I fully agree that the leadership of Hamas etc is to blame, but let’s not avoid the fact that Israel imposes a “peace” on Palestinians that inevitably engenders enmity.
Then again, I wouldn’t move into my neighbor’s garage on the premise that he wasn’t using it and then gradually move into his house, room-by-room, and then claim “self-defense” when he starts moving my shit out on the curb.
Agreed–I’m just attempting to point out that if Israel were to hypothetically unilaterally just start calling all the occupied territory Israel and all the people living there Israeli citizens that would in itself be illegal and a form of non-consensual conquest of the Palestinians, the one state solution requires the consent of the Palestinians in the OT to be legitimate, and at this point in history I do not believe it would come anywhere close to consensus support among Palestinians if it were put to a referendum.
This is only second-hand information, but an acquaintance who went to Gaza a couple of years ago said it was indeed a shithole, not just because of the local regime but because it was impossible, for example, to get into your car and commute to Tel Aviv; there was a ludicrous unemployment rate.
Not sure how many people directly care about the exact number of states, I mean quite a few do and this is a huge political problem, but I have seen people live in France and work in Switzerland (for instance), so things like that are not theoretically impossible.
heres something i just read thats unsettling
I agree. And I do basically think that no viable solution is realistic.
I think the current situation where Palestinians generally don’t have voting rights over the government that ultimately controls a huge amount of their destiny. So it’s reasonable to ask Israel to either give them voting rights or have more respect for their sovereignty, and it’s also expected that when they don’t have that, some of them will resort to violence. The current situation is such a mess that just the way Palestinian land is divided up likely makes governing themselves impossible, so it really is a quagmire.
I do think if there’s some way for a coalition in Israeli parliament with some tiny level of compromise between Arab and Zionist parties might be a tiny baby step down a path towards some realistic solution, but I think the recent violence is going to make that almost impossible.
At what point does the statute of limitations run out on a conquest? It’s been over 50 years. Should the US give the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana back to the Sioux? Is the issue that the Sioux hasn’t been lobbing rockets at us? Is the lesson that you must be terrorist-y enough to keep claim? Kill enough women and children? If anything, the actions of the Palestinians have shown that the Israelis were indisputably correct in trying to control them as tightly as possible.
I disagree with a number of things in this article.
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The author speaks of targeting residential high rises but declines to mention they were being used as Hamas command centers and that the Israeli military phoned in advance so people were able to evacuate. I mentioned upthread that Israel has not issued much of a justification for hitting the press building so I’m waiting to hear their argument there. But I do think it’s dangerous to exclude this fact.
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The author says that Israel is indiscriminately killing thousands of civilians, while basically tut-tutting over the fact Hamas is the party actually using indiscriminate weapons. By all accounts both now and in 2014, Israel was using targeted weapons and targeted strikes, and appeared to generally make attempts to avoid unnecessary civilian casualties. There are some examples where these standards were not upheld, but his portrayal of Israel as just massacring as many Palestinians as possible is not in line with the factual reality of these conflicts.
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He casually references “ethnic cleansing” of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the formation of the State of Israel. This is a horrifying simplification of the reality. The reality is near the end of the British rule over “Mandatory Palestine” a civil war broke out between Jews and Arabs. Horrific war crimes occurred between both sides, this was not a pretty war, it was a street fight more or less, between two quasi-state entities going at each other. Many of the referenced 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes, and were not expelled, as they sought to avoid the fighting. Some were expelled. However the way he portrays it is as if Israel fell out of the sky in a space ship and forced 750k Palestinians out of their home. He completely declines to mention that just the approaching spectre of the Jews in the region being given a state (while other former Ottoman subjects were being given the exact same thing) was enough to precipitate mass Arab hatred across Jews around the region, including expulsions of Jewish communities from ancestral Jewish quarters in cities throughout the Middle East, some of which were over a thousand years old. In the civil war, Jews did bad things. So did the Arabs. It is incredibly dishonest the way this author painted the conflict. He also completely ignores the fact that that civil war lead right into the 1948 invasion of Israel by much of the Arab world after Israel declared its independence, or that the “1967 war” he just mentions with no context other than to explain that is when Israel’s occupation of the West Bank begun–omitting the fact that the causes and activities of the 1967 war are generally controversial to this day and that many view it as an attempt to basically end the existence of Israel.
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He then spends multiple paragraphs blasting Israel for forming a relationship with Saudi Arabia, due to Saudi Arabia’s terrible human rights record. This is rank hypocrisy considering the entire Western world largely enjoys robust diplomatic and trading relationships with Saudi Arabia, but Israel who has to contend with the actual realities of the Middle East at the ground level, is somehow singled out for dealing with KSA? What a fucking load of bullshit.
Frankly, this is a bad article by a stupid person who shouldn’t be read again.
Edit to add: I will admit to being strongly pro-Israel. Meaning I believe Jews have an innate right to live in Israel and their presence there is fundamentally legitimate. But I don’t want it to sound like I am blind to anything Israel has done–Israel has much to answer for with many of its behaviors, but the answer to that reality is not to publish an article like Salon did that paints Israel as the evil monsters in a one sided conflict in which only Israel is bad, that isn’t a helpful way to understanding the reality.
It’s Salon. It’s left wing rag. I don’t even read those articles anymore.
God what an impossible situation. Israel is led by corrupt, hateful opportunists like Netanyahu who are perfectly willing to kill women and children (and endanger Israeli women and children) in order to maintain power, and the Palestinians are largely dirt-poor, desperate, and powerless, with only corrupt, hateful opportunists like Hamas (who are also perfectly willing to kill women and children and endanger Palestinian women and children) to turn to for any possibility of leadership. Israel has far, far more wealth and power, so I believe there is more moral onus on the government of Israel to give some benefit of the doubt to the other side to try and create space for the possibility of peace, but with scum like Netanyahu (and Hamas) in charge, it’s hard to imagine how this could get better.
I’ll also note that I’m pro-Israel and Zionist, in the sense that I believe the Jews should have a state to live in and guarantee the existence of the Jewish people (my people, ethnically speaking). But I don’t believe this gives the Israeli government the right to settle occupied territory (or encourage/tolerate this settlement), unfairly treat Palestinians and Israeli Arabs under their control/within their borders, etc. And quite obviously, these real grievances do not give Hamas the right to murder Israeli non-combatants.
But what is the solution? Imagine we are neighbors and I work at McDonalds and you are a rich billionaire twirling your mustache. You want peace. But my position is that you and your family should all be killed and not exist in your house. How in the hell do we reach a compromise? You are a more sophisticated party, sure, but what do you give up? Only one of your kids has to move out?
Right, I mean I think the most realistic view is this situation is not meaningfully fixable in a practical sense any time soon. Given the birth rate of Orthodox Jews in Israel I’m not sure Israel is going to be moving in the direction of greater political liberalism on the matter.
International pressure on Israel, which largely would have to start with the United States doing so, could perhaps shift the reality, but for a whole lot of reasons that is also fraught with peril and exposes basically the Democrats to really bad partisan attacks from Republicans, many of which might “find their mark”, and result in Republican electoral gains.
A core issue is that the faction Netanyahu represents quite clearly has never really believed in the two state solution, they view the massive expansion of settlements as a way to get what they’ve basically always wanted–most of the land. They also want most of the Palestinians out, and they haven’t been bold enough to try to just expel them to Jordan, but the path that the Netanyahu faction is on can only logically end with that, but they aren’t willing to openly do something so brazen, so here we are. In a way what China or Russia did with Tibet and Crimea is kind of what Netanyahu wants to do, but they did it far more openly and dispensed with pretending. But Netanyahu isn’t all of Israel, his political position is tenuous.
However 600,000 settlers in the West Bank and the huge geographic dispersal of the settlements throughout the West Bank, to my mind, largely means the two state solution is no longer a practically achievable goal, simple fact. Not saying it’s right, just stating my opinion.
That’s why I think long term the goal should be to build a collective consensus for peace within a shared state in which everyone has equal rights. That is a lofty goal, and likely not achievable in any of our lifetimes.
That’s the position of Hamas, but not the position of all Palestinians. It’s more akin to your position (as the brutal, ruling patriarch of your family) is that we should be killed and our property taken, but some of your family under your thumb just wants to stop being desperately poor and frequently humiliated and sometimes even beaten by some members of my family.
It’s still a very difficult situation, but as the party with almost all the power, it’d be my responsibility to stop brutalizing and humiliating every member of your family and ensure that everyone in your family has a decent chance at a decent life, even though some of you (and you, the boss) want to kill me and mine.
A general thanks for all of your posts in this thread; like many others’ they are well thought-out and well-written contributions to the discussion.
An especial thanks for that article, tho. It was excellent.
Isn’t this pretty much the fundamental question, tho?
What did you think of this specific passage?
I don’t know that I’d characterize calling something a war crime as “tut-tutting”. And surely pointing out proportionality is legitimate?
When we fought the Axis in WWII we didn’t care about proportionality we cared about supremacy and winning. Might be why that war actually ended.
And also why it led to nuclear proliferation.
From the perspective of proportionality, you have to consider what each party is trying to do. Israel targets Hamas, but Hamas uses civilians as human shields so sometimes they are caught in the crossfire. Hamas targets civilians. Ignoring that reality is hypocrisy of the highest order.
Now, do I think that Israel’s course of action here is wise? No, I don’t. Hamas fires rockets out of a residential building; Israel warns everyone that they will destroy the building in retaliation, allows it to be evacuated, and then does so. Hamas loses nothing - their officials and fighters and materials are all evacuated in time. Palestinian civilians, meanwhile, lose their homes, their possessions, and sometimes their lives. This is fantastic recruitment material for Hamas at the cost of what is really a minor inconvenience for them. And Israel gets bad press, which hacks like that Salon writer love to exploit.
Now, my sympathy is limited somewhat. After all these consequences are the direct results of the actions that the democratically (allegedly) elected Hamas took on behalf of its citizens. But really, what percentage of the people in the building support Hamas is completely irrelevant, because from a practical standpoint, I think flattening it only generates recruiting material for Hamas and underservadly bad press for Israel. It’s a lose-lose for Israel and a win-win for Hamas (who clearly doesn’t give two shits about the safety and prosperity of its citizens).
On the other hand, allowing the rocket attacks to go on without retaliation isn’t wise either. Israel really is between a rock and a hard place here, and I don’t have an alternative suggestion for the IDF.
@octopus makes a good point upthread. Israel is a modern first world nation trying to be decent. This “residential complex” contained a lot of people who knew that their neighbor was using his upstairs apartment to lob rockets. But we do the decent thing; we don’t bomb civilians.
But what does that get us but 50 years plus of warfare and tensions? People in Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were “civilians” but they contributed to the war effort. To borrow from the war expert Brittany Spears, they aren’t that innocent.
However modern society doesn’t allow that. Not the UN, not the United States. And although I’m not advocating total warfare, I take @octopus’s point that our “modern” ideas let these terrorists continue.