What Palestinians need is what Israelis got: a state. To the extent there is an argument maximally antithetical to that cause, it’s arguing that Israel shouldn’t exist.
Arafat was an hero for the Palestinians, but he was the main responsible for the failing of Oslo agreements.
Moreover Hamas won the elections in Gaza with 45% of the votes and, as we saw immediately after 7/11, most of them was cheering for the slaughterings and the rapes.
Unfortunately Palestinians have an huge responsibility on the actual situation.
> Hamas won the elections in Gaza with 45% of the votes
That was a generation ago.
> as we saw immediately after 7/11, most of them was cheering for the slaughterings and the rapes
One, it’s unclear how widespread this was. But also two, you see similar dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis today. That’s just how human psychology works in a war footing—I think we and chimpanzees are the only species that will go out of our way to exterminate a threat.
> Palestinians have an huge responsibility on the actual situation
Oh sure. And I think whether a future Palestinian state could exist peacefully bordering Israel is a real question. But I would push back on the notion that a plebiscite today requiring recognition of Israel as a sovereign state within its current borders in exchange for a Palestinian state (with West Bank settlements transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction) wouldn’t pass.
Some surveys estimated that Hamas consensus was more than 60% before the 7/11. And this is the main reason why there is no other elections in West Bank since than: Fatah leadership is scared to lose elections.
> you see similar dehumanisation of Palestinians by Israelis today
I have many colleagues and friends in Israel and nobody of them is cheering about the civilian killings. At the opposite, they just demand peace and freedom for hostages.
This is the main difference: while in Israel a large part of population is against war and atrocity, Hamas is still supported by an huge part of Palestinian population.
> But I would push back on the notion that a plebiscite today requiring recognition of Israel as a sovereign state within its current borders in exchange for a Palestinian state (with West Bank settlements transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction) wouldn’t pass.
This was mostly the proposal of Oslo agreements and Arafat, as Palestinian representative, refused that. Do you really think that a public opinion supporting Hamas() , will accept that now?
() Hamas wrote in his statuta that any sionistic state must be unacceptable and Israel must be erased from the heart.
> Do you really think that a public opinion supporting Hamas() , will accept that now?
I think it’s worth a shot. (I wouldn’t put much worth in any polling in Gaza, let alone recent polling.)
One could even throw in a reparation fund for the lands Israel conquered since ‘48 as well as those which the French and British gave away. (Hell, eminent domain the West Bank settlers and pay them out, too.)
Even if it will win, having a state, means also to have an army. And guess what will happens immediately?
The problem is also the education: in Gaza, the school system (also the one by ONU/UNWRA paid by us) is completely rotten: they are not preparing people to improve their country, they are preparing people to become martyr and hate Israel.
> One could even throw in a reparation fund for the lands Israel conquered since ‘48 as well as those which the French and British gave away.
Do you have any idea about how many money the Western country put in Gaza for humanitarian and development projects? Well, a big part of those funds are spent on building tunnels, buying weapons and building rockets.
There is no any way to change the situation until Hamas would be there.
> Hell, eminent domain the West Bank settlers and pay them out, too
Israeli settlers are a big obstacle to peace and should be stopped and repressed with force. Unfortunately it will not happen until Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the government
> Even if it will win, having a state, means also to have an army
Sure. Hence why having such a referendum is important. Also, Lebanon has an army as does Egypt, and both are fine neighbours to Israel now.
> Do you have any idea about how many money the Western country put in Gaza for humanitarian and development projects?
Reparations would have to be distributed directly to individuals and be contingent on such a plebescite recognising Israel passing. If Palestinians decide to squander it again, yes, we’ll see another war, but at that point we can begin treating it like we did Nazi Germany versus the non-state with mixed attribution it has today.
> it will not happen until Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are part of the government
If Palestine gave up its hostages and sued for peace, I don’t think these fucks would have a say anymore.
> In any case, Israel doesn't even have the right to exist
It does: UN resolution, 1967.
That you do not recognize an entire state to exist is an admission to preparing a genocide. The fact that 4 countries around Israel are preparing genocide justifies Israel’s measures are reasonable to maintain peace.
What is reasonable?
Well it’s not like Gaza didn’t start the shooting with 7000 rockets pre-October festival (I was myself surprised that Israel didn’t respond pre-October). Those rockets were indiscriminate against population centers, each of them were a war crime. So it’s reasonable to reduce the neighbor’s ability to wage war to dust.
Are the Gazans exempt from responsibility of their state’s actions?
To answer, we need to check whether the Hamas was imposed to the Gazans or whether they voted for it and, in a broader sense, whether the Gazans wish the genocide of Israel. It turns out the 2006 elections were almost the last ones in Gaza, and that’s when the Hamas was elected (and the opponents were not better). So the Gazans are aligned with the actions performed by the collective group of their nation, it’s not a small group of extremists, it represents the will of the nation, and therefore the facilities and support network of the Hamas are part of the war logistics, and deserves to be reduced to dust.
Did Israel act with restraint?
Israel has the nuclear bomb and has enough power to genocide if they want. The fact that they perform spot actions instead of sweeping actions is proof that Israel tries to discriminate the military, its support network with genocide intent against Israel (=pretty much everyone) and tries to spare the innocents, is proof that Israel is not committing a genocide.
Would that be the same UN that Israel (and the US, to a large degree) refuses to recognize the authority of? Can't have your cake and eat it too, friend.
> What is reasonable?
Not instituting so many decrees ("militaty orders") that even the military authority responsible for 'ruling' the area can't produce an accurate or complete list of all of said decrees. Decrees which, I might add, forbid planting flowers, raising a flag, operating a farm tractor, going to school, or making a bank account withdrawal without the permission of the Israeli military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Military_Order
Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Another military order allows the Israeli military to seize your business if you don't open during regular business hours.
Those decrees also allow Jews to "buy" (seize) land from Palestinians who refuse to sell to them, merely by asserting "power of attorney"
Not having snipers executing children. Not conducting missile and gun attacks on ambulances and independent worldwide-recognized medical aid organizations, and then attacking rescuers who show up to render aid. Not slaughtering an entire hospital's worth of patients and burying them in mass graves. Not slaughtering people lined up to get food aid. Not purposefully starving millions of people.
Not using a black-box AI to decide who is a "terrorist" and then blowing up their entire house, thus killing not only the supposed terrorist, but the entire family, or possibly the neighbor - because a "smart" bomb would be too expensive.
An UN agreement is still the highest rank of agreements for whether a state exists.
UN is shock-full of anti-Israeli militants, so it is also unsurprising that Israel doesn’t respect all of it.
> Let that sink in: if you're a Palestianian you can't go to the bank and take out your own money without permission of the Israeli military.
Is this money used for the war against Israel? If yes, it can be legitimately seized. If Palestinians didn’t swear the death of Israel, that would be another story.
Both parties wage a war to death. If Israel gets feable, it gets genocide.
The only way out is peace, but you are actively arguing for the entire eradication of Israel, with the entire weight of the Western Civilization behind you, so… oh man that doesn’t help at all.
> Not having snipers executing children
Depends what the children are doing. Without context, it seems horrible, and yet every time we’re filled in on the context that was conveniently forgotten by “journalists” (who are a certain socio demographic of Western youths, surprisingly), then we notice there’s more to it than “Israel kills blindly”.
If Israel killed blindly, they wouldn’t take so many precautions.
And the funny thing is, I’m not even pro-Israel. I’m just here to show the balance that you have forgotten.
Really? Is this why the world does not recognize the north part of Cyprus despite Turkish Cypriots not butchering any Greeks south of the border since 1974, when they unilaterally declared
independence?
Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us. And please don't include previously warring peoples whose leaders agreed on a population exchange and imposed that mandatory trauma on their own people.
Palestine, Cyprus, and India had the unenviable luck of being long-term victims of a last gasp British empire's farewell divide-and-conquer gambit.
(and excuse me for ignoring the deflection trolling)
> Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us
It was quite common and very accepted method in the 1940s, hell, expelling 15 million germans, some living there for hundreds of years, was proposed by Churchill.
The reason you never heard about the rest of these is because the people were resettled, not kept in a state of permanent inheritable refugee state financed by the UN with financial incentives to be kept that way.
>Please name some of other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing"
(proceeds to list examples of countries which were already founded before the ethnic cleansing events they mention or events I already alluded to)
It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to list Libyans expelling italians as a comparable example, when Libya was a colony of Italy. Ditto Germans, a people of belonging to the aggressor country. Bulgaria declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. And you have to explain why you included the pakistan link, as I already mentioned it in my post.
Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.
The idea that people of different ethnicities live, unmixed, divided by neat borders of nation-states is pretty recent. This was the case neither in Europe, nor in Middle East for a very long time before the advent of state-based nationalism in the 19th century. It was quite normal for people of different ethnicities, languages, and even faiths to live intermixed in certain regions, especially areas of intense trade, which the entire Mediterranean coast used to be. Borders were more about economic and political control than ethnic identity.
(The ethnic unity purportedly achieved by nation-states formed in 19th and early 20th centuries is also often more by fiat: look at the variety of German or Italian languages prior to unification of Germany or Italy, for instance, to say nothing about India.)
Palestinians can be arguably labeled as the aggressor country if that's how you want to spin the narrative. As Jews were peacefully buying lands when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.
Most germans were living in their respected newly founded Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years if not more when expelled.
Italians, even if they were colonialists, were expelled from their homes, by people who previously have been colonialists themselves, some when arriving with the arab conquests.
Bulgaria expelled the turks in the 1950s, and the partition of india, forming pakistan and india, were two newly formed countries around the time of israel and palestine, included ethnic cleansing from both sides
Do you think that these examples of ethnic cleansing post ww2 are irrelevant when no new country was formed?
> when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.
Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers and local Arab populations have started long before that, pretty much as soon as the initial settlement began in the 19th century. Nor was it some kind of isolated incidents - Jabotinsky wrote https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot in 1923, and he wasn't alone in such views:
> There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ... Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."
And you can gather from your own quote that Jabotinsky's view was very unpopular at the time. The mainstream jewish opinion is that living in peace is possible. That's why there were no real attempts at creating a capable militia force until violence has started from the Palestinian side
You seem to quote him to prove the Palestinians had no choice but to do what the laws of history has ordained for them. But even though you don't quote the extreme or moderate Palestinians of the time, there were both views and as humans capable of agency they had a choice, and they repeatedly chose war until they had created a Jewish force much more capable than they were
No but when someone says "Israel is uniquely evil and must be destroyed because of [reason that also applies to dozens of other countries whose destruction they're not demanding]" it implies either ignorance or bad faith.
It's not a defense argument rather than reality. People seem to think this conflict is special, but usually due to ignoring similarities to their own countries and their own moralities.
Regarding court, there is a very valid defense in court called selective enforcement, and this is exactly for situations when someone is scape goated
The only thing special about this conflict is that it's far more "televised" than any other genocide in history, due to the proliferation of internet access and social media, and that the US is directly funding it.
I think it makes a lot of sense to be more incensed about the genocide in Palestine vs. the Myanmar civil war if you're an American citizen. Americans are struggling and the government is sending billions of our tax dollars to war criminals overseas.
Except that it's not a genocide, claiming Israel is out to destroy the Palestinian people after two years of war with precision bombs is hilariously incorrect and highly misrepresented.
There's a reason that your example includes mass civilian executions, rapes, ethnic cleansing and burning villages, largely hamas' tactics, rather than precision bombs and evacuation calls in different channels.
Because Israeli tactics are extremely counterproductive for a genocide. There's reasons why genocide is usually done by concentrating populations rather than dispersing, and why aerial bombing can't be used, as victims would flee, or why the victims aren't forewarned..
It seems this entire popular argument rests solely on propaganda and redefining words without any shred of critical thinking
They've been out to destroy them for decades. The last 2 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering they've imposed on Palestinians through apartheid.
What's going on now IS a genocide and it's not being done by bombs but by starvation, which tracks exactly with what you said about "concentrating" people.
Do you have statistics as to how many people have died by starvation in Gaza? How is it related to concentration and how is it working to destroy the entire population of Gaza? (as in death rates vs birth rates)
(excuse me for ignoring the history trolling)