Or, and here’s a crazy idea, we could kill fewer innocent Palestinians?
That sounds kinda shitty.
I was under the impression that there were in fact some hard core Hamas types that were in favor of a one state solution where EVERYONE is an Israeli citizen.
I don’t know if either side has the political capital to meet the other side half way. Until then, one side will suffer oppression and the other side with suffer scorn as oppressors.
I asked a perfectly valid question, which, I perceive, you do not want to answer for some odd reason. Are you seriously unable, for ideological reasons, to condemn the rocket attacks?
I’m not saying otherwise. It is a raw deal for the Palestinians, and gets rawer by the day.
Yes, but with the caveat that all of the Jewish Israelis currently living there are driven out, killed, or agree to acknowledge Islamic superiority - a rather unlikely outcome at this point by the Palestinians, unaided by outsiders, given that the Jewish Israelis both outnumber them and hold a vast superiority in arms.
There is one concern: every day that the deadlock continues, the Palestinian position grows worse. It is far more in their interests to arrive at a solution than it is in the Israelis’.
It seems to reinforce the notion that the Israelis are stealing land from the Palestinians.
I don’t recall genocide or ethnic cleansing being a caveat. I thought the premise was that the normal mechanisms of democracy and demographics would transform Israel from a Jewish state to a non-Jewish state with a large Jewish minority.
Things have been changing over the last few years. It is now politically possible for a candidate on either side of the aisle in the US to express doubts about Israel. I don’t think we will throw Israel under the bus but ISTM that between the end of the cold war and the rise of groups like ISIS, I’m not so sure that Israel is the most important relationship we have in the middle east these days.
Well, yes: I think that, through the “settlements”, they are doing just that, in some places. It’s bad of them.
I think certain right wing Israeli politicians are using the deadlock as an excuse to steal what they can, though creating ‘facts on the ground’ in advance of an expected settlement.
This is why the deadlock doesn’t work to Palestinian advantage. The longer it lasts, the more the hard right in Israel is encouraged (and the left is discouraged), and the more “settlements” encroach on what had been Palestinian land.
While Israel has been willing in the past to clear out “settlements” standing in the way of peace deals (see: Sinai, Gaza), it is politically costly and difficult. This is what the Israeli right is counting on.
It is part of the Hamas Charter.
I’m not sure why this matters to the issue. The US isn’t about to take any concrete actions against Israel, at most it will withdraw funding and express the usual objections to Israeli actions - which will not really affect the course of events in a fundamental way: Israel is not, contrary to some opinions, reliant on US subsidies as an existential matter. Withdrawing the subsidies would hurt them, but not enough to dissuade them from adjusting the borders to their own satisfaction.
Put it this way: the Palestinians could not win with war, when they had the whole Arab world at least theoretically behind them in arms - with Soviet backing (US backing for Israel post-dates the vital '67 war). How are they supposed to win with war now, when the Soviet Union is history (Putin is a poor man’s replacement), the Arab nations are internally fractured by revolt, and are a hundred times more scared of ISIS than they are of Israel? Where, practically speaking, is their leverage to come from?
Their hand has few cards in it, getting fewer all the time. Waiting around for it to improve through sympathy from Western sources, while making impossible demands, strikes me as a losing strategy - it plays straight into the hands of the Israeli right, who is set on worsening their situation. Better to make a reasonable offer and enlist Israeli left wing in their camp, isolating the Israeli right as unreasonable and damaging to Israel’s international image, and get a deal done.
Too much Palestinian “pride” to get that compromise done. Too many people actually care more about justice and preserving some form of dignity (ridiculous terms like right of return that would dissolve the Israeli state) to save face after decades of military and political losses it’s just a dead end.
This is how it will all play out. There will continue to be no partner for peace, the Israeli right will keep pushing farther and farther with settlements, Europe will continue bds, The Palestinians will stay the relative gutter because surprise surprise, the Israelis are not masochistic enough to commit suicide to allow them to save the face they want to save.
Until recently I believed as you do. However, in the past year I’ve done some more research; my church has been sending people to Israel and Palestine (mostly Bethlehem) and I’ve come around to believe that Israel is the much larger problem.
At issue is that the Palestinians have no (none, nada, zip, zero, etc.) legal recourse to illegal Israeli actions. Most of the time this involves the confiscation of Palestinian land: Palestinians are evicted and the land is (eventually) given to Israeli settlers. The Palestinians attempt to bring this to court but it is ignored. The same thing happens with soldiers: an Israeli soldier will perform some illegal act (sometimes murder) and rarely is punished.
I don’t condone the terrorist actions by the groups in the area–especially the rockets–but what else would you recommend the Palestinians do that would have any hope of working? Meanwhile Israel is still confiscating land. The first thing that should happen is that Israel give Palestinians a real, viable way to redress Israeli acts. Otherwise they’ll just resort to rockets.
What Israel is doing is very similar to the way the US treated Native Americans in the 19th century. Is there anybody here who would defend that?
The Palestinians shooting rockets live in Gaza, not Israel itself or the WB, so this isn’t the right analysis.
It is true that the Palestinians often get a raw deal in Israel. However, you are exaggerating: Palestinians use the Israeli courts all the time, and win as often as not. Israeli courts are not corrupt as you have portrayed them.
Some random examples:
http://www.acri.org.il/en/2013/01/16/new-petition-firing-zone-918/
While Palestinians do win, there is no doubt that they face considerable discrimination and pressure from the authorities.
However, that has nothing to do with the situation in Gaza, from whence the rockets come. In Gaza, the Israelis pulled out from the “settlements”, and handed the whole area over to the Palestinians. After that, Hamas took over from the PA in a bloody civil war. Hamas, unlike the PA, is an Islamicist organization - an offshoot off the Muslim Brotherhood. Their motives for launching rockets have nothing to do with an alleged lack of recourse by Palestinians to Israeli courts, or the fact that Israelis are encroaching on Palestinian lands with “settlements”. Those Palestinians are the ones living within Israel or on the West Bank, not those in Gaza.
In Gaza, arguably the opposite occurred: Israel made concessions (that is, withdrew and removed “settlers”) and this lead to attacks.
I’ve outlined my proposal above: cut a realistic deal that establishes the WB as a Palestinian state, with defined borders.
This is prevented, on the Palestinian side, by demanding impossible terms (Israel must hand over Jerusalem and allow an unlimited ‘right of return’). Israel will never, can never agree to them.
To extend you “Native analogy”, imagine if the native Americans, seeing the encroachment of US settlers in 1840s, in which the natives were getting crushed, demanded that the US hand over Washington, DC as a preliminary to peace negotiations. Would. Not. Happen.
As pointed out, they have that. Israeli courts. This cannot stop rocket attacks, because Hamas in Gaza doesn’t give a damn about whether Palestinians get a fair shake in Israeli courts or not.
Well, I would not go too far with that analogy: Israel isn’t committing genocide a la the Trail of Tears here, nor are they expelling Palestinian Israelis: if the Israelis acted like the 19th century Americans, there would be a lot fewer Palestinians left.
However, using your analogy: did violent attacks on Americans actually do the native Americans any good? Strikes me all that they did was lead to massacres, given that the US had a much more powerful army.
Here’s another case:
More: Migron (Israeli settlement) - Wikipedia
It is pretty clear that Israeli courts can, and do, rule against “settlers” - even when, as here, they had express government support: and the courts win in such a confrontation.
By the same token, it is clear that the government continues to encourage settlers.
I disagree. It is true that on occasion Palestinians will win court cases. However they are usually ignored. Take, for example, the town of Kafr Bir’im. It was seized by Israel and the residents forcibly evicted (with the promise they would be eventually allowed to return). The matter made it all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor. However, the town was then razed and much of it expropriated by Israel. This is not an isolated event.
I disagree. The treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank by Israel leads to despair and discontent, which manifests itself in rockets.
False dichotomy. Such demands would not be an excuse for continuing to push Native Americans on to smaller and more desolate reservations.
I strongly disagree. Palestinians are not dying in the same proportion as Native Americans (roughly 15%) but they are dying in huge numbers. Just one operation by the IDF in 2014 resulted in over 2000 deaths
We can agree that it’s not effective. That has no bearing on the morality of Israeli (or American) policy.
I appreciate that you are trying to forge a possible solution; we can work together on that. IMO it needs to start unilaterally with Israel extending real and viable justice to all Palestinians. There is no excuse not to.
I don’t know anything in particular about Migron so I did some digging around. According to this recent article about Migron:
*The two famous demolitions and relocations that have occurred on Netanyahu’s watch were the 2012 Migron outpost and 30 homes in the Ulpana outpost 2013.
In both cases, the land was not returned to the Palestinian owners. Neither Israelis or Palestinians can use those tracts of land.*
(My emphasis.) Also, a high Israeli politician is still advocating for the settlers. This appears to be a situation like I mentioned earlier: sometimes the Palestinians win a court case but it’s ignored. Meanwhile some Palestinians had their property stolen 20 years ago and they still (apparently) don’t have it back. This is not justice.
Is that just a manner of speaking, or are you literally claiming that serious injustices against Palestinians are always brought to court, and that Palestinians involved in court cases get a decision in their favor approximately 50% of the time?
Because if so, it would be good to see a cite for that.
No, I have no idea of the relative frequency of wins vs. losses.
I merely point out that the statement “At issue is that the Palestinians have no (none, nada, zip, zero, etc.) legal recourse to illegal Israeli actions” isn’t factually true: Palestinians can, and do, win in Israeli courts.
So to answer you question - it was a figure of speech, not a literal frequency analysis.
We agree that the government is heavily pushing the settlements and that this is unjust.
I disagree on the notion that the Israeli courts are useless.
The problem is that you are conflating two groups that are not the same: Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians in the WB.
The government of the former is not subject to “settlers” seizing their lands, but launches rockets; the government of the latter is subject to settlers seizing their lands, but does not launch rockets.
Therefore, it strikes me, if you want to know why rockets are launched, to examine what is different between those two groups - namely, that the government that launches rockets is Hamas.
Claiming, as you do, that seizing land leads to rockets being launched strikes me as ignoring the facts. True, seizing land is part of what generates hatred, but the hatred expressed by Hamas would not be assuaged even if Israel did everything you say you want; it goes far beyond mere Israeli bad behavior. Nor is it any answer to state that Israeli bad behavior inspired Palestinians to support Hamas: in reality, that was mostly caused by Palestinian anger over PA corruption, combined with growing Islamicist sentiment (felt throughout the ME, and so not something that can be blamed on Israel).
Your real argument is that Israel should do what you say you want because it is the right, the moral thing to do.
I am not advancing it as any such excuse, so it is you who are constructing a strawman.
What I am saying, is that the current Palestinian negotiating strategy is foolishly self-destructive, in that it is handing ammo to the right wing government that wishes to dispossess them. It is aiding their enemies in their task.
Those were casualties incurred in a war provoked by Hamas. I strongly disagree that this compares with ‘ethnic cleansing’ practiced by the US in the 19th century in any way, shape or form. It’s a bad analogy.
Again, I’m not arguing that might makes right. I’m arguing that might cannot be ignored in considering strategy.
IMO that will make exactly zero difference to the problem of establishing a viable Palestinian state. To the extent Israel is committing injustices, it should stop doing so simply because they are unjust; the notion that this is necessary, or even will, advance the negotiations is a complete fallacy. It may demonstrate goodwill, and that may or may not help; it should be pointed out that part of the reason we are in this mess is that the Israeli left became somewhat discredited because previous attempts to generate goodwill by unilateral Israeli actions did not help.
The Israeli Right naturally began to state its theory, with some plausibility, that goodwill gestures are pointless (and so Israel should just take what it wants and wall off the rest).
My own position: doing what is right should be done, but not with any expectation it will advance negotiations. Negotiations should be pursued, even if neither party has done what is right. The two issues should not ne linked, because each side has massive grievances and can and will use them to torpedo negotiations if one side insists that the other prove their morality in advance; and the biggest losers, should that happen, will be the Palestinians, who are comparatively powerless.
Okay, thanks. But ISTM that what Deeg was mostly referring to was the specific issue of “confiscation of Palestinian land”. And AFAICT none of your counterexamples provides evidence of Palestinians actually having any effective recourse in such a case.
As Deeg noted, the Palestinians dispossessed in the Mignon case still haven’t been reinstated. Your other examples involve labor rights of Palestinian workers (not a land-confiscation issue), the rerouting of a section of the West Bank security fence (also not a land-confiscation issue), and a 2013 temporary injunction prohibiting the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from Firing Zone 918 (which as of this past February is going ahead anyway).
I would be interested to learn of any case where territory in the West Bank acquired for Israeli settlements or military purposes by displacing Palestinian residents has subsequently been officially restored to the former residents’ control and use. I don’t know of any such instance.
As you note, it’s not true to say that no Palestinian can ever win any case in an Israeli court. But when the issue involves control of land from which West Bank Palestinians have been displaced, ISTM that the distribution of legal outcomes is at best very, very, very, very one-sided.
I think the civil war was in the West Bank, whereas Gaza switched from PA to Hamas governance over by an election.
(Of course, once Hamas got in, further elections were never permitted to occur…)
One thing could stop all the problems.
The Jews take back all the land they claim as theirs 2000 years ago or pack up and go.
The thing is they are not going to go and the others are not going to go.
So there is the problem, it will never be resolved ever.
War will not resolve anything, it never truly has.
There is only one way, that is to follow and abide in the Lord of lords and King of kings, problem solved.
He is the Light of the world that has no darkness, he is the Truth and the Way, He is our Lord and Saviour.
I have to wash even the dust off my sandals with such who oppose the Lord Jesus.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Great! Can you give some examples of dispossessed Palestinians who converted to Christianity and got their land and/or homes back?