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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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Let's say Israel agrees to a two-state solution but Palestine just keeps attacking Israel over and over. What is Israel entitled to do in response? Do they just keep retaliating tit-for-tat? Are they allowed to invade, depose the government, but then must leave just to return when the new government does the same thing? Do they just have to improve their defences?

Let them do whatever they like, with their own capabilities and let them deal with the consequences. We, the West, shouldn't be standing behind the Israeli military, supplying the bombs and shells they're using, bankrolling their operation, threatening anyone who attacks them. Once they start taking our aid, we become a participant.

Azerbaijan has a spat with Armenia? Not my problem, let them handle it.

We, the West, shouldn't be standing behind the Israeli military, supplying the bombs and shells they're using, bankrolling their operation, threatening anyone who attacks them.

Why not? If Israel is in the right, it only makes sense to help them.

Everyone claims to be in the right, everyone has their own 'facts'. Should we support Russia in the war against Ukraine because Ukraine tried to suppress Russian minorities and shelled ethnic Russians?

Should we uphold the One China Principle and give Taiwan to China, since it's part of China and we recognize the PRC as China?

Should we invade Russia to stop their imperial megalomania and genocidal war in Ukraine?

We should follow our strategic interests, not arbitrarily pick out moral justifications and dubious 'facts'. Those who are best at convincing you that they're the victims may not be in the right. Our interests are not served by propping up the Israeli military and angering hundreds of millions of Muslims (who control resources we need), encouraging anti-Western terrorism. Nor would they be served by aiding Palestine and pushing a nuclear power to the brink. We should do nothing.

First of all, those are very different situations. It's not true that if Israel is justified in attacking Palestine that those other causes are justifiable, nor is it necessarily wise for the US to get involved. Secondly, it's not true that if the US helps one country it has to help them all.

Well, are the Palestinians justified in attacking Israel?

One common tactic they have used is to declare territory, including privately-owned Palestinian land, as “state land.” The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government has designated about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land. The group has also found that more than 30 percent of the land used for settlements is acknowledged by the Israeli government as having been privately owned by Palestinians.

Israeli authorities have also made it virtually impossible in practice for Palestinians in Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed under full Israeli control, as well as those in East Jerusalem, to obtain building permits. In Area C, for example, authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications by Palestinians to build between 2016 and 2018—21 in total—a figure 100 times smaller than the number of demolition orders it issued in the same period, according to official data. Israeli authorities have razed thousands of Palestinian properties in these areas for lacking a permit, leaving thousands of families displaced. By contrast, according to Peace Now, Israeli authorities began construction on more than 23,696 housing units between 2009 and 2020 in Israeli settlements in Area C. Transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population to an occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In addition, Israeli forces have regularly fired on Palestinian demonstrators and others who have approached fences separating Gaza and Israel in circumstances when they did not pose an imminent threat to life, killing 214 demonstrators in 2018 and 2019 alone and maiming thousands.

About 1,300 complaints of torture against Israeli authorities have been filed with Israel’s Justice Ministry between 2001 and June 2020, which have resulted in one criminal investigation and zero prosecutions.

While 80 percent of the Mountain Aquifer’s water recharge area lies beneath the West Bank,[304] Israel directly extracts about 90 percent of the water that is withdrawn from the aquifer annually, leaving Palestinians only the remaining 10 percent or so to exploit directly.[305] In monopolizing this shared resource, Israeli authorities sharply restrict the ability of Palestinians to directly exploit their own natural resources and render them dependent on Israel for their water supply. For decades, authorities have denied Palestinians permits to drill new wells, in particular in the most productive Western Aquifer basins, or to rehabilitate existing ones.

A report published by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Palestinian Hydrology Group in 2011 said that the Barkan Industrial Area settlement, near Ariel, “is notorious for flushing its leftover chemical waste onto Salfit villages.” [359] The report further states that “this chemical waste is thought to include petrochemicals, metals and plastic” and notes that “heavy toxic metals are linked to an endless list of conditions, from diarrhoea to diabetes, hyperkeratosis, organ failure and cancer.”

The Palestinians have a bunch of complaints about being suppressed and undermined. If I were Israeli, no doubt I would agree that it was right for Israel to win, vae victis, they don't matter as much as we do. But I'm not Israeli. We, the Western world, are not getting anything out of this conflict, we're paying so that another nation can do imperialism.

Is it really imperialism though if Jordan and Egypt consented to being invaded?

Did I mention Jordan or Egypt?

Do you know who the West Bank belonged to before Israel took it in '67? How about Gaza? Hint: The answer isn't "Palestine". What I'm suggesting is that if the Arab League and their cheerleaders/apologists in academia had genuinely wanted the 1948 partition to be respected they would've respected the 1948 borders.

Vae Victis indeed.

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