You understand that these rockets are falling all over Israel, not just on the settlements?
It’s possible we’ll have to disagree on this one–if you do a good reading of Netanyahu’s back and forth statements about the future of a possible Palestinian state, and the far right parties that have helped prop him up over the last half decade, I think the faction that wants what I’m talking about while they don’t comprise a majority of Israel, have in fact comprised the ruling coalition in the Knesset.
You understand that the entire country of Israel is a settlement.
You get to practice your religion. You get to have indoor plumbing. Your kids don’t have to go to war. You live beside us. Nobody is driven into the sea. Everyone lives peacefully and you can come into the first world. Nothing is offered?
Just like every other country in the world? Or is there a reason why you’ve got a different standard for Jewish countries?
Sometimes. If you’re over 50 and a man, sometimes. Sometimes not, if you’re a woman of any age, apparently.
Right, but when countries use force to expand settlements and engage in ‘defense’ that involves community punishment and terroristic warfare, we can and should condemn them for it. Israel has for decades, if not longer, employed these tactics.
For the record I’m also a two-state supporter and, regardless of the history behind it, don’t question the legitimacy of the Israeli state. I only point out the history because most Americans who’ve ever had an opinion about the Israeli-Palestinian almost reflexively defend Israel as a victim of Arab aggression without regard for the origins of the conflict.
For the record, I’m Israeli-American, so I’m intimately familiar with the situation and history, thank you very much.
Look at who I’m responding to. I’m no friend of Israel’s. But some of the criticism is just ignorant, as evidenced by the stupid analogy I was responding to.
Of course, context is exactly what he seems to lack.
But that is exactly what happened. Their neighbors do not believe that they have a right to even exist. This isn’t a trade dispute. They hate them because of their race.
It’s a territorial conflict between two different cultures, so yeah, hatred is inevitable. There’s real scarcity involved.
For the record, yeah, I think Hamas is pretty much shit, too, and they’re clearly manipulating the situation for their own political standing, street cred, whatever you want to call it.
But Israel, particularly the right wing in the country, are right there manipulating this as well.
The overarching point: take the US and Canada. We have a tiff over the US imposing export controls on vegetables and Canada imposing export controls on maple syrup. We are mostly friends. We can sit at a table and work this out. Canada isn’t going to blink and neither are we. But it is in our interests to work this out and walk out of the room with a handshake and a Molson Ice.
But the predicate condition for that is that we are friends and neighbors. We want to get along. If Canada was a third world country that had the expressed goal of destroying the United States of America, then the discussion wouldn’t happen or be productive. That is where Israel is at.
Except in the real world Israel has a significant hand to play in the general shittiness of life in Palestine. The unemployment, low education, poor medical care, poor access to clean water–much of this is basically directly attributable to Israel. You’re basically trying to simplify what is a complicated conflict. Israel has all the power, so it can take the stance of “we’re using conventional weapons and following the laws of war”, expecting Palestine to do the same is frankly silly. If your country was conquer and the conquerors were refusing to leave, would you really be choosing to fight their tanks and air planes with less weapons than a typical U.S. police department has? Would you be willing to put all your people in uniforms and etc? No, you probably wouldn’t. Insurgents generally cannot meaningfully wage conventional wars so they wage unconventional ones. The level to which the international community is “okay” with the insurgency is not based on broad principles of right and wrong, it’s based on realpolitik more often than not.
Also, just as not every Israeli is a fundamentalist who wants to purge all the Palestinians out of the land, not all Palestinians feel that way either. Palestine only vaguely even has a representative government, so it’s difficult to really say if Hamas represents the consensus of all Palestinians–they only have power in Gaza and they won an election 15 years ago and they basically haven’t had any since.
From the perspective of an everyday non violent Palestinian family, they’re mostly desperately poor with almost no chance at a decent life for their children, and are forced to suffer regular humiliations (and less regular brutalizations). And sometimes their property or ancestral homes are taken or destroyed. That’s not “living beside us”.
Some, but not nearly all.
I’m not dismissing the rest of your posts or this one as others and I have said are excellent, but this here is the problem. Should Israel hand over a portion of territory to a government that is a terrorist organization and does not even hold regular elections? It would be suicidal to do so.
No, but Israel should stop the ongoing settlements, ensure decent services and quality of life for everyone they can (the most desperate are in Gaza), harshly prosecute Israeli mobs who target Arabs and Palestinians (they already do for the reverse), protect property rights for Palestinians and Arabs in the same way they do for Jewish Israelis… as a start. They can afford to do all these things. They also ought to pull back a big portion of the settlements that have already been made (67 borders or thereabouts), but that’s not politically feasible at this time. But all the rest I mentioned should be feasible with a non corrupt government - until Israel at least does all that at the very least, it’s not credible to argue that the Israeli government is doing what it can for peace and decent treatment of Palestinians.
I mean Israel already did that. They withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005, they dismantled the 21 Israeli settlements there and forcibly evicted the Israeli settlers, and then moved their military out. (They paid compensation to the settlers of around $200,000 per family.) Would you say that Israel has “committed suicide?”
It frankly seems like you aren’t terribly informed on this topic with some of the thins you have been saying.
Now that being said, I’m not at all–and I do not think most people at all, are saying Israel ought immediately withdraw completely from the West Bank and East Jerusalem and destroy all the settlements. Now, some people are saying that, but it’s not the majority opinion in the West. Most people broadly accept that if a two state peace ever happened Israel would keep some of the settlements in the West Bank and would attempt to make territorial concessions elsewhere, while some of the settlements would have to be disbanded.
I appreciate your politeness but I will be equally polite in saying that you are incorrect. I remember that. What did that get Israel but 2,300 rockets this week? You talk about a two state solution; if Israel cannot stop terrorism, how can Hamas?