I could happen in Israel. The idea that any country is a permanent safe haven is just magical thinking, no matter how much the founders of that country earnestly believed they were setting that up.
The persecutions that Jews have suffered does not justify the Zionists’ oppression of the Palestinians. Their murderous ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians makes the Zionists, at the very least, “mean.”
Opinion duly noted.
It does not. The Palestinians The terrorist groups in charge of the Palestinians create their oppression all on their own through the placing of terrorist groups into power. their terroristic acts.
This is not a thing that happened, no matter how many times people lie about it.
That is, at best, extreme hyperbole. For one thing, the Palestinians as a group aren’t responsible for the acts or power of terrorist groups. For another, there are many instance of discrimination and oppression by Israeli policies that were not in response to terrorist attacks.
That being said, a one-state solution is Hamas’s preferred “solution” (and the Israeli extreme-right, for that matter). It’s a ridiculous notion.
Fair enough, I agree and edited my post to clarify. I don’t blame Palestinian as a people for terrorist groups being in power over them. I do blame the fact that terrorist groups are in charge of them for their treatment by Israel, and I clarified that in my origibal post.
That’s more complicated. Take the settler issue. Most Israelis think that the settlers suck but there is no political will to remove them because of the way that the withdrawl from Gaza had gone. It’s true that settlers are a huge problem and that what they are doing is wrong. It is true that it is not being done in response to terrorist strikes but by assholes with a shitty ideology. But the reason that the Israeli public tolerates the settlers and is willing to throw their representatives bones and to form coalitions with them is the anger at the Palestinian rejection of the peace process through continuous terrorist strikes.
If Israel withdrew from Gaza and Hamas did not come to power and terrorist attacks out of Gaza had not increased, I am sure we would have been out of the West Bank by now, too. Remember that the withdrawl from Gaza occurred under conservative leadership, not liberal. And the West Bank was on the table too.
Now, as I’ve said before, I think this is mistaken policy. I think we need to be willing to take 3 or 4 or 5 steps while getting nothing in return because at some point someone has to be the adult in the room. But I understand why there is no will within the Israeli public to go to the mat with the religious right over the settlements when there is very little evidence that this would actually lead to peace. I support doing this yet I have no answer to the question “why should we believe it will work this time?”. It very well might not.
“Could” is not “will be”, let alone “is”.
And how, precisely, are you suggesting such an intervention should be engaged in, if it were to happen?
I think we can all get behind “anyone murdering people to force them out of a geographic area is mean”.
There’s are significant disputes as to how much of that went on when Israel was formed. I will assume some of that went on. There are no disputes that the invading Arab nations also drove out the Palestinians, urging them to get out of the way so those armies could kill all the Jews. So the responsibility for that diaspora is mixed.
But what should happen now? Should the descendants of those people be held hostage to an ideal of “return”? Or should they be allowed to move forward? Like my ancestors did. Like the Cypriots did. Like the Jews driven out of Arab nations did.
Should Israel arrest all the west bank settlers, to prevent further displaced of Palestinians? Yes, Israel is the only authority that could do that.
There was a time when the parts of Palestine west of the Jordan River might have been combined into a single country. That time is long past. There is to much mutual hatred and fear. No number of blue-helmeted UN troops would successfully keep the peace and protect either the Jews or the Palestinians. There would be pogroms on Jewish neighborhoods, and the survivors would murder people in nearby Palestinian neighborhoods, much like the current war, but without governments that are capable of saying, “enough, we should stop now”. And it would go on and on until one side or the other was all dead. That’s not a future i can root for.
This may be true, but it doesn’t come close to justification – for one thing, allowing the Israeli settlers reduces Israeli security. Israel is by far the more powerful party, which means more responsibility to calm things down to move towards peace (which you acknowledge). For the last few decades, the Israeli government has largely done the opposite.
It’s come close before (like under Rabin). And more importantly, recent Israeli policies have moved even further away from a chance at real peace (and therefore real security). Hopefully the Israeli public will demand policies that actually move towards peace.
Hamas should be prosecuted for its crimes as should the Zionists. The encouragement would be internal to the international community to enforce peaceful laws in Palestine if the inhabitants were to be unable to enforce these laws themselves.
Can you name any nation or territory where “the international community” has successfully enforced peace?
I’m not trying to justify it. I agree that it is bad policy, like I said, and I often argue against it when discussing the issue with other Israelis. I am simply explaining the factors that lead some to reject my arguments.
I agree. I think Netanyahu’s policy was “status quo and hope things get improve magically” and that’s been proven to be disastrous, and the public knows this.
How quickly does the problem need to be solved and with how few casualties? Because if your standards are low enough Germany in 1945 qualifies.
I also wonder whether folks making the “right of return” argument live in a place like, say, the United States, where an indigenous population was displaced; if they believe that indigenous population has the right to return to the specific property where the posters live; and how they let the displaced indigenous population know of the posters’ willingness to give up their homes.
In the abstract, the “right of return” to ancestral homes holds some appeal. In the real world, it quickly runs into insurmountable obstacles. We’re not dealing with bloodlines, we’re dealing with living humans with specific, situated lives; and virtually nobody on earth in any location has agreed to surrender their homes to someone else because that someone else’s ancestors were displaced.
Right or wrong, it’s not currently a meaningful goal.
It might, and if World War III is our means of enforcing peace, maybe we go back to the drawing board.
Again, how?
Because what it looks like to me is this: the “international community” would have to produce a force to physically invade, at a minimum, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Iran (I may have left somebody out) in order to physically prevent attacks from Israel upon the West Bank and Gaza, and in order to physically prevent attacks from being waged on Israel from any of the other places. In addition, they’d have to physically prevent individuals and groups of assorted Palestinians from attacking individuals and groups of Jews within Israel (or, if you prefer, within Palestine in general) and also to prevent individuals and groups of Jews from attacking anybody else.
Syria, Iran, Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, and pretty much everybody else would violently object to this. The international peacekeepers would in addition to defending everybody from each other also have to defend themselves from everybody.
Said peacekeepers would need to remain on the ground, attempting to enforce not only peace but also educational standards, until nearly everyone who currently wants to murder everybody on one of the other sides has died, or at least become too old to do anything about it. Which might not be long enough, because in the meantime they’d be talking to their grandkids, even if they had to do it down in the basement at three in the morning; but which, if something resembling general prosperity had also been established, might get the danger down to the level at which a normal police force could handle it and would not itself be a source of the murders.
Do you seriously think that’s going to happen?
Do you seriously think “the international community” has any other way to enforce peace in the area?
(Just letting Hamas take over Israel and kill all the Jews who couldn’t escape wouldn’t do it, by the way. There are a whole lot of factions involved and they’d turn on each other.)
The crux of the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel is the Palestinians’ oppression at the hands of the state of Israel. The terrorists groups only exacerbate the conflict by detracting from the crux and providing non-sequitur rationalizations for Israel’s continued oppression of the Palestinians.
You are wrong. It did happen. It is not a lie. It’s been documented.
Your opinion is noted.
The terms behind the Zionists’ idea of a two state solution is not tenable what with their insistence on security merely amounting to the formalization of a version of their policies in Gaza and the Occupied Territories that are already in effect.
I don’t know what you mean by “successfully,” with its sense in the context of your question being subjective, and given the question itself, I suspect nothing in your opinion qualifies for “successfully.”
With that said, I think Operation Allied Force/Operation Noble Anvil during the Kosovo War was relatively successful in its aims.