Hamas either, although, to be fair, I don't know who has the moral authority to actually punish them. Possibly only the Palestinians themselves. Reading up more on the history of Zionism prior to the partition, I'm increasingly of the view this was a bad idea. Two of the quotes came from The Intercept article I linked to, Netanyahu's from this thread, and the Sam Kriss article I read months ago when it came out.
Frankly, I don’t believe you. You’ve already stated that you think Israel “should never have existed”, and that we should “forgive Hitler” - whatever forgiveness to a dead man even means. Maybe he should apologize first. Of course, I have no way to prove that one way or another.
But if you really are new to the subject, I ask you to consider: before 1947, Jews were spread out all over mandatory Palestine. In Hebron, in east Jerusalem, in Kfar Etzion in Samaria. After 1949, every place conquered by the Jordanians and Egyptians - formerly mandatory Palestine - suddenly became judenfrei. The Jews were all mysteriously gone. On the other side of the armistice line, there still existed a mixed population. In fact, this happened all over the Middle East, where Jewish communities would suddenly vanish from Muslim countries. So tell me, please, why do you think these countries have any right to exist? They also have their own sectarian violence going on until today, of course, where minorities have not been totally wiped out yet.
(That article is awful, by the way. The kind of foreign misunderstanding that’s close to getting it, but then misses the mark so widely it almost makes me want to defend the government I was just protesting against. He actually thinks anyone wants to shut down electricity on Shabbat? Jesus, how about shutting up?)
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