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Notes -
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
Why should Gaza accept being locked in a small open air prison in which they are under a blockade? Why should they accept continuously expanding Israeli settlements that slowly ethnically cleanse Palestinians? Why should they accept being second class citizens on their ancestor's land compared to recent arrivals from Eastern Europe? The option of cooperating with being ethnically cleansed because it will be nicer doesn't really make sense.
The best comparison to Palestine is the French in Algeria. France entered Algeria in 1830 and stayed for 132 years. That is 57 years longer than Israel has existed. There were 1.6 million ethnic French in Algeria. Many had lived there for generations when they moved home.
There are 2.3 million people in Gaza, making it a large city, 3.2 million on the west bank and 2.1 million arab citizens of Israel. Furthermore, there is also Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have a young population and a growing population. Their best bet is to do what the Algerians did in the 50s and 60s, simply make occupying them unsustainable. The French shot lots of Algerians, jailed lots of Algerians and won almost every battle. The Palestinians are not going to run out of people. Even with 20 000 dead in Gaza over the past 2.5 months, 15 000 have been born during the same time. The Palestinians are fighting an existential threat and have to push back continuously.
The Iraq war was a massive drain on the US. Israel has about 5.7 million jews not counting Haredis who don't pull their weight. They are not going to be able to fight an equivalent to the Iraq war. The Palestinians have a genuine chance of making Israel unsustainable. They can force Israel to have a huge prison population, to have a continuously mobilized army and to be in a constant state of turmoil.
They shouldn't. They should become a normal nation like the rest of us. The only reason they are under a weak blockade (its almost insulting to call it that TBH) is because they keep making war with their neighbor.
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The Iraq War wasn’t even the tiniest drain on the US’ resources. The US military had 1.4 million personnel in 2003, only 130,000 were required to totally destroy the Iraqi state.
So a tiny fraction of 2% of GDP was being spent on Iraq. Some pro-US analysts estimate Russia might spend 10% of GDP on the Ukraine war in 2023 all-in.
This is before considering that the Israeli advantage actually increases with drone warfare and automated defense tech, which has to be smuggled into Gaza but which can be publicly bought or even produced in huge quantities in Israel, which is also a country where the biggest constraint on offensive warfare is an extremely low casualty tolerance.
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It pains me to read these tired talking points on the Motte of all places. This reads like the equivalent a woke college student listing off their usual combination of strings handed down to them from the hivemind.
They created that situation for themselves by not chilling down with the suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket fire. It's like yeah their situation sucks, but no one asks why are they in the situation to begin with.
Because they launched 3 wars with help of their coreligionists and lost all of them. Starting a war hands you down the downsides of losing it.
20% of Israel is Arab. Ethnically no different than Palestinians. They got work visas and got entires into Israel, maybbe after a decade or two with no constant rocket fire and terrorist attacks, that work visa program could have turned into a permanent residency program.
As for the rest of your comment. You are right. Israels location is deeply deeply unfortunate.
This adds heat to your post, but no light. It's totally unnecessary. Please don't.
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While opposing the wokest country in the middle east that is flooding Europe with migrants? The hivemind on this subject is the neo-con war machine and the media dominated by AIPAC and the ADL pushing for more war in the middle east and more refugees to Europe.
Why would they accept being put in Gaza with their country split into two pieces? Why would they accept not being able to live where they or their parents grew up? If the Israelis could stop the occupying, they wouldn't get hit with rockets.
Again, why would they accept becoming refugees and not fight back? They have seen how Israeli zoomer soldiers hide in the bathroom and cry while trying to defend a strong point from an attack from a lightly armed militia. There is nothing that says they can't fight back and win. Fighting a large tank battle might not have been the best option. Fighting with FPV-drones, rockets and ambushes might work. Iraq and Afghanistan are great examples of how globalists were removed from a country by continuous small attacks. The Palestinian population has grown extensively since then. The Irish lost a bunch of armed conflicts against the British before most of Ireland became independent.
Clearly, the Likud was instead creating a refugee crisis on Europe's boarder by expanding settlements and slowly growing Israel. Unfortunately for Netanyahu, his population is increasingly consisting of a woke people, haredi fundamentalists and muslims.
Are you talking about Syria or the US? I’m honestly having trouble parsing this line.
Israel is flooding Europe with migrants. Israel has been economically blockading Syria, regularly bombing Syria and has armed all sorts of jihadist groups in Syria. Meanwhile, IsraAID is standing on the beaches of Greece and helping the migrants get into Europe.
Syria had a civil war which sent millions of refugees to Europe. It has nothing to do with Israel, and everything to do with its own regime and sectarian strife.
Israel is not capable of blockading Syria. It makes no geographical sense anyway. Here’s a map.
I haven’t heard of IsraAID until now, so I can’t comment on who they are. I do know that most Israelis would rather Europe not accept any Muslims, as it makes Europe less welcoming to Jews. What Europe chooses to do, however, is their own choice even if I think it’s a dumb choice.
https://www.haaretz.com/2013-09-07/ty-article/aipac-pushing-hard-for-syria-action/0000017f-f82d-d887-a7ff-f8eddf280000
https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-gives-secret-aid-to-syrian-rebels-1497813430
Not to mention regular bombing and missile campaigns against syria.
Not the view of ADL, AIPAC, jewish internet defence league or any other mainstream jewish organisation.
None of those are Israelis. Are you replacing “Israeli” with “Jewish” in your mind?
Also, again Syrian refugees are the result of sectarian violence, not US action. Israel is not the US, in any case, even if it were Jewish influence somehow forcing the US to act.
Israel will bomb Syria if needed, especially now with the civil war chaos, but those don’t send refugees to Europe.
Do you concede that Israel did not blockade Syria? Can you explain what made you think it did?
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Uh, because they lost the war(s)? They lost the political battle and the actual battle. Where are the Germans firing rockets at Czechoslovakia and demanding an absolutely extraordinary right of return? Why would you ever grant a right of return to a people supporting homicidal maniacs? There's three generations of people born in Gaza now.
Gaza was not occupied by Israel until the tanks rolled in a month ago. In fact, Israeli settlements were removed from Gaza in the interest of peace. It's clear how that worked out.
Germans can move to modern day countries that came from Czechoslovakia. There is no reason for them to accept ethnic cleansing. There is no reason for the rest of us to accept an Israeli caused refugee crisis.
It was under a blockade which was an act of war. Hundreds of the attackers who enforced this illegal blockade got what was coming to them. If Gaza is under blockade there is no reason for the people of Gaza not to break it.
Palestinians can also move to any country that will let them in. There aren't very many of those because, unlike the Germans, they have burned their bridges in every nearby Arab state.
Lol, okay, hope they are enjoying not accepting it and getting their shit kicked in.
It was under blockade because they literally started shooting rockets at Israel. If they hadn't elected a genocidal party and started a war with the preeminent military power in the region, gaza could have been the Singapore of the Levant at this point.
Why would they move to another country? Why would the rest of the world want an arabic refugee crisis. The best option is not to have millions of Arab refugees, the best option is for millions of Arabs to stay put.
The Algerians experienced that, now they have a free state.
Wonder why people who were shoved into a tiny open air prison while their country was cut in two and is continuously shrinking due to settlements don't fight back. If Israel hadn't been an expansionist aggresor they wouldn't have a rocket problem.
You tell me - you brought up Germans moving to modern day czechoslovakia.
Pacifying the algerians was not an existential issue for France. The existence of Hamas is an existential issue for Israel.
Daily reminder that:
gaza and the West Bank were not Israeli territory until the arabs started and lost the six day war
Israel occupied the entire Sinai and returned it to Egypt
Egypt did not want Gaza back
Jordan stripped West Bank residents of citizenship
it wasn't an open air prison until Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and Hamas started to fire rockets at Israel
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Losers of history get killed, that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it’s always going to be. Do you have a unique issue with this? Nothing that’s happened to the Palestinians hasn’t happened a thousand times to million different tribes through history.
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Both the IRA (and general Irish independence) and the Taliban could easily have been crushed if the relevant armies were willing to be brutal enough. The US could leave Afghanistan a couple thousand lives lighter and a trillion dollars poorer, but otherwise unscathed. The Israelis know it’s a fight for their survival, there is no backstop. The same applies to Vietnam, too. It was never a question of capability, only of will and to some extent geopolitical trade offs.
Peace in Ireland also, of course, involved the British government very overtly constraining unionist militants who were very well armed and who would have made any military attempt by Irish nationalists to take Ulster extremely painful, bloody and quite possibly unsuccessful. The best example of successful terrorist tactics is actually Algeria, except that even in that case the French could have won, De Gaulle just decided that enforcing permanent apartheid status on Algerian Muslims for the sake of the pieds noir was inefficient and risked the socialists, if they ever came to power in France, giving all Algerians French citizenship. Israel doesn’t have a France to return to, and the socialists aren’t going to come to power there any time soon, so again the same logic doesn’t apply.
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This makes me like Israel even more. Europe deserves another 50 million poor migrants from the third world as punishment for their historical actions as well as for the reification of "consequences" for their idiotic policies of subsidising bad behaviour.
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What do you propose happens to the 61% Israelis who are Jews ethnically cleansed from other Middle Eastern nations in the past 100 years? Where do they go back to?
French Algeria is not a good comparison, because the French have a France.
Eventually the French will not have a France in the current trajectory and unlike the Israelis they are politically not pro French today in the way Israelis are pro Jewish.
We don't live in a world that the argument in favor of respecting a people's right to exist as a majority in their own homeland is taken for granted. Or to continue to exist in general without demographic replacement and threat of persecution in their own homeland. Especially not by the pro Jewish lobby in western countries which has an isolated sensitivity to the possibility of Jews being oppressed that it doesn't apply to various other groups such as Palestinians, or indeed the French. Do you support France remaining French and the homeland of the French people?
In accordance to the person you are responding to, Israel's occupation makes it unsustainable, especially as Palestinian demographics increase. So the Jews living in Israel have the option to remain to Israel but abandon settlements and the occupation and still have a homeland. Stopping the settlements doesn't stop Israel from existing.
There is also the option of a transformation of Israel into a civic state that is multi-ethnic that grants equal rights to Palestinians even if eventually the Jews become a minority. Jews can have equal rights and live there. Another alternative is a state that is even suspicious of Jewish nationalism in the manner western societies are more anti their own ethnic group's nationalism than those of minorities and is pro mass migration. This wouldn't be a genuinely equal and just society but it would fit with the template of what mainstream liberalism and most influential Jewish ngos support in western countries and under their definition would be anti-racist.
Either scenarios can be be opposed to legitimately, if one consistently oppose such experiments by having reasonable worries in other cases, but not if they aren't. But the first scenario especially does exist in the table as an alternative.
The important issue is that Israel as a Jewish majority state can coexist with respecting the rights of non Jewish minorities in Israel and in Palestine. So it is a false argument to claim that Israel's current course is about its existence, when it is about an extreme nationalist agenda to dominate non Jewish Palestinians, ensure demographic dominance in the future as well and get control and land. Religion and the idea that all of that land and more is God promised land is also not irrelevant to this conflict. It would also be nice if Israel tried to police some of the religious intolerance towards the Christian community living in Israel and punish those spitting on them.
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It's also worth mentioning that Christians have been ethnically cleansed from most countries in the Middle East post WWI.
Lebanon was a majority Christian country until quite recently.
I wonder why the mainstream press in the West almost never covers those atrocities? Just this year, an enclave of Armenians had their homeland stolen from them and had to flee.
The outrage over Gaza is not a principled objection to violence or to ethnic cleansing.
No you don't.
You know full well why. As much as the secular progressive who identify as "woke left" and the secular progressive who identify as "dissident right" may hate each other, they hate Christians and Jews more.
The casual hatred and desire for destruction expressed by @BurdensomeCount and others in this thread is not the exception it is the norm.
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Lebanese Christians aren’t primarily a minority because of ethnic cleansing but because they have lower birth rates than Muslims. In addition it’s likely that colonial censuses undercounted the Muslim population, so the Christians never had the demographic advantage they (and the French) thought they did.
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Christians in Lebanon are mostly anti-Israel, and a majority of them supported the October 7th attacks. I'm not sure they blame Muslims for their diminishing numbers in Lebanon.
Israel is a strong ally and the main weapon exporter to Azerbaijan.
So the big question is, why are christians in the west so eager to support the country responsible for bombing christian churches in Gaza and help a muslim country ethnically cleanse one of the oldest christian communities in the world? The whole thing has a "chickens for KFC" feeling about it.
Christians in Lebanon aren’t big fans of Israel, but I’m pretty sure most of them do not like their Muslim neighbors much either- as in ‘had a brutal civil war with them in living memory’.
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Christians in the West are also major weapons exporters to Azerbaijan and primary clients of its oil industry. Meanwhile, the Armenians were staunchly allied with the Russians until Putin inevitably screwed them over. Meanwhile Iran allies with Armenia against Muslim Azerbaijan for fear that a corridor with also Muslim Turkey would compromise it strategically. It is what it is.
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I think you missed my point.
I'm not trying to assign blame. I'm showing that few people actually care about ethnic cleansing. Or, at a minimum, they don't care enough to learn a basic amount of history or geography.
They care about tribalism.
This seems like an isolated demand of rigor. Would you say people can't show outrage over the October 7th attack unless they read up and condemn every atrocity that was committed in the region leading up to that date?
Yes. More specifically, I think the scope of caring should be scaled to the level of the atrocity.
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