Israel/Palestinians: Your Take

Great Debates
301

You want Israel to commit suicide. Show me a country in the arab world where a minority jewish population is thriving amidst a majority muslim population. Got one? Got a SINGLE example?
Toss on decades of built up hatreds in a people who are still bitter because, after going to war and attacking the Israeli population for decades where they repeatedly lost and were placed into a sealed off box. There are no jews in Gaza, and what did the people of Gaza spend their time doing with their resources? Oh wait, just some people, perhaps just hamas and its supporters? Build tunnels from Egypt to smuggle goods and weapons and rocket materials, to try to dig tunnels into Israel, to live and build up themselves? No, to lash out like a pack of rabid dogs filled with hate and bile.
THIS is what Israel has to try to placate? This is not a population of Hindus being led by Ghandi, this is not South Africa where there was a real force of non retribution for REAL past wrongs that were infinitely less warranted and reactionary led by Mandela. The people in Power are Hamas.

The Palestinians don’t have direct control over the actions of Israeli policy, they DO have direct control over their own behavior, internal locus of control, the concept the left HATES because they presume brown skinned people are nothing but puppets on a string, willows blowing in the wind by fate, the only actors of any worth and power and AGENCY are western actors, this is where the burdens of responsibility lie.

#$%ing poison ideology, god awful way to look at the world, this infantalized view helps KEEP millions of people in the ditch. But at least they feel good about themselves, can continue virtue signaling and making it seem like they are good people for never punching down.
I already told you and others the path forward. The primary animus for Israeli restrictions on the Palestinian population, is the very REAL concerns over security. They are the more powerful party, so if you want some deal struck that is more beneficial to the Palestinians, you need to convince the Israelis that doing so is NOT a suicide move. Remove Hamas from power, stop members of your own population from going out to try and kill JEWS, stop the cartons that poison childrens minds from a young age against jews. Vile terrible practices you blind left wing liberals would blast anyone in the west for doing, but ignore when brown skinned people engage in the activity.
Or don’t, don’t demand any sort of better behavior, and let pure power struggles play out, with the Palestinians as the eternal loser over centuries.

302

I was referring to Germany and Japan after WW II; you are absolutely right that Americans stole land from Native Americans in the 19th century. There were plenty of apologists for it at the time, too.

303

Yes, but this leads to whataboutism. A common tactic to deflect attention away from current problems one engages in by redirection.
US criticizes russian annexation of Crimea,

Russian Response: But what about the battle of wounded knee?
It leads to an endless regress of past wrongs to the beginning of time until you got to some perfectly benign tribe of people that is probably no longer here because of their own sheepish behavior while surrounded by wolves.

304

Extending basic legal rights to Palestinians is in no way committing suicide. Let’s at least start from there. Is there any excuse for not doing so?

305

No. I’m fine with extending basic legal rights.

306

Is the U.S. swallowing up German territory for settlements, and I just haven’t heard about it?

307

I don’t, actually. It’s telling that that’s where your mind goes.

Bahrain, off the top of my head.

That’s more “hate and bile” than I care to try to address; suffice to say that I don’t accept your caricature of the political left, that Palestinians are subhuman, or that treating them like human beings is suicide for Israel. That reasoning wasn’t true when it was used to support Jim Crow and apartheid, and it isn’t true now.

IMHO, the path forward involves a credible third party, with no skin in the game and no grudges, arbitrating the situation. It may indeed require taking on HAMAS, in the sense of holding real elections, installing effective security forces, putting political criminals in jail, and superseding HAMAS’ vast network of schools, food banks, and etc that makes the dirt-poor Gazans dependent on it. As long as HAMAS is allowed to kill political rivals, nothing will be achieved.

308

Never said it did.

309

Very well. Yes, the Axis lost the territory they’d conquered in the war, and contested zones like Silesia…but they weren’t in a position akin to the Palestinians, and didn’t react the same way, for that and other reasons.

310

Watch it! That’s untrue, and pointless, and debases the debate. If you must, point to specific organizations or individuals who have said that – I think you’ll fail in this – but don’t go all smeary on us. There are still a few leftists who support Israel’s right to exist, and there are still a few rightists who favor self-determination.

311

You’re right, I am judging the left by their worst, most sloppy examples. The ones where every argument seems to presume that only party in the conflict with any agency and responsibility is Israel/US.
Dinesh touched on this here:

And the greatest example of the self loathing and masochism was the punching down article here:
312

And people have the gall to call me an apologist.

White House reveals number of civilian deaths from drone strikes

2009-2015: an estimated 64-116 civilian deaths with 2,372-2,581 militants killed.

Don’t even bother trying to argue that it wasn’t urban warfare. The Israelis could have followed exactly the same procedures, with or without American advice. But they didn’t. No, they wanted to stamp out the mosquito with the bazooka to ‘deter’ other Hamas militants. As if that would have any deterrent effect whatsoever.

313

Flying missile-carrying drones over Gaza? That probably would not have met with any greater approval.

Also…whom would they have killed via drone-strike? Hamas leadership? Would you actually approve of that kind of political assassination? The U.S. kills ISIS leadership, claiming their enemy combatants. Are Hamas leaders “enemy combatants” to Israel? Is it a state of war? If so, then artillery strikes are also okay, and you’ve got nothing to complain of. If it isn’t a state of war…why the rockets?

You aren’t making enough sense here to be an apologist.

314

Assuming they didn’t murder me for being an apostate or for going against Hamas’s circle-jerk?

You’re so eager to smear Israel that you’re taking Obama’s propaganda at face value? You know that the Obama administration has a history of pretending that anyone they kill is an enemy combatant unless they have undeniable evidence to the contrary, right?

315

Not exactly … Hamas indeed won an election, but what happened them wasn’t a peaceful transfer of power but rather a bloody civil war … under foreign prodding. This war was won by Hamas in Gaza, but won by the PA in the WB.

316

I agree that the cases involving “settlers” are very one-sided. That’s because the government, which is quite right-wing and expressly hostile to Palestinian interests, is backing them. In any state, it is difficult to litigate against the government; ours are no different.

The issue is whether the government can in effect dictate outcomes to the civil courts. In some countries, they can. In Israel, they can’t, as the cases I have demonstrated show.

That being said, the government has all sorts of tools at their disposal - there as here - to frustrate the winners in court cases. It is true that the ‘winners’ in that land case have yet to get back their land. This is not because the Israeli courts are useless, but because of active Israeli government hostility, which is active despite the fact that the Israeli courts are not useless. Try fighting the US Government on its exercise of “eminent domain”, and you will run into the same sorts of problems - endless litigation against a well-funded adversary who has all sorts of powers to cause you grief.

That doesn’t mean the US courts are useless, or that resorting to violence against the US government is sensible or advisable.

317

Yes.

I never understood the habit of people on either side of this debate on insisting their chosen “side” doesn’t have people with bad motives. Or that they are all of a piece.

I have no doubt whatsoever the Israeli “side” contains folks who see in the current situation nothing but advantage for themselves: mostly the extreme Right. My point is that the Palestinians, and those who claim to be on their “side”, should really stop helping these people, by ceasing making extreme demands and ceasing to express sympathy, however guardedly, for Palestinian violence (along the lines of ‘yes it is wrong to commit terrorism, but what else do you expect?’ - we’ve seen some of that in this thread).

Problem is, all that does is add arrows to the quiver of the Israeli Right. They love it.

Seems to me that you’d have to be daft to accept that Hamas, an organization dedicated to the absolute subjugation of all non-Islamic folks to Islam, would behave like secular democrats once in power. They haven’t done that in Gaza, why would any rational person expect them to do it in Israel?

The track record of hardcore Islamicists isn’t exactly encouraging in this respect.

How is that even a serious question? The answer is, without a doubt, Israel is in an infinitely better position now than in 1973 (which, as you may recall, Israel won).

Look at the facts. In '73, Egypt could count on Syria as an ally. Syria doesn’t even exist as a united country anymore - it is torn apart by civil war.

In '73, Egypt was united under Sadat. Today, the country is ruled by a military government of dubious legitimacy facing a powerful Islamicist undercurrent.

I '73, Egypt was independent; it had received massive arms supplies from the Soviets, but had shaken off Soviet control. Today, Egypt is kept alive by US subsidies, and is facing all sorts of crises simultaneously.

In '73, the Arab world was solidly united against Israel. Today, it is shattered by internal rebellions and ISIS.

The Israelis openly scorn the UN, have done so ever since the UN’s very unfortunate decision to remove its troops dividing Egypt and Israel in '67. Not sure what passing more UN resolutions would do. The notion that UN member states would contribute actual troops to attacking Israel to protect Palestinians is a fantasy.

Certainly, Israel could become subject to economic sanctions if they behaved badly. Russia was subject to sanctions for behaving badly. They hurt but not enough to actually stop the bad behavior.

Sure. Cease the demand for Jerusalem and a ‘right of return’. Borders between the WB and Israel to be firmly settled, based on the '67 borders but with the line to go around Jerusalem with a reasonable buffer, and border kinks ironed out in Israel’s favor. Palestinians within new solid Israeli borders to be offered choice of citizenship: to stay in Israel, must accept Israeli citizenship; otherwise, must leave, with reasonable compensation paid for any losses. Israel to pay compensation fixed by neutral third party arbitration, based on some agreed formula. Israel to offer subsidies to help establish Palestinian infrastructure, to be capped at a reasonable amount. Palestine to offer security guarantees. Payment of subsidies to be contingent on meeting security guarantees; payment to individual Palestinians not contingent.

That’s only my opinion of course on what a reasonable settlement would look like.

318

I never understood the point of rhetorical questions like this.

Is the point to state that Palestinian insurgency is a reasonable response to Israeli confiscations? Reasonable in what way - emotionally, morally, or because it is actually a good tactic?

My point is pretty simple: actual events have shown without the slightest doubt that Palestinian attempts at insurgency - whether justly provoked by Israeli abuses or not - lead to only three things:

  1. A small number of Israeli dead

  2. A vastly larger number of Palestinian dead

  3. The Israeli Right empowered politically to commit further Israeli abuses, because the Israeli public is now more angry and fearful than before.

You can add to that if you like ‘an increase in world outrage against the Israelis, which the Israelis will promptly ignore’.

Point is, these tactics don’t work - we can argue 'till the cows come home as to whether they are morally justified or emotionally understandable. They make everything worse, and the biggest losers will, without question, be the Palestinians.

319

Well, Iranians aren’t Arabs, of course, but if by “the arab world” you mean “the Middle East in general”, the Jews of Iran seem to strongly identify as both Jewish and Iranian.

320

Iran is probably one of the better countries in the Middle East to be a Jew in, but I would not trust someone who claims that there has “never been a single instance of anti-Semitism in Iranian society,” especially when 50-60% of Iranians polled held antisemitic views in 2014.