U.S. President Joe Biden and other world leaders have warned against Israel striking Iran's nuclear facilities over fears of further escalating the Middle East conflict.
Right because the following two things are the same:
A radical Islamist regime that has openly expressed genocidal intent towards the Jewish state, and Jews worldwide, and sponsors Islamist terrorists around the world, and has destabilized the entire Middle East and destroyed countries; and
The world’s only Jewish state with a total population of 9 million people that just wants to be left alone to live in peace but has been forced to fight for its survival since literally the day it declared independence.
What an absolute load of horseshit, is that why they attacked the fucking UN today, got bored of easy targets like women and children? Sorry I mean Hamas operatives…
I support Jewish people, and the people of Israel. I do not support their ongoing genocide, landgrabs, and invasions.
If you support the genocide of the Palestinian people (note I did not say HAMAS, who can go fuck itself), and Israel seizing their land, then you might be the bad guys.
The only people “supporting genocide” are, ironically, the supposed peace activists who are screaming for intifada and cheering for Hamas and Hezbollah on our streets and college campuses.
Invasions? Do you mean when they retaliated against Gaza AFTER BEING INVADED on Oct 7? Or do you mean retaliating against Hezbollah, AFTER A YEAR OF HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS BEING FIRED INTO ISRAEL? Do you think that Israel should just sit back and let themselves be slowly destroyed attack by attack?
I think there’s a big difference between protecting yourself and your people, and killing 40,000 civilians while whatever the hell this is.
Love to see you have eaten the poised, miss-information campaign about the peace protests.
So, yes, Israel is absolutely committing a genocide. I for one am against genocides, Are you? How many civilians are allowed to death while defending yourself?
Its currently nearly 40:1. Is that ok? if so, what about 80:1? 200:1? 400:1? When is enough enough?
Do you know how many civilians died in WWII protecting the world from the Nazis and Imperial Japan?
And no, Israel is not committing a genocide. Claiming “40,000 dead civilians” doesn’t define a genocide. Besides, a large proportion of those “civilians” were actually Hamas fighters.
It’s frightening how many people just soak up terrorist propaganda. What are you going to bring up next? The alleged hospital bombing? The fake famine? The so-called “Flour Massacre?”
Have you not been following the news on this? There is an actual definition of genocide in international law.
"The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. "
South Africa will not be able to make their case, which is probably why they asked for an extension on the date to provide evidence. No rational person can conclude from the facts that Israel has demonstrated the intent to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part.
So your criteria is a court conviction? I guess that’s one way to answer, but I was more asking what’s your criteria, meaning what’s the criteria you’d personally use to think whether such court decision would be fair or not.
demonstrated the intent to destroy the Palestinian people
If that’s what you mean as your answer, then I kinda agree. That’s about what I would use to define genocide.
That’s the definition of a genocide. The evidence has to support the conclusion that Israel has demonstrated intent to destroy the Palestinian people, and the evidence clearly doesn’t show that. Here are a few key data points:
Even if we take the estimated death toll at face value, every military expert who has looked at the numbers has concluded that the civilian-to-combatant ratio is among the lowest (and possibly THE lowest) in the history of urban warfare. This suggests that the IDF has actually done a very good job of minimizing civilian casualties.
Even if we take the estimated death toll at face value, it represents maybe 1-2% of the entire Palestinian population. If Israel intended to destroy the Palestinian people, you would expect the death toll to be much higher.
The pace of civilian death slowed dramatically over the course of the war in Gaza as the IDF moved into different phases of the war. If Israel intended to destroy the Palestinian people, you would expect the pace of civilian death to remain constant and not diminish over time.
Haha, you have just discovered the strong anti-Western, anti-Israel streak in Lemmy politics. I had to unsubcribe from the news forums because of it. Lemmy politics is pretty much the opposite of Reddit politics, and consciously so.
You do realize this conflict predates the settlements, don’t you? By about 50 years.
The settlements certainly don’t help the situation, but they are nowhere near a significant root cause of the conflict.
We don’t need to go back to Abraham’s time. Israel and Palestine came to an agreement 30 years ago. Palestine recognized Israel and in return there was supposed to be a peace process leading to two states in roughly the 1967 borders. But Israelis kept building settlements. At this point they have short of a million settlers living in places such that a contiguous Palestinian state is impossible. This has completely delegitimized the moderate Palestinians as any kind of potent political force and has lead to radicals taking over in Gaza. This is absolutely a significant root cause of the current phase of the conflict.
They spent 30 years building FACTS ON THE GROUND which are now just the facts they have to live with. They shit the bed, didn’t clean up and kept shitting. Now the rest of us are supposed to be empathetic when they act surprised they got sick.
You don’t have a grasp of the history. You make it sound like the Palestinians were actively working towards peace and only became radicalized 30 years ago, which is simply untrue. The Palestinians have been radicalized since Arafat became Chairman of the PLO in the 1960’s. The PLO carried out their first terror attack years before the 1967 war, before Israel even came to occupy Gaza and the WB. The 1948 war was literally a war of annihilation carried out by several Arab countries (and thankfully they lost).
Even Arafat’s supporters blame him for walking away from the negotiating table at Camp David. Peace was in sight and he rejected it. Abbas was offered almost everything in 2008 and again they rejected it. Do you know why? Because they have never been interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel. Never. They have rejected every partition plan and every peace deal because nothing less than all of it is acceptable to them.
All of that is entirely irrelevant to the settlements. Nothing the Palestinians did justifies the settlements.
Let me put it differently. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that the palestinians so far have been stupid and unreasonable. And let’s imagine that tomorrow morning the Palestinian leadership and the entire Palestinian society has a miraculous conversion to “moderation”. Imagine we magically flip a switch in every last one of their brains and each and every one of them becomes a Kamala Harris Democrat that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, and accepts a peaceful solution, with two friendly states side by side.
It’s plain to see that even in such an “ideal” scenario, the settlements that Israel built make any meaningful two state solution simply and plainly impossible. There is no territorial integrity, there is no cohesion, all the best land has been taken, water resources are gone. There is nothing for these Kamala Harris Democrat Palestinians to build a meaningful state with.
That’s what I mean when I say that Israel has fucked up. They have made the 2 state solution impossible. They are left with either going full genocidal fascist or a binational democratic state, with equal rights for all. Sadly, they seem to be going down the former path. And at some point, genocidal fascists do tend to get what’s coming to them.
That’s false, the Olmert proposal for example offered Abbas 95% of the occupied territories with a plan for territorial swaps. It’s a difficult problem for sure, but not an impossible problem. This would have been sorted out a long time ago if one side wasn’t driven by a genocidal narrative and holding on to a dream that if they just kill enough Israelis, they’ll eventually pack up and leave.
Israel has not fucked up. The Netanyahu government has made some mistakes, but the point is the Netanyahu government is a product of decades of failed attempts at peace. What killed the peace process for most Israelis was the second intifada, which is what they got in return for Oslo and Camp David. The next nail in the coffin was the Gaza withdrawal, which put Hamas in control of Gaza and gave Israel 15 years of rockets and terror incursions. The final nail in the coffin for peace? Oct 7, 2023.
But this is modern history and you have to understand it within the broader context of Arab nationalism and Islamist expansionism, which is the source of the Palestinian narrative described above. That’s why this conflict, out of all others, has persisted for so long and seems so intractable: because it all begins with the refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
Between Olmert’s time in office and now, the population of illegal settlers has gone from 450k to 700k. If it was hard then, it’s impossible now.
My argument stands even if we assume the worst of Palestinian culpability. Every time the Palestinians reject a plan, the Israelis have made a future solution plan that much harder.
The data simply does not support the conclusion that Israel is interested in a viable two state solution. And the problem in our era is not Arab nationalism. That’s dead. It’s been defeated. There are no Arab nationalists in power anywhere of consequence in the MENA area. Most major Arab countries are ready to accept a two state solution. They literally just came out and said in explicitly a week ago. They guaranteed Israeli security. The problem at this point is quite specifically Israeli nationalism.
Iran, yes, I can see that concern, but the only reason Iran has managed to insert itself in a conflict that is two countries away from its borders is due to Israeli policy and its failure to give Palestinians a positive vision for a solution.
I am willing to accept that the Israeli turn to the right is the result of the intifadas etc. But again the intifadas did not drop from the coconut tree. They were in return responses to legitimate Palestinian grievances. At every turn, Israel has not been able to understand and address those.
And ultimately Israel is the powerful party here. They get to dictate the terms of the conflict. And they keep winning every war and losing every peace. From Napoleon’s time we know that “you can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.” The Europeans learned at Versailles that in the modern era, total victory does not give you the right to enforce humiliation and oppression on a population and expect the argument to be over.
It’s not impossible if there was a commitment on both sides to make it happen. There has never been a commitment on the part of the Palestinians, and there isn’t one with the Netanyahu government.
As I said before, Israel WAS interested in a two state solution. Until the second intifada. How many plans and proposals would the Palestinians have to reject before you admit that maybe they actually don’t want peaceful coexistence?
Israeli nationalism is not the problem. Israel exists. I has existed for 76 years. The problem is Arab and Muslim rejectionism. They simply won’t give up on their dream of driving the Jews into the sea. Moderate Arab nations have given up on that dream but the radical Islamists haven’t. That’s why Hamas launched their attack when they did, because they wanted to destroy the Abraham Accords.
And sorry, but there is no room in any reasonable moral system for accepting barbaric terrorism as “legitimate resistance” or a response to grievances. Blowing up nightclubs full of young people and busses taking people to work and school is not political protest. Besides, they have had opportunities to negotiate peace and chose not to take advantage of those opportunities. They had a chance to turn Gaza into a legitimate state when Israel withdrew in 2005 and they chose to turn it into a Hamas terrorist base.
Israel has not won total victory, which is why this cycle has continued for so long. The US and the international community has never let them achieve total victory. This war is different. The Netanyahu government has decided to finally achieve total victory.
Left alone, as in “colonize” a bit more on the land they are stealing? Ah but we must understand Israelis, they just need a little Lebensraum to “defend themselves” from the people they stole land from.
Israel just need to “colonize” and expand on other people’s land by killing those already living there. They obviously just want to be left alone doing their “colonizing” and bringing civilization to otherwise barren lands.
I’d show you images of Israel expanding and taking more Palestinian land over the decades but you’ll probably say those are propaganda and that since Palestine is not recognized, killing their people and stealing their land is totally fine and in the line of wanting to be “left alone”.
You seem confused about the history of the conflict. You are also conflating Zionism with Judaism, which are 2 very different things. Israel has never represented all Jewish people and never will, nor are it’s actions done to benefit all Jewish people. The conflation is itself antisemitic. Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized (see 29:01) by Zionism during its history.
Origins of Zionism
Zionism is a settler colonialism project that was able to really start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
Quote
Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction
that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers.
The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat.
An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.
Israel justifies the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice.
Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:
The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.
Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution
LOL, I’m not the one who is confused about the history of the conflict.
You’re the one parroting Soviet antisemitic propaganda, which makes sense given your username. Is Lemmyworld just a hangout for Marxists?
You are delusional. Go ahead, name a single source I used that is ‘soviet antisemitic propaganda’ and explain how. None are, remotely. You are the one doing genuine antisemitism by conflating Israel and Zionism to all Jewish people, so stop.
Zionism is a Settler Colonialist Project. Israel has never represented all Jewish people and never will, nor are it’s actions done to benefit all Jewish people. The conflation is itself antisemitic.
Oh my. So you want me to teach you all about Soviet antisemitism? No wonder there is so much hatred out there. So much bloody ignorance.
Don’t fucking lecture me on what’s antisemitic. Israel is the Jewish state and was the Jewish homeland long, long before Mohammed rode in and built his holy sites on top of the ruins of our temples. Since you have no knowledge of history, you might not even realize that Islam colonized the entire Middle East. But I guess brown people perpetrating colonization and imperialism doesn’t fit your racial Marxist narrative, does it?
See my first link about antisemitism, the first section about the origins of Zionism, and all the linked books in the last section. They all show, in detail, how you are incorrect. If you consider Israelis to be antisemitic because they are anti-zionist, to the extent that you won’t even look at their works, you are way to far gone.
You are trying to justify the Settler Colonialism of Zionism with the myth of Ancient Israel, which even if true is not a justification. You are also conflating Palestinians with all Muslims and trying to tie both of those to the actions of old empires. Which is islamophobic and unsurprising coming from you. Jewish people are not a monolith, Muslim people are not a monolith.
Every Ethnostate is unjustifiable, every colonialist regime is unjustifiable.
LOL, do you actually think some random anti-Zionist Jew is an authority on the topic? Anti-Zionist Jews are the fringe minority. They are a fascinating phenomenon from a psychological perspective, but that’s about it. They have a strong interest in separating Jews from Israel so their work amounts to nothing but propaganda.
Ancient Israel was not a myth. We have extensive archaeological evidence to prove it. And Zionism is directly connected to it. Before Zionism became a political movement, it was an element of Judaism. We have long prayed about a return to Jerusalem. The great irony is that Israel is actually a successful decolonization project because it resulted in a return of an indigenous population to their ancestral homeland.
Every ethnostate is unjustifiable and yet many of them exist. There are a dozen countries that are basically Muslim ethnostates. Jews have one.
Right because the following two things are the same:
“Israel wants to be left alone”
What an absolute load of horseshit, is that why they attacked the fucking UN today, got bored of easy targets like women and children? Sorry I mean Hamas operatives…
The person you’re arguing with is a Dark Lord of the Sith, I don’t think it really makes sense to engage
Attacked the UN? WTF are you even talking about?
And yes, every single war has been started by Israel’s enemies.
At least be aware of current events if your going to chat shit.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/10/un-peacekeepers-in-lebanon-say-israel-has-fired-on-their-bases-deliberately
He’s an 11 day old spam account.
I joined 11 days ago to engage in discussions about a topic that is of concern to me. I can see that I will have to lower my expectations.
Rather telling that you responded to this comment but not the comment giving you the source on the attack on the UN troops. Funny that.
He claimed Israel “attacked the UN.”
Which they did.
LOL “attacked the UN”
Brainwashed dipshit
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/11/israel-attacks-un-peacekeepers-in-lebanon-why-its-such-a-big-deal
Keep quoting Al Jazeera, terror-supporting asshole.
Oh, they just wanna be left alone! That makes sense why they committed a genocide and have now instigated war.
What war did they instigate?
I support Jewish people, and the people of Israel. I do not support their ongoing genocide, landgrabs, and invasions.
If you support the genocide of the Palestinian people (note I did not say HAMAS, who can go fuck itself), and Israel seizing their land, then you might be the bad guys.
The only people “supporting genocide” are, ironically, the supposed peace activists who are screaming for intifada and cheering for Hamas and Hezbollah on our streets and college campuses.
Invasions? Do you mean when they retaliated against Gaza AFTER BEING INVADED on Oct 7? Or do you mean retaliating against Hezbollah, AFTER A YEAR OF HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS BEING FIRED INTO ISRAEL? Do you think that Israel should just sit back and let themselves be slowly destroyed attack by attack?
I think there’s a big difference between protecting yourself and your people, and killing 40,000 civilians while whatever the hell this is.
Love to see you have eaten the poised, miss-information campaign about the peace protests.
So, yes, Israel is absolutely committing a genocide. I for one am against genocides, Are you? How many civilians are allowed to death while defending yourself?
Its currently nearly 40:1. Is that ok? if so, what about 80:1? 200:1? 400:1? When is enough enough?
Do you know how many civilians died in WWII protecting the world from the Nazis and Imperial Japan?
And no, Israel is not committing a genocide. Claiming “40,000 dead civilians” doesn’t define a genocide. Besides, a large proportion of those “civilians” were actually Hamas fighters.
It’s frightening how many people just soak up terrorist propaganda. What are you going to bring up next? The alleged hospital bombing? The fake famine? The so-called “Flour Massacre?”
What is the criteria then to tell if Israel is committing genocide to Palestinians?
Have you not been following the news on this? There is an actual definition of genocide in international law. "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. "
South Africa will not be able to make their case, which is probably why they asked for an extension on the date to provide evidence. No rational person can conclude from the facts that Israel has demonstrated the intent to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part.
So your criteria is a court conviction? I guess that’s one way to answer, but I was more asking what’s your criteria, meaning what’s the criteria you’d personally use to think whether such court decision would be fair or not.
If that’s what you mean as your answer, then I kinda agree. That’s about what I would use to define genocide.
That’s the definition of a genocide. The evidence has to support the conclusion that Israel has demonstrated intent to destroy the Palestinian people, and the evidence clearly doesn’t show that. Here are a few key data points:
I wish Lemmy had some of the tools I had in Reddit, so I could mark you as “pro-extermination”
You can add user notes
Haha, you have just discovered the strong anti-Western, anti-Israel streak in Lemmy politics. I had to unsubcribe from the news forums because of it. Lemmy politics is pretty much the opposite of Reddit politics, and consciously so.
I’m getting that sense…
If they want to be left alone, they should stop building illegal settlements in the West Bank.
You do realize this conflict predates the settlements, don’t you? By about 50 years. The settlements certainly don’t help the situation, but they are nowhere near a significant root cause of the conflict.
We don’t need to go back to Abraham’s time. Israel and Palestine came to an agreement 30 years ago. Palestine recognized Israel and in return there was supposed to be a peace process leading to two states in roughly the 1967 borders. But Israelis kept building settlements. At this point they have short of a million settlers living in places such that a contiguous Palestinian state is impossible. This has completely delegitimized the moderate Palestinians as any kind of potent political force and has lead to radicals taking over in Gaza. This is absolutely a significant root cause of the current phase of the conflict.
They spent 30 years building FACTS ON THE GROUND which are now just the facts they have to live with. They shit the bed, didn’t clean up and kept shitting. Now the rest of us are supposed to be empathetic when they act surprised they got sick.
You don’t have a grasp of the history. You make it sound like the Palestinians were actively working towards peace and only became radicalized 30 years ago, which is simply untrue. The Palestinians have been radicalized since Arafat became Chairman of the PLO in the 1960’s. The PLO carried out their first terror attack years before the 1967 war, before Israel even came to occupy Gaza and the WB. The 1948 war was literally a war of annihilation carried out by several Arab countries (and thankfully they lost).
Even Arafat’s supporters blame him for walking away from the negotiating table at Camp David. Peace was in sight and he rejected it. Abbas was offered almost everything in 2008 and again they rejected it. Do you know why? Because they have never been interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel. Never. They have rejected every partition plan and every peace deal because nothing less than all of it is acceptable to them.
All of that is entirely irrelevant to the settlements. Nothing the Palestinians did justifies the settlements.
Let me put it differently. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that the palestinians so far have been stupid and unreasonable. And let’s imagine that tomorrow morning the Palestinian leadership and the entire Palestinian society has a miraculous conversion to “moderation”. Imagine we magically flip a switch in every last one of their brains and each and every one of them becomes a Kamala Harris Democrat that recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, and accepts a peaceful solution, with two friendly states side by side.
It’s plain to see that even in such an “ideal” scenario, the settlements that Israel built make any meaningful two state solution simply and plainly impossible. There is no territorial integrity, there is no cohesion, all the best land has been taken, water resources are gone. There is nothing for these Kamala Harris Democrat Palestinians to build a meaningful state with.
That’s what I mean when I say that Israel has fucked up. They have made the 2 state solution impossible. They are left with either going full genocidal fascist or a binational democratic state, with equal rights for all. Sadly, they seem to be going down the former path. And at some point, genocidal fascists do tend to get what’s coming to them.
That’s false, the Olmert proposal for example offered Abbas 95% of the occupied territories with a plan for territorial swaps. It’s a difficult problem for sure, but not an impossible problem. This would have been sorted out a long time ago if one side wasn’t driven by a genocidal narrative and holding on to a dream that if they just kill enough Israelis, they’ll eventually pack up and leave.
Israel has not fucked up. The Netanyahu government has made some mistakes, but the point is the Netanyahu government is a product of decades of failed attempts at peace. What killed the peace process for most Israelis was the second intifada, which is what they got in return for Oslo and Camp David. The next nail in the coffin was the Gaza withdrawal, which put Hamas in control of Gaza and gave Israel 15 years of rockets and terror incursions. The final nail in the coffin for peace? Oct 7, 2023.
But this is modern history and you have to understand it within the broader context of Arab nationalism and Islamist expansionism, which is the source of the Palestinian narrative described above. That’s why this conflict, out of all others, has persisted for so long and seems so intractable: because it all begins with the refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
Between Olmert’s time in office and now, the population of illegal settlers has gone from 450k to 700k. If it was hard then, it’s impossible now.
My argument stands even if we assume the worst of Palestinian culpability. Every time the Palestinians reject a plan, the Israelis have made a future solution plan that much harder.
The data simply does not support the conclusion that Israel is interested in a viable two state solution. And the problem in our era is not Arab nationalism. That’s dead. It’s been defeated. There are no Arab nationalists in power anywhere of consequence in the MENA area. Most major Arab countries are ready to accept a two state solution. They literally just came out and said in explicitly a week ago. They guaranteed Israeli security. The problem at this point is quite specifically Israeli nationalism.
Iran, yes, I can see that concern, but the only reason Iran has managed to insert itself in a conflict that is two countries away from its borders is due to Israeli policy and its failure to give Palestinians a positive vision for a solution.
I am willing to accept that the Israeli turn to the right is the result of the intifadas etc. But again the intifadas did not drop from the coconut tree. They were in return responses to legitimate Palestinian grievances. At every turn, Israel has not been able to understand and address those.
And ultimately Israel is the powerful party here. They get to dictate the terms of the conflict. And they keep winning every war and losing every peace. From Napoleon’s time we know that “you can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.” The Europeans learned at Versailles that in the modern era, total victory does not give you the right to enforce humiliation and oppression on a population and expect the argument to be over.
It’s not impossible if there was a commitment on both sides to make it happen. There has never been a commitment on the part of the Palestinians, and there isn’t one with the Netanyahu government.
As I said before, Israel WAS interested in a two state solution. Until the second intifada. How many plans and proposals would the Palestinians have to reject before you admit that maybe they actually don’t want peaceful coexistence?
Israeli nationalism is not the problem. Israel exists. I has existed for 76 years. The problem is Arab and Muslim rejectionism. They simply won’t give up on their dream of driving the Jews into the sea. Moderate Arab nations have given up on that dream but the radical Islamists haven’t. That’s why Hamas launched their attack when they did, because they wanted to destroy the Abraham Accords.
And sorry, but there is no room in any reasonable moral system for accepting barbaric terrorism as “legitimate resistance” or a response to grievances. Blowing up nightclubs full of young people and busses taking people to work and school is not political protest. Besides, they have had opportunities to negotiate peace and chose not to take advantage of those opportunities. They had a chance to turn Gaza into a legitimate state when Israel withdrew in 2005 and they chose to turn it into a Hamas terrorist base.
Israel has not won total victory, which is why this cycle has continued for so long. The US and the international community has never let them achieve total victory. This war is different. The Netanyahu government has decided to finally achieve total victory.
Left alone, as in “colonize” a bit more on the land they are stealing? Ah but we must understand Israelis, they just need a little Lebensraum to “defend themselves” from the people they stole land from.
Israel just need to “colonize” and expand on other people’s land by killing those already living there. They obviously just want to be left alone doing their “colonizing” and bringing civilization to otherwise barren lands.
I’d show you images of Israel expanding and taking more Palestinian land over the decades but you’ll probably say those are propaganda and that since Palestine is not recognized, killing their people and stealing their land is totally fine and in the line of wanting to be “left alone”.
What land are you referring to?
Holy shit you people are insane
Youre exactly like a German in the 30’s drooling about Lebensraum.
Sick genocide supporting fuck.
Nice Holocaust inversion, idiot.
Its called an arms race, you build nukes I build nukes.
You seem confused about the history of the conflict. You are also conflating Zionism with Judaism, which are 2 very different things. Israel has never represented all Jewish people and never will, nor are it’s actions done to benefit all Jewish people. The conflation is itself antisemitic. Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized (see 29:01) by Zionism during its history.
Origins of Zionism
Zionism is a settler colonialism project that was able to really start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
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Settlements, Occupation, and Apartheid
Israel justifies the settlements and military bases in the West Bank in the name of Security. However, the reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice.
The mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948:
Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967:
While the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements
The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.
Apartheid Evidence
Amnesty Report
Human Rights Watch Report
B’TSelem Report with quick Explainer
Visualizing the Ethnic Cleansing
Peace Process and Solution
Both Hamas and Fatah have agreed to a Two-State solution based on the 1967 borders for decades. Oslo and Camp David were used by Israel to continue settlements in the West Bank and maintain an Apartheid, while preventing any actual Two-State solution
How Avi Shlaim moved from two-state solution to one-state solution
‘One state is a game changer’: A conversation with Ilan Pappe
One State Solution, Foreign Affairs
Historian Works on the History
Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History - Nur Masalha
The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948 - Nur Masalha
A History of Modern Palestine - Ilan Pappe
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine - Rashid Khalidi
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences - Avi Shlaim
The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories - Ilan Pappe
The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development - Sara Roy
10 Myths About Israel - Ilan Pappe (summery)
LOL, I’m not the one who is confused about the history of the conflict. You’re the one parroting Soviet antisemitic propaganda, which makes sense given your username. Is Lemmyworld just a hangout for Marxists?
You are delusional. Go ahead, name a single source I used that is ‘soviet antisemitic propaganda’ and explain how. None are, remotely. You are the one doing genuine antisemitism by conflating Israel and Zionism to all Jewish people, so stop.
Zionism is a Settler Colonialist Project. Israel has never represented all Jewish people and never will, nor are it’s actions done to benefit all Jewish people. The conflation is itself antisemitic.
Oh my. So you want me to teach you all about Soviet antisemitism? No wonder there is so much hatred out there. So much bloody ignorance.
Don’t fucking lecture me on what’s antisemitic. Israel is the Jewish state and was the Jewish homeland long, long before Mohammed rode in and built his holy sites on top of the ruins of our temples. Since you have no knowledge of history, you might not even realize that Islam colonized the entire Middle East. But I guess brown people perpetrating colonization and imperialism doesn’t fit your racial Marxist narrative, does it?
See my first link about antisemitism, the first section about the origins of Zionism, and all the linked books in the last section. They all show, in detail, how you are incorrect. If you consider Israelis to be antisemitic because they are anti-zionist, to the extent that you won’t even look at their works, you are way to far gone.
You are trying to justify the Settler Colonialism of Zionism with the myth of Ancient Israel, which even if true is not a justification. You are also conflating Palestinians with all Muslims and trying to tie both of those to the actions of old empires. Which is islamophobic and unsurprising coming from you. Jewish people are not a monolith, Muslim people are not a monolith.
Every Ethnostate is unjustifiable, every colonialist regime is unjustifiable.
LOL, do you actually think some random anti-Zionist Jew is an authority on the topic? Anti-Zionist Jews are the fringe minority. They are a fascinating phenomenon from a psychological perspective, but that’s about it. They have a strong interest in separating Jews from Israel so their work amounts to nothing but propaganda.
Ancient Israel was not a myth. We have extensive archaeological evidence to prove it. And Zionism is directly connected to it. Before Zionism became a political movement, it was an element of Judaism. We have long prayed about a return to Jerusalem. The great irony is that Israel is actually a successful decolonization project because it resulted in a return of an indigenous population to their ancestral homeland.
Every ethnostate is unjustifiable and yet many of them exist. There are a dozen countries that are basically Muslim ethnostates. Jews have one.
You know Israel isn’t Canada, right? Polievre is working on CANADIAN politics.
Can you find Canada on a map?
I’m Canadian.