Israel killing civilians in Gaza and the West Bank
Here we go again. No rest afforded to the victims. If Covid isn't enough, why not add a few misiles and kill civilians. Whatever else will be said about this massacre, Israel cannot be said to be defending itself from territory it is occupying. It's a contradiction in terms.
The US needs to stop sending military support to the only country in the Middle East which has nuclear weapons and is destroying the lives of civilians which lands it is stealing. This issue will not stop until the occupation stops. Utterly horrifying and contemptible behavior from the Israeli state.
For some decent coverage on the topic, it's good to look at Israeli sources instead of US ones.
Haaretz is offering good, careful coverage of the current situation:
https://www.haaretz.com/
Also crucial is B'Tselem The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:
https://www.btselem.org/
EDIT:
For important recent information on the Israel situation Human Rights Watch recently issued a strongly worded condemnation of the situation of the Palestinians. It's worth a look for those who may not be aware of the extent of Israeli crimes in the Occupied Territories:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
The US needs to stop sending military support to the only country in the Middle East which has nuclear weapons and is destroying the lives of civilians which lands it is stealing. This issue will not stop until the occupation stops. Utterly horrifying and contemptible behavior from the Israeli state.
For some decent coverage on the topic, it's good to look at Israeli sources instead of US ones.
Haaretz is offering good, careful coverage of the current situation:
https://www.haaretz.com/
Also crucial is B'Tselem The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories:
https://www.btselem.org/
EDIT:
For important recent information on the Israel situation Human Rights Watch recently issued a strongly worded condemnation of the situation of the Palestinians. It's worth a look for those who may not be aware of the extent of Israeli crimes in the Occupied Territories:
https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
Comments (7611)
Interesting to see the usual defense mechanisms crumbling beneath the weight of the murderous reality it has fostered in its settler colonies.
Jewish victims don't matter - got it. Israel has no right to defend itself.
This is so effective because, unlike so many other ugly aspects of the US-centralized power alliance, Israeli apartheid is not some covert government operation being run by highly trained agents and manipulators. Those responsible for carrying out its day-to-day abuses are just ordinary civilians, police and soldiers who have not been trained on the sinister craft of perception management. Who aren’t acutely aware that it’s bad optics to tell a Palestinian family on camera that if you don’t steal their house then someone else will. Who don’t have bad PR at the forefront of their attention when they’re cheering as they shoot Palestinian protesters. Who just react to the racist nationalist propaganda they’ve been ingesting all their lives instead of considering how difficult it will be to narrative manage a video of them cheering and chanting “may their names be erased” at the sight of flames.
Awareness is spreading of Israeli apartheid brutality for the same reason awareness is spreading of US police brutality: the internet combined with smartphone cameras. Seeing is believing. Seeing brings change."
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/05/11/the-israel-narrative-is-crumbling-because-of-phone-cameras-and-the-internet/
Didn't say the word "Jewish" once, if you actually saw my post. There are Israeli's which aren't Jewish and the religion here is irrelevant to the crimes.
B'Tselem is excellent and is run by mostly Jews, I don't know why you raised that point. Unless you are purposefully mixing in the Israeli state as representing all Jews and then calling criticism of the state "anti-Jewish" hatred, which is getting very old by now.
It's more accurate to call it "aggression". If you think it's acceptable to kill people who's lands you are stealing, that's your problem.
You never mentioned the Israeli/Jewish victims of the rocket attacks in your posts, why is that? Elderly Israeli Jews have been killed by Hamas rockets.
:up:
Excellent. It's been long overdue, over 50 years of occupation and murder and massacre and theft. Really ugly stuff. The Israeli left is very small now, it needs to pick up members again to shift internal politics inside the country.
Yes, many Israeli's are honest about what they do, even if it's quite ugly. But as your post shows, it's now almost impossible to defend these acts. You just can't compare the land of Gaza which is now a garbage heap with one of the most advanced militaries in the world.
It's tragic that so many people have to get killed in such a senseless, brutal manner. But it's changing eyes and minds...
Hamas launches rockets from civilian areas.
Which is tragic. But even worse are the number of elder Palestinians and children being killed. So again, I don't see the point of talking about Jews here.
It takes away from the main problem now:
An occupying force is killing civilians in lands it is stealing. That's the point.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You're just a propagandist.
But by all means, continue to defend the murder of children so that such land grabs may continue.
Why? They are one side in this conflict.
And to understand just why the stance of the US is what it is, it's crucial to understand how domestically different this issue is compared to let's say the Turks bombing the Kurds, the Burmese going after the Rohingya or the conflicts between Armenia and Azerbaijan or Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
I somehow doubt this will matter particularly. Other regimes in the region are even worse at covering up authoritarian action. Egypt killed more civilians in a night than all the fatalities produced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 2010s, opening up on protest camps with belt fed machine guns. Public response in the US was muted. When Iran periodically puts down protests with live ammunition and kidnapping, it generally puts a damper on liberals favoring engagement for a month tops.
The people who generally don't favor the US alliance with Israel will, of course, circulate the images, as well as ones from Syria and around the region, since apparently current wars aren't horrible enough, so partisans feel the need to recycle and rebrand other conflicts. Those that support Israel will defend their right to self defense.
If the US didn't sanction Egypt for the coup, and continued to send them billions, I highly doubt this will move the needle on a much more popular ally.
I do fear this action could spin out of control. The Palestinians can't hold elections because the PLO and Hamas have both lost support and exert dangerously little control. Israel can't stop having elections, but in none of them does peace play a major role, because lack of Arab support for the Palestinians has made apartheid seem more realistic as a solution.
The Arab states, having originally denied the Palestinians citizenship to keep the conflict with Israel alive for a later day, have now seen that the politics of a captive people metastisized, and appear to be washing their hands of the Palestinians wholesale, so they can't exactly act as brokers for peace either.
If you were forced to live under an apartheid system and brutalized for protesting against it, I imagine you might be tempted to take up arms against it. I condemn all attacks on civilians on both sides without reservation. The underlying cause of this conflict though is the unrelentingly and largely unrecognized violent oppression of the Palestinians. Try the trivial thought experiment of putting yourselves in their place and you might come up with a more objective viewpoint.
If you're going to charge me with defending the murder of children then I can charge you defending the murder of the elderly Israeli Jews killed by Hamas rockets a day or two ago. We can go back and forth here and accuse the other of being Hitler.
I've never been to Gaza but there must be places that are less inhabited. In the past, rockets have been launched from hospitals and weapons and troops transported in ambulances, so I don't know what to tell you. Obviously it's awful that Palestinian children have been killed, but this is not intentional. Do you agree that intention matters?
This is true, but most of those other regimes are not held up as shining beacons of democracy with 'best pal' status with the US. We will have gone some way if we began to speak about Israel in the same terms as we do those other nations who you cite: as governed by dubious 'regimes', willing and ready to exercise violence upon both its own populations and those around it, as it indeed it does.
You don't get to use the "intention" excuse when civilian casualties are inevitable. Deliberately attacking civilian targets* is a war crime regardless of your stated intention (as if that should be trusted).
[Edit: *Which are "undefended and not military objectives"]
We could go back to The British Mandate of Palestine. We could then go to WWII and mention that a large portion of the Jewish elites did not care much about the Holocaust, as such an event provided an opportunity to demand a state.
We could also talk about how the original UN proposal would've divided the land of Israel something like 55%-45% in favor of the incoming European refugees. And it would've actually been less bad to the Palestinians to accept that UN resolution, because what they ended up getting was way worse for them.
Of course, I completely see why they would reject such an offer, it basically gave off land to settlers. But now they have almost nothing.
We could also talk about how Israel obtained the Gaza and the West Bank in the 67' war. All of this is legitimate and interesting and useful.
But for the narrow purposes of this "war" or massacre, I think talking about Jews and Arabs and religion complicates the scenario with not crucial info for the moment. What matters, I think, is that children and civilians are being killed indiscriminately. This shouldn't be accepted regardless of the history.
That's why I'm not talking much about the whole history of Israel. Which is very interesting.
No. You don't get to excuse one of the most sophisticated militaries on earth with opposie doopsy we made a whoopise.
No, it's not. If that were true then every general or commander would be a war criminal because civilian casualties are inevitable in war. Bombing of German industrial targets? War crime. Bombing on Japan? War crime.
Come on, Baden.
Yes.
No, you come on.
Definition of a war crime:
"Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts:
[b]Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities;
Intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, that is, objects which are not military objectives[/b];"
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/war-crimes.shtml
(Here is where the "intention" excuse comes in, but I don't buy it).
But also:
"Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;"
No mention of intention here.
Well, at least you're following your reasoning to its logical conclusion.
I'm curious though, lets say you're in charge of the US or UK during WWII.... are you just not bombing industrial targets? How about military bases? There's plenty of civilians working on military bases, trust me.
Because this mingling conflicts with their vision, they've been systematically abusive toward Palestinians, apparently hoping they would leave.
There are Palestinians all over America. Ask one what it's like there.
However why the US has quite a different approach to the conflict as in other cases was what I had in mind. This is very important in this case. We see that the whole peace process itself was started by Israel anticipating that once the Cold War was over, the US policy might change (as happened with South Africa). But that didn't happen, which is crucial here.
And of course the main issue is that this low key off and on -war has become totally sustainable for Israel: Israel can once in a while have these exchanges and a limited war with it's neighbors every once in a while without it making a huge burden for the society and economy. So the occupation can continue.
Yeah, that's with intention. The intentional targeting of civilians is wrong, as I've been saying.
I edited it to acknowledge that. So, there's a loophole in the definition. It doesn't change the ethical argument for me.
In any case while this is a cute hypothetical let's get back to how Isreali apartheid is finally being shown for what it is.
Sure. As far as I know, what brought the US in such close alliance was the 67' war, in which Israel defeated Nasser and with him secular Arab Nationalism. The US suddenly had an ally it could depend on in the Middle East. They also had Iran as an ally back then. Now they have less military allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel essentially, which is quite crazy if you think about it. Also Egypt, but they're not doing good.
Yes, the end of the Cold War did not bring forth a positive solution which could have been reached when the USSR collapsed. Now, very few (if any) powerful states support the Palestinians. Turkey a few years ago was agitating. Now I don't know. Maybe Russia could do something, but I don't know how it benefits them, which we sadly have to consider.
China is another potential player, but I don't see them getting too involved.
So the US is the main player here and Europe does almost nothing...
I agree that war is awful, disgusting business and that it makes monsters out of those who engage in it, but I also believe that sometimes it is necessary. Japan killed thousands in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor including many civilians... I don't know how else to respond to that if you're leading a country.
The whole idea of arms sales as pure aid is misleading though. Funds are often earmarked for specific purchases from American manufacturers, making aid function partly as a pass through of tax payer dollars to contractors, with the added benefit of the US military not having to pay to maintain the "donated" equipment.
You'd think the US would have long pivoted from giving so much aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and Egypt to investing at least as much in Central America given how much more relevance the later has on US politics and security (CA cartels produce far more deaths in the US than Islamist terror attacks, even including 9/11), but we remain embedded.
So, presumably you believe war against Israel by the Palestinians is justified? Again, in their position, living under a foreign occupation, how would you react?
Same goes if you start your argument from #3.
No, all I said was in some instances war is justified and in during warfare or military action intention does matter. That's all I was seeking to establish.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is a different issue and I don't have time right now to engage further. All I was seeking to establish was that intention matters in military actions and that civilian casualties are generally unavoidable during military action, but that this should not be confused with the deliberate murder of civilians.
Which contributes to the Yemen catastrophe.
Now we have this massacre. During a pandemic no less.
And then we still have people (a bit less so than before thankfully) asking "why are the Muslims so radical?"
Hah. As if many of us wouldn't be in Hamas or the Brotherhood or whoever is around to fight back to some degree, which compared to Israel or Saudi Arabia is like throwing a rock to a tank.
If you abstract these actions from the context in which they occur you render yourself cognitively incapacitated. And in that context, these actions are the deliberate murder of civilians. The universe doesn't operate on free-floating principles, unembedded in reality.
Answer the question. Is taking arms against an occupying army justifiable? Would you consider doing that if you were a Palestinian?
Part of the problem here is one of identification. If you don't identify with a group or do identify with their opponents, it's hard to be an impartial judge. Lay that aside and answer the question.
Yes, no kidding. What "missiles" are those that you can throw 200 of them and kill 2 people?
And to be crystal clear: I do not wish to see any more deaths on any side. This is a tragedy, but those with least capacity to fight back are getting totally slaughtered.
Those "anti-missile" technologies are just for PR purposes, they barely work. Using state of the art technology against civilians is contemptible.
Do you have a better idea, then? Is it just that all soldiers are war criminals and that everyone who partakes in war is guilty? Is that really the best you've got? Nazis are the same as Allied soldiers, we're all guilty and disgusting. What is your attitude towards an Allied pilot who bombs a German military base or a factory producing weapons?
That Isreal stop being an apartheid state and cease its colonial activites immediately. As a start. Ideally, pay for the reconstruction and restituion of the the land it has stolen. And then some.
You're the one who dragged in useless hypotheticals about WWII, let's not forget.
https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/5/12/in-pictures-9
Can you please answer my question about the Allied bomber? Otherwise I just don't know what your attitude towards military action is.
Quoting Baden
Targeting the Israeli army would be a genuine step above what they're doing now which is firing rockets into residential areas intentionally and killing civilians for absolutely no reason. They aren't responding to attacks from these areas.
The best step would be for them to re-enter negotiations.
I don't have 'an' attitude toward miltary action because I'm not so naive to think one can reason one's way to action from first principles.
Then you don't have an attitude towards the deliberate murder of civilians under the banner of military action. This is why it's difficult for us to converse.
The difference is that I will not search high and low to come up with excuses for the among the world's most sophisticated military for it's war crimes and deliberate murder of children, while it does everything it can to exacerbate resentment among its subject population.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Agreed.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You can't negotiate your way out of apartheid/occupation with a party who has chosen that above a one or a two-state solution. The US would have to step in and that's unlikely.
It arguably did change under Clinton and a deal that featured a Palestinian state on over 95% of the occupied territories was eventually proffered by the Israelis. There were plenty of problems with the deal, but the psychology of Arafat may have been the primary stumbling block there, since he publically turned away the deal without advancing counter terms in a show of bravado.
The Bush II admins position on the conflict, particularly after the start of the GWOT tilted far more towards Israel, and took pressure off Israel.
However, the biggest factors would be those internal to Israel:
1. Demographic shifts with higher birth rates in ultra Orthodox and Middle Eastern Jews, who tended to favor conservative parties led to a long series conservative governments less in favor of peace.
2. The new Israeli border security measures were very effective. The dramatic reduction in successful terror attacks took pressure off the government to make peace.
It's basically impossible to imagine the Israeli army being used to force settlers out of Gaza today; the country has shifted far to the right. The internal political situation is totally different from the early 2000s. It's also hard to imagine who could bargain for the Palestinians and actually control a binding agreement at this point.
It certainly doesn't help that Netanyahu, up to his neck in corruption and so weak a leader that he has been unable to secure a stable majority despite four elections in two years, has been pandering to religious nuts out of the sheer calculus of political mechanation. How convenient that there's now a national cause to rally around after all this deadlock! Can't be anything to do with the fact that Nethanyahu's opponent was recently picked by the president to form government?
But somehow I feel it doesn't matter to those whose homes are being demolished to make way for said religious nuts.
Anyone defending the tactics and behavior of Israel against the Palestinian people either doesn't know anything of what is going on, or they are extremely biased to the western anti-Islam narrative and won't dare to comment in fear of being called an antisemite.
Not being able to criticize a nation's behavior in this way is the reason the conflict keeps going. If the world were to ignore the self-victimizing behavior of Israel and the black and white fallacy-driven apologists of Israel's behavior against Palestine, then Israel would be pressured out of its blatant crimes as a nation.
Maybe the media and people could pay a little more attention to actually asking and visit Palestine in order to get a balanced side to the whole conflict, instead of automatically just accept the Israel perspective first and maybe change that opinion later in the rare occasion there's blatant proof, like the white phosphorus attacks.
In conclusion, there's no denying the crimes Israel is doing here, there's no denying the unbalance of this conflict. The Palestinian people are extremely pressured and controlled by Israel that there's no wonder some shoot homemade rockets. You don't have to condone or condemn these actions in order to understand why it happens. People rarely ask the question "why" something is going on, only that it "is" going on. If we were to start with knowing why some Palestinians shoot home-made rockets into Israel and understand that it comes from a source of desperation, we would see the causal line of events.
If Israel keeps taking land, evicting Palestinians to build luxury homes, control the movement and freedom of the Palestinian people, harass, assault, and even kill Palestinians through their totalitarian control of them, then how can desperate acts of violence by the Palestinian people be a surprise to anyone?
And how can anyone even say that Israel is the one defending itself? How seriously skewed is the logical thinking if that is the conclusion to anything? Palestine acts in desperation, they want freedom and to be their own nation. Israel denies that to them. Even though there is a portion of people who rage religious battle about key land areas and parts of Jerusalem, most inhabitants just want to live in peace. But they are denied that.
It's like if Canada all of a sudden shut down all airports in the USA, no one in the USA is able to move around as they please, they need to have special IDs, they can't leave the country unless being put through months of paperwork and can only do so by traveling to Canada's airports. All while risk being shot or assaulted on the border by "reasons". All imports and exports are prohibited and controlled by rations and sometimes Canada cuts the power grid. If any citizen of the USA were to speak up or try to fight this thing by building their own weapons, the retaliation is to bomb major civilian city targets with white phosphorus causing massive civilian casualties with globally banned weapons of war. All while the rest of the world turns a blind eye because they have trade agreements and good diplomatic bonds with Canada while thinking the USA just have a lot of people who might be terrorists under a degenerate religion.
That allegory should really show how skewed this whole thing is. There's no denying the fact that Israel is in the wrong here. There's no tangible argument for defending Israel's actions. There really is no debate once people abandon their biases and fallacies and look at the facts. Period.
No doubt that's true. But I think we should all be concerned whenever government acts, intentionally or disingenuously, because Deus Vult!
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Inshallah – this medievalism has to stop!
Yes very civilized!
[tweet]https://twitter.com/AyOdeh/status/1391851115776466951[/tweet]
Do you see a moral difference between:
a) Firing rockets targeting aggressors who have already fired rockets onto civilian populations with the knowledge that civilians will likely be killed, lets say 100 civilians die.
b) Intentionally targeting residential neighborhoods with the explicit purpose of murdering civilians and killing 100 civilians.
Do you see a moral difference between these two actions assuming the victim counts are the same?
Great, and I'm here to discuss the flesh and blood murder of Jews who have not faced this type of hate since Nazi Germany.
Glad we could partake in this productive conversation.
Could have fooled me. Perhaps you might want to ask me about Japan again or something to really drill it home.
Of course they are. What are they going to say? We're killing children?
And to those that think that the Arabs have not sought peace, just look at the "Palestine Papers" from just a few years ago. The PLO was willing to give up all of East Jerusalem just to be left alone. But this goes way back. It's been Israel, not the Arab states, that have repeatedly rejected peace in favor of power.
But Israeli loyalists will say that they are in an "existential threat" situation. They say this as they are actively destroying a nation. And see no irony in this.
But don't forget Israel created Hamas in order to divide the PLO, it just so happened that Hamas gained power in Gaza and manage to fight back to a limited extent...
I do know a few Jews who are openly pro-Palestinian and while these Jews will likely be ostracized from religious communities if they are vocal in their beliefs, I haven't seen any pro-Palestinian Jews hate their own Jewishness as a result of their position, but I guess it exists on some level.
If you're a Jew who wants to immediately dismantle the state of Israel then you are advocating for a very serious security issue for millions of Jews so you deserve to be ostracized. If you're advocating for a two state solution then you're just a mainstream Jew and religious communities will have no problem with you.
:roll: Palestinians under Isreali Occupation don't have that option. War or subjugation. That's it. Until Israel ends their confiscatory Occupation, etc.
Jordan will take them.
That's an incredible statement.
That's like saying why do Jews need Israel if they already have New York.
180s statement that they have no choice is wrong. You don't have to flash bullshit to support the Palestinians.
I'm not sure having Egypt as an ally was ever particularly helpful to the Palestinian cause. They did, at one point, consider granting Palestinians on their soil citizenship and letting them out of squalid camps, but only when Israel was offering them money and land for taking them on. Aside from that, Egypt mostly helped to keep unhelpful raids and reprisals going, following its own political goals, and then their disastrous military efforts helped set the stage for the occupation.
Not to mention that the Arab allies expulsion of their Jewish populations and expropriation of their property wasn't particularly helpful PR for the Palestinian cause during the Cold War, and dramatically increased Israel's need for land. The PR effects of the expulsions have faded over time as people have moved on, but the expulsions continue to haunt the Palestinian cause as the descendants of the Jews expelled from the Middle East tend to vote for more hardline political leaders.
As to your question, I wouldn't choose war. There is no point in waging wars you can't hope to win, and shrewd leaders can offer more through negotiation than conflict. Violence might be necissary, but that doesn't make all violence useful. The whole "any day now we're going to have a miracle victory and genocide our oppressors," statements were not exactly helpful for winning wider support, hence the eventual abandonment of those terms. Certainly plenty of groups could make similar appeals to their right to wage war against their oppressors throughout history, Jews in the Russian Empire for example, but that doesn't mean that waging that war is something every oppressed group is going to agree with, because all it is likely to do is make the situation worse.
It's also hardly the blanket sentiment of the Israeli Arabs or Palestinians I know. If your situation is dire enough, pragmatism can overwhelm moral outrage. In a similar vein, I've had an Afghan national express to me that his country would have been better off if the UK had colonized it, and most of the Egyptians I worked with openly supported Sisi after the coup, despite the admission that they were basically opting to go back under the same boot they were under with Mubarak, the sentiment being, "things can always get worse." To my mind, this is the logic that has driven the drop off in the intensity of the conflict over the past decades.
Rocket attacks in this context are less about costly signaling to Israel, since the effects are meager, as they are about building internal support for those carrying them out.
They're under a blockade in Gaza in which the Israeli authorities count the calories each citizen eats. That's monstrous no matter what:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/1-million-face-hunger-in-gaza-after-us-cut-to-palestine-aid
They are continuing to build in territory which does not belong to them. They're stealing another people's home and you except these people to say "thank you"?
180 is correct. They're not in a position to choose peace while occupied. They only have resistance or they acquiesce.
I'm a pro-Palestine American Jew, and having been conditioned, if not demanded, to support Israel for 30 years, it's hard not to feel a tinge of self-disgust watching Jews dancing and cheering at the Western Wall, waving the Magen David.
Does that justify killing civilians?
Can nobody stay rational for two seconds in a row on this forum?
No.
But under occupation they can acquiesce or resist. Resistance need not imply violence at all.
Crazy how people just reframe the core issue, an occupying apartheid state, to this.
It's a good PR tactic.
Concessions on apartheid are not concessions. And the state who is demonstrably - and so far successfully - committed to the annihilation of a population is Israel.
Most Israelis seem to think so.
Cognitive dissonance is a contagious bitch on this thread today. :mask:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You misread me. I was referring to Israel's alliances with Egypt & Saudi Arabia in recent years.
Wtf are you talking about? :shade:
Spouting bullshit is not helpful.
And Jews can go to New York.
This is nuts.
Sure. They shouldn't have gone there to create Zion. It was a terrible mistake. Those who supported them were used to screwing over the middle east, so they didn't think about the morality of it.
Originally the Palestinians welcomed the Jews, but that's not what Jews wanted.
I know the story. It's beyond tragic. Why would someone feel the need to pile bullshit on top of it?
Is that the core issue? I don't know anything about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. I'm just reading what people are posting here, e.g. StreetlightX agreeing here that all inevitable civilian casualties are war crimes, saying here that all war is unethical, and saying here that's he's just here to "discuss the murder of flesh and blood children by an apartheid state."
So should I be concerned more with the civilian victims of the fighting or with the reasons for the fighting (or is it equal)?
What is upsetting about Jews parading around with the Israeli flag? I get that it can be provocative to Palestinians, but what exactly is wrong with it? I understand that there's far right Jewish Israelis who support a "greater Israel" but I don't think this is what most Jews support. As an American Jew, most of my experience within Jewish communities has indicated to me that most Jews support a two state solution and just want peace.
But this is what there is.
First of all stop stealing more land.
Then go back to resolution 242, create two states.
Then we can proceed.
ok
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Yeah nothing upsetting about Jews waving the Israeli flag, dancing and cheering as a fire breaks out near the third holiest site for Muslims.
There's no single rule.
Number of casualties and who is murdered probably are (probably) the priority.
The history is long, complex, ugly. But there's substantial scholarly evidence that time and time again it's been Israel who has rejected peace in favor of expansion. It happened in 67 when besides Gaza and the West Bank, they took the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt.
Egypt offered a full peace treaty, not even recognizing Gaza and the West Bank in 1970. Israel considered the option, but rejected it in favor of incorporating the Sinai to Israel. They were building a city their, Yamit.
After the 73' war, they had to withdraw from the Sinai AND recognize Palestinian grievances this time around, which was worse from the Israeli perspective.
But they've continued building in the occupied territories. It does this because it has the power to do so. Israeli is acting like any other imperial state.
Notice how you can agree with this without making any false assertions?
Too late now. What I don't like is U.S. support of religious states. They aren't any better than monarchies or dictatorships. If you call out state policy, you get accused of antisemitism. BS. I've got no truck with Jews. But the settlements are hard to parse from our own immoral, illegal invasion and settlement of Indian Land.
The U.S. should use it's purse strings to influence what we deem to be proper behavior. But I'm sure there are strategic concerns in the Dept. of State that are over my head. It just seems we have more than Indian blood on our hands.
Sure. This issue does raise passions a bit, with good reason there's plenty of stuff in it.
Is the English that are known for understatement? Are you English? That's got to rank right up there at the tippy top old chap!
I agree. But to be a lying armchair agitator is a waste of good brain cells.
Truth is no-one cared for the Jews out of the nation states. Even in full knowledge of the Holocaust, it wasn't a moral issue till like the 60's or 70's in terms of anyone caring much outside Jews.
It's tragic. Though it doesn't justify what they did in Palestine, but I understand it.
But by now, after much reparations from Germany, they have an advanced industrial country and a massive military. They could just stop stealing more land and killing people indiscriminately. Jeez.
Quoting James Riley
Na. I'm Dominican/American/Spanish, but I love British humor. ;)
Yeah that does sound kinda shitty. Guess there's shitty people everywhere.
I don't feel any self-disgust though and I don't see why I would. If every time a Jew did something bad it caused me to feel self-disgust I'd just permanently be in a state of grossness.
Tim, you "win" by not responding to this. Yes, Zionists + Promise land = ethnic cleansing is true in just the same way that BLM + Police reform = White genocide.
You win by not responding.
Don't really know what kind of glue you're sniffing in order to interpret things this way, but it must be pretty strong.
Alright then, in any case I think we're both on the same page that people do shitty things then. I'm not going to justify everything that Israeli Jews do.
In Demographic shifts one should mention the huge influx of East European Jews once the Soviet Union collapsed. This immigration to Israel was far larger than at any time earlier. Hence this huge influx of European immigration in the 1990's changed the political landscape, as those coming from the Soviet system likely didn't vote for the Labor party. And also created natural growth of the economy. Before that people could forecast that the Palestinian population would overcome the Jewish population because of higher fertility rates, but after such dramatic increases in population fertility rates were unimportant.
And the basic problem is that if Israel makes peace, then that peace should be upheld by all sides. Basically only Egypt and Jordan have had the ability to enforce the peace treaty with Israel where the government of Lebanon hasn't been able to control it's territory. Hence the withdrawal from Southern Lebanon was done by Ehud Barak's labor government, the Hezbollah swiftly occupied the region (which then lead to war only in six years). Especially in Egypt the peace with Israel has been a political hot potato issue in Egypt. Yet this isn't a problem as the neighbors of Israel aren't a military threat anymore to it.
In the end, Israeli leadership has decided that this is just the "new normal", a permanent state of low intensity conflict which the nation is able to endure.
As I recall, rhetoric concerned with annihilating a population, or ‘driving them into the sea’, has been heard for years from certain non-Jewish quarters within the Middle East. . I don’t recall such threats ever coming from Black South Africans toward the white population.
Supposedly if they did, apartheid would have been OK, yes? Because otherwise surely black South Africans under apartheid never once wished ill upon their otherwise lovely oppressors?
Militant black south Africans even attacked government institutions during apartheid, at various points! Civilians too! Can you imagine? The audacity? Can't believe we got rid of apartheid.
Yes, a population of 4.6 million under extreme travel restrictions can just up and go to another poor country of just 10 million that already struggles with providing services. That should go swimmingly...
Palestinians don't/haven't have free access to move to neighboring Arab states. When they did flee there they were denied citizenships and set up in refugee camps. Gaza is blockaded by Egypt as well as Israel.
It's a nonsense solution, which doesn't even get to the whole point of why they should have to leave. What ought to happen is that they should be allowed to live where they are without ceaseless Israeli oppression. This is made impossible by fanatical Israelis who ostensibly want to cleanse the territories for their own use, and fanatical Palestinian militants who continue to think God will grant them a seemingly impossible victory over their opponents, or, as is more common, are more interested in being rulers over the ashes than seeing a peace where they are sidelined.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Unless the irony is lost on me, you're playing the racist card I see. That doublespeak is mighty MAGA/QAnon of you, BC.
form of democracy is that much different than what U.S. democracy started off as. Democracy evolves , you know.
They can go to Jordan. Most Palestinian refugees in Jordan have full Jordanian citizenship.
The Israelis would have forcibly moved the Palestinians to Jordan except it reminded them of their own forced transport, so they stopped short of that solution.
As American as Jim Crow & apple pie. Post-1967 Zionism = Manifest Destiny redux. :up:
You sound so naive. It’s not. a question of being ok, but of how groups respond to the rhetoric of the opposing side. It’s thing to commit an action of terrorism in the name of liberation , it’s another to produce a never ending stream of rhetoric that isn’t simply about freedom from oppression but about the illegitimacy of another whole population, even in the context of a hypothetical shared democratic state.
health point of view. If you’re not careful
you’ll turn into a Chomsky.
On this we agree, but not for reasons you think.
Oh I was just saying his point was so stupid you probably shouldn't even engage it.
Your concern is touching. And would we all one day turn into Chomsky's the world would be an incomparably better place.
:100:
All nation states, to the extent they have power, use force. Israel is no exception. It's just that they got into colonialism a few years later than others.
And now everybody can see how brutal it is. What boggles the mind is the excuses they come up with! "Human shields", "They don't want peace", "Move to Jordan", etc. etc.
It’s painful for me to read this. I’m not saying I completely disagree with it, but something is missing from the historical context. My father’s parents and grandparents lived in Palestine up until 1917 when the Ottoman occupation forced Jews to take up arms against the British, at which point they immigrated to the U.S., which prevented their extermination by the Nazis. They were among the waves of zionists coming from
Central Europe. As you may or may not know, there were a number of varieties of Zionism. Some believed in the Biblical injunction to return to Israel and rebuild the temple. The passover haggadah we read as children said and still says, as a prayer, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’.
Then there were the Zionists who were trying to escape the endless cycles of oppression and progrum , believing that only in a Jewish state could a Jew protect
themselves. Finally, there were socialist utopians with no religious affiliation who wanted to build a model community. I think there was a sincere if naive belief among those pioneers that a Jewish State could
also be a democracy that welcomed and was fair to all, Jew and non-Jew alike. I think this naivite led to incomprehension at the array of hostile Arab powers aimed at the destruction of this Jewish state. It also led to the delegitimization of the concerns of palestinians.
Of all of them, "move to Jordan" has got to be the most mind-numbingly idiotic.
Chomsky’s the kind of guy who, if stuck on a desert island, would alienate the pragmatists, steal the conch
and form a cult of personality.
And straight up racist too.
It's instructive to see how "Israeli" and "Jewish" are used interchangeably here. But all Palestinians are just Arabs, who cares where they live? It's the same thing. All Arabs have states, what they want another one? :roll:
We haven't improved much on racism. Somewhat sure, but damn, we've got ways to go...
But they weren't hostile at first. Wasn't it Jewish intolerance that started it?
Quoting frank
There were atrocities on both sides , which I think resulted from profound cultural differences and distrusts. Heres an interesting discussion on the reasons from the expulsion of palestinians after the war of independence.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_exodus
I meant when the Jews first started coming.
But yes, The Israelis put a lot of effort into making life hard for the Palestinians who remained, apparently expecting them to give up and leave.
Quoting frank
They wouldn’t have expected them to give up and leave if they knew how to get along with them. The Israelis didn’t expect or want the tremendous diversity of non-Jewish ethnicities already living in Israel to get up and leave. So why the Palestinians?
I think the cultural clash was a recipe for disaster. A poor , traditionalist culture invaded by modern educated Europeans invariably ends up with the former losing power and autonomy, and produces a vicious cycle
of resentment and paranoia , and self-justifying overreaction on the part of those with the power. Would it have made a difference if the Jewish arrivants had been more enlightened? Today’s polarized political climate in the West suggest not. Lesser educated rural
traditionalists distrust and feel opposed by the growing urban multiculturalists. Ironically, these Trumpists side with Israel over the palestinians. Why, because nationalistic Enlightenment liberalism is the traditionalist in political idea they are familiar with.
But more and more it's clear that Isreal is a state with full agency, brimming with state of the art weapons and a fully developed state apparatus which has long been autonomous from whatever history got it to where it is. I suspect it's even a victim of its own propaganda, which has worked tirelessly to portray it as a bastion of civilization surrounded by a sea of hostile barbarians, all waiting to pounce. Yet when push comes to shove it's this supposedly civilized state which has exercized the utmost brutality upon a completely wretched population, all the while bleeting about self-defense.
At issue - and everyone but the most propagandized can recognize this - is the present-day reproduction of violence and opression by the Israeli state that has jack shit to to with its history and everything to do with the exercise of sheer, untrammeled power, visited upon a destitue population, immeserated and left with little other than a hollowed out political vocabulary of violence. This is not about 'history' or 'culture' or 'fledgling democracries'. This is a land grab and slow burn genocide, worked upon the planet's biggest open air concentration camp. The irrelevance of the 'complexities of history' could not be more clear or more stark.
No wonder you don’t like psychology. You’re incapable of nuanced empathic insight.
I think the Republicans are the party of hardened pragmatists. Their allegiance is to people like Netanyahu, not to young Israeli leftists. :up:
The hardcore, old school Israelis are still in charge. Why?
Quoting StreetlightX
The more I read your cartoonish takes on complex
political conflicts , the more I get the sense that you’re not talking about the large political world at all, but working out your own personal emotional issues.
Let me see if I understand you. You’re saying that the new, populist Trump -dominated Republican party, as opposed to the party of Bush and Reagan, is pragmatic?
Don't talk to me about sublimating politics into emotional work outs.
I think they see themselves that way. It's ok to be brutal to illegal immigrants because otherwise, they'll pour in.
Why? How do you see the new Republicans?
You do sort of come across as mentally ill sometimes.
Although I’m a liberal, I agree with Conservative commentators like David Brooks, Ross Douthat and David Frum that the Trumpist republicans are a sinking ship and are completely out of touch with new economic realities.
Its early leadership didn’t go the direction of terrorist Begin. When he was elected , he moderated somewhat.
The right in Israel now is unquestionably dominated by racist shitheads, but why should Israel
be different from Russia, Hungary, Poland,Sweden, Germany or the U.S.? It’s today’s fashion.
What Israel is doing isn't different from what other states have done in the past/ongoing, but your attempt to provoke "why should?" really shows which side you are on that question, with the racist shitheads.
...The Israeli society have never been more conceited, racist and nationalist than in the last decade under Netanyahu. The four years of the Trump administration have greatly contributed to the illusion of total impunity, and the government has increased the tempo of land confiscation, illegal destruction of houses, and settlement building, proving that they intend to squeeze out as many Palestinians out of their country, and to make the life of the remaining ones so impossible that they will leave to wherever they may be able to. The process is over a century long, and succeeded in granting Israel total control over the whole of Palestine, so why doubt its further success?
...But now the streets are burning. Palestinians – those with the few rights still conferred on them by Israel, or their brothers and sisters in the ‘occupied territories’ (all of Palestine is occupied) who lack any form of rights, are now acting together against the atrocities of Israeli colonial control. What have they got to lose? Only their lives; and their lives are not safe under Israeli rule, for sure. They have had enough, much more than enough, for many generations, and those who advised them to wait, were false messiahs and snake-oil merchants."
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/israels-illusion-of-normality-collapses-may-2021/
Basically Sweden.
It really does? It really really truly does?Indubitably and forever more ? Are you sure? Will you send me a candy bar if you’re wrong?
Can I guess which side you’re on? Ready? Ok, here goes; you’re on the side of ‘reads a few lines of ambiguous text and , rather than asking a question or two to get clarification, simply goes with their first impression’.
How’d I do? Oh wait, you’d have to ask a question or two to know the answer to that.
Oh sweet summer child.
"Will you send me a candy bar if you’re wrong?" You clearly haven't evolved past grade school.
You have to excuse me. I’ll need to know the secret handshake before I can join the authentic political radical’s club, where self-righteousness flows like water and real psychological insight is in perennial drought.
You say it’s unambiguous and I say it’s ambiguous. How ever are we to get to the bottom of this? Perhaps by actually having a discussion about it? No, then you’d have to dismount your high horse and put your brain to work. But I know you can do it. I’ve read some
of your posts. There’s real promise there. So my first suggestion is that you attempt to summarize my
‘unambiguous position’ and we’ll see if it bears any resemblance to what I intended.
Quoting Saphsin
Actually I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten.
The point doesn't differ if for instance, you were being sarcastic rather than rhetorical. Since the beginning you've been giving nothing but defensive excuses. Oh they're racist and do bad things, but I have all these things to add to it while you naive guys voice your opposition to what they're doing.
Oh yeah? Wouldn't be surprised if you turn out to defend that current fashion of racist states you think is worth mentioning.
"Actually I learned everything I need to know in kindergarten."
Not a good thing.
Irony, you see. I thought it clear they screwed up then and there also.
Or were you being ironic as well? Goddam irony.
How is this determined? What would define a country lacking in agency? The United States is the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world, but it seems less able to direct even domestic policy than many other states (e.g. China would seem to have more agency in that regard).
I don't think you can divorce any nations actions from their history, and agency is often illusory.
That's a good description. It's genocide of the soul. Israel can deny claims to genocide in its conventional sense, since Palestinians have one of the highest birth rates in the world and are suffering from an obesity epidemic on par with the United States, rather than being starved out. This is the new world we live in. Providing food is now cheap enough, and mass exterminations now considered untasteful enough that the new method is a slow execution by the restriction of any access to freedoms or meaning. A restriction to a life of constricted opportunities and constant harassment, with the lack of any meaningful rights. This "genocide of the soul," is somehow considered acceptable enough for Israeli voters and Israeli allies. It is, if possible, even more morally repugnant than the Chinese attempt to forcibly absorb minorities, because it doesn't even envisage eventual parity, even after murdering the culture of other group.
Wait, what? I thought Jared Kushner brought peace to the middle east?
Damn! I hate when that happens.
Yeah. He failed, damn media. :joke: Then we've had repeated massacres in Gaza: 2008, 2012, 2014 and now probably this one. Maybe the ugliest one yet, what with all the world having problems to deal with by way of pandemic and financial troubles.
It's just a massacre. In the Israeli military, they refer to "mowing the lawn" in Gaza. Every few years we gotta teach them whose boss and put them in place. Which just increases the odds of it happening again.
The links in the OP are quite reliable on the whole. Just click on the headline in Haaretz and you'll get hourly updates. Bad day today.
I very much appreciate the historical context of the early Zionist movement. I should have been more precise with my attributions and said 'post-1967 Zionism' instead. I've corrected my previous posts where my meaning needs to be made clearer.
[quote=TI: What the Germans Lack (sect. 1)]One will notice that I wish to be just to the [Israelis]: I do not want to break faith with myself here. I must therefore also state my objections to them. One pays heavily for coming to power: power makes stupid. The [Israelis] — once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The [Israelis] are now bored with the [ethical], the [Israelis] now mistrust the [ethical]; politics swallows up all serious concern for really [ethical] matters. [Der Judenstaat, Der Judenstaat] über alles — I fear that was the end of [Israeli justice].[/quote]
(Emphasis and substitutions are mine.)
If you can give evidence if they're forced to do this to the Palestinians because of constraints, you should say so. Agency is the absence of constraints, or at least lacking enough to rightfully attribute blame. If they're politically obligated to do so for instance, well, that means the citizens are to blame as well as the state. Israel is one of the few countries where I think there may be truth to that. But the things Israeli state is being criticized for in this thread, why would you suggest they don't have agency?
The U.S. has poor domestic state capacity after suffering from the toxic effects of financialization, but also because it's filled with political elites unwilling to even to try to implement them. But it did have the capacity one time with willing political elites, it was able to implement some successful industrial policy in the 40s
This is ostensibly a philosophy site. I’m aware
that political philosophy and straight out political fights are also a part of what goes on here. I tend to avoid the political discussions because they tend to be muddled and over generalizating. This inclines participants toward a mentality of us against them , of who’s right and who’s wrong, without bothering to examine the context of arguments or the worldview through which they’re filtered.
For the record , I don’t give defensive excuses. I’m a post modernist who rejects moralistic approaches to understanding social value systems and political actions. I don’t give excuses because I have never met a side in a political dispute who couldn’t give legitimate s sincere moral justification for their acts and positions. So I don’t defend any side against their opponents. I defend all sides. This doesn’t mean that I dont prefer certain ways of thinking , certain worldviews to others, but I don’t blame others for falling short of that thinking. I attempt to move with them from within their perspective to a more effective thinking that they can endorse.
From a philosophical vantage, you could say I am positioned well to the left of you, if you maintain a moralistic politics.
I’m more than happy to relate my comments on Israel to this larger philosophical approach, because I am eager to define the philosophical position that grounds your stridently felt moral indignation.
For starters, I identify with Ken Gergen’s social constructionist approach:
By and large identity politics has depended on a rhetoric of blame, the illocutionary effects of which are designed to chastise the target (for being unjust, prejudiced, inhumane, selfish, oppressive, and/or violent). In western culture we essentially inherit two conversational responses to such forms of chastisement - incorporation or antagonism. The incorporative mode ("Yes, now I see the error of my ways") requires an extended forestructure of understandings (i.e. a history which legitimates the critic's authority and judgment, and which renders the target of critique answerable). However, because in the case of identity politics, there is no preestablished context to situate the target in just these ways, the invited response to critique is more typically one of hostility, defense and counter-charge.
In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right. In its generative moment, constructionism offers an orientation toward creating new futures, an impetus to societal transformation. Constructionist thought militates against the claims to ethical foundations implicit in much identity politics - that higher ground from which others can so confidently be condemned as inhumane, self-serving, prejudiced, and unjust. Constructionist thought painfully reminds us that we have no transcendent rationale upon which to rest such accusations, and that our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy? As we find, then, social constructionism is a two edged sword in the political arena, potentially as damaging to the wielding hand as to the opposition.”(Social Construction and the Transformation of Identity Politics)
The reason I responded that way was because you said you felt a tinge of self-disgust when other Jews were acting poorly. I just didn't understand why you felt self-disgust.
You misunderstand me, I am playing the 'both claims have about the same level of absurdity' card.
blame others for falling short of that thinking.
From a philosophical vantage, you could say I am positioned well to the left of you, if you maintain a moralistic politics."
The point of politics to improve the world and end suffering, that's why I bother spending time on it rather than plenty of other more pleasurable activities I'd rather do. The way to alleviate suffering in this case is to end oppression of the Palestinians. That is morality, and you are not to the Left of me for lacking it.
:100:
The foundation of politics is philosophy, also the name of this site, and I’ve heard nothing about it from you so far.
As far as being beyond good and evil , I don’t mind being in the company of phenomenologists , Nietzsche, Derrida, Gergen , post-steuxturalists, radical
constructivists and many other philosophical
positions that recognize the limitations of a moralistic thinking.
For the sake of understanding people, you have to see them amorally. Judgement closes the door on understanding. All you'll need to know is facts that serve the judgment.
But to live without judgment is inhuman. Without judgment you can't act.
I very clearly stated that it's hard not to feel a tinge of self-disgust and cultural dissonance after internalizing 30 years of pro-Israel propaganda, part of which has emphasized the importance of American Jews supporting Israel, despite the state of Israel undeniably functioning as an apartheid regime and an occupying force which has brutalized Palestinians. I shared a video, and I can't believe I have to repeat this again, of Israeli Jews cheering, chanting and dancing, at the holiest site in Judaism as a fire broke out near the third holiest site for Muslims, and after Israeli rockets killed 30 Palestinians and at least 10 children. What else can be expected when half of Israeli Jews (48%) say Arabs should be transferred or expelled from Israel. So no, this isn't just an instance of "Jews acting poorly". I didn't say "Jews acting poorly". Learn how to fucking read and process information.
Tbh, and this goes beyond philosophy and I'm not trying to be intentionally mean, but you just sound like an honestly miserable person. I've had disagreement with others but I don't get the same sense of vicious bitterness through their writing like I get through yours. Have you considered therapy or medication? I feel zero reason to engage with you if you're going to write like this.
That's exactly correct, if I sound like a miserable person it's because I interact with dogshit illiterates, such as yourself, who filter videos of Jews cheering death and destruction after rockets murdered several dozen Palestinians and nearly a dozen children into braindead commentary like:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
and:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
We've established it was a misunderstanding. Most people recognize this and move on.
"Dogshit illiterates" aren't to blame either for why you're miserable. You are to blame for why you are miserable. Nobody is forcing you to react in the way that you're reacting. The recovery process begins when you acknowledge this.
"We've" established no such thing. I've established your reading and comprehension difficulties given the dogshit statement below:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Does it ever get lonely up there on your pedestal?
I recall something like that resulting in Black September. Maybe I'm mistaken, though?
I fail to see how a commitment to a peace process established upon something like what people generally refer to as the "'67 borders" which would eventually facilitate the creation of an Israeli and Palestinian state, including obviously whatever other ethnic minorities there are there, with equal rights for all parties involved is just simply a concession. Though there is inherent pretense to their doing so, this has more or less, at least, a somewhat popular resolution to the crisis within certain circles in Israel, among certain factions of Fatah, and proposed by a sizable portion of the international community in the fight for the recognition of rights for Palestinians and the establishment of their state. Comparing every political situation that they find themselves in to the Six Day War only plays part and parcel to the near complete and total refusal on the part of the ruling order within the Israeli government to do anything other than claim that the Palestine Liberation Organization will shoot rockets into Israel, having been given an elevated ground, if they actually go through with an effective peace process, which is absurd, as it being effective would mean that the PLO had agreed not to do just that, which they will just have to accept on faith that they won't by offering them a set of circumstances that don't seem to justify that they would.
What can such a war of liberation entail other than the abolition of the state of Israel and the flight of Jews from there to either any number of countries in Europe or somewhere in the United States? I may not agree with that Israel should have been created as such, but I do acknowledge that it has.
The sad truth to the Palestinian situation is that almost no other government or organization in Western Asia has done anything to help their cause other than attempt to use them as a pawn.
Yeah, but to be fair, some of the Arab states have fallen behind the occupied territories on economic metrics, so they aren't particularly in strong positions to act as benefactors. That, and you have to question the leadership classes' commitment to human rights in general when they don't particularly treat their own minority communities any better than Israel. They might appeal to Muslim solidarity when it suits them, but they probably see kindred spirits in Israel.
However, they're populace at least has the excuse of being downtrodden and without political freedoms. The Israelis have all the benefits of a a developed state and continue to act as one of the worst authoritarian regimes.
While I appreciate your evocative and concerted condemnation of the killing of civilians and what is an apartheid regime, though I have certain qualms with the comparison to South Africa which Boycott Divestment Sanctions, who, by the way, does not offer a resolution to the conflict, when it is the one-state solution, though there is a certain paradox in that the way there is the two-state solution, is so very likely to invoke, and speculative and daring foray within Critical Theory, that you tout their dead in emotive support of the Palestinian cause is somewhat arbitrary. It's not really your casket to carry in the streets.
"Economic metrics" doesn't really justify authoritarian rule to me. What I'm saying is that this narrative on the primary part of any number of ruling orders in Western Asia of Israel representing "the West" à la an appeal to some form of "anti-imperialism" is just kind of a way for them to let politics there revolve around it.
I can't remember what meeting in the general course of the peace process it was, but there's a take from a Sweedish, I think, mediator on them in that, when they drew the borders, the Palestinians had absolutely no say in which borders were drawn. The only borders that mattered were those created by the Israelis. I don't have any illusions of their commitment to human rights. I merely recognize that an effective resolution to the crisis entails that whatever set of Israelis there are that is willing to is willing to speak with whomever it is in Fatah that is willing to establish a Palestinian and Israeli state. I hope that they, particularly the Israelis, will have the foresight to understand that such a resolution can only be temporary, as the nation of Israel is directly in the middle of what is proposed for the state of Palestine, and that an eventual one-state solution, which is to say, as there is much confusion upon this matter generated by both parties, a state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians, also including whoever else it is that lives there, of course, is set into motion.
There were people on that land before the Jews showed up. The Jews claim god gave them the land. BS. They took it.
Palestinians should be in Palestine. Go back to whatever was originally agreed upon after WWII. Conservatives love to let bygones be bygones and start over. Okay. But to make these people the problem of neighboring states, or make them responsible for the actions of neighboring states is BS.
:up: :shade:
The infamous United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 , which an Iranian friend once described to me as having been created because of that "Winston Churchill whipped out his dick" and effectively created the nation of Israel, was what was to follow the Second World War. It set up the West Bank, Gaza Strip, part of Egypt, and more or less formally recognized nation of Israel that would later result in the various political crises of which nearly all of the world has become completely fixated upon today. Though more than understanding of the motivations for the creation of a Jewish state, any number of Western powers ought to, by then, have understood all too well as to just what predicaments "nation-building" posed in territories that did have indigenous populations. Though I do think that Israel's "right to exist", and it is quite plausible that I may be accused of "new antisemitism" for saying so, is debatable, I do acknowledge that it does. There's a certain absurdity within certain left-wing intellectual circles to that the proposed resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the Jews should just move to Germany, which, being German, myself, I would almost be willing to endorse, as, personally, I could do without a certain degree of historical guilt, but ought to considered by any person who is serious about brining a resolution to the conflict as completely absurd. Acknowledging that the nation of Israel does exist, it seems that some other measures would need to be brought so as to bring an end to the conflict.
I am not sure if you are conceding my point or affirming your own, but am willing to leave this at whatever, as, to my general experience with this political situation, people only ever seem to become more and more convinced of what they already think about it.
From this POV, there is nothing novel about Israelis taking possession of a little more land. The area they wish to possess for the slightest enlargement of Israel is just not empty, free, and clear.
In the long run of history, one group of people obtaining more space almost always means some other group of people having less space. The Palestinians are, unhappily, on the "less space" side of the equation, and naturally they do not like it.
I suppose Zionists have a version of manifest destiny in mind, like 'everything on the west side of the Jordan River', at least. My guess is that they will eventually have it all, and will gain it by the use of force. Israel has never been hobbled by a "sickly unwillingness to use force". Unfortunately, other nations in the area have been as unhobbled as Israel; they use weren't quite as good at it,
Whether the various states in the region can tolerate Israel's expansion depends on the power of Israel. If Israel remains very powerful, the area's states will tolerate it, but with much resentment.
1. Palestinians are oppressed, discriminated against and economically undermined by border control that basically functions like the worst sanctions we have in the world
2. A gross differential in military might and state power
3. A gross differential in political support from other countries and political representation
4. Israeli "security" trumps Palestinian "security" pace every draft of every deal where on average there's pages upon pages on the former and very little or nothing in the latter
5. Israeli deaths are a fraction of Palestinian deaths
6. The multitude of discriminatory laws in Israeli proper linked to religious affiliation
7. Palestine barely functions, Israel is a modern state claiming to be a democracy
So when a Palestinian cheers an Israeli death, it's not the same thing. If an Israeli is killed in this conflict, it's not the same thing. To interpret the violence between these two groups as morally equivalent is wilfully ignoring context.
Nothing in the past 20 years has given any indication Israel wants peace. If one side doesn't want peace and undermines it every time, what's the moral obligation of the other side? At what point does violence against the oppressor become a moral obligation?
Yes, I agree. They started imperial conquest several decades after the great European Imperial Powers. Had this been done, say, in the 1800's or so, there would likely by now be little dispute. Perhaps plenty of racism, xenophobia and the like, but there would not be anywhere nearly as hated as they are now, simply because so much time has passed.
It's just that now the whole world can see just how ugly imperialism is. The PR they use is frankly disgusting and is no longer working, save for fierce Israeli tribalists. What makes this stand out is that, contrary to popular opinion, Israel is not at the center of the problem, it's the US. Without massive US aid and diplomatic support, Israel could not be doing what it is. They would not have the resources to steal so much land and kill so many civilians.
Like you say, Israel is not a special imperial power in this respect. But it's 2021. This should no longer be acceptable in any form.
It was just reported that 67 people died in Gaza, including 17 minors. This is unacceptable.
And there's really nobody in power seriously wanting peace. Extremists are in power or at least have enough influence to dominate the political environment. In the Middle East, those politicians that sign peace agreements are assassinated by their own people and the assassins are viewed as heroes.
Quoting Benkei
Just to take out of context what you wrote will just entrench further some that they are right and you are wrong. I did read your points, but still, what is the difference between one or another human being killed?
Anyway, this is quite a unfruitful way to look at a conflict. Every civilian casualty is a tragedy. Every combatant casualty is also a tragedy as we are talking about human beings. Conflicts are either solved by military means or by diplomacy, not by moral righteousness. I think the better way would be to look at what to do here.
I think that problem in general are religious fanatics who cherish this conflict. They keep sanity away from decision making.
https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-without-us-aid-israel-wouldnt-be-killing-palestinians-en-masse/?utm_campaign=Truthout%20Share%20Buttons&fbclid=IwAR3VcAljPM-Mccv4PiCYOLuw-JgpZfd1tolITiKrCR5vfgfHpi6SRoj4R08
Also Israel is destroying high rise buildings in Gaza:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/13/israel-bombs-high-rise-buildings-as-gaza-marks-deadly-eid-live
If you only look at the results and don't look at causes, both parties will look equally guilty. That's why people keep repeating "each civilian casualty is a tragedy" as a mantra because that reinforces equivalence. Intuitively it feels good, appears empathetic but really just glosses over the fact that not every tragedy is equally tragic. Just looking at the number of casualties on both sides makes this clear. The tragedy that befalls Israelis is of their own making, the tragedy that befalls Palestinians is wreaked upon them by the Israelis.
There is, however, also a problem inherent in treating this as a conflict between "two sides", where we can somehow add up atrocities and murdered civilians and come out with a moral judgement of an entire population.
Saying that the tragedy that befalls the family of a killed Israeli civilian is "of their own making" is reductive to the point of being false. What is the purpose of such a statement? It doesn't hold up as a moral judgement of individuals, nor does it provide any insight into the conflict or it's solutions.
Evils don't cancel out. The Palestinians are certainly oppressed, and against some kinds of oppression, violence can be justified. But only if there is a plausible connection between said violence and the end of oppression. And that connection simply doesn't exist here. The Hamas has no military solution, and as such it cannot justify its military actions as fighting against oppression.
Equally guilty? How?
It's because the US has by far the strongest military in the world. And is still the largest economy too. So they can get away with a lot.
NATO is basically the US and some European countries simply pay a fee, so they don't have to worry about military costs much. It was planned this way after WWII.
Sure. The list of US terrorist allies is long. It's well documented by William Blum in his book Killing Hope.
But again, normal imperial behavior. Other states in the US's positions would likely do the same. But it is very ugly. Israel is a part of that system.
Yea that was a disaster. My point was that they aren't compelled to fight. Many of them are Christian and their religion tells them not to.
Violence against oppression isn't evil. I'm not cancelling anything out. Sorry. And the conclusion that if there's no way out and they should just roll over and accept is ridiculously nihilistic. Evil should be resisted especially when success is unlikely.
This would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic. "If you can't win against a force that is successfully exterminating you bit by bit, then you ought to roll over and die in silence".
A couple days ago an elderly Israeli woman and her caregiver were killed when Hamas' rockets struck their homes in a residential area. Is this an example of resisting evil?
Indeed. And who has ever heard of Christians being compelled to fight? It's never been necessary to force them to do what they've always been so willing to do.
Pacifists don't usually make the headlines (unless they're being jailed for sedition).
Anyway, it's Hamas that handles violence. Kind of like the IRA. Hamas started out as disenfranchised professionals, like doctors and lawyers, put out of work by the state.
Would you sign up for the resistance if that happened to you?
Well, although I'm not a practicing Christian now, I was brought up Christian, as a member of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Christianity strangely lingers in me in some respects, so of course I'd resist and fight with gusto. Deus Vult!
Palestinians are Greek Orthodox, the ones I know are, anyway.
Would you toss bombs into Jerusalem?
Better to die in silence than take other innocent people with you.
Quoting Benkei
Pointless violence, however, definetly is. Hamas isn't fighting oppression. They're getting Palestinians and Israelis killed for zero gain.
Quoting Benkei
By what logic should you do something especially if it's unlikely to succeed? That's just indulging in a heroic fantasy.
And there it is.
Not a peep about the violence of settler colonialism of the Isreali state but - 'they should die in silence'.
Fucking warped.
It is worth clarifying how the debate in this thread is unfolding. There is one
side, so-called "pro-Israel," pointing out various dimensions and complexity of the ongoing conflict so that the achievement of peace would require patience and a trade-off. And there is another side, "anti-Israel," contending that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Strikingly, these positions and arguments are similar to one of Zizek's outstanding examples of ideological blindness: "Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they really are - in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of 'Jew' has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system."
(Zizek,' The sublime object of ideology’). No, an "anti-Israel" protagonist is not necessarily an anti-Semite. But the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations.
Yeah you're just putting words in my mouth. But that's par for the course with you.
I don't care to repeat all the correct condemnations of Israeli behaviour that have already been voiced in this thread. What I think of Israel's actions isn't relevant to my point, but obviously for you it's all about who I am as a person, not what my arguments are.
Your arguments show me who you are as a person. A rat.
Thanks for taking off your mask.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/gaza-israel-diverts-flights-rocket-barrage-palestinians-death-67-1.9796891
Quoting Echarmion
No worries, Mr. the-Palestinians-should-die-in-silence.
No, it's not.
Quoting Echarmion
It's never pointless. They are fighting oppression. Use of methods which adversely impact innocents is a consequence of inequality. You want a fair fight? Then arm up the parties until they are on an equal footing. Don't want to do that? Okay, I understand why you would not want to do that. But then you live with the consequences of your oppression.
Quoting Echarmion
By the same logic used to oppress you. I would fully understand Comanches raiding settler's homesteads and slaughtering the "innocent" women and children, and inviting reprisals against their own kin. If we wanted a fair fight, we should have got naked, jumped on a horse and took over their land that way, leaving our guns at home. Or we could have armed them up and trained them to fight and kill us on the terms we want to be fought and killed on. That's just fundamentally stupid.
A genuine though misguided Christian community.
Quoting frank
We Christians have done far worse to the Jews than that. It's interesting to consider what would be the case if the Palestinians were all Christians, isn't it? My guess is that Israel would not exist, or at least that it would be a much more reduced nation than it is at this time. In any event, it would not be treating Christians as it is treating Palestinians now. If I were a Christian in the position of a Palestinian in these circumstances, I suspect I would be capable of doing most anything. Fortunately, I'm an aspiring Stoic.
Should the other side stop firing missiles?
Dark skinned Orthodox people would still seem foreign.
Why not? What's the utility of pointless death? I can understand fighting back even if you don't have a chance to win, but not if the people you hurt are not the people attacking you. And I mean "people" in the sense of individual persons here, not in the sense of sharing a nationality or language or "culture".
Quoting James Riley
I'll believe that if anyone can point out a practical way that rocket attacks or similar actions have the least bit of a positive effect on the situation of the oppressed.
Quoting James Riley
I'm not objecting to their methods in a vacuum. I'm not saying they should "fight fair or fight not at all". I'm saying that what you're doing must have some practical chance of resulting in a situation that is "less bad". And I don't see such a chance here.
Quoting James Riley
Understand, yes. Justify, no.
Quoting James Riley
At least the comanche raiders could believe that if they killed a bunch of civilians, the Europeans might retreat and they might get to keep their lands. But you'd have to be delusional to think that firing rockets at cities is going to get the Isreali military to back down, much less improve the chance of anyone else coming in to help you.
If some people come in and take your house including the living room, 2 bedrooms while you stay in the bathroom and they take your towels, the faucet and even the tiles, all while killing family members while they're doing this and you fight back, the other side is not "defending" itself by killing more family members.
That's aggression. Not defense.
It's not pointless. You're paying attention, aren't you? That's the point.
Quoting Echarmion
It's kind of a "How does it feel, MFs?" kind of statement.
Quoting Echarmion
You see, that's just it. Nothing they do would present such a case. Your argument reminds me of the arguments of some preceding the Civil War in the U.S. "Just wait, it will work itself out and go away." It had been generations. Sometimes, the gig is up. You can get on the trains or you can kick them in the nuts as you go down.
Quoting Echarmion
If justice had anything to do with it, we wouldn't have the situation in the first place.
Quoting Echarmion
I'd laugh if it wasn't so tragic. The exact, exact same arguments were made to the Comanche. In fact, some leaders were brought back east to see the might of the U.S. and the futility of resistance. That didn't help and, understandably, it wouldn't.
Edited to add: The Palestinians have a much greater chance than did the Comanche.
Do you support the intentional murder of Israeli civilians via Hamas rocket launches into residential areas?
Yes or no. That's all I want to hear.
Maybe, rather than talk, he should reverse all the Trump actions. Move embassies, etc.
No.
Do you support continued Israeli expansion and occupation of Palestinian territory?
If Israel doesn't like it, they should give Hamas smart weapons and the lat lon of Israeli military bases. That way Hamas could limit their attacks to combatants. No? Why not?
Expansion? No. Occupation? I don't like the occupation but until the Palestinians renounce violence as a political tool I think the occupation is a necessary evil. I would love to end it though.
I don't know how you'd react if they keep stealing your land and killing family members. The PLO was a "terrorist" organization, until Israel helped create Hamas, as they did. Such reactionaries as the WSJ can confirm this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
So what are they to do? Say thank you for stealing more land, for not staying to resolution 242 and for limiting our caloric intake in Gaza?
Please.
I think the world is just going to watch. Unless the Saudis decide to attack Israel.
Well Palestinians keep killing our family members too. This cycle has gone back thousands of years and it's likely going to continue. You say the Palestinians are mad and grieving? Well so are the Israelis. How many Israelis do you know that were killed in the two intifatas? How about the random knife killing sprees in populated, urban areas that put the entire country on edge? What about the bombs disguised as wrapped gifts that Hamas used to lure in children? Do you have younger siblings?
I've never claimed Israel is perfect, but any resolution to this issue is going to have to acknowledge that it's not a black and white issue and that wrong exists on both sides.
The point is death? For its own sake or what?
Quoting James Riley
Yeah, that's just straight up evil in my book.
Quoting James Riley
Who is "they" here? Are we treating all Israelis as some kind of faceless amalgam, where one part can stand in for the sins of another?
Quoting James Riley
If morality goes out the window in difficult situation, why have it at all?
Though I want to point out I'm not blaming Palestinians for doing what they do. They're in a terrible situation and will do whatever they think they have to do.
My problem is with people sitting in front of a computer casually accepting or dismissing death and destruction.
Quoting James Riley
Again, I'm not saying I don't understand why people would act this way. I just don't see what's good about it.
Quoting frank
Didn't he already tweet a message of support to Israel?
It doesn't seem likely that the Biden administration would do anything of consequence to stop Israel.
That and spend money on whichever side.
Quoting frank
I'm always confused about who's in bed with who, and when. But it does seem the common denominator is religion. I always root for the underdog.
The Saudis? I can't imagine they would. They'll just milk the conflict for their own gains. Oppressed Palestinians are useful to them, as it allows them to distract from their own oppression.
Saudi and Hamas are both Sunni and kind of fundamentalist. Iran is Shia. Iraq is both. Pakistan is both. Since Iran is theocratic, they foment sectarian violence just by existing.
Sectarian violence is just one funeral after another. The cause gets lost and it's just driven by grief and rage.
Saudi Arabia is a strong nation, attempting to make progress on human rights.
How about the Israelis renounce violence as a political tool? Clearly Israel is more powerful and less at risk. Just stop responding with violence.
Quoting frank
No-one needs to "attempt" to make progress on human rights. We already know what those are, you can just adopt them.
It's not black and white like Apartheid South Africa was not black and white.
Was the murder of a white South African civilian during apartheid a good thing? Of course not. Apartheid was still the main thing responsible for the violence.
So sure, innocent Israeli do get killed. That's bad. Many more Palestinians are killed in much worse conditions. Does that mean that Israeli lives are less than others? Of course not.
But if you steal land, regiment a population in regards to caloric intake, separate the West Bank into cantons, sabotage the Palestinian authority at every moment and the like, you must except bad consequences. Remember one country has one of the best armies in the world, the other population is literally in a prison.
Israel was safer prior to these last 15 years of incursion into Gaza and settlement expansion in the West Bank, not less safe. This is the result of such policies.
See "How does it feel" below.
Quoting Echarmion
If you'd like to avoid evil, then, I guess you won't support the activities that engender such feelings.
Quoting Echarmion
You said "I'm saying that what you're doing must have some practical chance of resulting in a situation that is "less bad". And I don't see such a chance here." The they is Hamas. Nothing they do will present a situation that is less bad. As to your second question, yes. The Israelis are a sovereign. As sovereign is an amalgam of the faceless. You suffer for the sins of your sovereign. That's why, as an American, I don't want my sovereign backing another sovereign that is making people feel like straight up evil is the only card they have to play in response to what they feel is straight up evil.
Quoting Echarmion
You said "justify, no." I said justice apparently has nothing to do with it. I you want morality to stay in the room, then get off the Palestinian's back.
Quoting Echarmion
Oh, okay. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax. I feel the same way about people sitting thousands of miles away, allowing their sovereign to send money to prop up an oppressive, apartheid regime that makes people feel like straight up evil is the option in response to straight up evil. So yeah, I get what you're saying.
Oh thanks. And here's me thinking you have to work at it.
I once read an article by Scott Ritter about the sectarian issues in the Middle East. It got so deep, and so detailed that I felt like I was reading a physics chalk board with a complicated equation. It went WAY deeper than the sunni/shia divide. Way deeper. But when I step back, as your typical American simpleton, I can't figure why we aren't in bed with the Shia. The Sunni seem further from our leanings; though Saudi Oil fields seem to be a player. There is always those strategic concerns that we aren't clued in on.
Let's weep for personal tragedy to obfuscate the slow genocide of an entire people. Sorry. Not playing. I can empathise with the personal tragedy but once I step back from the particulars and look at the bigger picture the moral position is clear. That Israeli woman had been sacrificed on a zionist altar.
Wow. That's some deeply targeted sarcasm.
Mainly because they hate us.
It's not genocide and for you to use that term is absurd. If you think the Israelis are literally trying to genocide the Palestinians then there's no point in talking to you. It would put me in a position where I'd be defending Nazis. I can't go on in this conversation. Are you at all familiar with any of Hamas's genocidal language towards the Jews within their Constitution? But who cares about that - weak victims are always good, even if they're throwing gays off rooftops which happens frequently.
Quoting Echarmion
I only support violence when it's for self-defense and if Hamas is going to launch rockets from inside Gaza then Israel, like any nation state, has a right to respond.
Both try to wipe the others history out. In some interviews I've seen, many Pals on the street don't really know the significance of the Western Wall for example..yet they have been living right next door for years. When you don't even know your "enemy" thats frightening.
Meh, so do the Sunni. Nothing a little money can't buy.
Maybe Apartheid was in some way responsible for the violence, but the existence of Apartheid does not justify/condone murder. No one is permitted to murder people even if they're the dominant group within a racist society. China and Japan can be quite racist towards minorities, especially blacks - can we murder them? The US has obvious racial problems, can blacks go around killing whites because they help uphold the system?
Any decent starting point to negotiations begins with the unequivocable condemnation of the intentional murder of innocents.
If you murder someone because they are the dominant racial/ethnic group even within a racist society then it'syou who is at fault. By the way Arabs are equal to Jews under the law in Israel, but of course Israel like other nations does have racial problems and I'm not going to deny that racism exists. Jews are severely discriminated against in Arab countries.
Quoting Manuel
You may very well be right here and I'm happy to discuss this. We can discuss whether Israel has gone too far in the West Bank... what is not up for discussion is whether the murder of innocent Israelis is justified or whether Israel ought to cease to exist as a state. That would put the lives of millions of Jews at serious risk. Arabs have attempted to annihilate Israel on multiple occasions and Israel is a war torn, traumatized society.
As Jews we cannot rely on other ethnicities or races to protect us. And for that we need a state. We can negotiate the rest.
It's not genocide because it's not going quickly enough to your liking, or what? How fast should the destruction of Palestinian society go exactly before it is genocide? The Israeli State is fascist and yes you're defending fascists. This was already recognised by Einstein and Arendt in 1948 and unfortunately very few Jews recognise they've learned more from the Nazis than they care to admit. Things haven't improved. I'm intimately familiar with the entire situation, having studied international law for years, by the way. I just don't have the patience anymore to guide people through all the steps why I see things this way
Hamas' language is no different than that of Israeli main political party. Zionism implies racism, discrimination and the slow killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel is denying the right to exist to Palestinians in their own country. That fits the bill.
Saudi Arabia is ruled by a tiny minority of very rich and powerful men. Are you telling me they're trying?
Quoting James Riley
Everyone has their feelings. If that's all you want to talk about, I see no point.
Quoting James Riley
I think this is a terrible moral philosophy. It turns persons into just replaceable cogs in a machine. Essentially giving whatever sovereign rules a country the right to dispose of their citizens lifes.
Quoting James Riley
This is just ad-hominem. Do you suppose the Palestinians read this thread as a guideline as to what to do?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That's sidestepping the question. I didn't ask whether you think Israel has some kind of "right to retaliate". I asked why they don't just stop doing it.
This is telling. "I won't call it what it is, because if I do, I would have to recognize the situation for what it is, and that would be unbearable to me".
Don't ever create a situation where that is all there is. Simple, right?
Quoting Echarmion
Yup. We agree. So, should the U.S. pull the pack our bags (of money) and go home? I'm hip. After all, as others opined on this thread, Jews can't count on anyone else to protect them. They have nukes, they are a self-sufficient island now, ala the "individualist" who doesn't need anybody any more.
Quoting Echarmion
First, it's not ad-hominem. It's fact. And second, the Palestinians don't need us to tell them they are getting fucked or how to stop it from happening. They are there. They aren't thousands of miles away second-guessing their own actions, like an armchair quarterback who would have them concede because, well, they are the underdog.
Once more for the genocide apologists in the back. Like @Echarmion, to name names.
I don't think anyone here would say that murdering innocent Israelis is not a problem. What's been the issue is that if a people have been oppressed for over 50 years and land theft continues, it would be strange for anyone to be surprised if such a people fight back against theft and discrimination. It doesn't make murder right in any case, but it makes it understandable given the context.
Settlers in the West Bank for example, cannot expect the people who's land they're taking not to fight back and possibly get killed.
But I think it's a mistake to take today's circumstance, which is what matters, and say that the two sides have problems. As if the problems on each side are in any way equal. One is clearly much more responsible than the other, given the available force and infrastructure they have.
Just switch Palestinians and Israelis. Make Israeli's the victims in the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine the occupying force. In such a case, the exact same arguments would go to Palestine and not to the Israeli victims.
So one thing you need to get straight is that lauding democracy is a neoliberal ploy. When you can't buy off religious leaders, you want democracy so you can subvert it and raid. They know that.
No doubt. There's probably no shortage of them feeding intel to Israel. Again, I liken it to the American West, where many an Indian rode against their own. Kind of like the Plutocracy sewing discord and pitting left against right. Age old tactic.
Are you honestly asking me why Israel doesn't just let Hamas fire rockets into Israel and not respond?
I don't know, maybe this is some kind of 500 IQ move that'll get them to stop and reduce violence in the long run but I honestly have no idea. If you're saying it's the best strategic move maybe I could entertain that purely on strategic grounds, not moral grounds though.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's just a factual disagreement, nothing more. Never mind the fact that the Palestinian population has grown considerably over the past decade. To me it makes about as much sense as saying the US is trying to genocide black folks through police violence, but then again this may be something you believe so maybe it's not the best example for me to try to reach across the divide.
All true. But this does not somehow make any consideration of tactics and the relation between ends and means superfluous. The results of an escalation are obvious - people will die, most of them Palestinians. And then it will provide further cover and justification for continuing and deepening the oppression.
And again I'm not imagining I'm somehow talking to Palestinians here. I just don't understand how anyone can see anything positive in stuff like rocket attacks on Israeli cities.
Quoting James Riley
Yes. Or even better actively work against further escalation and expanding settlements.
Quoting James Riley
All of us here are armchair quarterbacks. Cheering them does them no good either.
Quoting frank
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
Yes.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It's the reverse, I'm saying it's the best move on moral grounds. Nothing is gained from cycles of escalation (except of course power for Israeli politicians and Hamas' warlords).
Quoting Benkei
It's not their country. It's the Jewish homeland.
What amazes me is why you care so much. Are you an Arab? Just tell me you're an Arab and this'll all make sense. For a white Dutchman to have such a strong belief that this is Arab land and ought to be controlled by the Arabs and in turn Jews be subjugated is bizarre, to say the least.
Presumably you're the kind of person who'd tell a rape victim to sit there and take it if the rapist is stronger.
[quote=Raphael Lemkin]More often [genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong.[/quote]
Lemkin being the Jewish legal scholar who coined the term, of course.
What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank for decades has been nothing less than genocide, committed by the state of Israel, being accelerated as we speak. That makes you a genocide apologist.
Leaning toward the left is like becoming a mystic, you start saying things you know sound crazy, but they're true.
Not that Saudi is likely to consider democracy. Their government is working fine. They ally with the US because the US threatened to destroy them in the 1970s. True story.
Presumably, you're the kind of person who'd disembowel a village chief in front of his wife and children because he accepted rice from the imperialists.
Quoting frank
Quoting frank
It's working fine for the richest 1%.
It's working well by and large. Progress for women is a work in progress there.
I'd be willing to entertain what you're saying with the note that I do believe that proportional self-defense is always a valid option. Both options - response or non-response - would be morally acceptable but I'm not an expert in these kind of issues so I need to reserve judgment for this.
It would need to be strategically justified for me to consider it. If we stopped responding to them and they just keep launching rockets then it's no-go for me. It may embolden them or it may appease them; I have no idea.
Are they allowed to leave their house without a male guardian yet? I'm sure in another 50 years, they'll have worked hard enough to outlaw marital rape. We all know marital rape is important to prevent the US from invading your country.
Basically, I see two ways this conflict ends - some new coalition gets to power in Israel (or else the international community forces their hand), unilaterally stops all escalation and provides material support to Palestine, thereby depriving would-be extremists of people willing to risk their lives.
Or Apartheit and oppression continue indefinetly, with thousands more deaths and many more displaced people, until the Palestinians are eventually ground down so much they're no longer recognisable as a people.
It's not hard for me to decide which of these I want to happen.
I'll take that as a yes then.
Likewise.
That's the Taliban, not Saudi Arabia. But they all look the same to you, huh?
See how it is? You become leftist and you're like WAPOW! I'm holier than thou.
The Taliban can at least argue that they've been invaded by superpowers twice, so they didn't have much time to consider reforming their ways.
This is getting very off-topic though.
Oh you'd be surprised, there have been quite a few posters here that have refused to explicitly condemn it.
Quoting Manuel
I understand what you're saying here and I agree. I understand the anger when Israel comes and bulldozes houses of the families of suicide bombers. I understand that the occupation makes life tough. However I also believe that one is always fundamentally responsible for one's actions and that one's own problems or difficulties are not an excuse for wanton murder.
Quoting Manuel
I'm happy to discuss ways in which we could make things easier for Palestinians. I certainly don't hate the Palestinians, but then again I'm not an Israeli who has had a relative killed or lived through several wars where my country faced total annihilation. It's just a very different culture over there. Trust me I've been there.
I think most Israelis want peace, but ssu made a good point earlier where he cited that more conservative groups like the ultra-Orthodox and the Mizrahi are growing demographically so maybe their conservative influence will be felt more.
As long as you're ok with the existence of Israel and believe that the murder of innocents is wrong, your view has a place at the negotiation table. We can discuss about removing settlements and Israel has removed settlements in the past. I'd be more than happy to remove settlements if it meant peace. Unfortunately for the time being it seems both groups don't have much of an interest in peace from a political perspective. Israel is also facing a number of internal issues like COVID and a rapidly growing and non-productive ultra-Orthodox population which lives off the state among other problems. Life isn't easy over there.
That's not true. But
Quoting Echarmion
point taken
Then I'd disagree with them. Moral judgments about the value of life are universal or they're not serious.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It's easy to talk for me, I don't live in Israel nor the Occupied Territories. I'll just say, if someone bulldozes my home and kills my brother or father, I can't say I wouldn't kill someone back. We've crossed a line here.
On the other hand If I were a settler, I'd think I'd recognize that me being murdered is a possible outcome. It a risk I'd have to know about and be willing to accept.
If I'm an ordinary Israeli, not currently in the military, just living my life and someone kills a family member, I would likely want blood in exchange. The only important difference here, is that I'd know that an occupation is the main cause of the murder. I can try and vote for the left, talk to my friends about the issue, do whatever I'm willing to do to diffuse the situation.
But I'd like to think that I'd still hold my beliefs that what my government is doing is horrific and monstruos. To be clear, the US as an international actor is way worse than Israel. So as a citizen of the US, I'm aware of the consequences that could come my way in terms of payback should be expected.
But never wanted.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I don't doubt that. But exactly as is the case with the US, the way the media in Israel to presents the situation to Israelis is quite different from what happens. And the effects of that propagada are just enormous. Not only in the US or Israel, but just about every state: the more power that state has, the stronger the PR. Look at China, Russia, etc.
That's just how states work.
I wonder whether there's a case to be made that the US is genociding black people under this definition. While the black population has grown, an argument could be made that black culture is being usurped and black social institutions destroyed. I think we can both agree that plenty of social and political policies implemented by the US government have hurt the black population.... but is there any actual plan to destroy them? Has there ever been one?
Genocide is different from mere subjugation, we gotta remember that. What do you think about this point? Are blacks subject to genocide by the US Government?
I think we both know by now that we're not going to have productive conversations with each other, so can our conversations then at least be entertaining? You probably believe all kinds of fun stuff; I have no idea what the boundaries of your belief system are so why not try to find them?
When you engage in a discussion with someone you have never met , have no background context on , and especially when the topic is something as complex and personal as politics , you might want to examine what it is that makes you inclined to use worlds like ‘moron’ , ‘stupid’ , ‘deliberate obfuscation’. I understand my sarcasm irritated you, but it was intended
as a gentle prodding for you to explore more than just what initially seems to you to be the obvious and correct interpretation of my comments. Especially since the reality is I could care less about Israeli politics , I just jotted off my comments in an offhand way, and I am not wedded to any of the assertions I made. Apparently my sarcasm had the opposite effect, making you feel threatened and causing you to double down on your initial
construal of my post.
I’ll tell you what I am wedded to, and that’s a way of understanding human behavior and belief systems that rejects the concept of ‘evil’, which I’ve noticed you like to use. To me , ‘evil’ is what we accuse other people of when we fail to make sense of their thinking from their own perspective. The paradox is that it is this well intended accusation of evil or immorality leveled at individuals or groups that is the root of the sorts of violence and conflict that our concepts or morality are supposed to attach themselves to.
For me your response to my comment is a textbook case of a well intentioned attempt to defend a righteous moral view. But what it shows at a deeper level is that righteous moralism , and along with it the use of terms like ‘stupid’ and ‘moron’ , is a failure of insight, an inability to recognize that we all view the world from
within what in many cases are profoundly different perspectives, all of which can righteously justify themselves in equal measure.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
There's no Jewish Homeland defined except in the Torah which, as a religious text, has no legal standing. There's an area designated for Jews to settle, which area was called Palestine, with the understanding original inhabitants wouldn't be displaced. We all know what happened and who have been driven from their homes. I think it was Begin who said : there's not a Jewish village that isn't build on the rubble of a Palestinian.
Here's some more material for you : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/100000/mde150332004en.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj1ptPlr8fwAhUREhQKHXWcACYQFjAFegQIDBAC&usg=AOvVaw3SBqsmtye-7u37B9kbhC8f
A nice reminder that, despite the propaganda, plenty of people can still recognize the depravity of Israeli actions - even in the imperial heartland.
One, I didn't call you stupid, I said your comment was unless it was made in bad faith. Second, I also never called you a moron but since you identify as a defender of fascists you believe it applies to you. Thank you for clearing that up for all of us. Saves me a lot of time.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/tsengputterman/status/1392585106380910593[/tweet]
:100:
Is this God raising his (no doubt enormous) head, bellowing "homeland", and ordering Israel to destroy men, women, children and livestock as he used to do?
Just a reminder that your position will have no bearing whatsoever on events.
Giving to the Red Cross most definitely would.
C'mon Benkei, you can do better. You want to be a beta dog your whole life? You've got to get in there and accuse me of genocide for suggesting that the most we can do is give to charities that are trying to help the victims.
Make weird combinations of profane words. Just basically rave like an unmedicated bipolar patient.
Except this arbitration is still being directed towards those who are oppressed, not the oppressors, therefore falling for the liberal demand that the latter not only solve their own emancipation but that they are issued limitations for the "correct" way to do so.
10:25 P.M. Sources say rocket fire from Lebanon committed by small Palestinian group
Rocket fire from Lebanon toward Israel was the work of a small Palestinian group and occurred without Hezbollah's knowledge, according to Lebanese defense sources. (Jack Khoury)
Man, is Lebanon becomes involved, this is going to be very bad.
I don't really understand this line of argument. Are you saying that what the Hamas is doing is both moral and reasonable (from the perspective of instrumental reason) or are you saying that since Hamas represents oppressed people, I shoudn't talk about whether or not what they're doing is either moral or reasonable? Isn't the entire point of having a topic about this on the philosophy forum to talk about the "correct" way to do stuff, from either perspective?
I never said you have no personality of your own. I don't know where you got that from.
BTW, I don't think you understand "poison the well."
I think Russia is going to handle it.
That went over my head. Putin's power is constrained despite what is reported in the US.
In either case if the US doesn't tell Israel to tone it down, war will break out.
They are compelled to engage in protest, but not to ascribe to a form of revolutionary fanaticism. Because the Western powers, primarily the United Kingdom and the United States had a vested interest in creating a Jewish state in Western Asia so as to promote a meta-narrative of their "promoting freedom and democracy", a great irony, considering the number of coup d'états that particularly the United States has been involved with there, the Palestinians have very little going for them when it comes to the global discourse and can be so inclined to endorse fairly fanatical ideas by that account. I, too, think that Israeli and Palestinian leaders, perhaps even those who would not be my natural allies, do need to come together and create an effective and lasting resolution to the crisis. What that means is the abandonment of certain forms of Zionism and certain forms of abolition in the creation of two states, which ought to eventually transform into one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
There's a lot of troubled history within such a venture, though, as the Jewish diaspora was a partial raison dêtre for the creation of the nation of Israel, and, though I do think that their situation differs from those of people in the former apartheid South Africa, Palestinian rights activists are right to characterize the biopolitical stratagem undertaken against the Palestinians as an "apartheid regime".
As I am a mere Western spectator, I don't really feel like it is my place to offer a resolution to the crisis and merely hope that some human rights lawyer successfully will. People let this dispute become all-consuming when it is extraordinarily particular and wholly unrepresentative of geo-politics as a whole.
So what should determine who the rightful owners are? International law? What makes international law special? If there was a UN 500 years ago would you have followed it unquestionably? But now it's word is permanently binding, it's law - ok, got it. :brow:
"You all know what happened." I'm sure you do, just you know all history that happened 80 years impeccably. Have you read Benny Morris on the subject?
Begin may have said that but what were those Palestinian homes on the rubble of? Ottoman/Turkish homes? Byzantine homes? Roman homes? Babylonian homes? Jewish homes again before all that?
Russia wants to broker peace.
Before the oppressor (and his patrons/apologists) can legitimately criticize and condemn the oppressed for their means and methods of resistance, he must completely dismantle the entire state-apparatus of oppression now. Until then, the logic of oppression entails that there cannot be "innocents" in the oppressor's camp, especially in so far as the oppressor tactically discounts them – his own noncombatant civilians – as potentially "acceptable losses", that is, the necessary cost of maintaining his strategem of oppression. In order to survive, the oppressed must resist – always have and always will – by any means necessary. (Foot's on his neck, certainly that's what the oppressor would do – what everyone's ancestors at some time or another have done!) So if any oppressor-state is serious about stopping "terrorism", that oppressor-state should begin by giving up its own policies of state-terrorism and military-economic support for client/proxy-terrorism.
They need a Gandhi.
Ah. I hope they can achieve it.
Looks quite difficult now, momentum is swinging towards full out war.
I don't think Hamas can wage war (not against Israel).
I agree. If Hezbollah gets involved, that would be awful for everybody.
I don't think so. But who knows how far this one will go?
their own parents the bird for good measure (it’s been said that Chomsky has a Daddy complex).
Any moral ambiguity to this plot set-up cannot be permitted, lest it spoil the illusion of moral superiority on the part of the self-critical Western activist.
What's the "oppressor's camp"? Do it's inhabitants get any say in whether or not they are placed here, or do they become mere bargaining chips for "the oppressor" to spend and "the oppressed" to cash in?
It's one thing to say that Netanjahu or whoever else we consider an oppressor bears the blame for all Israeli causalities as well. It's another to just exclude those casualties from moral consideration entirely. Blame is not a zero-sum game. I can assign the full blame to the oppressor and also apply the full blame to whoever orders the deaths of civilians without even a military justification.
Quoting 180 Proof
This seems backwards. In order to resist, you must first be alive and second in a position to impose costs on your oppressor. Otherwise what you're doing is not resistance but suicide.
And because I'll be accused of blaming the victim or demanding non-violent resistance: I'm not saying never use this or that method, I'm saying use something that works.
Quoting 180 Proof
I totally agree. It's first and foremost the Israeli state who should stop all violence, no matter how many rockets are allegedly fired.
What makes something qualify as being a "state-apparatus of oppression?" Who makes this determination?
Also, your statement would seem to excuse certain individuals of moral culpability.
I'd bet that it's as per their reading of Frantz Fannon, who became common to invoke in debates upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, probably beginning sometime in the late 1980s.
@180 Proof is correct to suggest that Hamas's capacity to wage an effective revolution against the nation Israel, of which they have absolutely none, is "evasive", as, what they were suggesting is that, if Israel wants to bring about an effective and lasting peace, then they must first begin to dismantle the apparatus created in order to carry out their biopolitical program.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-may-27-fg-mideast27-story.html
I don't know. We've got one black guy, a Chinese Australian, and a NY Jew.
What they seem to have in common is that they're so leftist they aren't even on this planet anymore. They're somewhere left of Saturn.
I think they see themselves as caring for anyone who needs defense from state action. Do they understand Hamas? I don't think so.
Do they understand Israeli hardliners? Honestly, I don't understand them. Do you?
Quoting Joshs
Okay. Candor at least. :shade:
The current position of the Israeli government, at least as of 2011 is that Gaza and the West Bank are "disputed territories," not occupied territories.
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us black , Chinese or white Westerners , the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .
If you can get past that he has left the implicatures of his discourse open so as to also be as if he were issuing an ultimatum, the substance of his argument is actually quite good.
At least you do mention that Hamas political objectives are quite the same as the most militant Zionists. As I've said, extremists have the ball in the political game and the game is played how they want it to be played.
You think these people will seek solution of side-by-side living? They say quite clearly above that a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 lines would be only a step towards the destruction of Israel. Of course in the Middle East rhetoric and actual agreements can be quite different from each other. So people there will say one thing and do another.
I personally don't see much morality in history. Those who demand justice usually are the people who start wars, not those who end them.
In a setting where you and I are sharing what life made us into, I'd try to explain to you how deep my nihilism actually goes and the freedom that gives me.
I'd listen to why you can justify the murder of the Arab child who was killed by a Hamas bomb in Jerusalem the other day.
I don't think that's what's going on here, though.
@180 Proof has put forth the point of contention that, if an effective and lasting peace is to be established, then, because the Israelis have undertaken any number of political strategies which have effectively resulted in the dispute, it is up to them, and not the Palestinians, to offer a show of good faith so that the aforementioned peace can be meaningfully established.
He has framed this argument within kind of a black and white style of argumentation that, though I would bet that he would have much to say in the beaten way of clarification in this regard, as he is of the libertarian Left, in all likelihood somehow proceeds from anti-Imperialism.
His point of contention, however, is more than fair.
Ah, so God it is, then. But if that's the case, God's been remarkably inclined to allow others to make the Jewish homeland their homes, wouldn't you say?
The Canaanites and Philistines, and perhaps Phoenicians as well, were there before Jews were. We're told that on their arrival the Jews dealt rather harshly with their predecessors. For example: “Then they devoted all in the city to destruction, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.” — Joshua 6:21. Yes, even donkeys.
It's difficult, but not impossible, to name all the others who lived in and ruled Palestine since the Jewish conquest. Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians (and Medes, I should say); then it became part of Alexander's empire, then it was ruled by his successors, Seleuces and his dynasty; then Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and did a pretty thorough job of evicting Jews from Palestine, even renaming Jerusalem, under Hadrian; then the Byzantines (who stilled called themselves Romans); then came the Muslim conquest, interrupted briefly and partially for a couple of centuries by the Crusader kingdoms. It was Muslim/Ottoman territory until the mid-twentieth century.
I may have missed some of the many occupants of that land. Let's say that in the last 2800 years or so, Jews haven't had much in the way of ownership of Palestine.
Why then say that it isn't the country of the Palestinians, but rather the Jewish homeland? It seems to be unclear even God has been convinced of that.
Hitler is a similar symbol, right? He would have been perfectly normal in years past. He became the new Satan because he was a turning point. American gave up on eugenics because of him. They began to see their own racism because of him.
I wonder if Israel is turning itself into Satan. That would be so ironic.
He's dehumanizing people. I can't deal with that.
It does get hot as hell there in summer
Yeah, it has switched hands a few times. But its the Jews turn now.
[Quoting Ciceronianus the White
There have been some theologians that argue that this was only banishment such as William Lane Craig but in any event who knows.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Well done with this paragraph. Thank you for the history lesson!
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Well, it works out for me because I am Jewish and a Jewish state does serve as a form of security for the Jewish people. I can't pretend to be a totally disinterested observer to the question. I'm also generally supportive of self-determination movements elsewhere.
Which is fine. Every state deserves security. Israel is asking for more because they are increasing settlements and annexing parts of the West Bank. Thus Israel is asking more rights than most other countries, and getting them.
But you said, the settlements are a necessary evil. But we agreed that prior to the expansion of settlements post 2000's, Israel was more secure. So that shows you that the fear goes hand in hand with the expansion. It's a self-feeding loop: We are in danger, therefore we have to keep our settlements and increase them so we can be safe. But the settlements are the problem.
The Palestinians more than deserve a state. Will there be complications if such an agreement is reached? Sure. But that's a risk Israel must take or continue in its path of hurting itself and killing people in one the most brutal blockades in the world.
As Chomsky says - who was a Zionist prior to Israel's existence and lived in a Kibbutz for some time - says: “Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it."
That means your own government. That will ease tensions. Doesn't mean once they have a state you don't have security. You guys have nukes and a powerful army. Palestine will never get that.
Good post. You can't separate groups into large boxes like oppressor and oppressed and expect to get a full understanding of conflicts. It's a useful lens, but hardly the only one.
To be sure, the Pashto of the AfPak border area are beset by a number of oppressors, but when the TTP butchers 150 school children, it's not wrong for the Pakistani special forces to go in an kill them. Israel has the technological and material measures to absorb rocket attacks, and should be less aggressive in hitting civilian launch sites. That doesn't mean they aren't justified in going all out against attempts at tunnel raids aimed at butchering civilians. "Any means," is not justifiable. Nor does the logic of the stronger group being able to disarm necissarily have much meaning for individual encounters. Israel might have a modern army for defense of the country, but it's meaningless for the Jew (or random person mistaken for a Jew) being dragged out of his car and beaten to death by a mob. You have to have a distinction, otherwise the mob is being justified resistors if they happened to beat a real Jew, but oppressors if they happened to beat a Palestinian Christian, which is ridiculous.
We know from militants own communiques and planning that attacks that producing backlash against their own people often is a goal of violence. The goal is to kick off the cycle, knowing that in group preference will help them come out ahead. That's what the Israeli mob was doing marching around Jerusalem, trying to provoke attacks.
To be sure, every side has its true believers and fantatics, but seasoned militants aren't thinking in those terms, and we shouldn't project that sort of heroic lens on to them. Half the time their more concerned with protecting their turf within their own in group. For example, as soon as the US gave the Kurds breathing room in the 1990s, they fell to civil war.
The other problem is that the roles and power relationships are rarely as clear as they are in Israel. Did Islamists go from oppressed under Mubarak, and thus justified in their resistance by any means, then to oppressors as they tried to solidify total control over the country, thus justifying Sisi's coup?
Palestinian violence makes sense when it is forcing Israel into concessions. Violence helped them get closer to a state in the late 80s and 90s, but then too much violence, violence by partisans more concerned with ousting other Palestinians' control in Gaza rather than in fighting Israel, helped them lose that chance.
I don't know why the world, or at least the Western world seems to care about this conflict so much more than larger ones. It seems to me that it is becoming just a proxy for the culture wars wracking America, and I can't say that I think that bodes well for the US or European powers being able to act as an arbiter for peace.
I, in the general course of this argument, have referred to the subjugation of the Palestinian populace on the part of the Israelis as a "biopolitical program". As I understand that I have a perspective that is situated by my experience of the world, I know that some may take usage of Michel Foucault's concept to be strange, if not indicative of a certain degree of either pretense or cult pathology.
Because @180 Proof his issued his argument in a rhetorical style typical of left-wing black intellectuals, a number of other posters in this thread have assumed for it to be indicative of some form of dogmatism. Being capable of deciphering what he has put forth, I have merely been attempting to clarify that, while there is a certain degree of what you might call "equivocation" to his manner of speech, what he has said is neither controversial nor injudicious.
What he has said is that, should the Israelis want to establish an effective and lasting peace, it is up to them to make a show of good faith by revoking the various machinations that they have undertaken in the general course of the conflict that effectuate the subjugation of the Palestinian populace. What he is suggesting is that peace can only begin when the Israelis abandon the form of apartheid that they have enforced up until now.
While I do not agree with what you have only inferred as what he has been implying, that Hamas is somehow justified in their attacks on the Israeli civilian populace, I do agree that an effective and lasting peace can only be created when the Israelis decide to take the measures of which it would be requisite for them do so.
He is also correct to point out that a number of members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, of whom there is much to say, but that is neither here nor there for the time being, do more or less advance the resolution to the conflict that I have put forth, being the establishment of a Palestinian state along what people generally call the "'67 borders", effectively consisting of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and eventual creation of one state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. Though I think that this state ought to be called "Israel-Palestine", I am willing to concede the moniker in so far that politicians within the nation of Israel become sincere in their establishment of such a genuine state.
My take on all of this is only so relevant, however. We, now, have other predicaments, but, there were enough people in Fatah who wanted to establish an effective and lasting peace for the peace process to be functional and not enough Israelis who were even willing to scale back their settlements, let alone abandon them entirely, for it to be. What there is to take from his claim, that it is up to the Israelis to make a show of good faith so that peace can be meaningfully established, is just simply to the point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Don’t know if you saw my previous post:
Israel has become a flashpoint for the left not just because of its subjugation of palestinians
but because its form of nationalistic democracy exemplifies the Enlightenment era liberal political self-identity that the West is trying to distance itself from via brutal self-critique. There is nothing quite so threatening to a person than witnessing a way of thinking in an other that they have themselves only recently struggled to free themselves from. This is a thread common to the intensity of. BLM, #Metoo and anti-Israel sentiment. Israel is us Westerners, the way we used to be, the way many of us still are ( Trump , Brexit supporters) .
I agree with that. Why do you think they withhold any show of good faith?
Palestinian territory is illegally occupied by Israel under international law, they're strangling under their boot. That is dictionary definition of oppression. Who cares the fuck about whether the word oppression is flaunted in culture wars, people need to stop being triggered by popular discourse. We’re talking about concrete policies that need to be opposed here.
He has found fault with the Israelis in the general course of this dispute. Though I, too, think that, as it particularly has unfolded, they are who is bear the lion's share of the blame for the conflict, I am willing to give them more of the benefit of the doubt as per the general course of human history. Regardless as to who is at fault for that the conflict continues, it just simply is only the Israeli government who can take the requisite measures with which to establish an effective and lasting peace. This, first and foremost, means that they must abandon the strategy of settling in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, something that they have consistently refused to do, despite the many allegations of their violating both human rights law and the accords which they, themselves, effectively delimited, and almost definitely also necessitates the eventual recognition of a state of Palestine.
What I suspect for best and brightest affiliates of Fatah to have told Israeli delegates time and time again is that, even were they willing to concede their loss of territory so as to establish a peaceful relationship, should they continue to settle in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because the situation is just simply out of their hands, the conflict will just simply continue. What I suspect for the Israeli response to this to have been, time and time again, has been to say, either to themselves or even to explicitly inform the other party in these negotiations that "we know an just don't care", proceed to draw a set of borders on a map, and more or less imply, "that's our peace to say and you can take it or leave it."
You're saying there is no coordinated will to back off of Gaza.
Most likely this is about money. Some powerful entity stands to lose money if Israel backs off.
Agree 100%. My point was merely that the culture war paradigm works to retard meaningful change in US policy. Likewise, no negotiations are going to work without acknowledging that Israel has legitimate security concerns, oppressor or not.
Good points! Yet, the escalation of the anti-Israel rhetorics requires additional explanation. I would like to bring my previous post that could help to understand why Israel keeps
attracting so much attention and hatred:
"It is worth clarifying how the debate in this thread is unfolding. There is one
side, so-called "pro-Israel," pointing out various dimensions and complexity of the ongoing conflict so that the achievement of peace would require patience and a trade-off. And there is another side, "anti-Israel," contending that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Strikingly, these positions and arguments are similar to one of Zizek's outstanding examples of ideological blindness: "Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves from so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they really ar - in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire. The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of 'Jew' has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the ‘Jew’ is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system."
(Zizek,' The sublime object of ideology’). No, an "anti-Israel" protagonist is not necessarily an anti-Semite. But the ideological operative system here is similar to the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology in Zizek's sense. The grounding desire, an aspiration to immediately achieve the ultimate peace and justice, presupposes the evil ('sublime') object, invested with negativity and monstrosity. As a result, an ideological figure of 'Israel' has been constructed. 'Israel' has been labelled, demonized, and removed from civil discourse and the historical context. As Zizek points out, 'a pathological, paranoid construction' rejects objective facts and arguments. It employs them just for rationalizations and self-affirmations."
What Joshs is actually saying here is that he is so incapable of basic human sympathy that he cannot fathom how others can be capable of it.
Quoting Maw
Numbers2018 sees through that self-serving interpretation.
Quoting Number2018
It’s a powerful analysis
To the contrary, I don't think that capital has anything to do with this at all. I think the ruling order in Israel has cultivated a national myth that it now believes in all too directly. They have become as method actors who can no longer differentiate between their part on the global state in the Homeric epic of the triumph of Western democracy and their real-life roles as diplomats, intelligence officers, journalists, and religious scholars who live in a fledgling democracy that all too often serves as a global synecdoche. Within the general course of collective dissociation and dissonance born out of Israel's troubled history, they have forgotten their oft-cited experience as a somewhat ritualized other and have mistaken the apophenic experience of the call of the epochal for the writ of the divine. They have become lost in what they understand all too well of just what it takes to secure political power. When I think about the political ecology of the nation of Israel, I feel no righteous indignation or misplaced revolutionary fervor; I am merely touched by the twinge of poignancy and a sense of pity. In the beaten way of speculation, I would suggest that they have learned all too well from a certain American correspondence of theirs, one that can't help but know that their entire cataloged history of clandestine actions has done nothing to cultivate any of their former Liberal ideals and that it, much to the contrary, has only served to incite any number of geo-political crises which Giorgio Agamben characterized as "civil war as a political paradigm". People say that Western Asia is a "powder keg". Israeli intelligence has watched their American allies leave the gunpowder on the floor and the matches in the hands of adventurous children. They have seen them smile and will soon learn to do so as well.
I don't think that the nation of Israel cares for capital. I think that it's a pedagogy of the oppressed. T.E. Lawrence closed "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" with this stanza:
"Men prayed me that I set our work,
The inviolate house,
As a memory of you
But for fit monument I shattered it,
Unfinished: and now
The little things creep out to patch
Themselves hovels
In the marred shadow
Of your gift."
I don't wonder what he meant.
Wouldn't a move towards peace necissarily mean the removal of repressive restrictions of movements on Palestinians?
I agree with you on the relative threat of rockets. When militants weren't cut off from Israel they didn't use rockets, and they killed a considerable number of Israeli civilians. The border wall and onerous restrictions did indeed seriously cut down on deaths on the Israeli side, just as the occupation cut down significantly on larger scale raids and more fatalities across the 1950s. The year after the signing of Declaration of Principles, 1993, saw a terror attack every 7 days, and the guns and bombs used were significantly more deadly than today's rockets.
There is a lesson in that period, in that the violence was in some sense less about Israeli actions, which were moving towards peace and statehood, than about intra-Palestinian struggles over peace and spoiling attempts. That is, it was giving space to peace that in turn created the security situation that turned the Israeli public away from peace in the long term (although demographics are a larger issue).
Unwinding those security measures while maintaining public support for peace is going to be a challenge for earnest peace makers (if they ever get power). Dynamics today are not all that different. If the West Bank was moving towards statehood and relaxing of border controls, it's not hard to imagine Hamas carrying out attacks with the goal of stopping the process. The more veto players (agents able to carry on violence unilaterally) in a civil war, the more likely it is to continue and the less likely it is to stay settled after a peace. That's why I've never felt it was in Israels long term interested (peace) to atone infighting. Now they have riots on their streets and rockets coming in across the border and no one on the other side to talk to who can control things (they're also, in at least some videos, unwilling to put down their own mobs, something they had a stomach for in the 1990s).
An agreement that creates a Palestinian state, a functioning state with a future, will necissarily open up those avenues of attack by loosening border controls. Indeed, if gross inequality isn't to keep the fires alive even after independence, the Palestinians need access to the Israeli economy (as well as reparations to invest in development). It's a necessary change, but one that doesn't come without risks.
Judaism is a dying religion isn't it? That's why they went to Israel: to protect their religion from assimilation into a world that didn't hate them anymore, or enough to keep them isolated. Is that true?
It's heartbreaking. The Muslims have also been shaped by a sense of irretrievable loss and impending doom.
Where do sympathy and empathy come from? Are they simple ‘capacities’ or do they depend on our ability , rather than desire, to understand worldviews alien to our own? Are ‘oppressors’ and ‘evil-doers’ lacking in the intent to care, or so they misinterpret those they ‘oppress’?
Is it threatening for you to contemplate the possibility that there is nothing that distinguishes from you those you condemn for subjugation, prejudice or even atrocity in moral terms? That they believe passionately, as you do, that they are behaving according to the highest standards of morality? And that the root of our conflicts is precisely what you are doing here, questioning moral intent and will to sympathy of the other rather than focusing on differences in perspective and worldview?
Judaism will live on just as any other religion or spirituality will and can do so with or without the nation of Israel. I'm really just having a conversation with a person, probably a man, whom I, perhaps, only imagine to read this.
What has become of the nation of Israel, I think, is just tragic. All of the youthful enthusiasm, longing for a spiritual homeland, and hope that came along with things like the Kibbutz Movement have long since vanished. It's just kind of this spectacular postmodern display of the one of the world's foremost security apparatuses and fourth-generation warfare now. The militarization of Israeli civil society has become so diffuse that half of the general discourse of political debate often bears an uncanny resemblance to operations undertaken by American psychological operations. People are fascinated by Israel because it is an emergent form of biopolitics. It's like an intelligence operation that has become a political regime.
Being said, not everyone there is as inculcated within what is a national myth as they are often made out to be and I would prefer to remain hopeful both for the betterment of the political ecology of the nation itself and that it should facilitate an effective and lasting peace process. It is still a Liberal democracy that is entirely capable of establishing good relations with neighboring nation-states. They just kind of ought to choose better allies.
So it all goes back to the US? What kind of global scene would be more conducive to a peaceful Israel-Palestine?
A US-China cold war?
It is except among the orthodox and ultra-orthodox , whose number have grown wildly. At their current growth rate, they may become a majority of NYC Jews soon.
Though there is much that any person could take away from the blistering sentimentality of the poetry presented as political theory in my above post, the general gist of what I'm trying to get across to the person in Mossad whom I only imagine to read this is of my rather speculative theory that the CIA has been using the nation of Israel as a kind of geo-political experiment, which I think is just the sort of thing that a person who cares for the well-being of either your person or the community that you belong to would not do. It's a tightrope walk on the fine line between genius and insanity.
Most of Europe, kind of a lot of people in the United Nations, people in the United States who have good reason to be critical of our intelligence community, and people who generally care about human rights ought to be the sort of people whom Israeli officials ought to think should view them favorably. On some level, that is sort of already the case, but I am willing to suggest that the military alliance between Israel and the United States has had a detrimental impact upon Israeli society, despite whatever either real or perceived security measures are considered as necessary to protect it.
It's this crux that is mistaken, the Oslo Accords was the exact opposite of what you were saying. It was the completion of Israel's control of the Occupied Territories, not intent to give Palestinians their own sovereignty. That changes your whole picture of the motives for the attacks.
"Oslo was not designed to lead to Palestinian statehood or self-determination, in spite of what the P.L.O.’s leaders at the time appear to have believed. Rather, it was intended by Israel to streamline its occupation, with the Palestinian Authority acting as a subcontractor. In Oslo and subsequent accords, the Israelis were careful to exclude provisions that might lead to a Palestinian political entity with actual sovereignty. Palestinian statehood and self-determination are never mentioned in the text, nor were the Palestinians allowed jurisdiction over the entirety of the occupied territories. Israel’s intention is even more clearly visible in the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, which followed the start of the Oslo process. There were fewer than two hundred thousand Israeli colonists in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem when negotiations began. Now, according to the Times, there are about six hundred and fifty thousand of them.
The P.L.O. leadership, for its part, played a weak hand poorly. It failed to capitalize on the expertise that its delegation had accrued in Madrid and Washington in the two years prior, sending to Oslo inexperienced negotiators with little knowledge of the situation in the occupied territories or international law. As a result, Oslo reinforced rather than evened out the political imbalance between Israel, an undeclared nuclear power supported by the world’s sole superpower, and the Palestinians, a stateless people living under occupation or in exile. With the weight of the United States tipping the scales heavily in its favor—diplomatically, militarily, and through pressure on the Arab states—Israel was able to impose its will, entrenching an apartheid system in which millions of Palestinians live under military rule, with no rights or security, while Israel appropriates their land, water, and other resources. The only part of Oslo that was faithfully implemented, in fact, is the protection that the P.A. provides to Israel by policing its own people."
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/beyond-abbas-and-oslo
Here's an exposition of the details of the agreement
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/palestineremix/the-price-of-oslo.html#/14
I do, in part, agree with your assessment, though find for the general proclivity towards Conservatism on the part of certain Jewish emigres to be fairly understandable, aside from that I will say that there are a few Orthodox Jews who kind of have better ideas on how to follow through with the peace process than most Labor Zionists. As much as I am an Anarcho-Pacifist and have a general preference for left-wing Liberalism, what I will say of effective Pacifism is that it does take all types.
The US may be Israel's protector, but Israel is also our agent. Having agents in far away places, especially ones that are not only willing, but are successful in putting up with the 'bad neighborhood'. On balance, Israel is certainly not worse, and is probably better than the other people occupying the neighborhood.
Among the neighbors of Israel, which one would you prefer to live in, if Israel wouldn't have you?
Sure, if the analysis of a partisan in the fight, writing 20 years later, through the lens of later shifts is to be taken as the final word...
Did the Israelis also know ahead of time that Arafat would walk out on the offer of statehood? Clearly the must have, since they were a unified bloc with a hidden agenda, commuted enough that some of those who advocated for peace have continued to keep the act up for three decades.
I mean, I just assume this is the case without any facts to prove it. The US is not exactly Assyria, but they screw over as much of the world as they can. The CIA has done a lot of experimentation. That's no secret. What sort of experiment would they conduct on Israel?
If you don't want to answer that's fine.
What about biopolitics? What's that?
This is delusional. Isreal is a racist state that is engaged in ethnic cleanisng. Moreover, it is supported - with arms, money, and media fawning - by the very 'West' you say is distancing itself from it. You are wrong on both counts of your comparison. Isreal is a 'flash point for the left' because its naked brutality is a second aparthied South Africa now with backed with 21st century weapons and a genocide program. "Nationalistic democracy that exemplifies Enligtenment era liberlism" - utter fucking madness. No wonder you're shit at philosophy, you've got bolts loose.
From 1993:
"The realization of the Israeli industrialists’ demands and their acceptance by the representatives of the Palestinian bourgeoisie would amount to a transition from colonialism to neocolonialism — a situation similar to the relations between France and many of its former colonies in Africa. But until a Palestinian state is established, Israel’s policy is clear. As Lt. Col. Hillel Sheinfeld, the Israeli coordinator of operations in the territories, put it, the declared goal of his work is to “integrate the economy of the territories into the Israeli economy.”
https://merip.org/1993/09/israels-economic-strategy-for-palestinian-independence/
"Throughout the interim years of the Oslo Accords, Israeli settlement activity was allowed to continue unhampered, with the number of settlers increasing from 110,000 on the eve of the Accords in 1993 to 185,000 in 2000, during the negotiations over a final status, to 430,000 today. That increase seriously undermined the notion that Israel was sincere about making way for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/the-oslo-accords-were-doomed-by-their-ambiguity/570226/
As I have the fortune of being within the libertarian Left, I can always claim that Abdullah Öcalan's change of heart was wholly without any form of subterfuge and offer note terribly critical and more or less unconditional support for the "Libertarian Municipalists" in Kurdistan. My joke aside, I do think that, though kind of an obvious rebranding of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, he was, to some degree, sincere in having turned away from Marxism-Leninism in favor of the political philosophy of Murray Bookchin.
As to who to ally oneself with in the region, it's difficult to give any general political categorization or definite commitment to any particular alliance. There's probably a set of activists who took part in the Arab Spring, a set of intellectuals in some form of vague opposition to this or that authoritarian regime, the Kurds who are actually not interested in engaging in an ethnic conflict with Turkey, some Israelis, some Palestinians, and more or less de facto every person who is sincerely engaged in brining a genuine peace to the region whom I would find as allies.
Despite what is mostly untenable of almost the entire Western Asian political spectrum, there are still good people out there with good ideas who even possibly could make a positive difference in the world no matter where it is that you go. I think that everyone in the West would choose to live in Israel given the alternatives. I am friends with an older man and devout, in kind of spiritual sense, Christian who went to Jerusalem not too long ago and found for his experience there to be fairly unsettling. His only remark was that it was "very sad". I think that kind of a lot of people would have a similar experience.
Do they live isolated the way Jews used to?
The Wikipedia definition of biopolitics is that it is "an intersectional field between human biology and politics. Biopolitics takes the administration of life and a locality’s populations as its subject. To quote Michel Foucault, it is "to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order." I think that this is fairly apt. It's difficult to adequately summarize Foucault's theories succinctly. You kind of just have to read him to figure them out.
As I interpret biopolitics, it moreso relates to Giorgio Agameben's theories, which proceed from Foucault, particularly in Homo Sacer, The State of Exception, Remnants of Auschwitz, and Stasis, both what I understand best of him and think to be his best work, of sovereign power over life and death. He has this grand concept of "forms-of-life" that a lot of people within the ultra-Left occasionally invoke, but, as he only explains this concept thoroughly in The Highest Power and makes mention of it The Use of Bodies, and, in the former, only really so well, I kind of don't think that most of them have any real idea as to what it is that they are talking about, as I kind of suspect that he only really has kind of a vague understanding of it, himself. Every Critical Theorist will tell you otherwise, though.
I was saying that they were conducting an actual experiment, though they have been notorious for conducting psychological experiments in the past; I was just saying that they were using the nation of Israel as a geo-political experiment. I was using a metaphor. They kind of use the nation as a synecdoche, a single part that represents the whole, for the West. Doing so has the effect of making much of politics seem to revolve around Israel and providing them with cover for clandestine operations.
I really just kind of felt like writing some political poetry, though.
It was very much appreciated. Thank you
I read the Khalidi article when it came out, but the 1993 one was new to me. It doesn't support your first quote, although the introductory paragraph might appear to. It's written from an Marxist prospective and explicitly states that Israeli power (i.e. the bourgeoisie) have abandoned colonization with the Oslo accords and are going for a NAFTA model (NAFTA being framed in the dire terms of the 190s) of exploitation. A neoliberal neocolonialism, which explicitly intends Palestinian autonomy and statehood. Maybe from a Marxist perspective they aren't different in the grand scheme, but with 20 years of hindsight, a US-Mexico relationship looks like something to aspire to.
Everything I've read suggests Rabin was serious about peace. He sacrificed considerable political capital, and eventually his life advocating for it.
It could be the "very sad" comment was directed at the penny-ante squabbling among the Christians over this or that holy sight. Or maybe it was the situation of the Palestinians.
The Kurds are another group that can't seem to get a fair deal from anybody, They, among others.
This person is both genuine and sincere and was referring to the social ecology of the Irsraeli populace. He had thought that going to Jerusalem would be kind of a revelatory pilgrimage, but was disheartened by that the Israelis seemed to be subject to a kind of collective malaise. That's what I assume, anyways.
The Kurds, unlike the Israelis, seem to be often more or less ignored by the mass media. Despite that the United States Military had been allied with the People's Protection Units in the fight against the Islamic State, the PKK is still designated as a foreign terrorist organization. It was really kind of duplicitous of us to have just kind of left them out there in favor of whatever alliance we have with the Turkish government that had already been pre-established. Though I don't really think that there are sides to take in so far that we are to exclusively consider the conflict between the proposed Kurdistan and Turkey as an ethic conflict, I do feel sympathetic towards the Kurds and think that it wouldn't be too much of a diplomatic effort to convince them not to wage terrorist attacks on Turkish civilians in exchange for being taken off of the list of foreign terrorist organizations, aside from that I think that they ought to be let to claim some form of self-determination.
Though there is also a thriving and vibrant community of Israelis, aside from that I, myself, admit that Israel is probably a preferable place to live in Western Asia, I do still stand by that the militarization of Israeli civil society has had a detrimental impact on it. I'd bet that there are probably kind of a lot of Israelis who would tell you more or less the same thing.
I am glad. Thanks as well!
The intentions of the efforts are laid out in the Oslo agreement:
Jerusalem: Amid an analysis of Jerusalem as the nexus of Israel’s conquest strategy (‘an ever-expanding Jerusalem [is] the core of a web extending into the West Bank and Gaza’), Said presciently observes that ‘in the history of colonial invasion … maps are instruments of conquest’. Turning to Oslo II, we find that, although the text defers Jerusalem’s fate to the permanent status negotiations, to judge by the map appended to the accord, Jerusalem is already a closed issue. The official map for Oslo II implicitly places Jerusalem within Israel. Said also laments that the PLO agreed to ‘cooperate with a military occupation before that occupation had ended, and before even the government of Israel had admitted that it was in effect a government of military occupation’. In fact, the so-called Green Line demarcating pre-June 1967 Israel from the occupied West Bank has been effaced on the official Oslo II map. The area between the Mediterranean and Jordan now constitutes a unitary entity. Seamlessly incorporating the West Bank, Israel has ceased to be, in the new cartographic reality, an occupying power. On the other hand, the textual claim that Oslo II preserves the ‘integrity’ of the West Bank and Gaza as a ‘single territorial unit’ is mockingly belied by the map’s yellow and brown blotches denoting relative degrees of Palestinian control awash in a sea of white denoting total Israeli sovereignty. In sum, the official map for Oslo II ratifies an extreme version of the Labour Party’s Allon Plan and gives the lie to the tentative language of the agreement itself.
Water: Although Palestinians will be granted an increment to meet ‘immediate needs … for domestic use’, the overarching principle on water allocation for the interim period is ‘maintenance of existing quantities of utilization’, that is, ‘average annual quantities … shall constitute the basis and guidelines’. Turning to Schedule 10 (‘Data Concerning Aquifers’), we learn that these ‘average annual quantities’ give Israelis approximately 80 per cent and Palestinians 20 per cent of West Bank water. Prospects after the interim period seem even dimmer. Although Israel does ‘recognize Palestinian water rights in the West Bank’, these rights do not include the ‘ownership of water’, which will be subject to the permanent status negotiations. Indeed, Israel already claims legal title to most of the West Bank water on the basis of ‘historic usage’. That is, having stolen Palestinian water for nearly three decades, Israelis now proclaim it is theirs.”
Reparations: Juxtaposing the cases of Germany and Iraq, Said repeatedly deplores the absence of any provision for Israel to pay reparations: ‘The PLO leadership signed an agreement with Israel in effect saying that Israelis were absolutely without responsibility for all the crimes they committed’. Indeed, Oslo II explicitly imposes on the newly-elected Palestinian Council ‘all liabilities and obligations arising with regard to acts or omissions’ which occurred in the course of Israel’s rule. ‘Israel will cease to bear any financial responsibility regarding such acts or omissions and the Council will bear all financial responsibility.’ In what might be called the chutzpah clause, the Palestinian administration must ‘immediately reimburse Israel the full amount’ of any award that, ‘is made against Israel by any court or tribunal’ for its past crimes. “ To be sure, Israel will provide ‘legal assistance’ to the Council should a Palestinian sue the latter for losses incurred during the Israeli occupation. Washing its hands of all responsibility for nearly three decades of rapacious rule, Israel – Said rues – ‘crowed’ while ‘an ill-equipped, understaffed, woefully incompetent Palestine National Authority struggled unsuccessfully to keep hospitals open and supplied, pay teachers’ salaries, pick up garbage, and so on’, and ‘dumped’ Gaza ‘in Arafat’s lap … even though it had made the place impossible to sustain’. As we shall see, South Africa’s apartheid regime displayed rather more magnanimity after its comparable withdrawal from and institution of ‘self-rule’ in areas of black settlement. Even after conceding the Bantustans independence, South Africa continued to cover much more than half their budgets through grants.
Sovereignty: Oslo II refers only to an Israeli ‘redeployment’, not a withdrawal, from the West Bank. Excluded from the Palestinian Council’s purview are ‘Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis’. Israel retains full ‘criminal jurisdiction … over offences committed’ anywhere in the West Bank ‘by Israelis’ or ‘against Israel or an Israeli’. Regarding internal Palestinian affairs, the Council effectively cannot ‘amend or abrogate existing laws or military orders’ without Israel’s acquiescence. There is even an explicit proscription on the wording of postage stamps which ‘shall include only the terms “the Palestinian Council” or “the Palestinian Authority”’. On a related matter, the Palestinian National Council must ‘formally approve the necessary changes in regard to the Palestinian Covenant’. No comparable demand is put on Israel to renounce its long-standing claim to the West Bank – and much beyond.”
Security: Israel retains ‘responsibility for external security, as well as responsibility for overall security of Israelis’. In the name of ‘security’, Israel is thus free to pursue any Palestinian anywhere. Although duty bound to protect Israeli settlers and settlements that are illegal under international law, the Palestinian police cannot – ‘shall under no circumstances’ – ‘apprehend or place in custody or prison’ any Israeli. Israel preserves the right ‘to close the crossing points to Israel’. Palestinians who, due to Israel’s systematic destruction of their economy, are dependent on work in Israel are thus still left to the latter’s mercies. Israel retains ‘responsibility for security’ at the border crossings to the West Bank and Gaza. Accordingly, it can detain or deny passage to any person entering through the ‘Palestinian Wing’, and enjoys ‘exclusive responsibility’ for all persons entering through the ‘Israeli Wing’. Said dismisses these arrangements as a ‘one-sided farce’. Yet, Palestinians do get to post a policeman and hoist a flag at their entrance and provision is made for the expeditious processing of provision is made for the expeditious processing of Palestinian VIPs. The ‘Palestinian side’ also gets to issue new ID numbers for residents of the West Bank and Gaza – which, however, ‘will be transferred to the Israeli side’
Land: The first phase of Israel’s redeployment leaves Palestinians with territorial jurisdiction over only 30 per cent of the West Bank. Further redeployments are promised in the future but their extent is not specified. And within the areas coming under Palestinian territorial jurisdiction, Israel continues to claim undefined ‘legal rights’. Moreover, the Palestinian areas are non-contiguous. A caricature of South Africa’s Bantustans, the Palestinian territorial jurisdiction comprises scores of tiny, isolated fragments.”
Excerpt From: Norman Finkelstein. “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.” (from chapter 7 with the citations for the Oslo II accord)
a) What sort of political realities or solutions would you like to see in Israel/Palestine?
b) How likely is your imagined solution?
Imagine being an "independent writer in philosophy" and still writing this babble. Textbook example of how many self-described philosophers end up kicking up so much dust just for the sake of it that everything becomes opaque. The result is as you see here: resorting to pseudo-intellectualism as apologia for colonial atrocities. Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner.
a) Hopefully population growth will eventually slow in the fertile crescent as it has been in many other countries recently and the two sides will have some breathing space.
b) It's likely if the younger generation turn into a bunch of internet nerds as they have in other countries.
b) Very difficult. I mean the first step I hoped for was pressure from a Bernie Sanders Presidency (who seems quite serious about it), but that didn't happen.
Terror from the air now supplanted by terror from the ground.
103 Gazans dead, including 27 children. That makes more than a quarter of the dead, children. Anyone claiming 'self-defense' - like @BitconnectCarlos - can go fuck themselves with a rusty nailgun. But more likely they will continue defending atrocities carried out by a murderous regime, while demanding that Palestinians die without complaining quite so much (i.e. @Echarmion).
And some vapid shit like @Number2018 will say that all this isn't about Israel, employing philosophy in the most cynical, self-serving manner - or should I say copy-pasting, considering that is the only thing he or she knows how to do - while a @Joshs will have the gall to talk about 'empathy' while being utterly devoid of it.
Quoting coolazice
:fire: Start here.
Quoting Joshs
In any violent, vicious conflict, whom do you side with, Joshs: the weaker or the stronger? "David" or "Goliath"? Hint: The answer is fucking partisan. :shade:
Quoting Joshs
I don't know where you got your p0m0 apologetic bullshit from, brother, but I got my 'critical resistance' to oppression & colonization from these lucid, courageous comrades:
[i]Toussaint Louverture
Thomas Paine
Frederick Douglass
Martin Buber
C. L. R. James
Mahatma Gandhi
Ho Chi Mihn
Malcolm X
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Abraham Heschel
James Baldwin
Hannah Arendt
Edward Said
Noam Chomsky
Nelson Mandela
Subcomandante Marcos
et al ...[/i]
Who is doing that? The only person who has said anything along these lines (that I have read) is @BitconnectCarlos, and basically everyone else here has disagreed with him.
The discussion here focuses on the Palestinians and ways out of the conflict because everyone agrees that what Israeli forces are doing is fucking evil and deplorable, so what is there to discuss?
I have asked you this before, and you have not reacted: is any discussion of anything but atrocities and murders commited by people associated with the Israeli state automatically aiding the oppressors? @StreetlightX certainly seems to think so, given he feels the need to lie about, belittle and insult me for deviating from that line.
If by 'discussion' you mean, "it is preferable that the Palestinians are genocided in silence" then yeah, that's aiding the opressers you fuck.
These are the kinds of people who watched the Death Star blow up in Star Wars and then cried about all the innocents who were on board.
Never said that, you duck.
Quoting StreetlightX
"These are the kinds of people". You sound like an Israeli nationalist.
You want Israel, a genocidal state, to hold the exclusive means of violence. At least people like twoBit are clear minded in their shittyness - your liberal civility politics is the worst of both positions - one that plays enabler to genocide while pretending to call it an evil. An evil that you're so concerned about that your counsel is to 'just let it happen baby'.
There's a reason that when they lined up the Nazis and the collaborators against the wall - the latter of whom always protested that they were just trying to make things bearable - they shot the collaborators first.
No, I don't. I want violence to be useful.
Quoting StreetlightX
And what's your "counsel" then? You're accusing me of "enabling genocide" by disagreeing with you. So what is it that you do that is so important in the fight against genocide? Does your unwavering support on an internet forum turn into a weapon in some poor Palestinians hands?
Does thinking about lining me up against the wall and shooting me arouse you?
Which, in the context of the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, is indistinguishable from demanding that Israel alone has the exclusive rights to exercise violence. Your gatekeeping of violence does not take in some rarefied intellectual game-space where a genocided population gets the pleasure of picking when and how they enact resistance to a power that crushes them at every turn. It doesn’t take place after tea time, once the children are put to bed, and everyone agrees to duels in twilight by the gardens.
I don't see how you imagine that attributing to someone the "right" to commit useless violence helps them.
Quoting StreetlightX
That's precisely where it takes place. I'm not under the illusion that any talk about who has the "right" to commit violence changes the situation on the ground.
You, on the other hand, seem to think that there is some mystical connection between what's written in this thread and the fate of actual people in Palestine.
Except rhetoric like yours is routinely wheeled out precisely in order to uphold the conditions of atrocity, and yeah, I really enjoy showing it up for the absolute shithouse of an argument it is.
I'll just repeat what I said:
Quoting Echarmion
Do you imagine that calling me names and fantasizing about committing violence is somehow helping?
Quoting StreetlightX
Ah yes, I'm just a symbol of oppression. This is all an elaborate theater piece where you are the knight in shining armour tilting against the evil oppressor. What anyone actually says or believes is irrelevant, so long as you imagine yourself on the "right" side. And if it so happened that you judged Israel to be home to an oppressed people, you'd effortlessly argue in favour of killing Palestinian children.
You're the one who insists I'm "enabling genocide", that I'm sitting in some ivory tower, divorced from the actual situation. You tell me how what I'm doing is so different from what you're doing.
Quoting StreetlightX
What have I dropped?
Actually, you insisted on this after I pointed it out. Having you admit that you're literally talking about a fantasy is quite good enough in my book. It means you have nothing to say and, in the case that you do, it means nothing of relevance. Well, outside of using that fantasy to push for the cause of aiding a genocidal state.
And yet you found it necessary to lie about me repeatedly. Weird to lie about nothing. Oh and also you fantasized about lining me up against the wall and shooting me. I think it's very important that we keep that in mind here.
By the way, you're evading my question.
Your shit take on Palestinian resistance - which, apparently, has nothing to do with actual Palestinians.
But by all means, make this discussion about me, personally, instead, you vapid, substanceless nong.
So, does firing rockets at Israeli cities help actual Palestinians, or does it simply kill them faster? Does saying that Israeli citizens are "in the camp of the oppressor" help actual Palestinians?
Oh right, helping the actual Palestinians isn't the point. What is the point?
True.
Quoting StreetlightX
Now it's only one tiny step from this conclusion to the realisation that yes, it actually matters whether or not the rocket attacks help. But that's only if you actually care about the result.
Quoting StreetlightX
Quote me then. Show me these exact words coming from this account.
Obviously you can't, liar.
Quoting Echarmion
Which, again means: only Isreal can exercise violence.
I'm sorry, I though you were going to show me where I said I'd prefer Palestinians to "lay down and die in silence"?
But of course all you can offer is an interpretation in line with your theater. Liar.
No, I understand the implications of my own words precisely - that it's better to die rather than to die and cause more pointless death on the way.
I would have thought that isn't controversial, but one can be wrong.
No, what I want is practical measures. "Civilized" doesn't come into it.
Quoting StreetlightX
Once again we're doing theater. Should I preface all my posts with a denunciation of Israeli actions or can we treat each other as people rather than carricatures?
= what you want is for Palestinians to die in silence.
Good chat.
And what you want is for people to just die. You want more people to be killed, either because you like people dieing, or because you cannot face the reality that sometimes bad people win.
But you do want it, or else what's the implication of wanting violence, even where it is useless?
Why not? Because the optics are more important to you than lifes? Because you can't bring yourself to face the reality?
It's not out of concern for the people in question, because you have already concluded they'll die. So your concern here can only be for yourself, your ego.
Because I'm not an armchair shitstain who, in addition to being a lapdog to genocide, would even demand to control the terms of death by those meting it out.
Haha, well I guess that's as close to an actual answer as we're going to get. Can't get your own self image as the glorious revolutionary get dented.
It's true that callous disregard for human life in pursuit of ideological purity is often a hallmark of revolutionaries (the ones that ended up in power, anyways. Ruthlessness probably plays a big role). So you're in good company, I guess. Just glad you're in front of a computer and not in any actual position of power, given how you treat disagreement.
Not resisting genocide because people might get hurt <> ideological purity. Got it.
Sad that people like you not only exist in front of a computer, but are in actual positions of power too.
Quoting 180 Proof
Ok, so you like Jews when they're weak, subjugated minorities but when they establish a state and manage to secure land from aggressors and demonstrate strength then they are the oppressors.
As a Jew I'd rather have your enmity than your support then if it means the actual security of my family. I have real skin in the game here.
Weakness does not make one good, strength does not make one bad.
A very revealing headline, separating the death toll from the "hitting of targets". From just the headline, one might assume Israel is firing at target dummies while somewhere else people just drop dead.
Even the BBC at least mentions in the subtitle how many people have been killed.
Interesting way to say 'ethnic cleansing'.
At the end of the day it's either the Jews or the Arabs in charge. It's that simple. When you tell the Jews that they need to dismantle their state and lay down their arms then you're just putting the Arabs in charge again and promoting the subjugation of Jews as is routine under Arab rule.
Pretty sure you can find something like it in Mein Kampf too.
Israeli Arabs are given the same rights as Israeli Jews. People in the disputed territories are not Israeli citizens so it's not an apartheid.
So are American blacks and Jews in other Arab countries. So is virtually every minority in every country ever.
I'm fine with an ethno-state. I'd give the Kurds one if I could.
Of course you are. As with all racists.
And I guess American blacks are treated like shit so that makes it OK?
Mask off here we goooo.
by ethnostate I meant a state that strives to reflect certain cultural values in its laws & policies and strives to maintain a certain ethnic make up. are you mad at India because they strive to maintain a fundamentally Indian state with Indian values?
Silly question, you're ignorant as shit, of course you haven't. But go on, keep telling on yourself.
Just now they bombed the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, which is south of us – very close but we don’t know where. They bomb with F-16s; there’s the constant noise of the drones and the planes flying overhead. When they bombed Arafat City [the police facility], our building swayed from side to side. We saw the plane as it dropped the bombs.
“I think around 20 bombs were dropped on the police facility. It’s like somebody went nuts. The shock wave was stronger and scarier than the explosion itself, as if the earth were blowing up into itself. The warships also didn’t stop shelling from the sea at the refugee camps. We haven’t been able to sleep for two days.
Impressive "self-defense", very brave. :shade:
You and I are just different then. I don't see anything wrong with a state having a fundamentally, e.g. Indian, Han Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, character and striving to maintain that.
Yes, because you are a racist. So this follows quite nicely.
You're the one who wants to tell other entire nations that they're not allowed to enshrine their own cultural/historical values into law and maintain those through governance and I'm the racist. :chin:
You just don't respect other customs. You don't respect the autonomy of communities. We don't all have to be like you.
:rofl:
How dare you tell racist states not to be racist. You're the real racist!
Ahh you crack me up.
I certainly think one can implement cultural values and not be racist. Do you believe that all countries ought to run themselves in the same way? No cultural variation?
Indeed I do. Which is why when countries exclude members of their population - or engage in ethnic cleansing to 'purify' that population - they do not 'run themselves'. They are made to run along exclusionary lines which make them - wait for it - racist.
Amira Hass is the real deal, a golden standard human being.
Terrorism, absolutely. Putting a people in a blockade, limiting caloric intake, shutting down electricity, limiting how far they can go fishing and just bombing people indiscriminately is akin to putting fish in a barrel, starving them, shocking them and then bombing them.
But these are people, not fish.
And to top it off, have the audacity to call it a "war".
So would this be a liberal democracy? What system are you looking to implement everywhere?
You just said you want to see all countries run roughly the same way and I'm just trying to get a sense of what that would mean. Just give me something to work with. Even if we had the same governance systems around the world the policies implemented would be quite different if we're dealing with democracy.
By this definition, the more diverse a country's population, the less racist it is. So China must be the most racist country by a multitude of factors above any other country. Someone should tweet LeBron James to let him know.
China is quite racist actually and Japan as well for that matter.
But so is Israel.
China is insanely racist. Like Israel, it too runs concentration camps.
I don't know why people like you bring up all these supposed counter-examples which can be answered with a simple "yes". It's incredible. (I bet India is racist! Yes. I bet China is racist! Yes. I bet you think the Allies committed war crimes! Yes). Shows how fucked up people's moral compass' are.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Not along ethnic lines would be a minimum. I.e. not racist.
How about the Arabs countries? You think they love Jews over there? I haven't forgotten about your earlier post btw, I didn't mean to ignore it but I was just so mobbed with responses yesterday.
Quoting StreetlightX
How about religious ones then? Example: Calls to prayer in Muslim countries that are broadcast everywhere. You think non-Muslims love to hear this? Are you going to tell Muslim countries that this is a no-no?
Of course not. Religion ought to play no role in government. Like - I'm sorry I have to provide you a minimum of civic education? And yes, the Arab states are almost universally fucking awful. Another 'Yes'.
They don't. The Israeli's also haven't helped themselves in this regard in regards to the many wars it has fought, which could have been avoided, minus the 48' war and (perhaps) the 73' war.
I understand that it's not easy to create a state in such a place. It's the only place in the world in which there is some claim to a land for the Jews, even if the source of the claim doesn't merit any real life authority.
Nevertheless, by doing what your state is doing, they won't be loving Jews any time soon...
Hitler: What about the soviets? You think they run a fair and equal country?
Stalin: What about the nazis? You think they run a fair and equal country?
And so both are justified apparently.....
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Calls to prayer = Shooting them with missiles.
Ok.
Also, there are no mosques around areas what are mostly not Muslim. So if you hate the prayer calls that much, move.
As a foreigner in Japan: I don't think they're comparable anymore. Most you'll get in Japan is a glare by a 90 year old who can barely stand who's gonna croak any minute. Most Japanese people actually really like foreigners in my experience.
:rofl:
Ah, that's good to know. I assume this change is more or less recent? I've heard of many cases where foreigners can't even get a home to live in if they don't speak Japanese.
But, good for them. It's a really fascinating country with a messed up recent history, but I'm glad they're doing better.
Yeah, that's just a difference between us then. But you see how one could call your view intolerant? You're making a universal declaration that cultures or societies need to operate in a certain, secular, western way. Who are you to tell the Chinese that they can't implement some version of Confucianism in education? You think they care?
In any case - and this'll probably be my last post on the topic for the time being - I don't think your view on this subject is insane or out of line. I disagree but there is a certain part of your argument that I can sympathize with.
Intolerant of intolerance, yes.
--
Also, if I recall, the Japanese are not exactly forthcoming with extending citizenship to non- , let's call it, racially pure Japanese. And anecdotally, if you're darker skinned in Japan, it's not exactly sunshine and rainbows, from what I hear from friends in that position. I'm willing to be shown wrong about both of these things.
But also, Israel is an unambiguously racist state so alot of these comparisons are not really necessary. Other than maybe to sharpen just how unambiguously racist it is. So back to how it is terrorizing it's colonial territories.
They need a Gandhi or MLK Jr. Lots of marching and civil disobedience. That approach has a pretty good track record.
In the meantime Israel should keep doing what it's doing. They don't need a Gandhi or an MLK, or anyone. Only the Palestinians require that.
I tend to want to look at things mechanically. What would actually change things?
Does condemning Israel change anything? If so, how?
That still happens sometimes though rarely. They don’t hate foreigners, but they really expect you to speak Japanese. Because the country is so bureaucratic, if you can’t speak or write Japanese it will be very difficult to deal with you, so some providers just refuse to give you whatever service is in question. It doesn’t seem like a race thing to me, just a bureaucracy thing.
On the flip side if you’re a bilingual foreigner everyone loves you.
I see, it's easy to prescribe a solution for the Palestinians. They just need to produce a Gandhi or an MLK. No sweat. What should Israel do? Oh that's complicated how would condemning them even change anything?! Feel free to reread my posts, as well as @StreetlightX and @180 Proof, throughout the thread. Israel is the occupying force. The onus is on them. This has been explained multiple times. This shouldn't be a difficult concept to grasp for anyone over 14.
"Does condemning Israel change anything? If so, how?"
Since when did supporting Gandhi & MLK not coincide with condemning the oppressor, the British Empire & White Supremacy. That is just obscene hand waving without caring what the movements behind those people were about.
But they've done civil disobedience many times. They've also gone on hunger strikes.
But when they do this the western media ignores them. The consistent coverage they now get is "Hamas is terrorist."
The onus is on Israel to stop extending occupation and naval blockades. They have the power to stop and minimize the harm they are getting in return.
Hamas calls me on the regular. I tell them "passive resistance, guys, that and lay down the fucking Salafism. You'll have the world eating out of your hand."
They just bomb a cafe the next day.
Israel, trust me, when Netanyahu calls me, it's nothing but the word fuck and fucking. He gets tired of it, but you gotta get those fucks in.
Yes of course Israel is terrible. It has been for decades.
So Gandhi would not condemn people defending themselves.
Another wasted condemnation. Sigh.
Yes.
Ok, but I was wondering on what basis you claimed it to be the "Jewish homeland." Perhaps this is why, but if not, let me know if you like.
It was the French more than the Russians. French newspapers made sure everyone in the planet knew about Little Rock, Arkansas.
It became a national security issue because new countries, recently freed from colonialism were aware that the US was a hypocrite just when the US was trying to shore up the infrastructure of global trade. Countries that went with the communists disappeared off the global stage behind the iron curtain.
I don't know what else to tell you besides ancient/religious texts and Jewish oral history. Jews have prayers going back thousands of years that speak to this issue.
And sure we could take a step back and go "well rationally speaking...." and say that since the Jews are only one group that has claimed the land, what should make their claim rightful? Well who defines what is rightful? Who determines which sources are valid and which aren't? No human is in a position to do this, i.e. to say "here is the absolute truth." So the struggle continues.
Really? The Arabs are anti-semites because they didn't welcome European invaders? I suspect the same can be said of Native Americans in regard to Americans, those Natives surely are anti-American.
But this raises an important point. If the US really cared so much about the plight of the Jewish people, which reached it's horrible zenith in WWII, why didn't the US take in most of the European Jews? There's plenty of land in the US, but no offer came.
Aside from the 1948 war, all other wars Israel was involved in were voluntary, with the Yom Kippur war maybe being an exception.
Quoting tim wood
“My mother is in the hospital 7 kilometers [4.3 miles] from us, and we can’t get to her because of the shelling. Only my sister is with her. What do the Israelis think the end will be? Isn’t there anyone in the Israeli media who says, ‘Stop, desist, let’s think about what we want?’
“Aren’t there people who are afraid for the fate of the Jewish people and say, ‘Let’s think about what will be in a hundred years? Let’s defend the Jewish people.’ Since yesterday I’ve been wondering: Who’s the crazy one here? Us or them?
“Our young people are delighted [by the Hamas operation], really, because they have nothing to lose. There are two generations in our home – my generation, the older one, which harbored the hope that one day we’d live in this country peacefully with the Israelis, and my son’s generation.
“If he were an Israeli, he’d be drafted in another four months. He was raised on love and accepting the Other, but he’s in turmoil over what’s happening – over people he knew who were killed just yesterday, over the feeling of fear. And how will I be able to talk to him now about living in peace with the Jews?"
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-four-gaza-friends-tell-me-what-it-s-like-to-feel-the-wrath-of-israel-s-f-16s-1.9806495
Yeah, rabid anti-Semites who deserve the caloric restrictions placed on them by Israel. :roll:
On the one hand, you insist on a historical perspective, on the other hand you write of anti-Semitism as some disease that suddenly infected the region in 1948. This ignores the historical realities.
Just to name one thing, Israel didn't just "become" a state overnight. It was established by force of arms. And that included massacres and displacement of the muslim population.
Nor is anti-semitism simply a natural occurrence or a mere reaction to the presence of a state of Israel and the way it was founded. It's part of a variety of political agendas.
Quoting tim wood
So, let me get this straight - the Muslims are unfortunately "infected" with anti-semitism, and since this is part of their nature and cannot be cured, Israel must unfortunately murder them until they are no longer a threat?
Wow.
Such statements send chills down my spine.
Horrifying.
The Enlightened West with its freeze peach and - oh wait, no, it's just fascism.
But it isn't today.
I know this topic decently well enough. There aren't too many I can say this with some confidence.
But even if I did not, the fact that a human being doesn't bat an eye at the prospect that an entire population is put under caloric restrictions by an occupying army, which took 78% of the historical land of such people, is astonishing to me. Now it's even more than that.
Granted, the 20th century was a horror filled era, the fact that in 2021 some people don't find such facts bothersome, regardless of whatever else they may believe in terms of culpability, only shows how slow and little we have progressed.
I've seen and read many horrible things. Doesn't mean I get used to them.
Oh wow. You're literally advocating for murdering people because they aren't acting properly civilized enough for your tastes?
They tend to live in highly concentrated neighborhoods like Willamsburg in New York City or Meah Shearim
in Israel. So they are isolated in this sense but in the midst of large metropolitan areas.
I take it you lived through it, so who do you blame for the breakdown since the Oslo accords? More Israel? or more PLO?
Ok, so maybe I'm wrong. Judaism thrives.
So, Joshua lead a horde of rabid Hebrew tribes to steal Canaanite land (i.e. ethnic cleansing) through mass rapine slaughter at the behest of voices in his fucking head (and voices in dead Moses' fucking head) more than three millennia ago AND THAT "justifies" modern Israelis claim now to "the Jewish Promised Land" and therefore their ("divine birth")right to gradually reenact that ur-myth atrocity by nearly eight decades of dispossessing a centuries-long settled Arab population in order to ethnically cleanse the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for "Der Judenstaat, Der Judenstaat" über alles? Well, Bitcon et al, to quote my beloved Hillel the Elder: G-F-Y. :shade:
We SHOULD imagine that this discussion was about slavery, or the holocaust , or serial killers, or Stalin or Pol Pot. That’s the whole point. The model is worthless if it skirts the most blatant examples of alleged oppression and inhumanity.
Quoting Maw
On the other hand, there are a group of commenters on this thread( perhaps you included , perhaps not) who seem to evince textbook characteristics of what I call ‘woke cultishness’ . They have been remarkably consistent: a tendency toward bullying ad hominems and an almost compete refusal to delve into moral nuance, ambiguity and complexity associated with the political
issue they are so passionate about. Why is this? I think that in many ways wokism takes the place of religious cults of years past. It shares many of the same characteristics. An intense desire to belong to a community of shared ideals combined with an unsteady or unscholaely grasp of the underlying ideas leads to a hectoring black and white us against them mentality. As Streetlight proclaimed ‘This Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides the ideal example of pure moral clarity’ Well, yes it does if you only see your politics in such rigid terms, which is the hallmark of woke cultishness. Every political conflict must reduce to moral clarity. If it doesn’t they will be compelled to force it into that mold.
These are not the intelllectuals behind the movement , they are the enforcers, the shock troops.
The thing is , I support the intellectual underpinnings of various forms of wokism and CRT. I think they are here to stay in one form or another, and I certainly prefer them to the conservative alternatives. But I think the bandwagon cultists who are not intellectually secure enough to question and reflect on their driving ethico-political assumptions in respectfuldebate are dangerous , because a bullying kind of verbal violence is their main recourse in discussion combined with an inability to actually DISCUSS.
“ If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency. And as in America, where antiracism has redefined racism and relocated the problem to a place where it costs little for white liberal elites to "do the work" combatting it, so has this happened in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where real and urgent civil rights abuses against the Palestinians have been obscured by a binary, maximalist view of the situation that's now fully mainstream.”
"Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED," one viral Instagram post reads. "There is no 'fighting', there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid." This rhetoric is hardly new to the conflict, but it's become absolutely ubiquitous thanks to the binary of wokeness at play here: There is no "fighting" happening because one side, the Palestinian side, is subsumed by its victim status at the hands of Israeli "colonization." No weapon in the hands of a Palestinian is thus ever real—even, apparently, rockets that have killed Israelis—because Palestinians are the OPPRESSED in the situation, as the drawing would have it, and oppressed people cannot fight, apparently. It's wokeness 101: The oppressor has all the power, all the agency, and the Israelis are the oppressors. Case closed.“
Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”
i Palestinian suffering is real. Too many have been killed in Gaza. Too many have been brutalized by the police. For too long, Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank have been deprived of basic civil rights, like the right to vote for the government that exercises state power against them and freedom of movement. For too long, Gaza has been forgotten and left to languish under an unnecessarily brutal blockade, its young people and children deprived of any future. Israel has all too often penalized nonviolent resistance instead of bolstering civil society and supporting a new generation of Palestinian leadership. These all fall squarely on Israel's shoulders, and all nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to solve these problems are legitimate.”
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON , NEWSWEEK DEPUTY OPINION EDITOR
Quoting 180 Proof
I think this writer is talking about you.
“Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”
:up: :up:
Of course they do. They’re novelties. Only 2.3% of the country are foreigners. And of those, what’s percentage is non-Asian? Let’s see what happens when foreigners are more than a tiny percentage of the population.
I agree with @thewonder that they've become conflict habituated. It's feeding something.
The situation is reinforced by the US, occasional attempts at peace brokering notwithstanding.
Your bullying hostility isnt motivated by a need to back the weaker against the stronger, it’s driven by your moralist judgement of the MOTIVES of the stronger. There’s a huge difference between a need to aid the weak out of pragmatic considerations and a thinking which labels the aggressors as immoral, evil, pathological, greedy, selfish. Demonizing your enemy can justify all kinds of ‘evil’ on your part, starting with something even as simple as bullying other commenters on a philosophy site.
I sense a perhaps hidden theological basis to your self-righteousness.
years ago, when there really was something like moral clarity, and the methods you prefer were appropriate. Today almost every political situation the wokeness cultists attach themselves to is riddled with complexities and ambiguities, but the only tool the cultist has available is a bludgeon. The irony is that notions like CRT are intellectually complex , and so lend themselves best to environments like the workplace and academia, where they are having a real and positive effect.
And now, the UN estimates 10,000 people have fled there home. If these people were Jews today, you can bet whatever you like that NATO would be carpet bombing countries...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PTtsugw9pE
Before I even start with this we really need to address this term "ethnic cleansing." It can be used for both genocide and banishment/expulsion, and while these are obviously both bad things the two are not the same at all and should not be used interchangeably. The Jews have been banished all across Europe throughout their history but I would feel weird saying that Europe "ethnically cleansed" the Jews e.g. in the Middle Ages, due to this term's association with genocide. Just something to be aware of.
Onto the topic - What kind of justification would suit you in terms of proving that the holy land belongs to the Jews? Do I need more ancient sources? Is that really going to convince you? Short of God personally coming down here, what on Earth could I use to justify this to you? Do you believe the Muslim holy books more?
There have been Jewish communities living in that area for thousands of years. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled in 1948 because they expected the area to be a mass graveyard after the fledgling state fell & Arab armies rushed in. I'm not saying it's all cookies and cream and forced expulsions occurred just as many Jews were kicked out of many Arab countries following these wars. Are you going to demand that the Arabs and the Europeans compensate the Jews? Let's get started on that.
I'm not talking to you 180, just using your quote. I don't think anybody who has stepped into this thread has condoned Israel's recent actions. Nobody. So why this accusation?
Can't find someone to attack so you attack the people in your own side. What?
Joshs has put a couple of theories on the table. My theory: it's primal. It's mundane frustration and disappointment. These things find whatever outlet you offer them.
It's exactly the same thing that fuels racism and religious in intolerance. I could find creative ways to deal with my emotions but instead I'll just vomit them up on you. I'll join a crowd of Jews who are beating the crap out of a Palestinian.
Same thing.
Maybe if Isreal wasn't involved in exactly both, it would be slightly harder to use the term. But of course insofar as it is engaged in both settler colonialism and genocide - in one in service of the other - 'ethnic cleansing' is quite the rather apt term.
Ok and what's the upshot of this? Do we wag our finger at Israel and tell them to be better? Or does it mean we should dismantle the Israeli state? Have you seen how Jewish minorities are treated in the Arab world? Have you strongly condemned the Arab treatment of Jewish minorities in this thread? There's plenty of work to be done around racial justice everywhere in the world including the US and Canada. How have you been treating your muslim immigrants over there in Europe?
Terrible thing, isn't it. But what about the ongoing genocide of black and brown people in the United States? Shouldn't we be condemning that one first? Have you been to Baltimore, Maryland lately? Reminds me of Auschwitz. Come on over the states and we can protest together.
Why are we talking about Israel? Lets talk about the Arab countries today, no more Israel talk. Lets make a list of everything they've ever done wrong... for what purpose? Who knows, we just want to make them feel bad! :brow:
It's quite alright, we have enough problems with our treatment of aboriginals to deal with right here. And of course, more whataboutism from you. Expected from a racist, but there you go.
Because they’re currently shooting a place with missiles. Also because that’s what the thread is about.
Wouldn’t think that one needs an explanation.... Live and learn I suppose.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Start a thread about them if you want. If talking about the atrocities committed by the country you don’t like makes you feel better about the atrocities of the country you like... go ahead.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Well, no, we want to discuss the issue and show genocide supporters like you why it’s wrong.
I was going to provide a response but once I heard this it's just a no-go for me. We're just throwing insults around now, nothing productive.
...Right, and imagine someone replying that in such conversations "focusing on differences in perspective and worldview" instead of direct condemnation of slave-owners.
Quoting Joshs
Congratulations for being the umpteenth dumbass to use "woke cultishness", a meaningless phrase used typically by conservatives as a substitute for actual thinking. A thought terminating cliché and clarion call for dipshits. Christ, banal white people have appropriated "woke" for own purposes for several years now, it's so boring at this point. It's ironic that you are accusing us of lacking "moral nuance", and "complexity" before quoting Batya Ungar-Sargon, who once compared Ilhan Omar to David Duke, harasses Jews of Color, and publishes insane articles about befriending Neo-Nazis.
moron alert! moron alert!
And I think the main problem is: you couldn’t provide a response. Not that you felt insulted. You’ve been called all sorts of things on this thread “genocide supporter” is hardly the worst. So I doubt that it made you feel insulted enough not to respond.
See here for instance:
Quoting StreetlightX
That’s the guy you’ve been talking to for multiple pages now.
It’s just that you recognize that you can’t justify atrocities by mentioning other atrocities. You have no counter argument and you can’t support your position without using that fallacious tactic. But I’m willing to bet you will continue to do so regardless. “The arabs discriminated against us so that justifies systematic slaughter”
lol maw it was obvious satire. learn to take things less literally.
Not a statement of fact. Complete lie. There has never been any Israeli plot to genocide either the Palestinians or the Arabs.
I could throw the same thing back at you - why are the Palestinians trying to wipe every Israeli Jew off the face of the Earth?
We could do this all day. Is this a productive line of conversation?
Right of course, "obvious" ex nihilo satire.
It was a reference to an earlier conversation that I had with Streetlight.
Finally. Really appreciated ...
... Oh look, too good to be fuckin' true! Off topic again so soon – in the same sentence. Anyway, okay.
Nothing ethical justifies ethnic cleansing.
I don't.
No more than myths, fairytales or comic books can convince me to dispossess generations of the majority inhabitants from the land continuously inhabited for at least several centuries by their ancestors before foreign refugees and colonizers invaded the land and dispossessed and then (now) oppress them.
Even if g/G exists, a deity's word alone would not justify dispossessing, oppressing & ethnic cleansing, only condone it and, thereby, expose its own evil.
Same ignorance and falsehood, different tribal language. I've found history books far far more credible and corroborable.
Of course not. Europeans already have "ccmpensated the Jews" by firstly making an egregious mess of colonial partition after the collapse of the Ottomans and secondly then giving degrees of support for the establishment and on-going existence of the European Jewish State of Israel. Any more "compensation", if such is needed (and it's fuckin' not), should come from the dregs of the Ottoman & Roman Empires which in their respected ways had dispossessed Jews almost completely from the Levant and scattered Jewish communities to "the four corners of the known world" in a diaspora that has lasted millennia.
I'm going to go with his probably accurate impression of collective malaise.
There are billions of citizens in various countries subject to a collective malaise. I should add all sorts of qualifications to such a blanket statement, but that would become too convoluted.
I see plenty of examples of some sort of malaise, unrest, dissatisfaction, anxiety, anger, and so on fairly often in the US. My guess is that the largest causes of this malaise are the still-uncertain (but pending none the less) outcomes of pandemics, global warming, destabllizing political behavior, uncertain economic futures, challenges to traditional roles, and so on. These (and more) factors affect both affluent and poor populations, just with different details.
Collective malaise makes sense under the circumstances. The world has been in dire straits before, and I would guess collective malaise was much more common at those times (pandemics, world wars, economic depressions, revolutions, civil wars, etc.)--especially in the absence of outstanding good news. World war was disturbing, but less so for population which were on the side that was winning. A robust economy and the war's end probably helped people deal with the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Does this theory make sense to you from your POV?
The 'self-defense' of Isreali fascism.
Are you serious with this silly over the top rhetoric? Who talks like this? You sound like a walking cliche. You have no idea what my actual involvement or commitment has been to social causes or suffering individuals, because you never bothered to ask me. I don’t think you want to know , because that would threaten your ‘moral clarity’. With all your history of assured , theoretically grounded activism , you’re triggered to insecure belligerence over a few measly provocative paragraphs from a stranger on a philosophy forum? Have you learned nothing from these great thinkers you mention?
Jews are the indigenous inhabitants of Israel and they were the ones ethnically cleansed when they were originally expelled from their homeland by occupying powers. The Jewish immigrants coming from Europe were simply righting that original wrong and many were fleeing from Europe prior to the second world war. After the war many Jews in displaced person camps arrived in Israel seeking a better life after witnessing the horrors of the war. And some have the nerve to call these people "imperialists" or "colonizers."
Quoting 180 Proof
Arabs could absolutely be asked to compensate Jews for any number of atrocities & ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries following the 1948 war. Why haven't you commented on this ethnic cleansing? There were also pogroms against Jewish villages during this time by Arabs. I could of course go on to list these but all I'm really after is you acknowledging that there is a long history of Arab atrocities towards Jews, including ethnic cleansing. You could make a pretty strong case that the history of the Middle East is just one ethnic cleansing after another.
So let's say, e.g. everyone is evil and the history is all f*cked up. So what do we do now? If we just nuked the whole joint that would put an end to the ethnic cleansing (and if Maw is reading this I want to point out that this comment is tongue in cheek.)
And having been victims of ethic cleansing does not give one some kind of special licence to engage it after the fact. If anything, those who are all too quick to cry victim ought to be more, not less, vigilant against ever enacting such atrocities ever again. Yet here we here, with Isreali fascism murdering people left, right, and centre, being excused by genocide apologists like you. Pathetic.
Did you know that around 1/4 of Palestinian missiles fired into Israel are misfires and they end up going back into Gaza? They've killed some number, at least 8, of their own children this way.
Yeah, out of 850 rockets fired into Israel 200 of them stayed in Gaza.
You've demonstrated time and time again that you genuinely cannot tell the difference between actual murder and collateral damage so I just can't take your views on warfare or conflict particularly seriously.
"Collateral" from artillery shelling densely packed buildings, "collateral" from a ground invasion armed to the teeth. Israel continually carries out terrorist attacks and the distinction between 'collateral' and 'deliberate' simply does not exist for it. It is is distinction without a difference for a state that doesn't give a shit who it kills.
Maybe you both need to educate yourselves before speaking about things you don't know. According to this:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16/a-revealing-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-countries/%3foutputType=amp
Israel is on the more diverse end than China.
And look at Western Europe and Australia compared to the U.S. Looking at this map one would think that the Americans on this forum should be educating Australians and Western Europeans on diversity rather than the other way around.
Sorry that you need something so basic explained to you.
:rofl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_migrant_vessel_incidents_on_the_Mediterranean_Sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_European_migrant_crisis
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/record-number-of-asylum-seeker-deaths-at-sea-in-2014-international-organisation-for-migration-20141217-12903h.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/10/refu-o24.html
I knew you were a fucking moron but I didn't think you'd be quite so ready to hang your ignorance out for display like a fucking show boat.
Condemnation is easy and doesn’t require thought so much as visceral reaction. You don’t do yourself a service by taking this easy route. The most difficult thing in the world to do is be open to the possibility that the one you are instinctively driven to hate , to condemn, to criminalize, construes the world though an entirely different lens than you do. You think all that separate us is our moral compass , but that is what binds us. What separates us is the almost impossible
difficulty of bridging alien systems of interpretation of fact.
As for Israel vs. the Palestinians, Israelis and Arabs are the same race. Religion is the cause for the violence, not racism. But that is what we expect: racists are focused on race, even when race isn't a factor.
Opposing genocide really doesn't require these vapid brain loop-de-loops. Maybe Israel shouldn't be "instinctively driven" to demolish Palestinian housing, stealing Palestinian land, and bombing Palestinian civilians.
Not the quality post one would expect from a moderator.
Quoting Joshs
No.
Apologies. Having to wrangle with genocide apologists is unnerving. No less American chauvinism wrapped in ignorance.
It's actually extremely easy and obvious
:roll: For the fuckin' slow or disingenuous:
Quoting 180 Proof
All those deaths are “happy little accidents” I guess right?
4000-5000+ deaths due to “collateral damage” in “self defense” against the murderous terrorists that killed 30 of us.
You have to be ridiculously biased to buy that. You think those numbers are “self defense” numbers coming from any other country?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Because they were invaded and displaced. Still are getting displaced. And terrorized in “self defense”
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
If it reduces the number of genocide supporters like you? Yea.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Imagine if Egyptians tried to annex Sudan because it was part of ancient Egypt. You think they’d be justified?
The upshot is of course that if people recognise Israel for the racist Apartheid State it is, they might finally come to their senses about continuing to support it.
According to locals, some people have taken down decorative Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr decorations, such as moon crescents.
Meanwhile in Haifa, it appears that some Arabs are moving Muslim symbols from building facades, after residents claim they saw youth painting entrances to Arab homes in red. Women who wear the hijab head covering are also reportedly scared to leave their house.
These latest events join calls on social media to boycott Arab business in the cities.[/i]
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-gaza-flare-up-heavy-rocket-fire-from-gaza-bombards-be-er-sheva-ashdod-1.9810782
It's almost a civil war inside Israel.
With the Covid situation a lot of countries in the Middle East are struggling more than usual. So who could possibly help the Palestinians now? Turkey? Egypt? Looks unlikely.
The US is still behind Israel. Biden on foreign policy has not been a big change, which is sad.
Science should have occurred as a common, true understanding of reality - and served as a rationalising influence that brought humankind together over centuries to form a species identity, concerned with doing what's morally right in terms of what's scientifically true, to promote sustainable prosperity.
Instead, we maintained religious ideas as authoritative, and merely used science in pursuit of religious, political and economic ideological ends. What's happening in Israel and Gaza is the natural consequence of this religious psychosis, and it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Within a causal reality, there's a relationship between the validity of the knowledge bases of action and the consequences of such action. Acting on the basis of ideas that are false to reality makes extinction inevitable. This conflict is pathological to the ideological psychosis of maintaining religious belief in denial of scientific truth. If that doesn't change - and 1,111 posts on this subject, all to no avail suggests it won't change, humankind will suffer unto extinction.
Hamas has been open that they won't lay down arms until the state of Israel is destroyed. As strong as Israel is it can't control the actions of the Palestinians who mainly govern themselves. Simply by continuing to exist as a Jewish state it draws hatred and violence. The Palestinians have agency in this.
Whenever you're dealing in international relations like this you're essentially choosing friends and enemies. You're picking sides. If I was a neutral bystander to a regional conflict and one of the countries treated its minorities better than how the other countries treated their minorities - even if the treatment was far from ideal - I would still likely give credit to that imperfect country for that treatment of minorities.
It reminds me a bit of in the 50s and 60s when the US would criticize the Soviet Union for human rights' abuses and the Soviet Union would respond "well you guys lynch black people."
When you demand the absolute highest standard for one country and routinely penalize just that country for failing to meet that standard while essentially ignoring the other side that's a horribly unfair way to treat the conflict. It's not objective at all.
That's an absurdly transactional view of morality, imo. Morality doesn't apply based on some tit for tat where your wrongs are covered by those of some other person.
Morality is a different field than international relations. Countries aren't people.
Countries are run and populated by people. Morality applies to their actions just fine.
Hamas has never, ever been shy about its intentions: Destroy Israel, establish an Islamic state in its place. It does not care if Israel removes settlements because its final goal is the absolute destruction of Israel. Hamas has sent suicide bombers into crowded nightclubs and bars on weekends, and they terrorize their own people through strict social controls that includes the execution of homosexuals and the routine subjugation of women. Hamas embezzles funds meant for humanitarian aid to the Palestinians to spend on weapons. Hamas doesn't even care about their own people.
But then again they are the weaker group compared to Israel and they don't like the US so how bad can they really be? Gotta support David over Goliath.
I don't think StreetlightX is person. It's a clearly an internet bot as it never really understands what it's talking about.
Countries consist of millions of people interacting and consist of multiple different layers of government and in addition to those governments you have countless institutions which have their own rules and norms. To treat a country as if it were an individual person is just not a realistic description. Sure, there may be problems in certain institutions and not in others. Does that mean the entire country is just basically one person that we label as "evil?" Even powerful political leaders can't just press a button to make a certain problem go away unless it's totalitarianism.
Well considering Israel murders Palestinians on a scale of orders of magnitude higher, while keeping the rest of them in concentration camp conditions, yes.
It's just that they aren't in charge right now. If they were, it would be 'kill them! their lives mean nothing!'
Meanwhile the real Palestinians are being slaughtered. It's horrendous.
Hamas is in charge in Gaza right now.
I meant they don't control the situation. Israel does.
I have a hard time believing that.
Israel just re-entered Gaza because rockets were being fired into Israeli and killing Israelis. Prior to that Israel hasn't had any ground forces or settlements in Gaza since 2005.
What's super clear to me is that human life means nothing to 180. He's basically a psychopath, though hopefully inactive.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
You know why Hamas started bombing, right?
Israel is a client state of the US. Nothing they do happens without the latter's backing. The game to be played is a long one. And one can taste the current in the air, and I'm not convinced it's carrying Israel's way.
It seems clear to me that - as of these recent actions - the reflexive line of 'criticism of Israel is anti-semitism' has withered away like the dead vine it is. Not even the propagandists like twoBit or Joshs can make the accusation - Joshs at least acknowledging, however cynically and insincerely - that Gaza is a hellscape that owes alot to Israel for it's condition, and twoBit doing acrobatics to avoid talking about it because he knows he has nothing to say. I think these kinds of things are emblematic. Boomers like Tim Hill recycle talking points from 30 years ago, but he and others like him will keel over and die soon enough. Everyone knows the playbook now. In that sense I think threads like these are emblematic. Watching Andrew Yang get torn a new one has been pretty satisfying - although one wishes it were Nancy Pelosi instead. Biden remains a spineless coward - as he is in everything he does - but as Greenwald notes, if you pay attention, the politics is changing too, whatever happens at the top level.
Israel is in a race against time. Their accelerating brutality attests to it. It may be that the winds of change - which are real and present - will not blow fast enough, but that would only mean that Israel will go full mask-off in the time they have left before that happens and simply bring their genocide to its logical conclusion. That could happen too. But I'm hopeful. But it will still mean that thousands of Palestinians will continue to die and suffer at the hands of Israel for at least the near future.
That's because they seek to attribute blame, rather than understanding that both sides are afflicted by religious identity. The solution is simple - accept that we are all human beings, evolved from animal ignorance over thousands of years, and that religion occurs in the course of evolution, for the political purpose of uniting hunter gatherer tribes in a multi-tribal social group.
It took primitive man 35,000 years to figure out that tribes who believed in the same God, and the same set of moral laws could live together in peace. The problem occurs when one civilisation established on this basis, comes into contact with another, similarly constituted civilisation. They then have the same problem they started with - and theoretically, the solution is the same as it was for hunter gatherers. But I'm quietly confident humankind will become extinct before adopting science as a common understanding of reality.
The riots and clashes between protesters? Storming of the al-Aqsa mosque because the Palestinians were stockpiling weapons there?
Ask yourself this: Does anything justify the deliberate launching of rockets into residential areas for the purpose of murdering random civilians not responsible for the conflict?
Simple yes or no question: Do you support the rocket attacks into residential areas of Israel?
:clap:
Excellent post.
There's only so much horror anybody is willing to see before your start losing a PR battle. Some people here aren't bothered by caloric restrictions placed on the people of Gaza, these will never be startled even if they carpet bomb the whole of Gaza and kill every last person with white phosphorus. But as you said, once the PR battle is lost, the clock begin to tick and there's no stopping that.
It's a microcosm of the history of humanity in a sense. Thousand upon thousand of senseless deaths and for what? Pride? "Security"? Nationalism? And yet here we are. We're born after a very long time, live in this little blue planet we're burning up for a nano-second, and we'll return to nothing for ever. To be killed in such a brutal manner, for mere political theatre is disgusting.
As you said, maybe these deaths will eventually mean that they will be able to get a state and live in peace. I think it may be possible.
Agree about Yang. He's on the wrong side of this one, as are almost all Democrats. But it is changing. About time.
Good to know, then you wish the rocket attacks into Israel would immediately stop? Once that happens Israel will stop responding with its own attacks.
This is the Hiroshima question. We could knock back and throw ideas around. Nobody ever does what they themselves conceive to be evil. Bla bla bla.
The Palestinians are being slaughtered, man. It's gut wrenching.
No they won't. Because Israel has been on the offensive for the past 50 years. Israel does not 'respond' to anything. Israel is the aggressor, through and through.
Do I want the rocket attacks to stop? Yeah, but I don't feel too strongly about it.
Unlike, say, Israeli genocide.
Have they bombed any UN schools yet?
Can't say I'm surprised but its awful.
This kind of fascism can only hide itself for so long.
Also, I kinda like @Joshs incoherent babbling in this thread. It's all they're reduced to. That, or the obvious racism of someone like twoBit. In all cases their rhetorical game is up. Which unfortunately usually means more violence. Nothing more dangerous than an animal whose time is coming - the Israeli ethnostate, in its current form.
Well, I think the line usually given for attacks such as this one would be something like "We destroyed the enemies communication center." Or the classic "human shields" answer.
One problem Israel faces, aside from those already mentioned, is that it's an extremely paranoid state. They keep actually believing that some Arab country will come and wipe them off the map. As if any Arab state would do that considering the fact that Israel's army is vastly superior and it has nukes to boot.
The US and the EU wouldn't ever come close to dreaming about something remotely close to that ever happening.
So under this paranoia they strike southern Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and kill Iranian scientists out of fear. Which then acts as self-fufilling prophecy when they get hit back on occasion.
In any case the most fanatic of all Arab states is Saudi Arabia. Rhetoric aside, at the top level, there is mutual understanding and maybe even friendship of interest with Israel. So that can be ruled out too.
iIn principle, we need to determine if Zizek's line of thought still could be relevant. Zizek offered a particular model of a political unconscious. Do we deal here, in this thread, with a kind of ideological system, implying the implicit dimensions and mechanisms? A keen anti-Israeli debater contends that Israel bears full responsibility for the existence and escalations of the Arab Israeli conflict. Her (or his) vision of the conflict and its resolution presupposes exhaustive knowledge of facts and the ultimate rightness of her ethical and moral believes. She possesses clear distinctions and dichotomies between good and evil, light and darkness, victims and aggressors. These positions are backed and reinforced by intensive affective and emotional commitments and responses. Strikingly, these cognitive and affective patterns are not necessarily may be evoked by the atrocity and inhumanity of the current conflict in the Middle East. Three years ago, she demonstrated almost identical attitudes during Justice Kavanaugh's nomination.
Last summer, in a similar manner, she championed BLM's cause and fought for racial justice. On any occasion, she promotes an extreme, left-wing viewpoint. So far, her repetitive patterns are not necessarily symptomatic because they can indicate the aspiration to change our overall societal order ultimately. Yet, there are a few more factors: she regularly acts in concert with the intensive mass media hysteric events, maintained and reinforced by the corporate media, big tech companies, and the neoliberal elites. Regardless of the content of a particular event, she always takes part in the intensification of the left identity politics, causing the erosion and degradation of liberal individual values and the progressive concentration of power. Therefore, the conscious revolutionary desire for radical change disguises the unconscious counter-revolutionary totalitarian aspirations. The creation and proliferation of the newest tribal identities incorporate the production of their doubles, the opposite ideological figures, invested with negativity and monstrosity: 'a sexual predator,' 'a racist,' 'a fascist,' 'an apartheid Israel,' ‘a science denier’, etc. The ideological figure of Zizek's 'Jew' has been replaced, transformed, and proliferated 'to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system.' The newly created 'pathological, paranoid constructions' swiftly occupy digital platforms and all our sites of public social life. Not just a left-wing intellectual, but all of us are programmed to mirror and reflect our ideological others. Yet, comparing with Zizek's analyses, there is a new assemblage of desire and identification. The decisive role of the digital medium in the reproduction of our political unconscious makes Zizek’s reliance on Lacanian concepts unproductive and ineffective.
Never seen such fucking low-level discussion in a place dedicated to rational thought. Maybe 4-chan kind of forums is a better intellectual level for some in here. I thought this was a place to have a higher level of discussion, but I guess I was wrong about that.
No need to read the rest after this line
Did you miss my post? I'll save you scrolling up:
Here is TPF, a self-styled philosophy site, and nearly everyone posting has reverted to hostility and anger whether actively or reactively. Let's instead create solutions.
— tim wood
Quoting counterpunch
More like the is US an ally of Israel and Israel decides what to do. You see, client states get orders from their masters and here that isn't happening. For the US relations with Israel is above all a domestic policy.
And this isn't because only of AIPAC, it's because Christian evangelists back wholeheartedly Israel, hence the US doesn't treat Israel as a normal country. The whole situation has become to this as everybody panders to religious zealots.
Additionally discloses how untenable the Zionist line that only one side of this conflict is a "terrorist organization", despite whatever Olympic-level mental gymnastics will be conducted to justify this and similar attacks that are aired live.
I never label entire countries or people as "evil". I have opposed such views in this thread. But to say that morality doesn't properly apply in the context of international relations because states are not individuals is an evasion. Every single actor in a state has the ability to choose the moral course of action. The unwillingness of some to do so does not excuse the others. The excuse that one was "just following orders" has been thoroughly discredited by the experience of the Holocaust.
Someone has to pull the trigger, fly the plane, drop the bomb. Someone has to select the target, give the order, enforce discipline. Someone has to write the speech, make it, campaign for their view. Someone has to cast the vote, remain silent, pay their taxes.
Everyone here has a choice. Many of these are hard choices. But to claim that noone has a choice because other people are involved is a cowardly evasion.
Quoting tim wood
An immediate unilateral de-escalation by the Israeli government / armed forces. A stop to further expansion of settlements.
Quoting Manuel
Well said. An author once said something along these lines: a thousand years from now, when the children's children's children look at this in the history book, will they see anything other than a tragedy? Death and destruction over such fantasies as religion and nations, which in due time will all disappear or morph unrecognisably anyways.
Quoting tim wood
Could you explain what you mean by this?
You asked for solutions. I explained the real nature of the problem and gave you the solution. The solution is sound. It's not the fault of the solution that it will - almost certainly, not be adopted.
1,111 posts on this forum, on this subject, met by indifference similar to your own, convince me of that.
This is true. And the problem with paranoia is that, as you said, it is self-fulfilling. However the present violence comes to a lull - it won't be an end - Israel will come out on the other side of this even more paranoid than before. Considering that most everyone can see it for the terrorist state that it is, I have no doubt it will double down - because it has no other choice. Things will get worse before they get better.
One thing that's not mentioned as much as it really, really ought to be is the fact that much of the current violence is a cynical election ploy by Netanyahu, who has been stuck at electoral idle for 2 years now and is hoping this nationalist surge will finally break him out of his current political impotence. It's a gamble (a 'good' one, as far as murder goes), and if he wins, he'll take it as a vindication and things will get unimaginably bad. If it doesn't - I dunno, the Israeli political system will stay in it's current black hole and that could take it anywhere.
to what was behind your previous the most intensive debates?
[tweet]https://twitter.com/workerism/status/1392565942400520194[/tweet]
Or for some reading: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/05/israel-palestine-sheikh-jarrah-al-aqsa-mosque
Yes. If we're still around by that time...
Quoting StreetlightX
And I heard Finkelstein mention that the remaining option are to the right and to the far right of Netanyahu. If that's correct, that's pretty nuts.
And to do this on top of the recent peace deals with other Arab countries, such as the UAE, is dumbfounding.
Who gives a damn?
Although it's notable that this is like the 3rd or 5th time someone's tried to 'personalize' this and make this about who "I" am (is he happy? is he mentally OK? What's your deepest desire?). I love these questions. They're an an admission of utter substancelessness. They're a sign that one is one the exact right track. It gives me life, right before I ignore this kind of shit entirely.
Zizek: “Maybe I’m too much a humanist utopian, but secretly I hope that the coronavirus crisis will scare the shit out of Israelis and Palestinians and seduce them into, ‘Okay, let’s try a little bit more of collaboration and mutual help.’
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-slavoj-zizek-s-brutal-dark-formula-to-save-the-world-1.8898051
Left wing clowns like Zizek wouldn't know philosophy if it hit them in the eye!
"My formula is much more brutal, and darker. The state should simply guarantee that nobody actually starves, and perhaps this even needs to be done on an international scale, because otherwise you will get refugees. For our part, we need to forget about cars, air travel, fashion – and everyone should give back to society according to their ability. This means, for one thing, that the state should be given a certain right to mobilize people when needed. Can you imagine any other way to solve the problems we face?”
Yes, I can. I have explained how to achieve a prosperous sustainable future - 1,111 times on this forum, but left wingers, who use sustainability as an anti-capitalist bettering ram, don't want solutions. They want problems they can exploit for political ends - from the environment, to BLM, to Israel and Palestine. They don't really care people are dying. They just want to signal their virtue.
Interesting. I was under the impression that Yair Lapid, is the most likely next candidate, and is more of a centrist. Which is not saying a great deal, but still. If you want to distinguish yourself from a Yahu, leveraging the bubbling condemnation of these attacks would seem to make sense to me. I feel like push comes to shove - and this is shove - nobody really wants violence. But I could be gravely misreading the Israeli propensity to open aggression (like, I do think they'd prefer if the Palestinians to be genocided out of the limelight, and not in it). If you find any good analysis, let me know.
I haven't looked into Israeli domestic policy in some time. I too was under the impression that Netanyahu's rival recently, Benny Ganzt (?), was more moderate. So I'm unclear too, but I tend to trust Finkelstein.
As for a source, it's quite a long video, all of it interesting but the relevant point here begins around 55:38:
https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/norman-finkelstein-on-israel-in-2021-the-katie-halper-show
I don't know what it means to have "no useful concept of self-realisation". Who has a useful concept of self-realisation and where did they get it?
Quoting tim wood
I don't know if I'd call that irony. Perhaps from the perspective of an intransigent nationalist it would seem ironic. To me it just seems like the way things are: Peace requires, to use a biblical term, to love your neighbor like yourself. Europe eventually managed an imperfect peace in this way, though lots of American money of course helped along the way.
Quoting Manuel
Well someone probably is. If not us, maybe our intelligent toasters.
Quoting counterpunch
Meanwhile, people really are dieing. Why do we allow that to happen?
Lunatic
This is not the claim that I am making.
I was saying if if you're a neutral third party evaluating a regional conflict between two parties, how these two parties treat their minorities (e.g. Egyptian Jews, Israeli Arabs) is relevant in an evaluation of the conflict. If one party treated their minorities extremely poorly and the other party treats them less poorly but not in an ideal manner, then that should impact our evaluation. It would be ridiculous to spend all our time and energy as a neutral third party denigrating the more humanitarian side and completely ignoring the other especially when the other treatment is ethnic cleansing.
Additionally, plenty of other countries have had racial problems but these problems have been improved on. There has been progress. We didn't advocate for the immediate destruction of these states that have/had racial problems either, we just work towards improvement ideally within established, democratic channels.
I tried to use mod powers to fix it, it looks like the Twitter user changed their access permissions to non-public.
Edit: I was in the middle of the video.
Obviously, all facts should impact the evaluation. But then one can do good things in one area and bad things in another, and those don't cancel out. It can still be shitty for the western powers to invade Afghanistan, even if the Taliban do terrible stuff.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That rather depends on the circumstances. In general, you should do what is effective to stop the poor treatment from happening. There is no rule that says you must always deal with the worst people first. To stay on topic: Public condemnation of the Israeli government is probably more likely to be effective than public condemnation of Hamas, because Hamas doesn't need to win elections.
I'll happily deal with a minor issue if I can do so quickly and easily than tackle a major issue with slim chance of success. Effectiveness matters. Of course there are circumstances where it would be really important to hand out condemnation in proportion to the amount of immoral action, like if you're an editor for a news network that fills a limited attention span of viewers.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
The point is that asking e.g. the Israeli people responsible for commanding and executing airstrikes to stop is in no way equivalent to asking for the destruction of Israel. Israel is not remotely in danger of being destroyed.
In the Middle East, where we provide nearly $4 billion dollars a year in aidvto Israel, we can no longer be apologists for the rightwing Netanyahu government and its undemocratic and racist behavior.[/quote]
FeelTheBern :fire:
Had a look about. Couldn't find it.
I explained the philosophical nature of the problem - and the solution. It's religious identity maintained in denial of the validity of a scientific understanding of reality, we should have accepted in common as truth from around 1635. That's not what happened. Instead, science was decried as heresy, even while it was used to drive the Industrial Revolution. It's like giving machine guns to monkeys. We have advanced technologies while remaining ideologically primitive; it's bound to end badly.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
:up: Finally, sounds like you support the weaker oppressed Palestinians over the stronger oppressor Israel. Perhaps, Bitcon, you have a "moral conscience"? :roll: Irony of Ironies, isn't it? how behaving more like the enemy than the enemy you have become what you (claim to) hate most.
Actually, it is much easier to steal someone's land if they are dead first. Just saying, from a practical perspective, dead people do not object.
Do you have a more preferred reason for being killed? Just wondering.
You think that among the reasons a person could die or be killed from, political calculations for a group of politicians is particularly noble or decent?
The point is that these murders are particularly onerous, given the situation.
Defending one's home or family and dying for them seems to me to be as good a reason as possible for dying. But killing people in the largest open air prison in the world is pathetic.
All I find hateful is Hamas and their insistence on the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The "occupation" can be negotiated and Israel has made concessions in the past such as removing settlements and withdrawing the army from Gaza. Right or wrong, that territory was won by Israel in a defensive war.
Accept Israel's right to exist and we precede from there and negotiate like civilized people. Reject it and it's permanent war. Hamas chooses the latter. Smart, forward-looking Palestinians choose the former.
As distinct from the actual destruction of the Palestinian people, whose destitution at the hands of Israel you have consistently ignored and or excused.
I feel bad for the Palestinian people but when the ruling body in Gaza refuses to accept the existence of its much more powerful neighbor & launches lethal attacks that's gonna end up hurting the people when the retaliation comes, just as Hitler's regime left the German people endangered.
I still haven't heard you talk about the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs between '48-'72, by the way.
Your 'feelings' are just about the most irrelevant possible objects of discussion right now. In any case your words of lip service are belied at every turn by what you continually say.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Yes, you'd do everything you can to change the subject to further ignore actual suffering taking place in real time at the hands of current-day Israeli murder. You're as transparent as the air in your head is thick.
Ethical-Existential tip, Bitcon: the ends never justify the means in the long run where those means undermine – e.g. performatively self-contradict – said ends. Ergo, eighteen centuries of Jewish diaspora following several centuries of both Babylonian exile and Roman domination. A lesson from the Torah – it's exceedingly hard, even futile, to try to keep what was stolen by unprovoked mass murder. As Rabbis Buber & Heschel repeatedly make clear: zionism without justice is nothing but fascism. :fire:
Says the person who doesn't even believe in letting other societies rule in their own way and set their own national policies based on their own unique histories and cultures.
I'm not even going to accuse you of being a racist here; I honestly think you just don't like humanity. Like...at all. You have absolutely zero respect for other cultures or traditions, and your fundamentalism isn't far from the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhist statues. Same level of respect for others.
Says the person whose sole objective in this thread is to excuse genocide. If that's the 'culture' you'd like to 'respect' then I hope to hell it is universally 'disrespected'. I am fundamentalist about the rejection of Israeli state terrorism.
They haven't been doing shit for peace, just security, since 1967. That's when Israel became a US client-state in the Cold War. Begin fell into the realpolitik embrace completely. Almost three decades later, after the Soviet collapse, Rabin tried to loosen for good the reciprocal Arab-Israeli death grip but was assassinated for his strategic prudence and moral courage by a (deranged?) Israeli rightwinger. And here we still are, almost three decades on from there, the State of Israel remains an even more fascistic US client-state.
There is no genocide. Never has been. What ever happened to our discussion about America's ongoing genocide against its own minorities? Now that should be news, why not start a thread on it?
Streetlight quoted a thinker earlier who basically defined genocide not as the actual extermination of a people, but as the erosion of their social institutions. Under that definition virtually everything is genocide.
Genocide denial and more attempts to change the subject. Nice.
Why haven't you acknowledged the attempted genocide of Jews by Hamas? How about by the rest of the Arab countries? How about the slow, gradual genocide of virtually every minority by its host country? Everything is genocide today.
They could but that would require an IQ over 70.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-israel-airstrike-family-omar-b1848193.html
But this doesn't matter to Bitconnect because he thinks it's about sides and he's already taken his. Moral vacuum, exactly.
Raphael Lemkin
You couldn't sum up what is happening to the Palestinian people by way of Israeli agency better than this if you tried.
In a split second 11 members of the Palestinian family, who had gathered for Eid, were buried by the giant claw of an Israeli airstrike.
The remains of the building in Gaza’s Shati refugee camp were strewn with children’s toys, a Monopoly board game and plates of uneaten food from the holiday gathering.
In total 10 were dead: eight children and their two mothers, who were sisters-in-law.
But by some miracle there was a cry: five-month-old Omar, the youngest, was alive.
“What had they done to the Israelis to be targeted while wearing their special Eid clothes as they sat in their uncle’s house?” the distraught father Mohamed al-Hadidi, asked The Independent, from Shifa hospital where his son was being treated.
“They are only children, they haven’t fired rockets, ” he added, breaking down.
“Except Omar, I lost my entire family, in an instant.”
A mass slaughter of civilians, many of them children, by an absolutely dominant occupier as a form of deliberate collective punishment. If you can't step out of your partisan stance and see this for the inexcusable moral wrong it is and continue to distract with whatsboutism, you are just missing something human.
Yeah sure, being killed is trivially, not good. Within the possible reasons for why one could be killed, there's some room for honor, altruism and the like.
What Israel is doing now is horrific and senseless. They are not even winning any favors in the PR department outside of fooling themselves. If they continue like this, there will come a time when even the US elite can't put up with it anymore, if only to save face.
From this point to whenever that may happen, will take lots of senseless deaths.
Damn.
I don't know how'd I'd live after something like that. No words.
Of course Israel was just defending itself against those terrorist children in the refugee camp. The bombers did nothing wrong. Just ask @BitconnectCarlos.
I believe the surviving baby is Hamas too, so they should probably go in and finish the job. Like, literally this is the logic of apologists like @BitconnectCarlos. And then he'll ask you why you care, are you an Arab? It's beyond comprehension.
And human shields too.
Israel needs a strong left. They don't have one and this can only lead to more monstrosities.
Amira Hass, Ilan Pappe and Gideon Levy can only do so much. And if one doesn't see things the way they do, you're going to have to rationalize how your state can do such things...
Fuck Israel and anyone who defends her immersartion of the world - including, and especially the United States - including and especially Biden.
[quote=Abraham Lincoln]If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.[/quote]
Ethnic cleansing is even worse than slavery. It cannot be "justified" by either politics or religion. Clowns like BitconnectCarlos et al keep the bloodbaths of humanity's moral circus in business.
The situation is incorrigible.
Your answer shows that you misunderstand my question and my apprehension of the concept of desire. I do not care about your mental health; it is none of my business. So, when I ask: "what is your deepest desire?" I mean, what are you doing while posting here.
By the way, your answer also manifests your implicit understanding of
desire as an individual psychological faculty. I try to apply the different concept of desire, taken from D&G's 'Anti-Oedipus': it is the ultimate collective investment into the overall societal order. One of the central themes of 'Anti-Oedipus' is the metamorphosis of desire: How can we start desire our own oppression? One of the D&G answers is that the seemingly revolutionary desire may disguise counter-revolutionary investments. For me, it is alarming when a left-wing intellectual is fighting for the noblest goals, but the actual result is the intensification of the left identity politics, accompanied by the erosion of liberal individual freedoms and the progressive concentration of power of the corporate media, big tech companies, and the neoliberal elites.
Off-topic posts like this will be deleted in future.
Haven't read the entire thread, but I truly wonder about the timing of all this. Seems to be a nice distraction for Bibi. I wonder if anyone else has read anything about this and whether it's supported by any evidence. I wouldn't be shocked in the least.
You literally have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. No one is arguing on behalf of Palestinians because of their 'identity'. They are arguing on behalf of Palestinian because they are being genocided. Neoliberal elites? What the fuck are you smoking?
Finkelstein and Amira Hass look at this stuff with utmost care. The Israeli media seems to accept it as a fact. This all point to your suspicion being correct. So yes, plenty of evidence, much of it in Hebrew. Won't be long before we get stuff in English. That is what is happening, alongside the Palestinian pent up anger at being treated like garbage.
So yes, another Netanyahu massacre, combined with long felt grief by the native population which is also causing internal fighting within Israel.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahus-deadline-form-government-expires-rivals-eyed-2021-05-04/
'Defenders' of Israeli genocide here are Yahu's pawns in his own ploy of power.
This is absolutely party politics being played out at the expense of Palestinian lives and the deadly acceleration of geopolitical instability. It is maddening - but predictable - that no one is talking about this.
Sure, we can tally up rights and wrongs and then say "well if it were me...." but I can only take this type of talk so seriously before I start rolling my eyes and tuning out. It's about what we do in response. Of course Israel deserves condemnation when condemnation is due, and we can entertain a variety of approaches towards how to improve the state of Israel and make it more moral. You remember your idea of non-response to rocket attacks? I told you that I was willing to entertain it, and I am still am, but what about the actual flesh and blood politicians? Would they be willing to sit on the sidelines while their voters and constituents are being bombed? Is this really a reasonable request to ask of a politician in any country or are we asking the politician to commit political suicide even if the idea is sound?
In international relations our approach needs to be practical, first and foremost, and with an understanding that no country is perfect. International relations is no place for moral crusaders and zealots. Incremental improvement and compromise should be the MO. Often look to allow your opponent a way to save face as opposed to backing them into a corner. Of course there are some instances where we can burn everything down but this should be a last option.
Quoting Echarmion
Absolutely, I agree and we can discuss ending airstrikes or the "occupation." What we cannot discuss -- and what the ruling party in Gaza has refused to acknowledge -- is Israel's right to exist. You've heard that phrase "don't engage with others who refuse to acknowledge your right to exist" - that's why you don't negotiate with Nazis.
Quoting Echarmion
Hamas did get voted in, no? In any case I'm all for public condemnation of Israel when warranted and given this condemnation is in view of the deeper reality of the situation. See, I could actually rightfully condemn an act - say, how US soldiers massacred Dachau guards after liberating the camps (they should have rightfully gone to trial) but if that's all I'm saying then something is seriously wrong with me. Condemnation needs to be proportionate and in view of the bigger picture. Retaliatory strikes do not constitute genocide, and to claim so is possible indicative of bigotry.
People can b*tch & moan all they want, I don't care, it's action that counts. Money matters, weapons matter. I'm going to start donating $50 to Israel every time someone in this thread accuses Israel of genocide from now on.
They're genocidal.
I can't read Hebrew, so I'll have to wait. I also haven't yet heard anything directly from Finkelstein, but I look forward to it.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yeah, and yet we get front-page articles like this:
[quote=] One week earlier, Mr. Netanyahu’s opponents were poised to unseat him and form a new government, potentially ending the rule of the country’s longest-serving leader as he faces corruption charges. He denies wrongdoing.
But the past six days of national turmoil have offered the Israeli prime minister a political lifeline. When Arab parties and a right-wing politician pulled out of talks this week to join or back a rival coalition, the threat to unseat Mr. Netanyahu appeared to collapse.
“Netanyahu has always thrived in environments of uncertainty, of chaos and crisis,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster and director of Keevoon Global Research, who worked as an aide to Mr. Netanyahu in the 1990s. “He basically goes from crisis to crisis.” [/quote]
https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-turmoil-hands-political-lifeline-to-embattled-prime-minister-netanyahu-11621092285?mod=hp_lead_pos2
As if to say "What luck for Netanyahu!" Most read newspaper in the states.
One way is by stopping their brutal decades-long occupation and agreeing to a two-state solution, as most of the world wants.
I think they're doing pretty well. They ran Palestinians out to the west bank, where they responded by starting lemon farms. Israel diverted the water supply, so no more lemons. They responded to that by making small retail shops. The Israelis raised taxes til they went out of business and ended up in refugee camps that festered and bred despair.
It's a slow motion genocide, but yes, that's what they're doing.
Cool, we got $50 so far. I'll check back on this at the end of the month. Maybe I'll donate it on behalf of the forum.
I actually said it twice, so that's $100.
"The establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall. And since the existence of Israel is a danger that threatens the Arab nation, the diversion of the Jordan waters by it multiplies the dangers to Arab existence. Accordingly, the Arab states have to prepare the plans necessary for dealing with the political, economic and social aspects, so that if necessary results are not achieved, collective Arab military preparations, when they are not completed, will constitute the ultimate practical means for the final liquidation of Israel."
(preamble to the final statement - 1964 Arab League summit meeting convened in Cairo)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(Jordan_river)
You just admitted here that Palestinians are genocidal, so given that you've already accepted that, why should the Jews be willing to negotiate with a group who wants them dead? The Jews have also been displaced and invaded and terrorized. They need security, and that security needs to be their own state. The Jews have offered to end the "occupation" on several occasions in exchange for peace.
Some advice - we're going to have to be willing to put these blood feuds behind us if our groups want to make peace. Actually, Israel has already made peace with much of the Arab world which has accepted their right to exist so it is possible. That's all it's about: Accepting our right to exist. We're here and we're not going anywhere.
And why can't Palestine's Arab neighbors absorb them as immigrants? The Arab countries could fix this problem if they wanted to but they don't because it's a thorn in Israel's side. The Arab countries just don't care about the Palestinians and that not Israel's problem. If you're a Palestinian then I'm sorry your fellow Arabs have failed you.
Haha, that's unfortunately not how it works or I'd be broke very quickly. It's one per a poster.
I'm starting to doubt your commitment to spinning this toward an Innocent Israel.
Israel is already guilty by virtue of simply existing for most of these posters.
Your own feelings are all that matter to you. What's your assessment?
It's honestly a complete mess. Rockets are being fired into Israel from residential areas which basically forces Israel to respond by striking residential areas. It's a question of how much collateral damage is accepted, not whether collateral is accepted. Then many of the rockets Hamas launches ends up killing their own people because their weapons are cheap and they're idiots who don't care about their own people. I'd be curious to know how the US would respond vs. how Israel is responding now. A military expert would be welcome in this discussion.
Just saying, not sure why the term is different when a Government does it, blowing up civilians is generally terrorism, n'est pas?
It's insanity. There's no point in trying to wade through it with reasonable principles about accepting damage. They're locked in.
They need a cease fire.
See my previous post. In any case, Hamas is violating the laws of war by firing rockets from within residential areas leaving Israel in a terrible position. These are not different countries - Gaza is not a country. It is a self-governing territory.
I agree I'd be totally down with a cease fire.
It'll come. BTW, if the US was in Israel's shoes, they'd obliterate Hamas. Completely.
Yeah I was thinking something similar. I couldn't imagine the US tolerating rocket attacks on US citizens with their homes being bombed and neighborhoods destroyed. There'd be some major hell to pay for the aggressor.
The Israeli army withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and there aren't any settlements there either.
Yes Hamas is a terrorist group. They are also the sole governing power in Gaza which is a self-governing territory. They were voted into power after the Israeli's withdrew in 2005 and have been in power ever since.
That's simply nonsense.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
That's like saying Native Americans were genocidal -- so why should the colonists negotiate with them?
I suspect you're willfully ignoring both history and current reality.
That's the crux of it. Everything else is peripheral. This has been going on since ancient times. Plenty of posters here - Streetlight, 180, among others refuse to accept Israel's right to exist. Hamas, the governing power of Gaza, refuses to accept Israel's right to exist and refuses to negotiate or compromise with Israel. How do you make peace under those terms?
Come to the bargaining table with us and we'll talk. We've withdrawn settlements and forces in the past and we'll do it again, just be civil.
Interesting how the opposition to Israeli genocide is translated by you as a denial of its right to exist. Is the implication that Israel's existence is premised on genocide?
No, this is simply nonsense. This is a claim used over and over again to justify a brutal occupation. Israel has rejected the international consensus for years, the power balance isn't anywhere close to equal, and it's had the backing of the United States for decades.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Could have ended with Sadat in '71. What happened then? Or in Taba? Were they not asked politely enough?
We're at $100 now.
No I didn’t? Wtf? “Terrorized in self defense” as in the Israelis are terrorizing them and claiming it’s self defense. Cognitive bias at its finest.
Hamas is genocidal sure. But are you seriously comparing Israel to a terrorist organization? That’s telling.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Why can’t the Jews go elsewhere? For the same reason you just stated:
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
It’s not as simple as “Move to another country duh, and we’re just going to keep murdering you in the meantime”.
I can’t believe you seriously suggested that the inhabitants of the country you don’t like should just move away, while defending Israel........ If you don’t accept that the Jews should move away why should the Palestinians? They were there first you know (that Jews were there 5000 years ago doesn’t matter)
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Not accepting an entire country’s population into your own to save them from genocide = don’t care about said population.
Ok buddy.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I’m not. But again, are you seriously suggesting that the solution to the genocide is that the entire population should leave their homes and move away? Why shouldn’t the Jews be the ones to do that?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I’m not Palestinian... Just someone who’s not completely biased. Check this thread. It seems the only person defending Israel is the Jewish guy. And anyone who’s not Jewish thinks what’s happening is atrocious.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Except it’s more like: Entire residential areas are getting leveled because Israel heard a Muslim there possessed a pocket knife.
5000 vs 30 dead to missiles. Who does it seem to you is doing the “self defense” here? The side that lost 30 or the side that lost 5000?
It’s ridiculous to think that these missiles are defensive. It’s just an excuse to kill.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
More like “was forced to accept their existence because they’re backed by the US and so couldn’t be displaced”
Of the Arabs only the diplomats think Israel is legitimate.
Nonetheless, we've got posters in this thread who have little interest in doing anything except feigning moral indignation, virtue signalling and just trying to drag others through the mud. There are some interesting conversations to be had about this situation and you'd think a philosophy forum might discuss them but this thread is about as bad as it gets. The very same people who are generally being retards on this forum, back at it again, many of them moderators - or at least streetlightx.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/480/site-guidelines
The guidelines on this site are a complete farce. No need to like me or care about what I think, just read the guidelines and try to match them to this thread to see its quality.
Quoting StreetlightX
And that ergo any state's "existence" "premised on genocide" forfeits "its right to exist"? (Sweet fuckin' Jeezus, a categorical imperative!) This makes the Palestinians today's "Canaanites" in Bibi's "Joshua" cosplay. Bitcunt probably has no fuckin' clue he's been making Ahmadinejad's case by shadowboxing with his strawmen while making vacuous excuses for continued, incremental genocide.
Here's a thought: just because you are incapable of sympathy doesn't mean everyone incapable of it, and therefore are "virtue signalling" or "feigning moral indignation".
Quoting Judaka
Looks like the veracity of my comment here strikes again.
Look at what they say in the first paragraph (my bolded emphasis): "yes Israel is an apartheid state, yes Israel engages in systematic oppression and institutionalized racism" etc. ..then looks at who they critically target (my italicized emphasis), "This thread is really ugly. The usual suspects are really just going hard on the name-calling, insults and hyperbole." Not people defending or unconcerned for moral atrocities that they agree are immoral!, but people saying mean things to others. That's liberalism folks. All about tone, not content.
:100:
Quoting Judaka
It's a thing of sheer groin-aching beauty compared to the latest historical atrocity unfolding in real-time which many here are grappling with. Perspective, friend; fallacious bullshit, not passions, are beneath dialectics.
People support Israel? What a surprise. Oh, wait, no it's not, you're already aware that hundreds of millions of people across the globe support Israel. Do you actually believe your actions here make even a tiny difference? That if you berate the handful of people here to disagree with you that you're going to change their minds - or even anything at all? If you were even trying to change their minds, you wouldn't talk the way you talk. This is the crux of the problem, this false pretence, the only thing you're doing here is stroking your own ego, virtue signalling and acting a fool.
The people who support Israel may be ignorant, or even willfully ignorant or maybe it's something more insidious. I already made my opinion on the matter clear, what do you want me to do? Join in with you and berate any poster who dares to argue something I disagree with on a sensitive matter? Sympathy? Are you sympathising with the Palestinians because of what Israel is doing or because literally 2-4 people on an obscure philosophy forum think it might be justified?
Countries are fictional human inventions created by force. The Arab-Israeli conflict shows what happens when people refuse to acknowledge a countries validity. You can only resolve a countries identity through force and survival of the fittest.
And finally parents are the only cause of a child's suffering. No one can blame anyone else for a parent having a child in a war zone.
Idiot, moron, nincompoop.
@Maw how am I doing? I am sympathetic to Palestinians and here's the proof.
https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/1621075141-report-uae-demands-hamas-stop-rockets-attacks-or-face-halt-in-investments
"If Hamas does not commit to complete calm, it is dooming the residents of the Strip to a life of suffering. Its leaders must understand that their policies are first and foremost hurting the people of Gaza.”
"Property is theft"
Quoting Maw
hmmm
You just articulated sympathy with Palestinian plight here. So what excludes you from this psycho-analysis of intent or are you just more upset by people calling others by mean names over people denying apartheid, moral atrocity, etc. ?
What else are civilians for then? Surely a glance at 20th and 21st century war should disabuse one of the notion that civilians are to be protected. When US sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously said, "We think the price was worth it."
Quoting Judaka
Thought I'd go the opposite way. Civilians. They're what's for dinner.
It's actually fucked up, I admit, because myself, @180 Proof and @StreetlightX and several others are legitimately the only people in the world capable of ending conflict in the Middle East, and yet instead of doing so we just routinely ridicule others on the Internet.
And by the way this is one of the least lethal conflicts in History. Casualties are dwarfed by the war in Syria, in the Congo etc.
A thread based on the premise of "Israel killing civilians" will and should elicit moral stances. You're not going to be allowed to use it to jump on your hobby horse of morally condemning anyone who morally condemns anything. You do that regularly as a way to attack other posters, particularly mods, and it sidetracks and disrupts threads. So, stop now (and no need to answer this post because it's not up for debate).
I suspect he's a Hamas propagandist parodying the enemy. It's brilliant.
Your argument is that not supporting Israel while they are doing this is anti-semitic.
You are either trolling or very ill.
99% of the killing is done by Israel. 99% of the children murdered are murdered by Israel. The idea that's just defending themselves from the vastly inferior power they are violently occupying is where the parody comes in.
I am a not Jewish. Stop spreading the deeply Anti-Semitic myth no one supports Israel other than Jews. Let me requote this from very Islamic UAE:
"If Hamas does not commit to complete calm, it is dooming the residents of the Strip to a life of suffering. Its leaders must understand that their policies are first and foremost hurting the people of Gaza.”
You're really losing it now. Israel's biggest supporters are American Christians. Anyway, done with you. Anyone who supports terrorist attacks on children is not someone I want to spend time talking to.
Where is your thread supporting the thousands of children starved to death in Yemen. Or the thousands of children killed in Syria? The persecution of Christians around the world. The kidnap and rape of Pakistani Hindu and Christian girsl?
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/muslim-teen-throat-slit-dad-20724696
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwkQCKYRBFo
People you hypocritical liars don't care about.
Ah, I see, you're an Islamophobe. Some of us have no difficulty condemning these types of things based on the idea that they're wrong not on who's doing them. It's totally irrelevant to me whether the guilty party is Muslim, Christian, or Jewish. All of the above are capable of the same.
"The cave and an adjacent tent are home to 18 people: Nawal's father, his two wives and 15 children. The family's 200 sheep are penned outside. "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/08/children-of-occupation-growing-up-in-palestine
It is not Israel's fault that someone has 15 children
Incredible! Opposing the abduction, rape and forced conversion of girls and the murder of gay people makes me an Islamophobe. Now your true colours are showing.
Read the Hamas charter people.
You brought in information absolutely irrelevant to the thread. The only reason to do so apparently to attack Muslims. Don't do that again.
On a wider note, it's symptomatic of these threads. There are always attempts to make it about who we like more, Muslims vs Jews. It's not. The ethical argument concerns what is a justified use of force by party A against party B. The relevant contexts are things like power asymmetries and the killing of civilians in terms of method and extent by both sides.
It is not irrelevant to the thread because you are using inflammatory language against the Israeli's which you have not applied elsewhere. So I am putting your inflammatory language into perspective.
Why is this issue more important and more deserving of hysterical coverage? Apparently this the only conflict that warrants a thread on philosophy forum and surprisingly (not) it involves the Jews.
How can you devote a thread to vilifying Israel whilst ignoring much greater casualties, prejudice, misogyny and real genocide/gendercide elsewhere. I can only think of one reason for that and it begins with A.
Also opposing a religion is not a phobia I was a victim of religious child abuse my entire childhood. religion is spread by childhood indoctrination. Supporting Islam or any other religion is a self lobotomy and defence of child abuse.
I'm genuinely sorry about your situation. I don't support Islam or any other religion and am very anti-fundamentalist. To me, that's not the issue here though. So, please stay on topic.
It is not a competition. Self defence is self defence. Firing 1,500 rockets indiscriminately on civilians is not self defence. Self defence due to attempted (mass) murder has no restrictions. How can Israel defend themselves if Hamas hides behind women and children.
The Palestinian casualties are very low considering there is a population nearly two million in Gaza and the deaths are under 200 hundred. The deaths of Palestinians are always used as propaganda and the deaths of Jews are always defended.
War by it's very nature cannot be ethical. A war can be a mutual combat or self defence but the inevitable deaths are not moral.
The topic is an analysis of Israel's actions. How can you analyse Israel actions if you don't compare them with anything else?
I am comparing them to something else to show how exaggerated the vilification of Israel is.
Andrew,
Please be aware that criticism of Islam could lead to the UK Labour Party turning itself inside out for several years, and going AWOL at the height of a domestic crisis - like they did during brexit. Choose your words carefully. You know the left are very, very easily distracted by political correctness. A comment like yours could, quite conceivably, put the whole of the left out of action for years to come.
The delusion of moral authority reeking from Anti-israelis is amusing if not stomach churning.
I Have always voted labour but they have made themselves unelectable and I feel relieved when they get thrashed in elections. I won't stoop to voting Tory so I may have to vote an independent candidate next time.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I was raised in the red wall constituencies Labour lost in the North, and I will vote Tory. They may be horrible bastards, but it works economically - and at least they don't take everyone else's side against our own. Labour took the North for granted - while pursuing their identity politics agenda, and I don't fancy their politically correct chances of repairing that damage, ever. If the Tories can create economic opportunity in the North - and that wouldn't take much investment because the north is poor compared to the south east, they will be impossible to displace.
I think the Tories have improved since the pandemic started and have had to institute massive social interventions. If it lasts I could vote for them.
I don't understand why Labour thinks working class people are interested in identity politics and an irrelevant Middle East conflict.
There are Labour supporters of Israel but of course they receive death threats. Only further electoral defeats could change Labours ideology.
The obsession with Israel is really pathological.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Jews have traditionally voted Labour - and so do Muslims. They are fighting for control of the party. So the Israel/Palestine conflict (and every other conflict of identity) is occurring within the Labour Party, as well as in the middle east. Remember when Alastair Campbell said "We don't do God." Wise words!
Is that an inference, or an observation, or something else?
I have never understood why being left wing means you have to oppose Israel.
I think the reason most people oppose Israel is Left wing ideology, Islamic pressure or simple anti-Semitism.
A lot of Muslims in the UK actually support Israel but they are not allowed to do so publicly. A lot of Iranians support Israel because they don't support the Iranian regime and its support of war and terrorism.
No one's support of the Palestine seems to be unbiased and often relies on canards and lies including blood libel.
Here's a thing to keep in mind: if everyone who disagrees with you looks biased and dishonest to you, it's exceedingly likely you are yourself biased and dishonest.
It's the asshole rule: if you meet one asshole on your way to work, you met an asshole. If you meet only assholes, then you're the asshole.
Unless it's something extremely simple, like whether Jews have a right to exist, it's very unlikely that you are so immune to bias that no-one could ever disagree with you and be right.
Maybe Jews have been too economically successful - too involved in finance and business, to be trusted around the Labour Party's precious communist ideals. I think you're right about some Muslims withdrawing support for Palestine - but I'm not sure that translates directly into support for Israel. It's a Sunni/Shi-ite thing, related to in turn to Saudi Arabia and Iran vying for influence in the middle east - but I can't say I understand it entirely.
Maybe.
However often the truth is lost in relativism. To me relativism is gaslighting and claiming all claims are equal.
This thread now has a similar number of pro Israelis and anti Israeli's making it a balanced discussion. (I suppose)
As is anyone who unashamedly supports one side on an ethical issue because of who they are rather than what they do. And I presume the absurd attempted distractions concerning communism and UK politics will continue until they are modded out, but that anyone with any sense will ignore them.
Are you okay Baden? Did your nine year old get a hold of your keyboard again? Or is that really you?
Both of you will need to stay on topic. You can start your own thread about purported anti-semitic left-wing Corbynism if you wish. This thread is specifically about whether Israel is justified in killing civilians.
To re-emphasize, you can either argue that the killing is justified and present relevant arguments or it's not and present relevant arguments. Being emotive is OK given the subject matter but going totally off-topic isn't.
:up:
Yes you're right. It's mostly a way of talking about how people are trapped in an open air prison and being massacred. All while going through Covid and caloric restrictions.
Albright is worse than trash.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yeah, ok.
In today's world, property means people's livelihood and sense of identity.
There are nearly 2 million people in Gaza and under 200 hundred of them have died including Hamas officials after Hamas indiscriminately launched 1,500 hundred rockets into Israel.
Hamas has created the prison. After the Israelis withdrew their settlements on the strip they have launched non stop aggression and murdered their political opponents including Fatah.
Let me repeat what the United Arab Emirates said:" If Hamas does not commit to complete calm, it is dooming the residents of the Strip to a life of suffering. Its leaders must understand that their policies are first and foremost hurting the people of Gaza.”
We should probably stick on topic. At least we haven't been banned which is prolific on Twitter and reddit. The use of cancelling and banning now has become an essential tool of suppressing rational debate in favour of uncritical ideology.
This is false. Hamas has no control over the territory. No control on the blockade. They don't even have the control of being able to leave Gaza.
Israel only withdrew there settlements because they could reap no benefit from the land, not due to good will.
Hamas is ugly, but they fight back and give the people in Gaza a modicum of dignity. If Israel doesn't like Hamas, they should not have helped create them in the first place. Again, the Marxists at the WSJ can confirm this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275572295011847
Anyone?
Israel withdrew their settlements by forcing the settlers out.
After that Hamas took control and killed the Fatah opposition. They forced Israel to have a blockade as self defence and their charter calls for the extermination of Israel. Hamas is collectively punishing Gaza.
Not everyone suffering is a Victim.
What do you want Israel to do?
Israel cannot undermine it's own security and no one should have to.
I'm sorry. I don't know where I got the impression you're from the North. It's been deleted, so I can't check. Anyhow, I enjoyed the discussion, but I need to wash and eat.
I have met an Israeli cab driver in my city (Bristol. UK )I know a former Israeli midwife who now lives in England with her British husband. (Neither of them are millionaires.) I know a Belgian Jew who escaped the Holocaust and spent most of her life in my city.
Fight back against what? Israel left the the Gaza strip making it a Jew free territory and Hamas used it to fire rockets into Israel. When has Hamas tried to negotiate a peace? Apparently no Jew should live in the Middle East. Let us not forget the expulsion of Million's of Jews from Arabic countries at the same time as Nakba
They made a big show of it. Embarrassing really. As if the settlers were going to be placed in refugee camps in Israel. :roll: They didn't belong in Gaza in the first place.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Hamas won a democratic election in Gaza. Israel did not like the results and punished Gazans for voting Hamas in.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Withdraw as stated in resolution 242. Give Palestinians a state, autonomy. Risk peace for a change. If, under given circumstances they launch rockets again, then Israel would be defending itself. It cannot defend itself in a territory it is occupying.
What Israel is doing now is nothing short of monstrous.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Against the strongest army in the Middle East? A country with nuclear weapons. Again, they withdrew because that territory was not beneficial to Israel, not out of good will.
When has Hamas wanted peace?
https://peacenews.info/node/3849/hamas-has-offered-peace
On 21 April 2008, hard-line Hamas leader Khaled Meshal told reporters in Damascus that the organisation was willing to a ten-year truce with Israel on the 1967 borders, without formally recognising the state of Israel: “We agree to a [Palestinian] state on pre-67 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital with genuine sovereignty without settlements but without recognizing Israel. We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-charter-palestine-israel-1967-borders
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/hamas-offers-peace-deal-with-israel-1.1007111
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-israel-hamas-idUSTRE6B02ND20101201
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Hamas-would-accept-Saudi-peace-plan-spokesman-2844179.php
And etc. etc.
Do you think any Jews belong in the Middle east?
Do you think Palestine should be a one race country?
Now that they're there, yes.
Palestine one race? Short term I suppose.
I don't think it is feasible in the long term. But now, short term planning is the only way to move forward.
Under 200 Palestinians including several members of Hamas have died after Hamas launched 1,500 rockets arbitrarily into Israel which has nearly 2 million Palestinians living there . One rocket killing an Israeli-Palestinian seven year old boy.
I think you need to revisit the definition of monstrous.
Anyone should be allowed to live anywhere. That is the logical and philosophical only viable position. The attempt to eradicate Jews from the Middle east is the epitome of a Genocide.
2 million or so Arabs live within Israel but no Jews should live in Palestine? Um okay.
The settlements are controversial but the alternative is a middle east free of Jews.
Yes I agree with the bold part.
As for the rest, total lunacy and paranoia.
Israel has nukes and the US as an ally. Any country that seriously attacks Tel Aviv or Haifa would be flattened.
Heck, Israel wasn't far from using them in the Yom Kippur war, which is could have prevented in 1970.
Israeli's already live in what was called Palestine. They should not steal the lands of what remains of Palestine.
This is such a philosophically shallow debate.
Countries do not exist they are a linguistic turn invented humans. No animal else considers it lives in a country. Palestine was never a country but a region of the Middle east colonised Multiple times.
You are guilty of reification and making human constructs as if they were physical facts.
No one is entitled to anything, humans rights don't exist. We are just part of nature struggling to survive.
The survival of the Jews is apparently not high on your agenda.
It can't use it's nukes on its own population. It is facing a civil war. That is the tactic of Hamas. Israel's neighbours know that they could never attack Israel without severe reprisals so they fund the Palestinians to attack them. They supply Hamas with weapons and money in a proxy war.
No you don't.
How can you partake in the ethical argument if this is your stance though? Aren't you just saying you've picked a side and that's it?
Because no Jews belong in the Middle East? I live in the UK which has over 6 million immigrants. Do they belong here. Who are YOU to decide who belongs where?
Yeah, sure. I don't like nation-states either. But that's what exists.
So by your logic, Israel asking other countries to recognize that it has "a right to exist" is also non-sense, which is true. Not state has such a right.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Again false. I want Israel to be safe and continue existing. It is a unique country with promising aspects to it.
But going down this road is creating monsters. And worse of all will lead to massive suffering for Israelis. It's a self-fufilling prophecy, we're in danger, we need to expand and attack or we'll get bombed. They do this and then get attacked. Yeah, no kidding.
Those who support Israel now support not only the misery they inflict on others, but also support the death and hatred for Israel which can only increase with such acts. So, actually, despite what you may say, you are supporting Israel's own misery too.
No. I am saying the premises of the debate are fallacious. Moral debates are mainly garbage. I am antinatalist/ No one who creates children has a moral leg to stand on in my opinion.
What is the ethical debate here anyway? I created a thread a long time ago about the validity of property and countries which received a handful of responses. People are not interested in the foundation of ethics or things like property but flair up about stereotypical tribal debates.
:100: :fire:
Quoting Echarmion
:lol: :clap:
But you don't recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation trying to destroy them or the previous attacks on Israel by it's neighbours an effort to destroy them? Israel won it's territory like most countries in a war it did not instigate.
I recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization which is a flea against the massive terror organization that is the IDF.
Hamas cannot destroy Israel. If they could, in some dreamland, they would be destroying themselves too.
That is what they are doing now by stoking intercommunal violence.
Israel need psychiatric treatment. This is paranoia on steroids.
Has anyone fired 1,500 rockets at your house recently?
Which is a case in point of supreme lunacy.
Total insanity and evil.
Has anyone destroyed your whole neighborhood, limited your caloric intake and prevent you from leaving an open air prison?
Created by Hamas killing its opponents and firing rockets into Israel.
Do you want Hamas to be allowed in to Israel to directly massacre the Jews?
It does not. Repeating this claim does not make it true.
There is no existential threat for Israel.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Did I say this?
On the other hand, killing people in an open air prison is perfectly fine for you.
But Hamas. Hamas. Yeah, those Hamas fighter jets and bunker bombs are an existential threat...
So you think Israel should allow itself to be wiped out by people like yourself without defending itself and taking down its aggressors. I will be happy to die to prevent the defeat of Israel and its Anti-Semitic enemies. Israel taking it's enemies to its grave with it is highly desirable and is seeming a distinct possibility.
The attempt to destroy Israel started immediately after it's foundation. That is how Palestinians lost territory. You are lying. Israel was attacked after is modern creation and several times after by Syria, Egypt, Jordan etc and sponsored by Iran. Who do you know that want's Israel to survive? Clearly not you.
What you think that Israel as last resort for not giving up land they are stealing should start WWIII!?!?
There are literally no words to describe such a consideration. Nothing.
We are talking about today, which is what matters.
After the 70's it's impossible for Israel to be destroyed. Nor would the US or the EU ever allow it.
You forgot to mention the 1,500 rockets fired into Israel. The only reason they didn't kill thousands of people is because of Israel's intelligent Iron dome project which intercepts these missiles. That you must be disappointed by.
Yes. Israel is on the verge of civil war. There are around seven million Arabs and seven million Jews living in this area and you toxic inflammatory opinions are not going to bring peace. But for some reason you think you have a moral high ground. Puzzling.
I'm done with you, you're not speaking in good faith.
Go argue your Zionist lunacies with someone else.
Property is theft. Land is only owned by force
And good luck with your rabid delusions.
I see.
I doubt it. You engaged in a bogus moral debate based on false premises weak axioms and emotions. Defend your axioms and let's debate. Let's have no slogans and sentiment.
It is called not being Anti-Semitic and supporting Jews.
The population of The area "Palestine" was 800,000 in the mid 19th century there are now 7 million Arabs living there. So where exactly is this genocide taking place? In your imagination?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatah%E2%80%93Hamas_conflict
"The Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights has found that over 600 Palestinians were killed in the fighting from January 2006 to May 2007.[14] Dozens more were killed or executed in the following years as part of the conflict."
Add this to the list of things which totally aren't expansion by conquest.
I guess now is as good as a time as any for a post-mortem here.
For me it honestly wasn't that bad. I've had many other discussions with SL and I thought compared to those that this was one of the better ones. The key when you're talking to people like that is you've gotta translate - when he calls you a racist or genocidal you just ask him to explain what those mean to him and you'll see where he's coming from: He defines these terms is a very different sense than you or I would. It's actually a good thing if SL calls you a racist and I stopped viewing the term as a bad thing given his definition of it. I also noticed his levels of toxicity never really reached past a certain level so I just kinda gradually became accustomed to it and gave a bit of it back sometimes. There was only one other poster here who struck me as being unnecessarily hostile as well as extremely critical so I just stopped interacting with him. Most of the others were o.k. to interact with -- not comfortable -- but I think I've been called genocidal or a racist or a Nazi so many times in this thread that it just doesn't faze me anymore. You also just don't have to respond to everything.
It was a fun way to pass time on the weekend but I gotta get back to work now.
I visited Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, in early 2019. Why relevant?
I understand what you're saying but it would probably help for clarity to explain exactly what you think this means in practical policy terms... I assume you mean dismantling all settlements over the Green Line, ending occupation and bombing campaigns, that sort of thing?
Apologies for the late reply, have been away. (and in all honesty somewhat trepid about getting myself involved in a 28 page Israel thread...)
:100:
No need to read it actually.
Only thing required is curiosity and/or interest. ;)
You say that this would be a difficult proposal, I'm just wondering what you make of the failures not just of Oslo but also Camp David and Taba? It seems that these negotiations were deeply unpopular with both Palestinians and Israelis.
What argument for securing the future of the people of Israel would not also apply to the people of Palestine? The latter are also a people of diaspora - created by the actions of the former. They need a homeland too.
Yep.
Quoting Manuel
No doubt many Muslim countries do terrible things. And no doubt there are anti-semites around, some of them on the left, some on the right. No doubt this thread is not about either of those things. Please focus your agreement or disagreement at least mostly around the points raised.
Both sides need the moderates to kick their extremes out and realize it is a zero sum game to do otherwise. The end.
Indeed.
Notice the rhetoric. If our team does it, it’s self defense. If the other team does it, it’s terrorism.
Completely ignoring the power imbalance, and hence reality.
If these scenes - eg the air striking of an Al Jazeera office, the bombing of a hospital, blacking out internet and social media sites - came from another middle eastern country, that country would be seen as part of the Axis of Evil.
Right. Which should provoke some basic questions: why does the US so strongly side with Israel? Why do we vote in lockstep with them? Why do we send billions of military aid and technology to them?
Questions a child would have, but which reveal some very interesting facts. I hope threads like these at least encourage people to look into it a little deeper.
The reason Israel suffers so many less casualties is because they have a missile defense system that intercepts the vast majority of rockets which saves countless lives. Would you support Israel more if more Israelis died and the casualty count was 50/50?
Have you also considered that around 25% of the rockets fired (200/850) by Hamas misfire and explode around Gaza killing their own civilians. A couple days ago 8 Palestinian children were killed this way.
I'll put a link here once it's available.
Yeah, in that ballpark. From the cheap seats, the practical terms look to me something like this
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/536647
No worries. Glad for your company again, cool; though in all seriousness all I can say about joining this knife-throwing circlejerk is "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies."
Is this meant as a joke, or do you sincerely not see how fatuous this statement is?
You've clearly identified with one "side" and so are possibly incapable of looking at this conflict objectively, but take a few moments to consider again what you've said and see if you can at least play Devil's advocate to your own remarks.
(If you can't, there's no need in going any further -- defend Israel to the end; I'm not interested.)
"99% of the killing is done by Israel" is a fatuous statement. It has zero bearing to who is right or wrong in a conflict.
Israel is definitely defending itself, it's just defending itself so well that people like Baden have no idea that it's defending itself. It if was defending itself worse the killing would be more 50/50 and Baden wouldn't have this stupid line to use. Is there no such thing as attempted murder?
Ok. Let me try to simplify this, see if we get somewhere.
If somebody, X, comes up to you and steals your wallet or hits you that's an assault. I think it is quite reasonable to fight back against X. Such an act can be called "defense", I think, without much controversy.
Now suppose that X steals your wallet, your watch and other such possessions in a violent manner. This is still an assault. Ok. You fight back maybe you throw a punch or push him back. But then the person comes with a gun shoots your leg and when you hit back, he gets furious and says he is defending himself from you.
Is X justified in saying he is defending himself from you? I think in such a scenario, whatever else X says, he is wrong to say that he is using defense.
How would you modify such a scenario?
This analogy isn't apt because Hamas started launching rockets first. Israel did not just begin the aggression.
As a response to what happened in the Al-Aqsa mosque.
X is stealing food, electricity and water from Y. Preventing food and aid from coming in is akin to stealing.
Israel raided Al-Aqsa because of a weapons cache there that would later be used against Israel. In hindsight, was this the best way to go about resolving the situation? Very possibly not, I don't know. Lets say it was wrong and that Netanyahu deserves blame - ok, fair enough.
Regardless, the correct response to this is not to start launching rockets against Israeli civilians in residential areas. Now Israel is going to defend itself against those firing the rockets, who are themselves firing from inside residential areas.
Israel does allow food and medical supplies in, they just screen out the weapons. Lets stick to the first point for now though.
Well, you live there. It's a small country.
If Hamas is planning to fight, what, they should all line up in the beach, so they could be killed and Gaza loses all defense they have?
So the idea here would be take all the possible humiliation you can get, and be happy we let you live in pile of dirt? There's only so much people can stand after 50 years of occupation, surely you can see that, even if you disagree with them on all else...
They don't have anywhere near the sophisticated weaponry that could shoot at tanks, much less aircraft.
In any case, there is nowhere near any proportionality in the violence committed. It's a total massacre.
Quoting Xtrix
Yes -- to say nothing of the decades-long brutal occupation. Apologists for Israel are incapable of seeing the reality. Anything Israel does is defensive, there's no power imbalance (and if there is it is somehow irrelevant), it's all about the "right to exist," etc. No sense in wasting time trying to convince them otherwise.
Quoting Manuel
The proportionality is because Israel actually has missile defense. 90% of rockets are stopped. If Israel didn't have that the kill count would be much closer. Attempted murder is just as bad as murder. You have no idea how many rockets are actually being launched at Israel because the vast majority are stopped, but the military does know where all those rockets are coming from.
Quoting Manuel
This is thankfully because of the blockade.
Quoting Manuel
If they don't take precautions to conduct their military activities away from their civilians then they are partly liable in the event of response attacks. Imagine you're a military commander, how would you respond if someone was launching rockets out of an enemy hospital? Are they just safe?
Totally agree. We've learned from the same man a good deal. And others too, including women of course.
Since he's living in the country, I try to reduce as much emotion as possible, to see if we can at least agree on some basic things.
I'm afraid Carlos would be what is "the left" in Israeli, meaning people not like him are much further to the right. That's not good for them, if you include the Samson option, it's literally bad for the whole world.
I don't think we'll change minds. I won't change my posts or tone, but who knows? Others here have said pretty spine chilling things. It's madness.
But if we agreed that prior to settlement expansion Israel was safer, why do you think ending the blockade means they'll destroy Israel? Yes they're furious, with good reason, but they wouldn't want Gaza to disappear off the face of the Earth.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Again, where do they go? They barely have room to defend themselves, unless they make themselves visible on the beach or in the border. That's suicide.
Or they can just be humilated time and time and time again. I'm sure no Jew would want the same thing done to them and not except a reaction.
Doesn't Israel have snipers and intel on Gaza? I'm sure they could be much less brutal. A large part of this is just nationalism gone nuts.
The two families turn up, and the restaurant manager just gives one of the families - family A - the table and gives the other family - family B - an inferior, cramped table in a less desirable location.
Family B are understandably pissed off. They should be pissed off at the restaurant manager, but they've decided to be pissed off at family A instead. And the parents of family A are behaving a little rudely.
If you want - for it doesn't matter much for the sake of the thought experiment - make the parents of family A incredibly rude. Perhaps they even try and take the condiments from table B because their own have run out or something. Obnoxious behaviour to be sure.
Now imagine that the parents of family B, outraged at this behaviour, decide to throw spears at the innocent members of family A. The parents of family A are good at fending off the spears and preventing them hitting members of their family. But family B are intentionally throwing so many they intend to overwhelm family A's ability to fend them off and hit some of the innocent family members. That's their intention.
I think you're a moral idiot if you think that's morally ok. That is, if you think family A's tactless and unjust behavour justifies the parents of family B in throwing spears at the innocent members of family A, then you're morally bust. What the parents of family B are doing is evil, plain and simple.
Family A's parents have guns. Family B's parents are throwing spears at their innocent family members. Are the parents of family A entitled to use their guns to stop the parents of family B doing what they're doing?
I think the answer is obvious: yes, of course. Hell, I am entitled to do so, and so are you. The parents of family B are intentionally trying to kill the innocent members of family A. Their deaths are not a foreseen consequences, but intended.
Now imagine that the parents of family B have covered their bodies in little tiny innocent people. Thousands and thousands of them. Every square inch of their body is covered in a skin of innocent people. And the parents of family A know this. And so they know that should they use their guns to try and stop the parents of family B from doing what they are doing, they will inevitable kill hundreds of the tiny innocent people covering the bodies of the murderous parents.
Are they still entitled to use their guns?
Obviously they are.
You're asking me where Hamas should launch rockets against civilian populations. The answer is nowhere, but if they are going to pick a place then don't do in schools (yes they have done this) or hospitals. Hamas does this purposefully for the press and it is evil. Conduct your military activities elsewhere, away from children. By storing weapons in schools you are endangering your own children and using them as pawns in a political struggle. It's beyond evil. Remember, self-defense is a fundamental right for any nation.
Quoting Manuel
I believe the blockade makes Israel safer, but that expanding settlements is a provocative move that that may very well endanger the safety of other Israelis.
181 dead, 52 children.
Roads to the major hospital bombed.
Israeli terrorism continues unabated.
Wonder who will write paragraphs of thought experiments justifying this? Probably a moral black hole of a human being - or three.
52 kids who won't grow up to be Palestinian terrorists.
Quoting StreetlightX
How'd I do?
I think we're up to 95% of the killing being done by the Israelis now and rising. But they could kill every single Palestinian, man, woman and child and their apologists here would still plead self defence. It's just bizarre that some here think the idea of proportionality has no moral relevance. Apparently if a bad guy comes to my house, the powers that be are justified in killing us both and all my children too. No questions asked. He used us as a human shield. *Shrug*. Yes, that's just the way it works everywhere. Nothing to see here.
American liberals signed off on the invasion of Iraq, which killed 1 million Iraqis who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. You opposed the invasion in 2002 I hope. The evangelicals lost their soul when they signed on to Bush's war, and so did the war-supporting Democrats and liberals. A very morally clarifying moment all around.
I protested it in London.
Quoting fishfry
I'll just presume this is a sardonic barb. Riiiight?
The moral rot is evident. :shade:
[quote=Elie Wiesel]I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.[/quote]
(Emphasis is mine.)
I thank you and admire you for that.
Quoting Baden
Doing my best to break through on this thread. "Civilians. They're what's for dinner," didn't even get a mention.
Wiesel was an ardent Zionist throughout his entire life. Nice try, though. :wink:
Eli Wiesel hated Hamas with a passion and always believed in Israel's right to defend itself. Whose side do you think Wiesel would be on today if he were alive?
What did he think about the treatment of the Palestinians?
He blamed Hamas for using children as "human shields." He called Hamas a "death cult."
Now given this information.... what should we conclude about his position? :chin: :chin: :chin:
The proportionality limitation is imposed in a retributionist model, where we want to limit the punishment to fit the crime. That doesn't apply in deterrence based model, where the concept of punishment itself is irrelevant. If the goal is to deter future attacks, the limit on the response would be set at doing the least harm to achieve that result. Unfortunately, the current response, as aggressive as it is, seems to still be insufficient.
That is to say, we limit our attacks upon our enemies only when they stop attacking us. This is especially the case when we are pure, just, and righteous in all other regards and our enemy is the opposite. It is obvious both sides assume themselves righteous here and it is not part of either side's calculus to limit their attack to the degree they might be second guessing the morality of their own position.
This is a specific response to your wondering why some find proportionality irrelevant in this context. It's because it is. It's also not bizarre. What is morally repugnant to you is the unrestrained Israeli response in light of what you see as a morally bankrupt Israeli apartheid state, but it shouldn't appear at all bizarre if you assume the Israelis reject your assessment and believe their right to exist in the form in which they do is just as legitimate as any other nation.
Hamas is just a section of the Palestinian population, so he could hate Hamas and regret Israel's attacks on the rest of the P's.
Hamas is the ruling party in Gaza. That's where the conflict is. Wiesel always supported Israel's to defend itself so unless you can dig up quotes of his that are critical to Israel your position doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Sure, it's technically possible but it's extremely unlikely in view of his previous statements.
That does not warrant you to equate Hamas with Palestinians. You know that.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
I was just asking if he objected to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
Israel is recognized by the UN. There's no need to be defensive about its existence or worried about its future. It's not going anywhere.
What makes a country legitimate?
Exactly as expected.
That was not my intended meaning and I'm sorry if it came across that way. Sometimes in conflict people refer to the opposing military forces just via their nationality (e.g. "the Japanese invaded Manchuria") and they don't mean the Japanese people. I'm doing something similar when I say "the Palestinians."
Quoting frank
I've never heard of him doing this.
Quoting frank
I'm not really worried about Israel being destroyed anytime soon.
"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the deadly bombing of the Gaza Strip would continue despite an international outcry and efforts to broker a ceasefire.
In a televised address on Sunday, Netanyahu said the Israeli air raids were continuing at “full-force” and would “take time”, adding that his country “wants to levy a heavy price” from Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Israeli air raids on Gaza City flattened three buildings and killed at least 42 people early on Sunday, health authorities in Gaza said."
It plays to the hardliners in the government, which is most of them, Hamas is a gift to them, because they have a "target" to go after. Yet this target is never defeated. But then they continue to bomb them. If Gaza did not have Hamas, Israel would have to make up a new enemy.
World opinion have been moving against Israel for about 10 years or so. An although world opinion is with Palestine, states are not. And if states don't get involved, the massacre will continue. Hamas knows this, but they also wanted to let the people in the West Bank know that they're in the occupation together.
But no, I doubt Hamas has world opinion in mind. They're also going through Covid, and the hospitals in Gaza are on the brink, they can't do more.
"World opinion" is so vague that it hardly matters.
They do get assistance and funding from the outside and although this conflict likely increases the assistance, naturally the expenses are spiralling in such a conflict too.
Yet Hamas isn't funded by Iran anymore, I think.
Say they were. What then? Does this say anything about Israeli war crimes?
A: No.
I think that's the shortest way to policy change in the US. With a bit of luck, Republicans will split in two parties for the next election, handing victory to the Democrats. That should give enough time to cement some changes in US foreign policy with respect to Israel.
Some weapons - I believe - used to get in via Rafah, but ever since the Muslim Brotherhood was kicked out, the military regime in Egypt has been quite hostile to Gaza.
Quoting ssu
I don't know either. I believe Hezbollah may still receive support from Iran, but I doubt Hezbollah would get involved in this matter now.
Hamas might be sensitive to that but I've heard their objective here is probably more to do with elections that were supposed to take place in Gaza and West Bank. They're taking a tougher stance on Israel because they believe it will help with those elections, that Hamas will do better in those elections.
:lol:
Such a shallow understanding of reality on display here really did have me laughing. How are you not embarrassed?
What a truly disgusting remark.
Almost unbelievable, until I realized you’re the same truther imbecile from another thread.
Netanyahu, to save himself politically, deliberately provokes the Palestinians during the end of Ramadan by storming Al-Aqsa. Knowing full well there would be a reaction, when it came it was used as an excuse for terrorism. (All in the name of self defense against Hamas terrorism, of course.)
214 Palestinians killed so far, including 58 children.
10 Israelis killed, 1 child.
https://www.aljazeera.com/
Now they are reporting shortage of medication. Also speaking of a man whose house was bombed and lost all his family...
Out of a sample of 850 rockets launched by Hamas, 200 ended up over Gaza. That's 23.5%, and that figure is from a few days ago. Currently, Hamas has launched at least 3000 rockets so given that same rate that's at least 700 of Hamas' own rockets raining down on Gaza.
Come to think of it, Hamas' rockets are almost certainly more likely to kill their own people than to kill Israelis. Israel has a defense system, Palestine has none. There is zero defense from this.
Some significant % of the dead Palestinians are directly Hamas' own doing.
Yet I wonder if the Palestinians are furious with Hamas as opposed to Israel. Apparently not.
You say that no country would willingly take attacks on a civilian population and do nothing about it. That's correct. It's simply much worse in Gaza, by a lot, as you point out.
It's shooting fish in a barrel. Total massacre. Hamas is defending itself too.
But then we are back at the beginning. If Hamas doesn't shoot rockets, Israel wouldn't need to retaliate. But if Hamas doesn't defend itself, it loses all dignity.
If Israel lifts the blockade and allows Gaza some actual relief, as opposed to crumbs, I'm quite confident violence would go down significantly. You'd disagree. I think it's just common sense.
It's just brutal. So brutal.
My guess is that quite a few Israelis have created children, and that those Israelis participating in the violence taking place have done so as well, or do so in order to protect children to be created. It occurs to me that the desire for the continued existence of Israel (beyond the lives of those now alive), and the desires of the settlers to settle, are premised on the desirability of creation of children--no more children, no more Israel, shortly. Why complain if Israel, or any other nation of children-producers, disappears from the face of the world?
But then perhaps, being an antinatalist, you long for the time when there are no legs to stand on, moral or otherwise, and since you seem to maintain Arabs procreate more frequently than Israelis, believe that the elimination of Arabs will tend in the long run to make that time more likely and its advent sooner.
Some are. Do you know any Palestinians?
:chin: Ya know, when your "dignity" is only "defended" via trying to intentionally murder random "enemy" civilians -- with most of the actual damage & killing going towards one's own people and property -- it might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate your approach, but that would require introspection which is virtually non-existent among terrorists, as well as leftists to whom everything is black and white -- good guys versus bad guys, bully vs victim and those poor victims can't do wrong.
As long as Hamas is in power there can be no peace.
I would not call what is happening a conflict nor a war, it is an oppression...my heart goes out to all those who have died, this world is too cruel!
You speak of Hamas as if it existed in a vaccum, it does not.
You don't mention settler violence, which is not only savage but humiliating in the extreme and the cause of the violence. Unless you suppose that those Palestinans in the West Bank aren't deserving of any rights.
As for "self-relfection", I think I'm more than meeting you half-way.
The self-reflection barb wasn't aimed at you. I had others in mind.
I'm not even following the situation in the West Bank because the current violence is occurring in Gaza where the Israeli army hasn't had a presence since 2005.
Regardless of how Hamas was created the organization exists for the singular purpose of destroying Israel and creating an Islamic state in its place. We have no reason to doubt their sincerity on this matter.
That's easy, [MOD EDIT*]: on the same side he'd always been on his entire life: David's, and not Goliath's (who, in this case, is the apartheid, ethnic cleansing, oppressor State of Israel; Elie Wiesel's conscience would, no doubt, break his heart).
According to Norman Finkelstein ...
You're welcome!
Absolutely it's tragic really.
Yes, Wiesel would have obviously sided with Hamas. :nerd:
Since I can't believe you're actually this stupid, I'm just going to concluded that you're a propagandist with zero intellectual honesty or commitment to accurately representing thinkers.
Quit appropriating my peoples' serious thinkers for your woke bullshit. :roll:
Now that's cultural appropriation.
Well, they already have shown they are awake here.
(To give an context for this, during the 2006 war Hezbollah was firing over 200 rockets at Israel in a day.)
I haven't read any Buber, but I gleaned some of his ideas about Zionism and while they seem nice I can't help but think they're a little too idealistic. Buber highly valued consensus with the Arabs, but there would be no state of Israel if we took that seriously as the Arabs categorically refused any Jewish state in 1947-48.
In actuality under Buber's view it would seem that there would just be no state of Israel and Jews would just be under Arab rule.
I see you're more of a mystic than Buber with that crystal ball.
This is history - no crystal ball needed. Show me where I'm wrong then. Show me that the Arabs were open to a Jewish state in '48 and I will reevaluate my position.
Yes. And it is normal to expect a response if provoked.
However as other Israeli sources are saying, because of the potential Iran-US peace deal, they'd want to avoid escalating beyond what happened:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-hezbollah-has-no-interest-in-gaza-fighting-spreading-to-lebanon/
[tweet]https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1394385978878476290[/tweet]
Some gold medal Olympic Gymnastics right here
I have raised this issue before but this conflict illustrates the problem with notions like "countries" and "ownership" Countries tend to be formed by force not reason. Europe has centuries of wars and shifting boundaries and massive colonisation.
With the relative peace and security in Europe after 2 world wars you can be complacent of your own moral superiority whilst facing none of the same challenges.
Well, well. I may have cited too soon:
The Israeli army said that a siren had sounded in northern Israel, near the border with Lebanon, and that they were investigating.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-bombs-home-of-hamas-chief-after-heavy-rocket-barrages-target-tel-aviv-1.9812903
Man, this better not get in the way of the Iran negotiations. That would be to add disaster on top of massacre. A miniscule glimpse of good news would be most welcome...
There's a lot to say about Democrats.
There's nothing to say about Republicans....
Why,’ you say, ‘shouldn’t they have chosen violence as a means of attracting attention to their existence and their dreams of obtaining a national identity?’” [Wiesel in The New York Times, June 23, 1988].
Wiesel, “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”
While Wiesel never condemned Israel, that was as consequence of his love for the country that was unconditional and that he thought he could not judge as a Diaspora Jew. On the other hand, in his later personal memoirs he has indicated he never did enough for the Palestinian plight.
It's ironic to the point of hilarity (you know, if the topic wasn't dead children) that you criticize the notion of "countries" and "ownership" and use that same criticism to excuse the violent attempt of a country to establish complete ownership over a territory.
I said both sides are using the same tactic. The Palestinians were defeated in the early bouts of conflict when they supported the attempt to eradicate Israel/Jews in the 1940's invasion by the surrounding countries. Extremists on both sides are calling for the subjugation or eradication of the other side.
If you are not interested in the validity of the notion of countries and ownership then you may as well commit mental suicide. You are starting an argument on easily defeasible premises. That's why you ignored the bulk of my post.
Brining up dead children in a rational debate is just a facile appeal to emotions.
I'm not starting an argument. I'm ending yours.
But your earlier said this:
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Why don't you tell is what your axioms are regarding countries, the morality of warfare etc.
Let me know if I'm misinterpreting Buber here, but AFAIK he really valued consensus but there was no way Israel as a Jewish state would ever come to exist if we relied on consensus from the Arabs. As far as I can tell, there would be no Jewish state if we demanded on meeting Buber's standards. It seems to me like had we followed Buber's consensus, Jews would remain in the minority in this theoretical binational state (because that's what the Arab consensus would be) and therefore the Jews would relinquish all bargaining power. When one cedes control they are no longer in a position to implement their vision, do you agree?
Especially in '47 the Arabs were not looking to make peace or compromise; they wanted the Jews gone. Tensions had already been rising for decades. Buber's ideas seem nice to me, I just don't know how we would have ever implemented them given the political realities of the day. The environment back then was very politically charged with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem a former ally of Hitler's and a vicious anti-Semite.
Quoting Benkei
Yeah, even ardent Zionists aren't actually anti-Palestinian... maybe there are a few but I would just call those people evil. The struggle has always been between those who wish Israel harm and those who wish to protect it. Wiesel was unequivocal in his condemnation of Hamas and had he been alive today there's no doubt where he would stand on today's conflict.
Quoting 180 Proof
You lean so heavily on this oppressor v. victim framing that it's led you to be oblivious to day-to-day realities. This is characteristic of philosophy and philosophers by the way - all theory, no fact.
Here are some facts: Israel has had no troops or settlements in Gaza since 2005. It's entirely self-governed except for the borders, with virtually all internal affairs dictated by Hamas. When humanitarian funds intended for the Palestinian people are embezzled by Hamas to build tunnels and buy weapons & Palestinians starve, that's not Israel's fault. When Hamas throws gay men off of rooftops because homosexuality violates the will of Allah, that's not the Zionists. If you are a sexual minority in Palestine, Hamas is 1000% the real enemy. If you are a reporter looking to free press, Hamas will arrest you. When Hamas makes a deliberate cultural effort to indoctrinate their children from an early age to hate the Zionist enemy and glorifies martyrdom & death, that is again not the Zionists. Peace is impossible with Hamas in power. Why won't you see Hamas as the true enemy of the Palestinian people? Hamas maintains a stranglehold on its population and kills more of them with its own rockets than it does the enemy.
Get a grip of the political and historical realities of the region before throwing this empty theory at me. Hamas could murder 50% of the Palestinian population and Israel would still be the enemy to you.
I don't think countries exist outside human fiction. There are continuous land masses inhabited by humans with arbitrary borders. No other species has a notion like countries and they just jostle for territory (survival of the fittest). War is an extended form of the competition found among animals. (Were you unware of the thousands of wars in human history including the over a hundred years war between Britain and France. What about the occupation of the UK by various groups including the Romans, Vikings and Normans.)
I live where I live through luck of birth not because I deserve to live here or have a birth right . I don't own my property. I have to pay rent to someone else. Many unfortunate people are homeless and orphans around the world.
Human rights are also a human fiction based on peoples desires not anything innate or biologically defended.
I don't live in a fictional world were I reify human fictions as concrete entities. I am neither nationalist or patriot.
I believe in stewardship and cooperation more than ownership. But nevertheless if we were to Claim "A" owned "B" what rights is that supposed to give them? If you own Buckingham palace should you be allowed to destroy it. If you own a forest should you be able to burn it down? If you claim to own part of the middle east should you be overpopulate it and stretch the limited resources and make you children live in need....NO
I think the the Jews are the only race left on earth that deserves to survive after the attempt to eradicate them and the thousands of years of persecution, displacement and the 6 million holocaust deaths.
I still don't think they should have children.
But Also I only blame parents for the suffering of children because procreation is the only way suffering can happen. I am not happy. I suffer everyday and have like everyone else an inevitable death sentence. No one who has children truly cares about children accept in maybe a delusional hypocritical way with cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization..
The concern about Palestinian children is highly selective and not matched by concern for the vast bulk of suffering and exploited, orphaned, molested and starving children.
I can blame someone else for my suffering but if I have a child now, for no good reason that I can't guarantee a good life that is my fault. Having a child in a war zone is like leaving a baby on a cliff edge. It's child abuse. But instead we are going to argue about the problems having children caused.
Prevention is better than cure.
If you don't think Jews should have children, then it would seem that you think only those Jews living deserve to survive, though, while others should not. Unless, that is, you maintain that because of the special suffering they've endured, they deserve to cause more suffering by having children though you think they shouldn't do so. Or, if they don't deserve to cause more suffering, that they nevertheless may be given a sort of "pass" in this regard; their wrongful creation of children being less wrongful, let's say, than the creation of children by Gentiles.
Antinatalism is a view I don't accept, obviously. Regardless, however, you seem to value the lives of Jews over those of others when you claim only they deserve to survive.
https://es.reddit.com/r/MurderedByAOC/comments/nengxp/joe_biden_doubles_down_on_israel_support_today/
Quoting gikehef947
:100: :fire: Stupid or deceitful or both.
Is that it? Is that your response to what I wrote? God, why did I waste my time with you? Well, I've learned now. Later.
I gave my reasons for this.
Do you think you can overlook the killing of 6 million people. Obviously it is relevant to the situation in the Middle as part of history. The expulsion of Jews from Israel by the Romans, the ensuing diaspora the crusades, pogroms and so on. Where did the Jews originate from and the Hebrew Language. The Jews are mentioned in the Quran.
If people killed 6 million of my relatives I wouldn't give a fig what people thought of my actions. Consider the genocide, colonialization and warring history of the rest of the world they haven't a moral authority to give or a moral leg to stand on
In this specific context I was talking about people having 8 children (or even 14) (like the case I cited earlier) and blaming the Jews or Israel for their problems. I can cite evidence that people In Gaza have deliberately had large families to outnumber the Jews. They are not having children to reduce their suffering or for the survival of an ethnicity they have simply overpopulated a finite space (like the rest of humanity is doing). You can criticise one sides actions and criticise the other sides.
But Like I say even if you think someone own a piece of land (something I think is metaphysically impossible) that doesn't mean you can do what you like on it such as overpopulate it increasing children's hardship.
Honestly baffling how people like this can possibly function day-to-day in real life.
That genocide is in your imagination. This is a conflict over territory and it is one of the least lethal conflicts in history.
It is a genocide to you because you don't want Jews living in Israel but that is your genocidal opinion.#
And no doubt you forgot the exodus of 850,000 Ethnic Jews from Arab countries at the same time as the Exodus of Palestinian Arabs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_Arab_and_Muslim_countries
Was that a genocide in your book?
What is the excuse for indiscriminately firing thousand of rockets into Israel. They would have caused mass casualties if Israel didn't have bunkers and the Iron Dome shield. That isn't an attempted genocide in your books?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
For the third time in this thread:
— Raphael Lemkin
A description which is indistinguishable from Israeli crimes against humanity currently perpetrated on the Palestinian population.
In what sense have Palestinian Arabs died out? Their population has went from in the hundred thousands in the mid 19th century to 7 million plus.
It is land dispute. There was no independent self governing country called Palestine in history. It was part of the Ottoman empire and other Empires, with a diverse population. The Palestinian Arabs rejected the initial two state solution and some of them actively supported the invading countries which tried to wipe out the Jewish presence, which is a true genocide. People have lost land in wars all the time throughout History.
When The Arabs either fled or where expelled into neighbouring countries during a mutual war the countries they went to would not assimilate them into these countries and have persecuted them, denied them equal rights and kept them with a refugee status with the 8500, 000 Jews that were expelled or fled from Arab countries and Iran were assimilated into Israel with equal rights.
If you lie about History then you can make anything anyway you like.
Anyhow I have been asking people here to legitimize the existence of their own country and no one has done so. You probably aren't in a fight for survival because like me in the UK you have a national army, police force, nuclear weapons and etc to enforce any citizenship an property claims you make. But this is not the justified and rational creation of country but the reliance of force to keep up a fictional national narrative which really beneath the veneer is an exploitative survival of the fittest.
You are starting your claims on weak "evidence", disputable claims, faulty axioms, historical ignorance, bias among other things. Enjoy keeping the hate going and ensuring Israel continues it's existential battle for survival.
Hitler was a vegetarian, animal lover and had one testicle and Male so apparently now all these things are illegitimate.
Stating the Middle East is overpopulated is fact based on limited resources. Stating People in Gaza have had large families to outnumber the Israeli's is a fact. Blaming Israel for a Palestinian having 14 children whilst living in a cave has got nothing to do with eugenics. It is about apportioning of responsibility which I have stated clearly and extensively here. So now you are throwing out red herrings and ad hominin?
You apparently think all the problems in the region are only caused by the Jews. I'll have some Antisemitism with my cornflakes please.
OK fascist.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
A 'dispute' in which one power is subjecting an entire population to destitution so as to steal their land and destroy their means of living at all points.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No, I think the problems of Palestinians being genocided are being caused by the Israeli state which is doing the genocide.
I wonder what counts as a "plan" here. Do they mean formal documentation like the Nazis at the Wannsee conference? In what sense do the Israelis have this plan?
I am an antinatalist and I condemn anyone for having children.
I think you are harming the Palestinian cause if you are going to claim having large families during this conflict does not add to the suffering.
What is your actual argument apart from the fascist ad hominem? (I grew up in a family of six. neither of my parents should have had children based on their mental state and they were both very religious) I know what is like for parents to cause unnecessary suffering and have unnecessary children because of their crazy beliefs.
You apparently cannot differentiate between a land dispute and a genocide. I can't help you there. I have outlined my position in detail. Even if you think all of the area belongs to the Arabs it doesn't mean they should have 14 children each. If you cannot see how they are exacerbating the conflict and suffering then I can't help You there either.
Quoting StreetlightX
Thank you for continuing lying. There are nearly two million Arabs living in Israeli borders. How many Jews live in Palestinian territory? Which is more diverse, Israel or the Palestinian territories?. Who is this "entire population". Your position is an unexpected fantastical exaggeration and caricature. I can only think of ONE motive for it because it is out of proportion to what is happening.
Your problem may be that you think all the land belongs to the Arab/Palestinians and see any Jewish presence thereas an affront.
WHO ?actually gets to decides who owns land? It is certainly not you nor is it the UN. (see previous posts for my critique of land ownership)
I have said to him and others that both sides on the extremes can be claimed to be intent on genocide. Any Arab or Jew who wants to completely expel or kill the other is genocidal. Unfortunately that is the Stated Aim on the Hamas charter.
A genocide may happen but that will be everyone's fault. Because of the rhetoric and lack of reasoned debate.
He's just going to keep at it in a refusal to admit that the Anarchist movement is a cult and in attempt to save the political, cultural, and intellectual legacy of Johann Georg Faust from the writings of Christopher Marlowe. It is not just a land dispute, though.
What else is it?
I am only claiming the alleged genocidal acts are disputes over land ownership.
There's all kinds of complex circumstances that play into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. People say that it's just about land, religion, Western exceptionalism, Islamic extremism, Jews, Arabs, Jerusalem, or whatever else, and you can look at it in all of those ways, but it was created out of a lot of circumstances and both has and does not have the complex history that it is occasionally said to.
"In the 1870s, Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession (1882). His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist.[3] His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), had a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi[9] and Martin Luther King Jr.[10] He also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly Resurrection (1899)."
- Wikipedia
"Kropotkin was a proponent of a decentralised communist society free from central government and based on voluntary associations of self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. He wrote many books, pamphlets and articles, the most prominent being The Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories and Workshops, but also Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, his principal scientific offering. He contributed the article on anarchism to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition[14] and left unfinished a work on anarchist ethical philosophy."
- Wikipedia
As per the unfortunately appropriative and essentializing code of the informal Anarchist and libertarian Left intelligence operation, we are the Palestinians in the West Bank. I could just as soon do without the code, though.
What I am, however, trying to explain to @StreetlightX about the website is that there now is no longer a reason for me to go on as such. While I do have kind of a habit of entrying various social organizations, reorganizing them in such a manner that either improves their social ecology or renders it not a problem for me, which I learned from A Thousand Plateaus, and then just kind of taking off, seeing that I've already successfully done that, there's no reason to be concerned about my continuing to do so.
But the main issue seems to be who "owns" or "deserves" the land.
I think humans are overpopulating and slicing up the world into ever slimmer pieces without a sense of personal or collective responsibility.
I don't consider I own anything and am just lucky to have things and I believe in stewardship where you preserve things in a good condition for everyone to enjoy. Aggressive national land rights and resource right claims are just over exploitation.
But As I have said I think this conflict is a microcosm or microscope on the problem of resolving land disputes. It is a personal preference whether you think one side has more rights than the others.
I live in an area with a lot of homeless people. Life isn't fair.
Perhaps in Israel or Palestine, but we Libertarian Communists, Anarcho-Communists, Anarcho-Pacifists, and Environmentalist Anarchists, and "lifestyle anarchists", though we weren't all Pacifists, and I, at least, even liked Communization, were just simply so inclined to believe that the word should travel well, which we took mean peacefully. It was a set of fairly recently established political factions within the Anarchist movement and libertarian Left who took issue with this and saw to it that we were isolated from the movement. Such praxis belongs only to me now, but it was generally thought to be agreeable among more or less the entire community, particularly that which does have a historical lineage, and only became a point of contention when the barbarism began at home.
It's not really a preference in Israel or Palestine, though. For all intensive purposes, the Palestinians were the indigenous population there. There is much to say of the motivation for the creation of Israel, but you can't really cite a time before the common era so as to make the claim that this or that population was somehow already there.
I have stated repeatedly here that I think property is illegitimate and that we are subject to survival of the fittest. I am taking issue with Israel being a pariah state whose existence is less legitimate than anywhere else.
If you don't believe in the legitimacy of ownerships, countries, law and human rights (for good reason) then you see any claim as being equally invalid and no one with a reason for moral superiority.
I am not saying this is you but why do most hippies live in liberal democracies where they don't face existential threats. I am aware my "freedoms" are being defended by the capitalist, exploitative, militarized structure I live in and not by esoteric ideologies.
I am in agreement with that Israel is just kind of like any other Western nation. I have a lot to say about it, but also already have in this thread.
There aren't too many good reasons not to believe in human rights, though. The only thing that you can say about them is that they're ineffective.
What we call "barbarism", and, because of its colonial connotations, we don't often do so, are any number of Machiavellian, in the pejorative sense of the term, political schemes that people, in every set and subset of the political spectrum, out of a kind of cynical pathology concerning human nature or history, occasionally attempt to set into motion. For the Central Intelligence Agency, it was justified by Ethical Egoism and Game Theory. It's difficult to say what convinces anyone else of such things. They become convinced nonetheless.
Where would they come from?
We are part of nature and nature allows us to suffer and die it doesn't enforce anything moral. No animal has rights and billions die everyday.
I have stated before that I am an antinatalist. The biggest problem is creating a person (which is a death sentence) leading to them inevitably suffering. We have a right not to be forced into existence.
I have mentioned elsewhere that my older brother died after a debilitating 25 year illness. Humans rights did not prevent years of disability and suffering, Human rights do not sublimate whatever nature has in hold for you
The problem with this conflict as I said previously is the reification of human fictions and bogus claims of moral superiority and ownership validity.
The validity of Nationhood status
The validity of classing something a war crime
The validity of any moral system
The axioms on which one is condemning their enemy
The denial of ones own prejudices
The use of inflammatory language like "War crimes" and "Genocide"
Your own personal authority behind the ethical statements you make.
Your actual political spectrum and biases.
Why anyone should take YOU seriously
Why you expend energy on one particular conflict and not the vast majority of conflicts and suffering in the world.
What role your position has in fostering a peace if that is what people (allegedly) want.
Why the death of a small minority of children out of countless child deaths every day should feature in an "argument" on a philosophy forum.
Why you don't believe in the theory of the survival of the fittest.....
This has nothing to do with you, but I should like to point out that what I mean by "crypto-Fascism" is that a person is cryptically engaging within a form of Fascist praxis. It is just what it would be defined as. It means that a person is behaving like a Fascist under the guise of their doing something else. Lot's of people use this term, and not well. I am using to literally refer to what it denotes.
Anyways, I posit that natural rights exist because they are always demanded in every given situation. A person necessarily demands to be free from coercion. Generally, however, human rights are good and you should just agree to that because of that they would do good in the world were they to be substantiated. God may not have granted me my freedom of speech, but I have used it better than any other American citizen. I don't need to have a philosophical argument about the First Amendment to know that I agree with it.
My claims have nothing to do with sanctimony, which, as, as a Pacifist, I could use to my advantage, but generally prefer not to. I ascribe to a kind of situational ethics that I assume to more or less just kind of be in effect. I think that ethics stem from the other. Because there are other people in the world, the situation for ethics arises.
I am sorry for your brother, but don't think that you should use such an anecdote to promote the nihilistic cynicism that you have adopted.
I don't think that you are correct in your assessment of the conflict. It has something to do with collective delusions and forms of pride, but there is much to said of both of those things and you reduce it all too much.
I have plenty of things to explain to plenty of people, but you just aren't one of them.
You have absolutely zero respect or care for material reality. The truth on the ground. It's honestly amazing.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Huh.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Hmm.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Are you seriously not noticing any of this? That’s.... impressive. Especially the last one, the two sentences are a paragraph apart!
That is not a contradiction.
No one has rights and that includes parents. They don't have the right to have children I misphrased by saying "we have a right"
If their are rights the primary one is not to exist because some other selfish narc wants children.
I thought you were an antinatalist? Are you going to support the right of Arabs/Palestinians to have 14 children whilst living in a cave?
The lack of rights favours no one. Moral nihilism favours no one. No one can defend their position using nature. Reality is anarchist and your position may survive or it may not.
I condemn everyone for having children not Just the Palestinians and Jews. You can ignore it all you like But Palestinian Arabs are having large families for just one reason. Having children is indefensible and harmful but having them to try and win a land dispute is delusional and sadistic.
I have been evicted from a property because the landlord was a crook but I didn't fire 1,500 rockets at him. I suffered abuse my entire childhood and have not used that to justify killing anyone.
Only as it has come to be commonly understood. Anarchists today have mistaken Anarchism for generalized chaos. They've let historians in the United Kingdom make it out to be akin to the civil war between England and Normandy that occurred between 1135 and 1153. Anarchism is actually a political philosophy. The entire movement has become wholly untenable because of that people think things like you think about it, though.
This is a silly thing to say or you don't realise what this factually means. Palestinians do not control access to clean water, electricity or gas, can't get medicine, don't get enough stuff to build (wood, concrete and steel), import of foodstuffs are regulated causing inflated prices and keeping Palestinians poor, they can't travel to and from Gaza, even through the corridor to the West Bank without going through a checkpoint, they can be administratively detained for 6 months which can be indefinitely extended without being charged with anything. And I don't recall with certainty whether this concerned Gaza, but Israel created a landfill in the most arable region destroying good land and poisoning the aquifer underneath it, increasing Palestinian dependence on Israeli water. And that's just the stuff I remember at 6 in the morning. This isn't self governance, it's an atrocity.
I will read the rest of your post later.#
However.
I grew up in a religious cult and was abused my entire childhood without freedom. Nature does not provide and respect freedom a lot if not of most young animals die in infancy. Most fertilisations end in miscarriage.
I just was not as privileged as you to demand freedom as a child hence I was imprisoned in a cult and attempted suicide as a teenager. It is too late to grant me rights now. No One cares. They are trapped in their own ideological delusions. People seem to think everyone else is the same as them and does not appreciate huge ideological and personal gulfs.
Anyone supporting Islam to me is a child abuser. I grew up in a Christian cult but they are endorsing the same kind of helplessness and abuse. And apparently you can't criticize Arabic/Palestinian/Muslim child abusers misogynists and homophobes because the real problem is the Jews.
You seem kind of distressed. What I'm saying is that you necessarily don't want to be in a cult. I'm not saying that people aren't conscripted into cults. You don't choose to be in a cult. You can only want out of a cult. You may not realize that you do, but, within the full breath of your reason, you would.
In any given political scenario, given the opportunity not to look down the barrel of a gun, a person will choose to do so. That's what I'm saying. People necessarily demand to be free from coercion. That is how the natural right of the freedom from coercion exists. It's not that people aren't held a gunpoint. It's that, being capable of speaking freely, they will always say that the other party has no right to do so. That's only so to the point, but I feel like will clarify this for you.
Freedom is good, man. Believe in what's good, man.
The human body is a mortal prison.
I can't see the freedom in that? Any freedom I get will either be in an afterlife or in finding personal integrity in this life.
Part of my personal integrity is defending Israel and the Jews with my last dying breath.
Like everyone else on the thread who seems to be in a state of hysteria and indignation. Making genocide allegations and what not.
They have had billions in Aid. Where did the stockpile of 30,000 rockets come from? Nearly 2 million Palestinian Arabs live in Israel.
Here is a list of Palestinian Arab members of The Knesset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Knesset
The Absurd is the Absurd, but Camus was in favor of freedom as well. Say what you will about whatever, but I still contend that freedom is good.
I am not an expert in anarchism but survival of the fittest is controlled anarchy were viable situations survive.
I am a skeptic of evolution but we are told it is a controlled form of chaos. Things survive but with no moral claim on their successes.
The anarchy is in letting things freely emerge without the intervention of minds. Antinatalism is not anarchy however. It is akin to Eastern religion and ending the cycle of life an death.
It recognise the trap of hedonism (The hedonistic treadmill) and surviving for the sake of surviving.
I'm of the opinion that a general purpose of life should be to extend it, all of it, not just human life, indefinitely. People can get lost in that, though.
I am the only person in my family who is non religious. Freedom for the rest of my family is not abandoning there religious indoctrination. In relation to the topic of this thread notions of freedom are distorted. Apparently Palestinian Arabs do not want to be free form Hamas, Misogyny, racism, Anti-Semitism, Islamic fundamentalism etc. Their only source of lack of freedom is Israel (ie the Jews) and not their own ideology?
Have Gazan's spoken up against Hamas. Umm yes after they have fled Gaza to the safety of somewhere else. Saying Hamas's captives in the strip support them is like saying I endorsed my childhood in a cult. Because I was indoctrinated and defenceless.
I am not using it. It is a fact. Nature causes and allows massive suffering.
Here is the Reverend Dawkins
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference"
Morality is opposition to the reality of nature and moral indignation is nay but a ripple in a pond.
That's not freedom, though. That's just an unwitting form of subjugation.
If you read my posts, you will discover that I support the two-to-one state solution effectively endorsed by the people in Fatah who have put enough thought into how to facilitate an effective peace process, though they'll probably tell you different things at different times.
From a purely existential standpoint, that's a way of interpreting the Absurd. We have the capacity to produce good in the world, though. While being reasonable, why not create it?
What is freedom?
I would consider anyone who is happy, however deluded, free from suffering. Which is the only freedom we want.
Denying the responsibility of parent for children's suffering is a delusion and subjugation to a fiction. Believing in fake countries, boundaries and human rights is a subjugation. Recognising the ruthless position we are in nature is enlightenment. This "debate" focuses on unearned premises and axioms and moral authority being used to condemn the Jews. It is not based on Natural Law or naturally emerging rights. It is the smug superiority of those who gained their own comforts through years of slavery, colonialization, oppression, misogyny and war and now they si ton their sofas condemning people with out this mental protection.
Freedom is just being able to do whatever you want to, aside from not being forced to do anything at all. Everything about freedom is good. I am just promoting the reasonable cultivation of what is good.
I'm not saying that they're lacking in agency. I'm saying that they're not truly free. They're subject to whatever religious sect they're a part of.
I am an Anarcho-Pacifist. You are giving a defense of Israel and accusing me of an uncritical support of the nation-state because of that I am in favor of human rights. Human rights came about in response to the humanitarian catastrophe of the Second World War. In your topsy-turvy world, though, advocating human rights is a form of subjugation. In a way, I could see how that could be the case, but people who violate human rights kind of lose what general sympathy I have for criminals. I think that they, too, ought to have some form of restorative justice, but, that is not something for me to decide. Generally, I consider for a person's attitude towards human rights to be sort of a litmus. If they don't like them, you do kind of have to ask why. I rather like that the United Nations loosely defined self-determination and think that it could both be meaningfully invoked in both Palestine and what is oft-called "Kurdistan". That's just whatever, though.
Israel is portrayed as the center of the world and the centrifuge of the West. In a way, to me, it's just like any other Western nation-state. It's just like France or the United Kingdom. I have much to critique and only some to laud by that account. In a way, it's not, though. I've written a post to get at that, but I don't think that you'd get it. That's neither here nor there, though.
You should watch this video of Werner Herzog. I think that you'd appreciate it. As much as I agree with his sentiment, I do still support the cultivation of goodness, though. Maybe I'll find out what it is someday?
The fact of the matter is that if Israel wasn't occupying and strangling the Palestinian territorities they wouldn't need billions in aid or build rockets to get the oppressor and occupier to move off of their lands.
https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Israelis-restrictions-cost-the-Palestinian-economy-34-billion-annually-328129
https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-chokes-palestinian-trade-says-un-study/10352
https://unctad.org/topic/palestinian-people
EDIT; Just read your post history here. Since you're an uncritical and unambashed Israeli war crime apologist, this is exactly the first and last time I'm replying to you.
Palestinian Arabs living Israel (nearly 2 million) are not real Palestinian Arabs. Well done solving that psychotic conundrum in your mind.
I have not caused Any problems in the Middle East but you certainly are by your barrage of lies. Well Done.
I don't expect you to Enlighten me on How Hamas took control of Gaza . Must have been the Jews fault!
You claimed the Palestinians (just Arabs) were being kept poor or are you applying that to the Palestinians in the Knesset?
Or are you just an outright lying propagandist anti-Semite. You decide.
Delegitimizing the millions of Arabs in Israel as poor victims is not only lies, but patronising dishonest, Anti-Semitic and deranged.
You will never be able to define a war crime to me so don't bother trying.
Although I will say what is the difference between a war and a crime just a rhetoric question?
But yay firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel is a war glory
1. Palestinians have a right to self-determination as well;
2. The Arabs were opposed to any type of partition in 1948 because they believed the rule "of Palestine should revert to its inhabitants", that included Jews and Arabs at the time;
3. In accordance with Bretton-Woods, acquisition of land through warfare is illegal because aggression is illegal;
4. You cannot acquire land through defensive war, because you cannot logically defend what wasn't yours to begin with;
5. Therefore the acquisition of land beyond the 1948 partition plan is predicated on the war crime from which all war crimes stem: the act of aggression;
6. The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are therefore illegal;
7. All settlements not in accordance with the 1948 lines are therefore iilegal and should be removed;
8. The Palestinians have been more than generous several times over to agree to solutions close to the 1967 borders;
9. The reason why the Israeli haven't agreed is because the right-wing political zionism, which has been in power most of the time, especially for the last 24 years, is intent on establishing an Israel from the Jordan river to the sea;
Let me know which ones you disagree with or think need to be qualified in some sense.
My conclusions from the above:
1. The fact there is no peace, can be laid fully at the feet of the Israeli government as its even greedier than the land it already stole in 1967;
2. Israel has been in breach of international law since 1948, the same legal regime it bases its own rights on (you can't have your cake and eat it);
3. As long as right-wing political zionism is effectively in control of policy, it's a policy of de facto ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people as their presence is slowly eroded through evictions in East Jerusalem and through settler colonisation (and let's not get started on the Apartheid rule in Israel proper itself, which is another atrocity);
4. Israel therefore deserves no help or respect from the international community until such time as it enters into good faith negotiations with the people its oppressing;
5. Considering Israel's obvious bad faith approach to any form of peace, I conclude that every Israeli tragedy is of its own making and every tragedy befalling the Palestinians is wreaked upon them by the Israelis.
I cannot fathom your level of delusion.
"On 15 May 1948, the civil war transformed into a conflict between Israel and the Arab states following the Israeli Declaration of Independence the previous day. Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and expeditionary forces from Iraq entered Palestine.[15] The invading forces took control of the Arab areas and immediately attacked Israeli forces and several Jewish settlements.[16][17][18] The 10 months of fighting took place mostly on the territory of the British Mandate and in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon, interrupted by several truce periods.[19]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#Battle_for_Jerusalem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War
Nothing belongs to anyone. Feel free to defend this statement.
I think that you have failed to understand the explicit purpose of my previous ramblings, which was to make it impossible for the forum to spread misinformation about my person so as to be let to cultivate social capital from a set of clandestine Anarchist socialites. I can prove that I have done this with this tidbit of information.
"Samizdat originated from the dissident movement of the Russian intelligentsia, and most samizdat directed itself to a readership of Russian elites. While circulation of samizdat was relatively low, at around 200,000 readers on average, many of these readers possessed positions of cultural power and authority.[9] Furthermore, because of the presence of "dual consciousness" in the Soviet Union, the simultaneous censorship of information and necessity of absorbing information to know how to censor it, many government officials became readers of samizdat."
- Wikipedia]
It is now lacking in plausible deniability. The dispute that I have with these Anarchists will be put aside and I will just simply move on with my life. I'm now just trying to figure how to either leave or trail off of the forum well, but am somewhat at a loss on account of having to explain too much.
Anyways, according to Wikipedia, "a war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility. Examples of crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torturing, destroying civilian property, taking hostages, performing a perfidy, raping, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and seriously violating the principles of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity.
The concept of war crimes emerged at the turn of the twentieth century when the body of customary international law applicable to warfare between sovereign states was codified. Such codification occurred at the national level, such as with the publication of the Lieber Code in the United States, and at the international level with the adoption of the treaties during the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Moreover, trials in national courts during this period further helped clarify the law. Following the end of World War II, major developments in the law occurred. Numerous trials of Axis war criminals established the Nuremberg principles, such as the notion that war crimes constituted crimes defined by international law. Additionally, the Geneva Conventions in 1949 defined new war crimes and established that states could exercise universal jurisdiction over such crimes.[1] In the late 20th century and early 21st century, following the creation of several international courts, additional categories of war crimes applicable to armed conflicts other than those between states, such as civil wars, were defined." I think that that definition should suffice. They do seem to be entirely reprehensible, even when committed by Israelis, and, despite my, at least, feeling a need to defend myself as I have here, you will thankfully not find another person who doesn't think just that.
War, in general, is condemnable. You, I am sure, will attempt to explain that is just some sort of fact of human nature, but you, I think, have listened all too well a particular set of Jack London's readership. That is neither here nor there, though.
What you ought to do is not to attempt to engage within the propagandistic feud that you are attempting to and consider as to whether or not you have become subject to a nihilistic and cynical pathology and if you shouldn't liberate yourself from it so that you can eventually secure a better quality of life. You are doing any Jews any favors by demanding a definition of a term when you damn know what it means.
I'm also not entirely sure that I believe you. You're just so like what you could be like so as to do a certain thing, though you could be like that. I don't want to even begin with that sort of thing, though.
The plan is mostly in the pudding - which includes, but is not limited to, the codified racism of Israeli law, the widespread demolition of homes, the forced displacement of families, the destruction of olive groves, the illegal blockade of Palestinian territory, continued extrajudical killings (not to speak of maiming), hundreds of checkpoints that restrict freedom of movement, arbitrary detentions, use of torture, the continued committing of war crimes (for all to see), and lots more. You can of course, read about it yourself -from the HRW report into apartheid conditions, or else the latest Amnesty report, among others.
Israeli state terrorism is well documented, and their treatment of Palestinians like animals can be seen pretty much everywhere one cares to look.
We don't know each other. I attempted suicide a few times and survived as a young man then I partially cared for my severely ill older brother till he died for many years. My prematurely dead brother doesn't own anything. You can't own anything after you have died.
No one will own the Middle East after they die. let us not continue this cycle of suffering by fictional ideas.
Shame on people who think having 14 children is not child abuse. Having one child is indefensible let alone 14 and then to pretend to be piously outraged over someone else's alleged iniquities.
By killing two hundred out of population of Millions after having 1,500 rockets thrown at them . Is there any depth to your dishonesty? And by the Way Israel contains nearly 2 million Arabs who were also targeted by these rockets. One of them a 7 year old boy was murdered by your martyrs Hamas.
Make up your mind whether you care about the Palestinians or not.
Palestinians are not just interchangeable with any Arabs, although I can see why this kind of racist talking point is peddled by genocide deniers like you. And of course Israel contains 'Arabs', all of whom exist as 5th class citizens and treated as animals of a barely higher order than those who lands Israel unleashes their terrorism upon, day after day.
I've attempted suicide too, but I don't use it to defend war crimes. I'm saying that your posts in this thread read as counter-intelligence to discredit me. You're probably just kind of out there, though. You should figure things better out, y'know.
Palestinians Are not Arabs? What language do they speak? What research have you done into their genetics? Where did the Hebrew language come from and have you read the Quran and the Bible?
Where did the Jews originate from?#
Your lies about Arab-Israelis are predictable easily defeated and deeply anti Semitic. I can't even be bothered wasting my time on you with counter evidence. Clearly this issue enflames you more than anything else but you are not anti-Semitic? Millions children are abused, die of malnutrition, die in countless wars and neglect please direct me to a thread where you show similar "compassion" for them
Or just continue being a Jew hater phoney..
Neither have I. But you appear to be depending Hamas's war crimes and stated constitutional aim to eradicate Israel. Is the reason you didn't commit suicide because you knew you just had to defend a misogynist, homophobic, evidentially murderous terrorist organisation? That certainly was not mine.
I don't accept your bad faith and phoney psychology speak. That is symptomatic of the demise of civilised reality.
I didn't say they are not Arabs, I said they are not interchangeable with any Arabs. Although I realize your illiteracy sometimes gets in the way of reading properly.
And those whole shtick about conflating criticism of Israeli terrorism with anti-semitism is a sad joke now. It doesn't work any more, sadly for you. Israeli terrorism has been laid bare for all to see. It's time of avoiding accountability for its crimes because it and you can cry 'anti-semitism' as a reflex is over.
You have really undermined yourself there with that incredibly trite turn of phrase in such dark times. #clap emoji
What differentiates them from other Arabs? Genetics certainly doesn't in fact genetics shows that all Jews including the defamed Ashkenazi's are closely related to Arabs more than Europeans. So you are pitting closely genetically related Middle Eastern people against each other. Would you like to add a blood libel with your tea?
I think that there should be established an Israeli and Palestinian state along what people generally call the "'67 borders" and eventual state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians.
I thought you were concerned with other people other than yourself. Quelle surprise.
And what makes your opinion relevant? (Not to be rude)
The same thing that distinguishes any people belonging to a geographical area - the fact that they have lived there, and that the land which Israel is stealing from them is theirs.
I don't think you understand. If they issue another threat, it's not going to be those Lenin boys. They only have one party to come after me with. It is only the far-Right in the Mafia. You know this. We're not playing a game of chess. I am telling you that information will be given to every party whom I find for it to be relevant to if you spread misinformation about my person. You will be declared a Fascist collaborator. Those are the rules of this game. You are right. I am desperate.
Leave now.