MrDibble is South African, and was referring to using sanctions to help end apartheid (and DSeid saying the situations aren’t comparable).
Ahh, thank you for the clarification.
I looked into the current state of Israeli politics and it’s hard to be optimistic at the moment. There is only one Israeli Jewish party that is in favor of the two-state solution, Yesh Atid, and even they don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about it. They have 24 members in the Knesset, out of 120. There are also 10 MKs who represent Arab parties. So together that’s a little more than 25 percent support for a two-state solution. And of course I’d imagine that that support has gone down in recent months.
Say what? That is very incorrect.
Absolutely. he has gotta go.
Yes, each time in response to acts of terrorism.
You are correct. I missed Labor with 4 seats who are also in favor of the two-state solution. But are there any other parties with MKs actively advocating a two-state solution?
As well as Yisrael Beitainu, which might be a more right wing party but supports a two state solution. So the entire opposition is pro two state solution.
That’s not to say that there aren’t far too many opponents of a two state solution in power at the moment. Polls show them taking heavy losses in any upcoming election, and we can only hope that indeed happens, and soon.
Why advocate when there is no current realistic path? Without advocacy support drops more. Less support less advocacy.
Would things change if there was perceived to be a partner and circumstance that could deliver a solution with security?
Could a next generation of Fatah leadership be able to do that? Or would they be quickly killed by those whose mindset is as of a violence prone version of @InfraBlue’s?
Countries can’t be evil.
You say this like there isn’t equivalent pressure on the Palestinian side.
Ceasefires don’t have to be unilateral.
Aah well, if you want the perfect to be the enemy of the good… you think all hostilities ended in South Africa when the Apartheid government caved to sanctions? Far from it. Doesn’t mean them caving wasn’t the right thing to do.
I disagree.
Israeli exceptionalism is as convincing as the American kind.
If that was really Rabin’s reason for expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, it seems like an incredibly dumbass and counterproductive response. Was he thinking that the situation was some kind of game, where if your side commits a terrorism then my side is awarded a penalty in the form of taking over some of your land?
That’s not the way that rational grownups deal with a territorial sovereignty dispute, if they are serious about both sides having legitimate claims to the homeland. I remain unconvinced that any Israeli leader who ever endorsed settlement expansion was ever really serious about supporting Palestinians’ rights to a Palestinian state.
Again I’ve no interest in this thread debating various concepts of “right”; more what is possible.
BDS only pressures one side and does nothing absolutely nothing to have the other side deliver on the item they must minimally bring to any deal. No amount of pressure of any sort would work without Israel getting satisfactory assurances that the other side can and will deliver security and is acting in good faith.
That’s not a difference between perfect and good; it is the difference between possibly good and completely worthless.
“Right” here has nothing to do with morality. I mean “right” as in the practical, sensible thing.
Nobody else is doing it. Plenty of other groups already sanction the other side.
That’s not their purpose. That’s like berating the Red Cross because they don’t save animals.
Absent pressure, Israel would be happy to just go on with the status quo, the way the South African Apartheid government did for decades.
Oh, I think it’s clear from the amount of pushback BDS gets that it’s far from worthless.
Sorry to interrupt, but I missed what “BDS” means. Apparently not a Korean boy band?
Boycott Divest Sanctions.
I will cross post something I just put into the US support of Israel thread: Biden administration placing economic sanctions on West Bank extremists. See the announcement here:
Also, a US Treasury alert on what this could mean.
https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/FinCEN_Alert_Extremist_Violence_FINAL_2.1.24.pdf
Old friend MK Bezalel Smotrich, head of the Religious Zionist Party, is not happy:
“The ‘settler violence’ campaign is an antisemitic lie that enemies of Israel disseminate to smear the pioneering settlers and settlement enterprise, and to harm them and thus smear the entire State of Israel…President Biden is wrong about the citizens of the State of Israel and the heroic settlers …"
When it comes to violent settlers, if they are clashing with Palestinian civilians/police/army today, they will be clashing with Israeli civilians/police/army tomorrow. They tried that trick with Hamas, and everybody can see how well that worked out. Rabin himself was assassinated.
Has it not been the case for a while that products from illegal settlements are sanctioned, not allowed to be labelled “made in Israel” for trade purposes, etc., at least in the EU?
P.S. Tel-Aviv is already the world’s most expensive city to live in. Is that viable? (I suppose somebody has to be #1, but it’s not like Israelis make that much money, and I am not convinced that Israeli economic and political policy is that forward-looking.) It also means, I suppose, that any real sanctions and/or economic collapse will be felt by millions of people in Israel.
Yeah, but that’s generally the case with pressure movements such as boycotts. They put pressure specifically on the more powerful side in a conflict, because that’s the side that has less incentive to change the status quo. [ETA: As MrDibble basically already said more concisely a couple posts ago. Never mind?]
To borrow the analogy with South Africa employed earlier, the 1980s divestment-and-sanctions movement against the South African government didn’t place any conditions on the African National Congress to renounce violent resistance or terrorist acts. Its purpose was to say to the South African apartheid government “Our willingness to continue associating with you will depend on your ceasing to unjustly oppress these people under your control.” Irrespective of the crimes indisputably committed by some militants among those oppressed people.
Divestment/sanctions/boycott-type pressure movements are not about setting out specific conditions on both sides required to achieve successful conflict resolution. That comes later, if we’re lucky. What such movements are about is getting the more powerful side to be willing to change the status quo.
Naah. It’s in the top 10, sure, but more like no. 8 or so.
It’s probably as good of a place as any to ask this: there was a lot of talk immediately after the attacks that Netanyahu’s political future was over due to a combination of the feeling that his policies led to the attacks being possible and even amongst his supporters that the attacks were a catastrophically massive failure of his most important job that happened on his watch and there was no way he could stay in power in the long term. My understanding of the internal politics of Israel isn’t particularly deep. For those more knowledgeable than myself, its four months later and Netanyahu doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. Is he just being the war leader who is going to be rejected once the crisis has passed, or was the initial judgment that his political future was doomed in error?