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Chudacabra

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  1. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from 6plus1SMC in PBEM ++ Guide?   
    "Pew pew pew"
    "Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!"
  2. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Lethaface in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    The PLO did this in the mid-1990s and I don't believe that any of the sovereign countries around Israel have this in their constitution, but correct me if I'm wrong. The Palestinian Authority has been just about the only player to live up to its obligations and has been consistently willing to negotiate. It has also been systemically undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments, who backed Hamas as a means of dividing and discrediting the Palestinians. Smotrich was quite explicit about this approach in 2015: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.” Netanyahu just boasted about specifically not pursuing a two-state solution. Smotrich has also been quite explicit about his desire to formally annex at least parts of the West Bank. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nimrod-novik.html I thought this was an excellent interview with a former Shimon Peres advisor, where he quite clearly made the case that Israeli security cannot be predicated on the oppression of the Palestinians and that it is in Israel's interest to provide a viable future for the Palestinians.

    Hamas and many sitting Israeli cabinet ministers have used similar genocidal rhetoric. I don't find it to be a very difficult position to feel that neither Israelis or Palestinians in positions of power should openly consider genocide or ethnic cleansing. This is not some age old conflict between Jews and Muslims, but rather a product of a modern political project. However, it is long past due to figure out a political solution that allows Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace. Both sides have bugled negotiations (sometimes at the same time) and both sides have done terrible things, but who can possibly think that a dramatic escalation in violence will break a cycle of violence? Even Israel itself shows that while there's certainly room for improvement, there's also no reason why Israeli Jews can't live together with Arab Christians or Muslims. It's a political problem that requires a political solution. I think there are three viable options (one secular state, two federated states, or two fully sovereign states), so best get to figuring it out.
  3. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Bulletpoint in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
    This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
    Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

    Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
    But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
    Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
    If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
    I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
    What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
    Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
    In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
    There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
    The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
    Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
    They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.
  4. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Lethaface in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Would you care to list those occasions? As in, when were the Palestinians offered a sovereign state with no Israeli roads bisecting their country or control over their airspace and frontiers? It'll be really hard because it never happened.
    The Palestinian expectation of a state in the West Bank and Gaza is itself a massive compromise accepting a state on 22% of the land of historic Palestine. Would Israel accept Egyptian control over its borders? Nope!
    It's so bizarre to me, because you have an immensely powerful country occupying and settling a neighbouring region and the reaction is that the oppressed people in that region have no acceptable political position except for submission. Oppressed people will fight back. Of anyone, Jewish people should know that people really don't like being ghettoized and oppressed.
    I don't even really know what this means. Of course, some terrible things happened on October 7th. Others atrocities, such as the beheaded babies or the baby baked in an oven, are completely fictitious, just like the babies thrown out of incubators story was used to justify the first Iraq War. Meanwhile babies did actually die in incubators in the Al-Shifa hospital and no one cared. Most people killed on October 7th were likely shot, others were killed in the crossfire and others were accidentally killed by the IDF. There seems to be this fetishization of extreme violence, as if people's deaths count more if there's some element of spectacular and personal cruelty to them. I don't doubt that some people did die that way, but I also don't doubt that a far larger number of Palestinians have died in utterly unspeakable ways in the weeks that followed. 
    Look, of course, there is dehumanization and demonization on both sides, but it's absolutely absurd to simply ignore that the same thing happens on the Israeli side as well. There's literally an Israeli Telegram channel of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering and deaths. It is a political situation that breeds dehumanization of the other side.
    And the scale of violence being unleashed on Gaza is simply barbaric. It is indiscriminate collective punishment.
    If someone wants to transform the nuclear power with a massive conventional military lavishly subsidized by American taxpayers into a country that feels it is not acceptable to kill 11,000 children in pursuit of unclear military objectives, then be my guest. The First Oslo Accord was a mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine, so at least some Palestinians have recognized Israel's right to exist since the early 1990s. Hamas has signaled it would be willing to accept the 1967 borders, but since there have been no meaningful negotiations for decades, it's purely speculative if they would actually follow through. But again, the logic here is very odd: Israel will continue an illegal occupation and continue illegally building settlements until the Palestinians do what exactly?
    Israel couldn't care less about international law. It has flagrantly committed war crime after war crime in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital was just a vile display of deliberately destroying a medical facility to show off a room and a toilet. The destruction of an impoverished enclave's entire medical system is unjustifiable. The mass settlement of civilians on territory occupied by a military is also a war crime.
    Again, there's extremism on both sides that manifests itself in horrible ways, but Israel is the overwhelming power in the conflict. That's the difference. What else but vile cruelty and dehumanization of the other could justify things like Israeli soldiers shooting a disabled Palestinian man for the crime of carrying lollipops? Reports of Israeli bulldozers burying people alive at the Kamal Adwan Hospital are simply horrifying. And the list goes on and on and on. What possible military or security goal is being served here?
    Western political thinking can be extremist and people are so blinded by ideology that they can't even see it. What was the American invasion of Iraq but an extremist movement launched by fundamentalists? The Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu's government, like Smotrich and Ben-Givr, are no different than Islamic fundamentalists (the bad kind, the ones that buy lots of American and British weapons are fine).
    Literally today, Smotrich said “To have security, we must control the territory. In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” They're planning to resettle Israelis in Gaza, it's like pouring fuel on the fire.
  5. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Lethaface in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    I think there are three viable options: one secular state, two fully sovereign states, or two federated states (https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr). I think any of them would be a drastic improvement on the status quo. I think the Land for All proposal is very interesting as a compromise between one secular state and two fully sovereign states.
  6. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Lethaface in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
    This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
    Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

    Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
    But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
    Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
    If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
    I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
    What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
    Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
    In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
    There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
    The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
    Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
    They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.
  7. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Lethaface in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    There isn't really another parallel to the West Bank. Is there another region that is being actively colonized by an occupying power? Maybe Western Sahara? The US never attempted to settle its citizens en masse in the countries it invaded. What country is the West Bank part of exactly then? It's not Palestine. Israel has unilaterally adopted a one-state solution that is extremely unjust for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants. The West Bank and Gaza lack many features of a sovereign country and those aspects are unilaterally exercised by Israel. If Gaza was part of a sovereign state, the Israeli blockade of the enclave would be considered a clear act of war.
    Bezalel Smotrich has been quite open about his intention to formally annex the West Bank as well. Netanyahu has never wanted peace or a two-state solution and just boasted about being proud of obstructing that option. The considerable and continuing expansion of settlements and Israeli control of the West Bank has seriously undermined any prospect of a viable nation existing there.
    Has Hamas wanted peace? It's hard to say. They have indicated a willingness to accept the 1967 borders and expressed interest in forming a unity government with Fatah. Would they have actually followed through if they were included in negotiations? Maybe, maybe not. We'll never know. There is a tendency to cast Hamas as some sort of nihilistic, Salafist movement like ISIS, but it is a nationalist movement with clear political goals dedicated to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. 
    Fatah has largely kept up their end of the bargain and what happened? Things just got worse and worse. Violent and non-violent means didn't do a thing to improve the situation.
    I have found Tareq Baconi to be the most insightful writer on the history of Hamas:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tareq-baconi.html
    Why is the same right not afforded to Palestinians and why is there an assumption that the safety of Jewish Israelis is predicated on the oppression of Palestinians? Israel should have a vested interest in ensuring Palestinians have access to a prosperous and free future. Instead, Netanyahu's successive governments have deliberately undermined the Palestinian Authority in part by supporting Hamas to divide and delegitimize the Palestinians and effectively pursued a policy of economic de-development in Gaza and in the West Bank to a lesser extent. You have what is essentially a giant open air prison with virtually no economic opportunity and people act surprised when something bad happens (leaving aside the abundantly clear evidence that Hamas was preparing for an attack that was ignored by flagrantly incompetent intelligence officers). It was never sustainable.
    Again, Israel is a state to promote the interests of a particular ethno-religious group with many institutions of a secular democracy within its 1967 borders. I think raises two questions: is this a worthwhile trade-off when compared to a secular democracy for all its citizens within the area where it exercises sovereignty? Even if the answer is yes, to me this is a question worth asking and answering honestly. And, could its political structure be arranged in a way that maintains the character of a Jewish state within the 1967 borders and provides for a dramatically better life for the Palestinians? Here, the answer is unquestionably yes.
    Are there other countries that exercise sovereignty over neighbouring regions through permanent military occupation coupled with the mass settlement of civilians or through a blockade? That's the difference. The West Bank and Gaza are de-facto part of Israel. 82% of the West Bank is under some form of Israeli control with some limited self-governance in the other 18%. How is that not effectively part of Israel?
    What exactly was the Palestinian "war of extermination" against the Jews in 1948? They barely had any sort of organized paramilitary force and really only the Jordanians had any sort of remotely competent military among the Arab countries. The disorganized Arab armies did attempt to stop the establishment of the State of Israel, but it was not a Palestinian-led war. With British support to varying degrees, the Israelis were better equipped (still scrappy by today's standards), better led and better organized force than the Arab armies (largely belonging to newly established countries), which is why they won.
    The establishment of Israel as a Jewish state happened and it's not going to be reversed. Israel has arguably not faced an existential threat since the early 1970s, although its nuclear status would have likely protected it against any truly existential threat during the Yom Kippur War. It's a nuclear power with a massive conventional military. It will keep existing and doing whatever its current corrupt leadership wants to do in the West Bank and Gaza, but this approach never really worked except for settlers and opportunistic right-wing politicians, and it backfired spectacularly on October 7th.
    It boggles my mind that Netanyahu and Smotrich, who supported Hamas as a means of dividing and discrediting the Palestinians, are still in office and trusted to make decisions. Netanyahu is obviously prolonging the war to save his own skin, which is quite possibly the most vile display of self-interest I have ever seen.
    The difference is that the Palestinians still live on that land. They were just pushed into a tiny corner of it in Gaza and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, along with the Palestinians who live in Israel proper. Israel is obviously willing to spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars destroying Gaza, an enclave with a GDP per capita that is approximately 60 times lower than Israel. The key problem is that there has never been any meaningful negotiation on the subject and sometimes situations without precedent will require solutions without precedent. Certainly it would be a lot better if Israel had helped Palestinians become a prosperous nation. People with a viable future and a job don't tend to resort to terrorism. This to me is the fundamental problem, as Israeli politics have shifted further and further to the right, it has largely lost the ability to imagine or articulate anything beyond a worsened status quo.
    Sort of. Israel extended the right to vote to Arabs living in the pre-1967 borders in the first elections, but they were under martial law until 1966 and did not enjoy the same rights to land ownership as Israeli Jews (and still don't). Again, no contention that non-Jewish citizens of Israel within its 1967 borders do enjoy comparable rights in theory to Jewish citizens of Israel, although informal and formal forms of discrimination and segregation are widespread. My point is that Palestinians under Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza lack any such rights and live in a sort of perpetual limbo with little hope for the future. 
    It's obviously an imperfect example, but at least Canada has begun to accept that it was founded on the dispossession and attempted destruction of its First Nations. For the most part, Israel society has done no such thing and in fact goes so far to actively penalize any memorialization of the Nakba. Some supporters of Israel even claim that the Palestinians don't even exist. It's an especially strange belief when you consider that Jews under Ottoman rule for example were Palestinians, as well as being Ottomans. Nations are imagined communities, time to get to imagining them differently.
  8. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Would you care to list those occasions? As in, when were the Palestinians offered a sovereign state with no Israeli roads bisecting their country or control over their airspace and frontiers? It'll be really hard because it never happened.
    The Palestinian expectation of a state in the West Bank and Gaza is itself a massive compromise accepting a state on 22% of the land of historic Palestine. Would Israel accept Egyptian control over its borders? Nope!
    It's so bizarre to me, because you have an immensely powerful country occupying and settling a neighbouring region and the reaction is that the oppressed people in that region have no acceptable political position except for submission. Oppressed people will fight back. Of anyone, Jewish people should know that people really don't like being ghettoized and oppressed.
    I don't even really know what this means. Of course, some terrible things happened on October 7th. Others atrocities, such as the beheaded babies or the baby baked in an oven, are completely fictitious, just like the babies thrown out of incubators story was used to justify the first Iraq War. Meanwhile babies did actually die in incubators in the Al-Shifa hospital and no one cared. Most people killed on October 7th were likely shot, others were killed in the crossfire and others were accidentally killed by the IDF. There seems to be this fetishization of extreme violence, as if people's deaths count more if there's some element of spectacular and personal cruelty to them. I don't doubt that some people did die that way, but I also don't doubt that a far larger number of Palestinians have died in utterly unspeakable ways in the weeks that followed. 
    Look, of course, there is dehumanization and demonization on both sides, but it's absolutely absurd to simply ignore that the same thing happens on the Israeli side as well. There's literally an Israeli Telegram channel of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering and deaths. It is a political situation that breeds dehumanization of the other side.
    And the scale of violence being unleashed on Gaza is simply barbaric. It is indiscriminate collective punishment.
    If someone wants to transform the nuclear power with a massive conventional military lavishly subsidized by American taxpayers into a country that feels it is not acceptable to kill 11,000 children in pursuit of unclear military objectives, then be my guest. The First Oslo Accord was a mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine, so at least some Palestinians have recognized Israel's right to exist since the early 1990s. Hamas has signaled it would be willing to accept the 1967 borders, but since there have been no meaningful negotiations for decades, it's purely speculative if they would actually follow through. But again, the logic here is very odd: Israel will continue an illegal occupation and continue illegally building settlements until the Palestinians do what exactly?
    Israel couldn't care less about international law. It has flagrantly committed war crime after war crime in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital was just a vile display of deliberately destroying a medical facility to show off a room and a toilet. The destruction of an impoverished enclave's entire medical system is unjustifiable. The mass settlement of civilians on territory occupied by a military is also a war crime.
    Again, there's extremism on both sides that manifests itself in horrible ways, but Israel is the overwhelming power in the conflict. That's the difference. What else but vile cruelty and dehumanization of the other could justify things like Israeli soldiers shooting a disabled Palestinian man for the crime of carrying lollipops? Reports of Israeli bulldozers burying people alive at the Kamal Adwan Hospital are simply horrifying. And the list goes on and on and on. What possible military or security goal is being served here?
    Western political thinking can be extremist and people are so blinded by ideology that they can't even see it. What was the American invasion of Iraq but an extremist movement launched by fundamentalists? The Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu's government, like Smotrich and Ben-Givr, are no different than Islamic fundamentalists (the bad kind, the ones that buy lots of American and British weapons are fine).
    Literally today, Smotrich said “To have security, we must control the territory. In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” They're planning to resettle Israelis in Gaza, it's like pouring fuel on the fire.
  9. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from The_Capt in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
    This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
    Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

    Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
    But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
    Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
    If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
    I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
    What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
    Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
    In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
    There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
    The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
    Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
    They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.
  10. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Beleg85 in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Would you care to list those occasions? As in, when were the Palestinians offered a sovereign state with no Israeli roads bisecting their country or control over their airspace and frontiers? It'll be really hard because it never happened.
    The Palestinian expectation of a state in the West Bank and Gaza is itself a massive compromise accepting a state on 22% of the land of historic Palestine. Would Israel accept Egyptian control over its borders? Nope!
    It's so bizarre to me, because you have an immensely powerful country occupying and settling a neighbouring region and the reaction is that the oppressed people in that region have no acceptable political position except for submission. Oppressed people will fight back. Of anyone, Jewish people should know that people really don't like being ghettoized and oppressed.
    I don't even really know what this means. Of course, some terrible things happened on October 7th. Others atrocities, such as the beheaded babies or the baby baked in an oven, are completely fictitious, just like the babies thrown out of incubators story was used to justify the first Iraq War. Meanwhile babies did actually die in incubators in the Al-Shifa hospital and no one cared. Most people killed on October 7th were likely shot, others were killed in the crossfire and others were accidentally killed by the IDF. There seems to be this fetishization of extreme violence, as if people's deaths count more if there's some element of spectacular and personal cruelty to them. I don't doubt that some people did die that way, but I also don't doubt that a far larger number of Palestinians have died in utterly unspeakable ways in the weeks that followed. 
    Look, of course, there is dehumanization and demonization on both sides, but it's absolutely absurd to simply ignore that the same thing happens on the Israeli side as well. There's literally an Israeli Telegram channel of Israelis mocking Palestinian suffering and deaths. It is a political situation that breeds dehumanization of the other side.
    And the scale of violence being unleashed on Gaza is simply barbaric. It is indiscriminate collective punishment.
    If someone wants to transform the nuclear power with a massive conventional military lavishly subsidized by American taxpayers into a country that feels it is not acceptable to kill 11,000 children in pursuit of unclear military objectives, then be my guest. The First Oslo Accord was a mutual recognition of Israel and Palestine, so at least some Palestinians have recognized Israel's right to exist since the early 1990s. Hamas has signaled it would be willing to accept the 1967 borders, but since there have been no meaningful negotiations for decades, it's purely speculative if they would actually follow through. But again, the logic here is very odd: Israel will continue an illegal occupation and continue illegally building settlements until the Palestinians do what exactly?
    Israel couldn't care less about international law. It has flagrantly committed war crime after war crime in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital was just a vile display of deliberately destroying a medical facility to show off a room and a toilet. The destruction of an impoverished enclave's entire medical system is unjustifiable. The mass settlement of civilians on territory occupied by a military is also a war crime.
    Again, there's extremism on both sides that manifests itself in horrible ways, but Israel is the overwhelming power in the conflict. That's the difference. What else but vile cruelty and dehumanization of the other could justify things like Israeli soldiers shooting a disabled Palestinian man for the crime of carrying lollipops? Reports of Israeli bulldozers burying people alive at the Kamal Adwan Hospital are simply horrifying. And the list goes on and on and on. What possible military or security goal is being served here?
    Western political thinking can be extremist and people are so blinded by ideology that they can't even see it. What was the American invasion of Iraq but an extremist movement launched by fundamentalists? The Jewish fundamentalists in Netanyahu's government, like Smotrich and Ben-Givr, are no different than Islamic fundamentalists (the bad kind, the ones that buy lots of American and British weapons are fine).
    Literally today, Smotrich said “To have security, we must control the territory. In order to control the territory militarily for a long time, we need a civilian presence.” They're planning to resettle Israelis in Gaza, it's like pouring fuel on the fire.
  11. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
    This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
    Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

    Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
    But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
    Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
    If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
    I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
    What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
    Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
    In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
    There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
    The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
    Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
    They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.
  12. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Vacillator in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Why not? There are 700,000 Israeli citizens living there permanently and Palestinian controlled-areas are incredibly fragmented by Israeli military control. Smotrich has been upfront about his desire to annex the West Bank. Again, 82% of the West Bank is under Israeli civil or military control. It's effectively permanent occupation.
    This is remarkably similar to the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa. They are areas with limited self-governance and few features of a nation-state beyond that. Control over borders and external affairs is a basic marker of a sovereign nation-state.
    Netanyahu's entire career has been predicated on the basis that security could be maintained without a political solution. Plainly, this backfired spectacularly. The problem for the Palestinians is nothing has worked. Violence didn't work, non-violence didn't work, diplomacy didn't work. For many, there is no acceptable political position for the Palestinians to hold except for submission. This is why slogans like "Free Palestine" are interpreted as threats. No one felt the same way about "Free South Africa" unless they supported apartheid. Equally, the Likud Party and Benjamin Netanyahu's son can use the phrase "From the River to the Sea" without any sanction while Israel also exercises sovereignty from the river to the sea, but no way can a Palestinian say such thing.

    Look at the Palestinian Authority for example. It recognizes Israel's right to exist, rejects armed struggle and largely cooperates with the Israelis. And the situation just gets worse and worse in virtually every respect and they are actively undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments.
    But the inverse is untrue? Palestinians are supposed to sit quietly and take any violence directed against them without reacting? The violence directed towards Gaza is wildly disproportionate. At last count, 316 children in Gaza have been killed for every child killed on October 7th. I've never seen anything like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population trapped in a tiny enclave with no clear military goals, not to mention no intention of getting the Israeli hostages back alive.
    Where are Israel's borders then? It controls the external borders of both the West Bank and Gaza. What other secular democracy controls neighbouring lands through military governance or blockade, settles its own citizens there (it is a war crime to settle civilian populations in areas under military occupation), controls nearly the entirety of their external affairs and subjects them to constant and demeaning military checkpoints and control over their movement?
    If Israel was just a secular democracy for everyone living within its borders, then the West Bank and Gaza would be part of it and the people who live there would be citizens instead of subjects under Israeli sovereignty. It is a one-state solution that happens to be quite miserable for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants.
    I'd be pretty pissed too if someone stole my land and pushed me off it, but what evidence is there that he Palestinians were particularly violent towards Israel in the 1950s for instance? There may have been some armed groups, but the PLO isn't founded until 1964. There are no meaningful attacks on Israel during this time. Why isn't Israel depicted and antagonistic and violent when it joined France and Britain to attack the nationalist government of Egypt in 1956 following the nationalization of the Suez Canal (a perfectly reasonable thing to belong to the people of Egypt)? 
    What state in Gaza? What state has its borders entirely controlled by another country? How do you have a successful state in that context? Gaza was not an attempt at statehood. Israel essentially just thought they could wall off the enclave in perpetuity and nothing bad would happen. 
    Did they? Are you confusing the pre-Israel Palestinian Muslim majority with Europeans? What pogroms were there in Ottoman Palestine? There's a reason why Zionism is initially a European movement, namely European anti-Semitism. Again, this is not to say there was no discrimination or violence against Jews in the Arab world or the Ottoman Empire (Jews both sought refuge in the Muslim world and were expelled from other parts of it depending on the time and place), but from all accounts Palestine was a religiously tolerant part of the Ottoman Empire.
    Palestinians opposed the Zionist movement because it aimed to create a state at their expense and pushed most of them off the land where they had lived for centuries, often with Jewish and Christian neighbours. During the Arab Revolt of the late 1930s, about 500 Jews were killed in Palestine with about ten times the number of Palestinian Arabs being killed. Both Palestinians and Jews conducted massacres of civilians, but there is no attempted genocide of any sort on either side. The British were by far the most violent force in Palestine at the time. Israel is ethnically cleansed of the majority of its Arab population, but again, there is no intention to kill them all.
    In the current context, the Christian minority in the West Bank and Gaza is also accepted as an integral part of Palestinian society. The only people persecuting Christians are the IDF, such as when they killed an elderly woman and her daughter when they were trying to use the toilet and shot seven more people sheltering in a Gazan Church on December 16.
    There's this bizarre sense that the Palestinians are inherently anti-Semitic and care about nothing else, so that if the country subjecting them to military occupation or blockade was Christian or Muslim, they would be content to just continue being oppressed. Would they cheer if Christians bulldozed their olive groves and destroyed their communities? Of course not. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto didn't hate and resist the Germans because they were German, it was because the Germans were trying to kill them all.
    The King of Jordan was assassinated in 1951, decades before most Palestinians were even born. No one ascribes collective responsibility to the Israelis for someone like Baruch Goldstein. The Palestinians I have met are just like anyone else I've met. They're just normal people who want to live a normal life. Why not associate the Palestinians with someone like Edward Said, one of the finest literary critics and essayists of the 20th century? Usually because one person doesn't adequately represent millions of people.
    Both Palestinians and Israelis have committed horrible acts, but the overwhelming balance of power tilts in Israel's favour. It's a bizarre logic at play for the Palestinians, unless you meet some unspecified expectations, we'll keep occupying you and expanding settlements on your land. But even if you do hold up your end of the bargain, the same thing will happen anyways! 
    They did? There are 2.1 million Palestinians in Jordan as one example. The Palestinians have enjoyed varying levels of support from Arab countries, and sometimes have simply been ignored, exploited for political gain, or forgotten. While some groups of Palestinians, namely the PLO, have been expelled from Arab countries, there's been no wholesale expulsion of them as being some sort of inherently violent barbarians. Again, they're normal people who want to live normal lives with the understandable desire to have a sovereign state instead of a permanent occupation.
  13. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Bulletpoint in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    All media has always been biased. There's nothing wrong with a particular point of view informing journalism as long as you're not pretending otherwise. Much better to be upfront about it and take biases into consideration instead of pretending to be "Fair and Balanced."
  14. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Bulletpoint in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnostate with some democratic institutions within its 1967 borders, but it lacks equality of citizenship, which is a basic tenet of democracy. Judicial oversight of the legislature was also greatly weakened recently, although I suspect that will be reversed once Netanyahu is ejected from office. Palestinians citizens of Israel do enjoy far more political rights than Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.

    But Israel has adopted a one state solution for the lands of historic Palestine. Israel exercises full sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in three very distinct ways. There is 1967 Israel, which is perhaps best described as an illiberal democracy. There is the West Bank where Palestinian control has been reduced to about 18% of the territory and is heavily bisected by Israeli settlements and areas under full Israeli military control. This is similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. What kind of democracy has roads only for certain ethnicities or subjects some citizens to military justice and others to civil justice? 

    Then there is Gaza, which is besieged by Israel aided by Egypt. While it was not actively occupied or colonized , it is effectively part of Israel as Israel has full control over its external affairs and borders. It has now been subject to one of the most intense bombardment campaigns in history, which is framed as a war, but is really a counter-insurgency against a domestic force.
    Ultimately, Israel will need to reckon with its foundation as a colonial project that emerged in the 1890s largely as a response to European anti-Semitism and that was established at the expense of Palestinian Arabs of Muslim and Christian backgrounds with somewhat mixed support from Palestinian Jews. It is imperfect as an example, but the reconciliation process in Canada is at least an acknowledgement of past harms towards indigenous people and could serve as a model. What if instead of spending billions upon billions to destroy Gaza, that money and resources were distributed as compensation in lieu of a right to return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948? An imperfect option, but an imperfect compromise to address past harms is a far better solution than a worsening status quo.

    I feel like people often get distracted with inane discussions of whether Israel has a right to exist. Israel will continue to exist unless it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. It is a nuclear power with a lavishly equipped conventional military that has an absolutely overwhelming amount of power in the region. As it has shown in Gaza, it can do more or less whatever it wants. The real question is what will happen to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? Any political solution would be better than the status quo, be it one secular state for all its citizens, two federated states (something like the A Land For All proposal - https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr) or two separate, fully sovereign states. If there is one lesson to be learned from October 7th, it is that the safety of Jewish Israelis cannot be predicated on the continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. There are lots of examples of multi-religious or multi-ethnic states or of neighbouring states of different religions or ethnicities living beside each other, often for the better. There is no inherent reason why this place should be any different.
  15. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Bulletpoint in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Call me crazy, but I usually blame the party committing flagrant war crimes (like ransacking hospitals on the basis of transparent lies, murdering women sheltering in a church, shooting a man with a developmental disability for the crime of carrying lollipops, killing their own hostages who they thought were civilians, assassinating journalists on a mass scale, permanently settling civilians in occupied territory, and so on and so on...). I find it very strange that supporting Israel seems to translate to supporting a very particular course of action designed for maximum cruelty and collective punishment. Israel's political and military establishment has been incapable of articulating a clear or achievable goal, and also has no long-term plans for a peaceful future. 

    https://www.972mag.com/israel-political-weakness-military-hamas/

    I thought this was a great piece highlighting that despite Israel's military might, it is politically weak and immensely unimaginative. Netanyahu's successive governments have proved incapable of articulating anything beyond a worsening of the status quo, not to mention their strategy of supporting Hamas as a means to divide and discredit the Palestinians backfired spectacularly. October 7th was a classic case of blowback, where actions taken to weaken your enemy end up coming back to bite you in horrible ways.
  16. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    There isn't really another parallel to the West Bank. Is there another region that is being actively colonized by an occupying power? Maybe Western Sahara? The US never attempted to settle its citizens en masse in the countries it invaded. What country is the West Bank part of exactly then? It's not Palestine. Israel has unilaterally adopted a one-state solution that is extremely unjust for about 5.5 million of its inhabitants. The West Bank and Gaza lack many features of a sovereign country and those aspects are unilaterally exercised by Israel. If Gaza was part of a sovereign state, the Israeli blockade of the enclave would be considered a clear act of war.
    Bezalel Smotrich has been quite open about his intention to formally annex the West Bank as well. Netanyahu has never wanted peace or a two-state solution and just boasted about being proud of obstructing that option. The considerable and continuing expansion of settlements and Israeli control of the West Bank has seriously undermined any prospect of a viable nation existing there.
    Has Hamas wanted peace? It's hard to say. They have indicated a willingness to accept the 1967 borders and expressed interest in forming a unity government with Fatah. Would they have actually followed through if they were included in negotiations? Maybe, maybe not. We'll never know. There is a tendency to cast Hamas as some sort of nihilistic, Salafist movement like ISIS, but it is a nationalist movement with clear political goals dedicated to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. 
    Fatah has largely kept up their end of the bargain and what happened? Things just got worse and worse. Violent and non-violent means didn't do a thing to improve the situation.
    I have found Tareq Baconi to be the most insightful writer on the history of Hamas:  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-tareq-baconi.html
    Why is the same right not afforded to Palestinians and why is there an assumption that the safety of Jewish Israelis is predicated on the oppression of Palestinians? Israel should have a vested interest in ensuring Palestinians have access to a prosperous and free future. Instead, Netanyahu's successive governments have deliberately undermined the Palestinian Authority in part by supporting Hamas to divide and delegitimize the Palestinians and effectively pursued a policy of economic de-development in Gaza and in the West Bank to a lesser extent. You have what is essentially a giant open air prison with virtually no economic opportunity and people act surprised when something bad happens (leaving aside the abundantly clear evidence that Hamas was preparing for an attack that was ignored by flagrantly incompetent intelligence officers). It was never sustainable.
    Again, Israel is a state to promote the interests of a particular ethno-religious group with many institutions of a secular democracy within its 1967 borders. I think raises two questions: is this a worthwhile trade-off when compared to a secular democracy for all its citizens within the area where it exercises sovereignty? Even if the answer is yes, to me this is a question worth asking and answering honestly. And, could its political structure be arranged in a way that maintains the character of a Jewish state within the 1967 borders and provides for a dramatically better life for the Palestinians? Here, the answer is unquestionably yes.
    Are there other countries that exercise sovereignty over neighbouring regions through permanent military occupation coupled with the mass settlement of civilians or through a blockade? That's the difference. The West Bank and Gaza are de-facto part of Israel. 82% of the West Bank is under some form of Israeli control with some limited self-governance in the other 18%. How is that not effectively part of Israel?
    What exactly was the Palestinian "war of extermination" against the Jews in 1948? They barely had any sort of organized paramilitary force and really only the Jordanians had any sort of remotely competent military among the Arab countries. The disorganized Arab armies did attempt to stop the establishment of the State of Israel, but it was not a Palestinian-led war. With British support to varying degrees, the Israelis were better equipped (still scrappy by today's standards), better led and better organized force than the Arab armies (largely belonging to newly established countries), which is why they won.
    The establishment of Israel as a Jewish state happened and it's not going to be reversed. Israel has arguably not faced an existential threat since the early 1970s, although its nuclear status would have likely protected it against any truly existential threat during the Yom Kippur War. It's a nuclear power with a massive conventional military. It will keep existing and doing whatever its current corrupt leadership wants to do in the West Bank and Gaza, but this approach never really worked except for settlers and opportunistic right-wing politicians, and it backfired spectacularly on October 7th.
    It boggles my mind that Netanyahu and Smotrich, who supported Hamas as a means of dividing and discrediting the Palestinians, are still in office and trusted to make decisions. Netanyahu is obviously prolonging the war to save his own skin, which is quite possibly the most vile display of self-interest I have ever seen.
    The difference is that the Palestinians still live on that land. They were just pushed into a tiny corner of it in Gaza and to a lesser extent in the West Bank, along with the Palestinians who live in Israel proper. Israel is obviously willing to spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars destroying Gaza, an enclave with a GDP per capita that is approximately 60 times lower than Israel. The key problem is that there has never been any meaningful negotiation on the subject and sometimes situations without precedent will require solutions without precedent. Certainly it would be a lot better if Israel had helped Palestinians become a prosperous nation. People with a viable future and a job don't tend to resort to terrorism. This to me is the fundamental problem, as Israeli politics have shifted further and further to the right, it has largely lost the ability to imagine or articulate anything beyond a worsened status quo.
    Sort of. Israel extended the right to vote to Arabs living in the pre-1967 borders in the first elections, but they were under martial law until 1966 and did not enjoy the same rights to land ownership as Israeli Jews (and still don't). Again, no contention that non-Jewish citizens of Israel within its 1967 borders do enjoy comparable rights in theory to Jewish citizens of Israel, although informal and formal forms of discrimination and segregation are widespread. My point is that Palestinians under Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza lack any such rights and live in a sort of perpetual limbo with little hope for the future. 
    It's obviously an imperfect example, but at least Canada has begun to accept that it was founded on the dispossession and attempted destruction of its First Nations. For the most part, Israel society has done no such thing and in fact goes so far to actively penalize any memorialization of the Nakba. Some supporters of Israel even claim that the Palestinians don't even exist. It's an especially strange belief when you consider that Jews under Ottoman rule for example were Palestinians, as well as being Ottomans. Nations are imagined communities, time to get to imagining them differently.
  17. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    All media has always been biased. There's nothing wrong with a particular point of view informing journalism as long as you're not pretending otherwise. Much better to be upfront about it and take biases into consideration instead of pretending to be "Fair and Balanced."
  18. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Probus in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    All media has always been biased. There's nothing wrong with a particular point of view informing journalism as long as you're not pretending otherwise. Much better to be upfront about it and take biases into consideration instead of pretending to be "Fair and Balanced."
  19. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    The PLO did this in the mid-1990s and I don't believe that any of the sovereign countries around Israel have this in their constitution, but correct me if I'm wrong. The Palestinian Authority has been just about the only player to live up to its obligations and has been consistently willing to negotiate. It has also been systemically undermined by Netanyahu's successive governments, who backed Hamas as a means of dividing and discrediting the Palestinians. Smotrich was quite explicit about this approach in 2015: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset. It’s a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it, no one will give it status at the [International Criminal Court], no one will let it put forth a resolution at the U.N. Security Council.” Netanyahu just boasted about specifically not pursuing a two-state solution. Smotrich has also been quite explicit about his desire to formally annex at least parts of the West Bank. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-nimrod-novik.html I thought this was an excellent interview with a former Shimon Peres advisor, where he quite clearly made the case that Israeli security cannot be predicated on the oppression of the Palestinians and that it is in Israel's interest to provide a viable future for the Palestinians.

    Hamas and many sitting Israeli cabinet ministers have used similar genocidal rhetoric. I don't find it to be a very difficult position to feel that neither Israelis or Palestinians in positions of power should openly consider genocide or ethnic cleansing. This is not some age old conflict between Jews and Muslims, but rather a product of a modern political project. However, it is long past due to figure out a political solution that allows Palestinians and Israelis to live together in peace. Both sides have bugled negotiations (sometimes at the same time) and both sides have done terrible things, but who can possibly think that a dramatic escalation in violence will break a cycle of violence? Even Israel itself shows that while there's certainly room for improvement, there's also no reason why Israeli Jews can't live together with Arab Christians or Muslims. It's a political problem that requires a political solution. I think there are three viable options (one secular state, two federated states, or two fully sovereign states), so best get to figuring it out.
  20. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnostate with some democratic institutions within its 1967 borders, but it lacks equality of citizenship, which is a basic tenet of democracy. Judicial oversight of the legislature was also greatly weakened recently, although I suspect that will be reversed once Netanyahu is ejected from office. Palestinians citizens of Israel do enjoy far more political rights than Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.

    But Israel has adopted a one state solution for the lands of historic Palestine. Israel exercises full sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in three very distinct ways. There is 1967 Israel, which is perhaps best described as an illiberal democracy. There is the West Bank where Palestinian control has been reduced to about 18% of the territory and is heavily bisected by Israeli settlements and areas under full Israeli military control. This is similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. What kind of democracy has roads only for certain ethnicities or subjects some citizens to military justice and others to civil justice? 

    Then there is Gaza, which is besieged by Israel aided by Egypt. While it was not actively occupied or colonized , it is effectively part of Israel as Israel has full control over its external affairs and borders. It has now been subject to one of the most intense bombardment campaigns in history, which is framed as a war, but is really a counter-insurgency against a domestic force.
    Ultimately, Israel will need to reckon with its foundation as a colonial project that emerged in the 1890s largely as a response to European anti-Semitism and that was established at the expense of Palestinian Arabs of Muslim and Christian backgrounds with somewhat mixed support from Palestinian Jews. It is imperfect as an example, but the reconciliation process in Canada is at least an acknowledgement of past harms towards indigenous people and could serve as a model. What if instead of spending billions upon billions to destroy Gaza, that money and resources were distributed as compensation in lieu of a right to return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948? An imperfect option, but an imperfect compromise to address past harms is a far better solution than a worsening status quo.

    I feel like people often get distracted with inane discussions of whether Israel has a right to exist. Israel will continue to exist unless it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. It is a nuclear power with a lavishly equipped conventional military that has an absolutely overwhelming amount of power in the region. As it has shown in Gaza, it can do more or less whatever it wants. The real question is what will happen to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? Any political solution would be better than the status quo, be it one secular state for all its citizens, two federated states (something like the A Land For All proposal - https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr) or two separate, fully sovereign states. If there is one lesson to be learned from October 7th, it is that the safety of Jewish Israelis cannot be predicated on the continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. There are lots of examples of multi-religious or multi-ethnic states or of neighbouring states of different religions or ethnicities living beside each other, often for the better. There is no inherent reason why this place should be any different.
  21. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Holien in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Call me crazy, but I usually blame the party committing flagrant war crimes (like ransacking hospitals on the basis of transparent lies, murdering women sheltering in a church, shooting a man with a developmental disability for the crime of carrying lollipops, killing their own hostages who they thought were civilians, assassinating journalists on a mass scale, permanently settling civilians in occupied territory, and so on and so on...). I find it very strange that supporting Israel seems to translate to supporting a very particular course of action designed for maximum cruelty and collective punishment. Israel's political and military establishment has been incapable of articulating a clear or achievable goal, and also has no long-term plans for a peaceful future. 

    https://www.972mag.com/israel-political-weakness-military-hamas/

    I thought this was a great piece highlighting that despite Israel's military might, it is politically weak and immensely unimaginative. Netanyahu's successive governments have proved incapable of articulating anything beyond a worsening of the status quo, not to mention their strategy of supporting Hamas as a means to divide and discredit the Palestinians backfired spectacularly. October 7th was a classic case of blowback, where actions taken to weaken your enemy end up coming back to bite you in horrible ways.
  22. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from The_Capt in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnostate with some democratic institutions within its 1967 borders, but it lacks equality of citizenship, which is a basic tenet of democracy. Judicial oversight of the legislature was also greatly weakened recently, although I suspect that will be reversed once Netanyahu is ejected from office. Palestinians citizens of Israel do enjoy far more political rights than Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.

    But Israel has adopted a one state solution for the lands of historic Palestine. Israel exercises full sovereignty from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in three very distinct ways. There is 1967 Israel, which is perhaps best described as an illiberal democracy. There is the West Bank where Palestinian control has been reduced to about 18% of the territory and is heavily bisected by Israeli settlements and areas under full Israeli military control. This is similar to the bantustans of apartheid South Africa. What kind of democracy has roads only for certain ethnicities or subjects some citizens to military justice and others to civil justice? 

    Then there is Gaza, which is besieged by Israel aided by Egypt. While it was not actively occupied or colonized , it is effectively part of Israel as Israel has full control over its external affairs and borders. It has now been subject to one of the most intense bombardment campaigns in history, which is framed as a war, but is really a counter-insurgency against a domestic force.
    Ultimately, Israel will need to reckon with its foundation as a colonial project that emerged in the 1890s largely as a response to European anti-Semitism and that was established at the expense of Palestinian Arabs of Muslim and Christian backgrounds with somewhat mixed support from Palestinian Jews. It is imperfect as an example, but the reconciliation process in Canada is at least an acknowledgement of past harms towards indigenous people and could serve as a model. What if instead of spending billions upon billions to destroy Gaza, that money and resources were distributed as compensation in lieu of a right to return for Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948? An imperfect option, but an imperfect compromise to address past harms is a far better solution than a worsening status quo.

    I feel like people often get distracted with inane discussions of whether Israel has a right to exist. Israel will continue to exist unless it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. It is a nuclear power with a lavishly equipped conventional military that has an absolutely overwhelming amount of power in the region. As it has shown in Gaza, it can do more or less whatever it wants. The real question is what will happen to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza? Any political solution would be better than the status quo, be it one secular state for all its citizens, two federated states (something like the A Land For All proposal - https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr) or two separate, fully sovereign states. If there is one lesson to be learned from October 7th, it is that the safety of Jewish Israelis cannot be predicated on the continued oppression and dispossession of Palestinians. There are lots of examples of multi-religious or multi-ethnic states or of neighbouring states of different religions or ethnicities living beside each other, often for the better. There is no inherent reason why this place should be any different.
  23. Upvote
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Bulletpoint in How Hot is Israel Gonna Get?   
    Two infants were killed on October 7th. Obviously unjustifiable to kill children for any reason, but that is the same number of infants who died in the Al-Shifa hospital's neonatal ward alone. So far the IDF has killed approximately 222 Palestinian children for every Israeli child who was killed on October 7th. I am simply at a loss to explain how anyone can possibly think this is justified.
  24. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Dr.Fusselpulli in WOW! Why didn't somebody tell me how interesting and fun this CMCW games was.   
    It's a really fantastic game, but so are all the modern series. I think CMSF2 is a bit of an unexpected surprise for me. I think it's one of the most challenging and diverse CM games. Red vs. red battles are very fun in that game. I can't wait for more CMCW though.
  25. Like
    Chudacabra got a reaction from Probus in How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?   
    In the history of bad ideas, shelling a nuclear plant must rank near the top.
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