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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27103 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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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.

You don't need to do imperialism against a state, you can do it against nations. The Arab League wanted land occupied by Palestinians for themselves in 1948. I'm not going to lick their boots and say Arabs, Arab states or Islam are great and wonderful. They're not pure-hearted victims who never did anything wrong.

The Palestinians and Arabs thought that the 1948 agreement was unfair since Israel got awarded a majority of the land, a great deal of land that was owned by Palestinians. They then fought and lost a war with Israel. So be it - why are we bootlicking Israel to the tune of billions of dollars and taking on huge diplomatic and economic costs to help them out?

I'm sure you don't think that the details of the 1948 agreement have any relevance to our support for Israel. The reason Israel gets all this US support is because of intensive, effective lobbying and propaganda work, not because of some 70-year old piece of paper. Furthermore, I'm not talking about 1948, I'm talking about now or at least the 21st century.

We aren't "Bootlicking Israel" though. We are offering them a relatively small portion of our Military Industrial Complex's total output in exchange for Raytheon, LockMart, NGC, BAE, Et Al using their backyard as a live-fire R&D lab and getting first crack at any patents their engineers might file.

The ways you can tell that the OP and others' claims about Israel being dependent on the US are being made from a place of either bad faith or extreme ignorance, is that it's readily apparent for all to see that even without the 10 - 20 billion dollars a year Israel receives from the US they would still be a nuclear power with a robust domestic manufacturing capability and a broadly "first world" standard of living.

Meanwhile Gaza without the 10 billion or so in combined US and EU aid it receives each year would be living in the 17th century. No Electricity, no motorized Transportation, and looking down the barrel of some extreme food and water shortages.

What comparisons are there are don't compare at all.

Meanwhile Gaza without the 10 billion or so in combined US and EU aid it receives each year

That's at least a factor of 10 overestimate.

According to figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aid to Palestinians amounted to more than $40 billion between 1994 and 2020.

And that's all aid, not just EU and US! Where are you getting your numbers from?

Israel is hardly a live fire testing ground, not since 1973. It's not like they're fighting high end wars, they're dealing with insurgencies and light infantry. The US clearly hasn't learnt any useful lessons on this front - indeed US support for Israel makes it harder since it creates all these new and exciting enemies. Osama Bin Laden for instance. We don't need to infuriate hundreds of millions of people to 'test' bombs or missile defence systems against sub-Scud tier rockets.

Regardless of the situation with Palestine (which also isn't our problem except in that we help Israel bully them), we should not be assisting a state that creates so many bitter and troublesome enemies for us. If it weren't for direct US aid and geopolitical assistance like the war in Iraq, they probably wouldn't have the borders they have now, they'd likely be pre-1967.

The Arab Oil Embargo, the Iraq War, this mess in the Red Sea, not to mention the USS Liberty - Israel is a massive deadweight that needs to be dropped, the sooner the better.

aren't bootlicking

Do you really not listen to the rhetoric from US politicians?

Pelosi couldn't get the boot out of her mouth if she tried: "I have said to people when they ask me, If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to our aid, I don’t even call it our aid, our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are."

Pompeo: "There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."

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