Not sure if this was directed at me, but it came directly after my post. My short-term solution was eloquently stated by andy:
How about no ethnic cleansing, no genocide, no forced relocation, allow enough food into Gaza so no one starves, allow enough aid so no one can’t get basic health care, and no more atrocities by the IDF?
Just, like, stop doing blatantly evil stuff.
I don’t have a long-term solution. The Zionist solution appears to be to continue having hostile relationships with everyone else in the region and getting involved in a series of increasingly horrific wars, until inevitably some Arab fanatics get hold of WMDs and then we lose more Jews in one day than we lost in the Holocaust. And they don’t really have other options, since one point I agree with Babale on is that there isn’t a lot of evidence that the rest of the region is particularly interested in developing non-hostile relationships with Israel.
My advice to Israelis and Palestinians, as individuals, is to give up on the whole mess and move to some relatively civilized part of the world. (realizing of course that this isn’t currently a realistic option for most Palestinians).
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Israel has been normalizing relations with more and more of their neighbors (part of why Hamas attacked when they did is the normalization with Saudi Arabia being on the cusp). And the wars have been much smaller scale since 73.
And we didn’t make peace with Egypt or Jordan or Lebanon by not fighting them when they attacked us. We made peace with them by defeating them each time they attacked until they gave up the goals they had that led them to attacking Israel.
When Israel’s repeated military victories dispelled the PanArab dream, those countries that harbored PanArabic ambitions made peace with Israel.
Likewise, when the dream of a Greater Palestine that stretches from the River to the Sea is done with, the Palestinians might accept a two state solution and make peace with us.
But, Israel has already roundly defeated Hamas. Hamas is certainly in worse shape than Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon were when they were defeated by Israel.
Uh, no, that’s completely not what I said. Hey, just give them some sort of identity documentation - make it non-voting if you like, that would certainly help asylum claims if/when they go elsewhere, make the discrimination obvious - so they can actually travel internationally. Prove they exist. Paperwork is essential these days.
I’m sorry about what happened to your family in Morocco. I’m sorry about what happened to my family in Russia. It all sucks. But Modern Israel is not the only possible haven for Jews in this world.
At which point you’ll probably point out (again) that Jews are a tiny minority in the US and the US could turn on us at any moment. And I’ll point out that where I live we don’t have to mandate bomb shelters in every residence. So much for the “haven” of Israel.
They can continue to hate each other as long as they’re no longer trying to kill each other.
I very much doubt anyone in Egypt has any affection for Israel yet they’ve managed to keep to a peace treaty between each other for what, 30 or 40 years now? Not lobbing missiles at each other would be a fine place to start for the rest of the folks in the Middle East, by which I mean not just shooting at Israel but just stop shooting at other people. Period. 'Cause even the crappy cease-fire the two Koreas have had for the past 70 odd years is better than the bullshit in the Middle East.
@Babale is correct on this point. I was about to bring it up myself but he beat me to it.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of room for improvement, of course. But you can say that about a lot of nations in regards to international relationships.
That will only work if the parties who want a Greater Israel that stretches from the River to the Sea likewise give up on that and accept a two state solution. Which is why hotheads and criminals like Smotrich and ben Gvir being in the Knesset/high level government is a problem even if they aren’t directly dictating policy.
Since intention matters in a conversation about genocide, it’s worth remembering what each side is trying to do: Those researching and writing about genocide in a serious way are desperate to stop it. Those who spend their skills and hours sifting through the vast horrors of Gaza to pick apart the suspicions of genocide are desperate to … what?
But I guess the Israeli dream of a Greater Israel from the sea to the river lives on:
“between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the Jordan River there shall only be Israeli sovereignty”
Menachem Begin, 1977
As quoted in
Steinberg, Gerald M.; Rubinovitz, Ziv (2019). Menachem Begin and the Israel-Egypt Peace Process Between Ideology and Political Realism .
…Babale asks why I continue to post in the Israel threads.
And one of the reasons why, after reflection, is because of people like Babale.
In the discussion thread just a few hours ago they posted vile disinformation about aid distribution. And they literally cited Israeli and American intelligence agencies as their source. As if we can believe anything they have to say on this.
I’m pretty fearless now. After a year and a half of being accused of being an anti-Semite and of blood libel, I’m pretty immune to ANYTHING they throw my way. And I’m well enough informed that I don’t fall for their bullshit.
So if you are going to post disinformation and lies: I’m going to call you on it.
Indeed, Hamas’s functioning as a cohesive organisation has now been disrupted. Before, you had to deal with Hamas. Now, many other gangsters (possibly less ideologically motivated), as well as Hamas fragments, and let us not forget the IDF and their ancillae and cat’s-paws. It is no easier to run a hospital in Gaza now.
As for (actually) prosecuting anyone for war crimes, has any country suggested that they would? History shows that (for instance) ICC arrest warrants are not enforced by parties to the Rome Statutes.
We are discussing sanctions, too, but those have not caused Putin’s regime to founder, for example, nor Iran, and they currently have it way worse than sanctions on Israel.
A retired US special forces officer has revealed to the BBC why he resigned from his work with US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid distribution centres.
“I witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at the crowds of Palestinians,” Anthony Aguilar told the BBC.
He added that in his entire career he has never witnessed such a level of “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population”.
There’s really no doubt anymore that the IDF are regularly shooting into crowds of unarmed civilians trying to get food.
I wonder what the latest lies the IDF defenders will use to rationalize this one?
Apparently the evidence of mass looting of aid by Hamas is lacking:
Granted, there’s a bit of warring between different parts of the US government here, but the repeated assertion that Hamas was engaged in systematic looting is not at all clear cut. Possibly as real as Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” used to justify an entirely unnecessary and needless war.
Not really; Israel has caused itself a great deal of damage with its behavior. Just like Al Qaeda did with the US on 9/111, they successfully goaded their opponents into self destructive behavior that will have long term consequences.
The Gazans themselves are just collateral damage to Hamas; in fact the more who die the better, it makes a bigger impact.
The Israeli game plan seems to be to simply make life in Gaza unsustainable. The Palestinians either leave or die of disease, dehydration or starvation. That there is no one willing to take them and nowhere else to go is their problem not Israel’s.
There’s a Substack I follow called "NonZionism" which I feel has excellent analysis of the conflict in Gaza. I’ve been reluctant to amplify his voice here, because I strongly disagree with many of his other opinions; he’s openly homophobic and racist (not “holds a lot of unexamined prejudices” racism, but “actively subscribes to preposterous psuedoscientific theories” racism). On the other hand, in a weird way these opinions highlight his moral clarity; he literally believes that Palestinians are genetically inferior to Ashkenazim, but still gets that it’s not OK to commit genocide against them.
Anyway, today’s post, Israel is a Borderline Failed State, sums stuff up well enough that I feel moved to summarize it, as it touches directly on some points we’ve been discussing in this thread.
The position that Gaza should be ethnically cleansed for settlement by Jews is a minority position in Israel, but not an insignificant minority, and is being actively encouraged by sitting government ministers.
The presence of extremists like Smotrich in the cabinet matters, because by threatening to leave the coalition, they make it impossible for the IDF to enforce any meaningful discipline on its troops. The IDF is functionally no longer a modern army, but a de facto collection of militias that do whatever their commanders tell them to do. If the commander wants them to randomly kill Palestinians, that’s what they’ll do, and they will face no consequences for doing so, because the government would collapse if it tried to enforce discipline.
Likewise, though Smotrich et al may be unable to force the government to increase the intensity of war-criming to the level they would like, they are quite able to block any proposal to decrease the level of violence against civilians.
The ongoing mass deaths at food distribution sites almost certainly reflect the IDF deliberately committing war crimes; the least damning explanation is that both the IDF and the State are completely dysfunctional and incompetent.
Centrist elements of the IDF leadership have failed to either present a coherent alternative strategy, or do the morally responsible thing and resign their positions.
Israel can’t “occupy” Gaza in the traditional military sense, because that would involve politically unacceptable levels of IDF casualties. Instead, they are over-reliant on airstrikes, a choice which inevitably produces mass civilian casualties among Gazans.
The goal of removing Hamas from power requires that some alternative regime be put in place, and Israel has made no effort whatsoever to identify and support such a regime (and of course it can’t, because if it made the slightest effort to do so, the government would collapse). The goal of crippling their capacity to attack Israel was accomplished long ago. Even if you assume that the ultimate goal for Israel is to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the main obstacle to doing that isn’t that the Gazans aren’t yet sufficiently miserable to leave, it’s that there’s no place willing to take them. Israel is therefore currently bombing civilians and flooding the world with images of malnourished children for no reason at all, except that it’s too politically dysfunctional to stop doing so.
Hamas’ strategy has always been to provoke Israel into committing atrocities which make regional normalization impossible and isolate Israel diplomatically. In other words, they’re winning.
Conclusion (edited): Gazans live in relentless misery, slowly dying of starvation in tents pitched on piles of rubble. This happened to them because they allowed the very worst people in their society to lead them into disaster in the service of ethnic narcissism, wounded pride, pathological brooding over historical grievances, revenge, and bullshit counterfeit religion. Inasmuch as collective responsibility can ever make sense as a moral doctrine, they have merited what has happened to them.
This sounds about as accurate as his analysis of race and homosexuality.
Aside from the rantings of an openly racist idiot, is there anything else to support this idea that the IDF is a “collection of militias”? Because based on everything I know from people who are in the IDF, and sometimes quite critical of it in other ways, this is absolute horseshit.
Great. Please provide a list of IDF personnel who have faced meaningful consequences during this war for violating the human rights of Palestinian civilians and prisoners.
Whether or not the IDF is a functioning military or not, there are multiple accounts, including from IDF members and American security at aid sites that report IDF members shooting at unarmed crowds of Gazan civilians who pose no danger.
And despite the dozens of reported atrocities, I’ve not seen a single real set of significant consequences for IDF members for any atrocities against Gazan civilians, which would support the assertion that the Israel government right now is incapable of seriously disciplining any soldiers who commit crimes against Gazans.