This doesn’t conflict with what I said.
Also, semantics. Who cares what we call it? I’ll drop the Jim Crow hijack. What we call it doesn’t really matter.
Israel is allowing and often directly supporting discrimination, oppression, and brutalization of civilians in the West Bank, and has been for many years. Do you deny this?
Why do you keep trying these ill thought out gotchas? Do you really think you’re being effective?
Content and information free post, so I’ll ignore it. No idea what you’re talking about.
Today I learned that West Germany in the aftermath of WW2 was Jim Crow.
Well, the Palestinians do. And if they limited their claims to Gaza and the West Bank, they could have it tomorrow.
Jim Crow was about creating a system where blacks where a permanent underclass to whites to replace slavery after it was abolished as part of the backlash against the equality imposed by reconstruction.
The occupation of the West Bank is about Israel being invaded over and over and over and over and finally conquering some territory in its defensive wars.
Living under occupation when you started a war of annihilation and have not given up that goal is not oppression, it’s the logical consequence of your actions.
If the Palestinians agree to a two state solution without a poison pill, they could end the occupation within a year.
What does this even mean?
Discrimination? No, treating people in occupied territory differently from citizens is not “discrimination”. It’s not apartheid or Jim Crow. It’s an occupation. Every occupation in history has involved treated the occupied population differently from your own citizens. And the occupation isn’t ongoing because of Israel. It’s ongoing because the Palestinians again and again reject the very possibility of a two state solution.
Oppression? Again, I don’t consider occupying someone to necessarily be oppressing them. The American occupation of Germany and Japan was not oppression, because the Americans occupied these nations at the end of a war that those nations started, and did so with with the intention of stopping them from continuing their aggression.
If the Palestinians were willing to agree to a two state solution without a poison pill, and Israel was occupying them anyways, that would be oppression - and I think you could make the argument that the occupation of East Germany was exactly this situation, since the Soviet Union held on to it long after East Germany was no longer a threat.
But the Palestinian leadership has rejected the two state solution again and again. Their goal, implicitly and explicitly is to wipe out Israel. Why the fuck should Israel end the occupation under those conditions? If in 1955 Germany was being led by Adolph Hitler Jr and he kept making speeches about how as soon as the American occupiers leave he will invade France so that from Alsace–Lorraine to Warsaw, Germany will be free, do you think America should have left? Should America have left Japan in 1952 if the Japanese were launching thousands of rockets a day into China and talking about how Manchuria belongs to them?
Brutalization? Not as a matter of policy. There are incidents that do occur, and they’re bad and should be condemned, and if the legal system fails to deal with them, that is bad as well. But I don’t think it is significantly worse than the treatment of any other occupying army, when compared to other Western democracies.
Then we live in such different factual universes that there’s no possibility of understanding.
Disappointing. I think less of you as a poster for finding so many ways to rationalize years and years of mistreatment.
I have no idea why @Babale is continuing to debate the “Jews are subject to a special set of restrictions” brigade.
Let them fly their genocidal freak flag.
I’m a Jew, by the way. My arguments have been about policies and practices implemented and allowed by the Israeli government.
It wasn’t long ago that several posters thanked me personally for starting this thread in defense of the formation of Israel: The creation of Israel was not a colonial project
My views haven’t changed since then. I still support everything I said in that thread.
Really? Because it seems to me that you responded to my post so quickly that there is no way that you could have possibly actually read through it to determine whether we agree or disagree on the facts. 
Ha! Trust me, the feeling is very much mutual. I’ve lost all respect for people who see the whole world through the single lens of oppressor/oppressed dynamics.
I can agree with you when you say one thing, and disagree with you when you say another.
The West Bank isn’t occupied because Israelis love oppressing Palestinians so damn much. It is occupied because the Palestinians, assisted by the surrounding Arab states, kept trying to wipe us out, until we took control of their territory and stopped them from waging full scale war. And since then, they’ve engaged in terrorism with the same exact end goal: wiping us out.
When that changes, the occupation can end. Until then, ending the occupation would be suicide. Not committing suicide is not oppression. Sorry, not sorry.
I’m sad both for your black-and-white thinking, and that you’re so quick to accuse me of dishonesty. Very sad.
Because unfortunately they represent a view that’s growing in popularity, especially among young people. And that shit is terrifying, not just because of the implications with regards to Israel but also because of the implications should the US ever go to war, even a proxy war, with Russia or China.
The attitude that the West and especially America is inherently racist, oppressive, colonialist, and destructive is immensely stupid and will lead to untold suffering by allowing racism, oppression, colonialism, and destruction run rampant so long as it is being committed by someone who is sufficiently non-Western. See: both far right and far left wing opposition to the war in Ukraine; the world’s reaction to China’s genociding of the Uyghurs.
Do you really believe that my personal view is that “Jews are subject to a special set of restrictions”?
No, I think you’re just misled about the reality of the situation on the ground, and as a result you argue alongside the “Jews are subject to a special set of restrictions” brigade.
The effect is the same: you criticize Israel for doing precisely what any sovereign state would do, and exercising far more control than most would care to while doing it.
So you don’t think anything significant Israel has done since Oct 7th is worthy of criticism? No big mistakes at all?
Well, the intelligence failure that led to Oct 7 happening in the first place was a massive failure worthy of both criticism and consequences for the highest of officials.
And as I said previously, incidents that I disagree with do happen in the West Bank, but I don’t think it’s a systemic problem with the goals of the IDF. There ARE policies I strongly disagree with and have said so on this forum before, like the use of people who were rejected from the army for extremist political view in auxiliary roles in the West Bank (which is what led to that incident with a guy who killed a terrorist and was then shot by one of these hill youth idiots).
Plenty of big mistakes, like when those hostages were shot.
More mistakes than any army engaging in an operation of this scale would have made? I highly fucking doubt it.
I strongly disagree. As much as so many people, and countries, are biased against Jews and Israel in particular, I think Israel could have done things much differently and would have held on to much of the sympathy it had in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7th. They didn’t have to go as hard in Gaza as they did (and still are), and they didn’t have to go as hard in Lebanon as they are now (and to be clear, in both cases I’m referring to utter destruction of so much of civilian areas and infrastructure). Those weren’t necessary for Israel’s immediate security, and in the long term I think they are very damaging. I’ve detailed in other threads what I think Israel should have done in the aftermath, and chief among them was absolutely ensure no more bad acts in the West Bank. They didn’t even try to do that. It sure seems like you think that just isn’t important at all.
What’s most frustrating, @babale, is that AFAICT you essentially agree with me that this Israeli government is allowing many bad acts by bad actors in the West Bank, but you still don’t think it’s significant or worth much discussion. It’s just not important to you, ISTM. Even while so many women and children (Gazan, Palestinian, Lebanese, and Israeli) are suffering so greatly.
I assumed you were. It doesn’t make you any less stupid. You know it is possible for members of a group to advocate strategies that are self destructive, right? You know, like you claim Netanyahu is doing.
Pfffft. Yeah, right. That’s why all the people saying “Why is Israel bombing when they should send in special forces!” celebrated when Israeli special forces rescued some hostages, right? Oh wait, they condemned Israel. Well, that’s why all the people saying “Israel must target only militants” celebrated when Israel blew up pages that only Hezbollah mbers were issued, right? Oh wait, they condemned Israel again.
Half the resolutions about a country that the UN has ever passed are about finger wagging at Israel. Half. Do you really think that this is a representative sample of worldwide human rights violations?
Give me a fucking break. There is absolutely nothing that Israel can do that will not be condemned, short of ceasing to exist.
The civilian infrastructure is being destroyed because both Hamas and Hezbollah specifically put their shit in civilian structures. If you want to pretend that isn’t the reality, go ahead, but don’t expect me to take your criticism seriously.
If there were ways to strike at Hamas and Hezbollah without destroying civilian infrastructure, this would be true. But so far, no one has ever offered a way to do that. They’ve either denied that Hamas and Hezbollah do this, or insisted that there “must be a better way”. Well, there isn’t. This is what urban warfare is like, especially against an opponent that’s this dug in and has this little regard for civilians.
Sure it’s important, because I don’t want my country to do things that are morally wrong. But it’s not important as a motivating factor for the war in Gaza. If you think Hamas or Hezbollah would be totally cool with us if only we didn’t have any asshole settlers in the West Bank, you’re fucking delusional.
It’s important to me, but it is not important as a factor in this war or in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The biggest problem with the Settlements is that they could erode support for a two state solution on the Israeli side by getting entranched enough that it is politically difficult to remove them. But it is not a major contributor to this war.
What’s so frustrating to me is that you claim to agree that Israel should exist, but you argue along the exact same lines as people who unabashedly tell you that the very concept of a Jewish state is something they are against (from the Right, because fuck Jews, and from the Left, because they think it’s an Ethnostate). The narrative you’ve bought into about the West Bank was crafted by them through the implicit assumption that Israel is a colonialist project; you reject this foundation, but accept their conclusion about Israel’s behavior in the West Bank.
These vibes:
