Israel Thread

[Gilrandir]

I was not remotely comparing Mexico to a hostile neighbour.

Shall we argue what "hostile" means? In my view, if you build a wall ON YOUR TERRITORY, it is neither hostility nor aggression. But if you "start stocking up on guns and ammos" that is completely different, isn't it?

Don't you get bored from arguing semantics?

It's obviously clear what they wanted to say by now and even if they worded it wrong, isn't it time to let it go?

I was severely reprimanded by Brenus if I worded something wrong, but I somehow never heard anything from you in my defense. So when you start treating the debaters equally, I will consider your optation.

[AE Bravo]

Shall we argue what "hostile" means? In my view, if you build a wall ON YOUR TERRITORY, it is neither hostility nor aggression. But if you "start stocking up on guns and ammos" that is completely different, isn't it?

If you are still arguing in the context of Palestine and the Zionists, the wall is an act of aggression because it is a massive obstruction to the survival and economic wellbeing of the Palestinian people. This wall is responsible for the regular denial of basic human services and some people cannot go to the store because of it.

[Gilrandir]

If you are still arguing in the context of Palestine and the Zionists, the wall is an act of aggression because it is a massive obstruction to the survival and economic wellbeing of the Palestinian people. This wall is responsible for the regular denial of basic human services and some people cannot go to the store because of it.

In fact I was arguing in the context of Trump's Promised Wall. Disussing merits and demerits of the wall you speak of will indeed be tiresome. Let me just say that both sides have their own view on survival and security, and I don't see why only the Palestinian one should be considered.

[Idaho]

Israeli planes spray Gaza farmland with herbicides for the fourth time. Sewing the ground with salt - very biblical.

https://972mag.com/israeli-planes-sp...ampaign=buffer

[Idaho]

The annual protest March by Arab Israelis has been blocked this year for the first time ever :

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea...ampaign=buffer

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Idaho:

The Israelis -- particularly their hardliners -- who you decry in these posts (and have decried before), already view themselves as being -- functionally -- pariahs to the larger international community.

They are not likely to give a rat's patoot about public opinion outside Israel and thus have little motivation to do anything aside from that which furthers their control over Israeli terrain (which they certainly define more broadly than the 1947 borders and probably more than the 1968 borders). So you are not going to sway them.

And the rest of the West is unlikely to actively oppose Israel any more than they already do. So....

[Idaho]

Actively oppose? Actively support usually. Vigorously in the case of the US.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Well, the USA does throw a fair amount of money their way, and we are pretty passive regarding other actions Israel takes that we officially oppose.

I had not thought that Europe was all that supportive of Israel at all though? Things not getting reported on that issue over here that I should know?

[Idaho]

Israel and its lobbyists do constantly say how Europe is against them, etc. This is because while European countries have normal political and economic relationships, they do sometimes say things like "can you.. Er.. Like stop ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from land you are illegally occupying?"

[Gilrandir]

IThis is because while European countries have normal political and economic relationships

European countries don't a a beehive for a neighbor.

[rory_20_uk]

Israel and its lobbyists do constantly say how Europe is against them, etc. This is because while European countries have normal political and economic relationships, they do sometimes say things like "can you.. Er.. Like stop ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from land you are illegally occupying?"

Even the BBC mentions the building with the statement "illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this". Funnily enough we don't get that caveat when it is North Korea building nukes or Russia invading the Ukraine.

[Idaho]

I have heard the BBC refer to both as being in contrivance of international law.

It seems that Israel and those who choose to support its actions are able to see the Palestinians as being less than full humans. That they don't need or deserve self determination, citizenship, property rights, political freedom, freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest. That it is not only possible, but entirely acceptable to discount their demands for these by picking on selected examples from history or of the actions of other states or political groups.

So Rory, is Israel occupying the west Bank, or is it Israeli territory? If the latter, why are those people living there not made citizens of this new state?

[Idaho]

Testimonial from soldier who operated in the West Bank. Taken by the group Breaking the Silence - which the Israeli government are trying to suppress.

“All the mattresses on one side, the carpet turned over, half the tiles are messed up, because maybe there's something under them. If they’re loose we take them out, we lift them. We hit the walls, make holes in them to see if maybe inside some wall where there’s a piece of plaster. That's what we did to it there. We drilled, and then used a hammer. We took out a wall, there's nothing there. What a bummer. Now there’s a whole lot of dirt in the room, and there’s no wall. A table and stuff, a computer – you look inside the computer. A teddy-bear, a fucking teddy-bear, you open its head and take the cotton wool out, maybe there's a gun there, who knows.
Was there a gun?
No.”
[First Sergeant, Nahal, 50th Battalion, Nablus area, 2012]

Read the full testimony >> http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il...atabase/379784

[Idaho]

Interesting the contrast between the 99% conviction rate for Palestinians in Israeli military courts and the 4.5% of Palestinian complaints about settler violence that result in any action whatsoever.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/....AD03039665C697

[Idaho]

It's Palestinian prisoner day!

Meanwhile, administrative detainees are arrested based on Israeli military intelligence data, to which the detainee has no access. Administrative detainees can be held without charge or trial for six months at a time, and their detention can be indefinitely renewed.

...

Last year marked the worst on record for child prisoners. A change in Israeli laws allowed Palestinian minors under the age of 14 to be sent straight to prison, instead of receiving custodian sentences. In 2016, 21 minors were under administrative detention. In the same year, a wave of Palestinian children received lengthy sentences, some amounting to more than 10 years of imprisonment.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fea...ampaign=buffer

A good, if depressing, eyewitness account from the Irish times:

The places where life was, children played, people called to each other and thought of as home and, once perhaps contentedly, as the boundary of their whole world, stand empty. Desolate. Turned into rat traps now, and cages. Sealed behind soldered doors. Closed off for hours, then days, then years at a time. Street names mauled and replaced so the very memory of their ever having existed becomes debatable, then fabled, then gone. The sheer effort, in this place, to make history die.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-...44958?mode=amp

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So, Idaho, why hasn't Israel gone to the logical conclusion of its policy? You seem pretty clear in your view that the entirety of Israeli policy is one of ethnic cleansing.

[Idaho]

They are moving to the logical conclusion. They are disrupting life, destroying homes, villages and communities. Destabilising political and civil structures. Breaking up families and interning civilians and even children without judicial review based on data correlations.

Their aim is simple and obvious - to make life untenable and force the Palestinians to leave.

How can you observe this seamus, and remain cool and unaffected? Have you no sense of justice? Are these not humans?

[Beskar]

Arguably, when Egypt and Jordan both invaded Palestine and if they gave them citizenship, a large majority of these problems would not exist. However, the Palestinian people were not given citizenship which gave them a limbo status where they received no help or support by those governments, with no right to live or work in those countries, leading to them to live in poverty and refugee camps. This made the situation even more dire for the people.

It doesn't change the current situation, but there could have been alternative rearrangements where the people are better off.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

They are moving to the logical conclusion. They are disrupting life, destroying homes, villages and communities. Destabilising political and civil structures. Breaking up families and interning civilians and even children without judicial review based on data correlations.

Their aim is simple and obvious - to make life untenable and force the Palestinians to leave.

How can you observe this seamus, and remain cool and unaffected? Have you no sense of justice? Are these not humans?

The scope of human suffering is broad and this is far from the only current instance of man's inhumanity to man.

In this particular instance, I have been leaning towards a "pox on both their houses" attitude more and more over the years. I discarded the "plucky Jewish underdog" crap a while ago.

I guess part of it, sadly, is psychic numbing. I have been seeing atrocities and stupidities in both directions for my entire life...I "watched" my first Arab Israeli war in 1973 when I was 9.

I am not one of those who thinks we need to keep paying for Israel - especially as their conduct as an "ally" has been as much or more one-sided as has my country's treatment of the Special Relationship.


I just do not believe this ends with anything except a) the Palestinians getting kicked permanently off of what was theirs in 1947 and Israel finalizing its control or the 1967 conquests, or
b) Israel getting extirpated.

[Idaho]

A pox on both their houses would seem a fair reaction if it was remotely a fair fight.

Take a look at this article. These are the normal people who are being squeezed by the apartheid state:

The soldiers patrolling among the houses and olive trees demanded to see 20-year-old Khaled Abu Sh’kheidam’s identity papers. He took them out and the soldiers checked if the plastic covering bore a handwritten number that matched their lists. It did. Abu Sh’kheidam entered his house, a few meters away from where they had stopped him.
The soldiers were following orders on the Saturday just before Passover. For the last 18 months, the Israeli army has been prohibiting the entry of Palestinians who are not among the 1,200 residents of the Palestinian Tel Rumeida neighborhood in the western part of Old Hebron.

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/....ampaign=buffer

[Montmorency]

Seems relevant (probably to several threads here):

When “ethnic conflict” joined the mainstream of comparative politics and international relations research in the early 1990s, there was a tendency to look uncritically at the labels applied to violent episodes. Actors were categorized
according to ascribed identities, usually ethnic but sometimes religious or linguistic. Typologies separated conflicts into analytical boxes accordingly. The easy categories of “Serb” or “Bosnian” masked a host of differences within
these allegedly separate groups in the 1990s, even though journalists and policymakers alike tended to use those categories without question to describe the belligerent sides in the Yugoslav wars. The labels Sunni and Shi’a took on a
similarly iconic status in Iraq the early 2000s. There are two obvious problems with using labels without being concerned for whether they really map social groups in the world. One is what might be called the implicit teleology of
ascriptive difference. It is often too easy for labels to masquerade as causes. To declare a conflict “ethnic,” say, usually rests on a set of assumptions about the roots of the conflict and the unusual levels of violence said to characterize it.
But emphasizing social identities can blind researchers to the mechanisms that are at work in shaping them, often in the middle of violence itself. Violence raises the stakes of defection by presenting both perpetrators and victims as threatened;
it makes it more difficult to move across interidentity boundaries. As one example, in the “lynching era” in the U.S.South—from the early 1880s to the early 1930s—a fifth of all lynchings were intraracial, whites killing whites and blacks killing blacks.
The highest incidence of these within-group attacks occurred before the period when new racial laws had reestablished the clear social boundaries between racial groups that had been eroded by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lynching was thus
not only an abhorrent form of intergroup violence but also a method of in-group policing. Violence does not always make identity, of course, but it can certainly push a particular identity to the top of one’s repertoire.

[Idaho]

How about this example seamus? Does it appear to be two mortal enemies locked in combat? Perhaps your adjustment from seeing the plucky Jewish to seeing two equally bad combatants is just a stop on a longer road?

Settlers are caught on video throwing stones at a Palestinian school in Burin, and a settlement security guard fires his gun into the air. But the soldiers who arrive on the scene take no action against the attackers.

By Yael Marom

https://972mag.com/watch-settlers-at...ampaign=buffer

[Seamus Fermanagh]

How about this example seamus? Does it appear to be two mortal enemies locked in combat? Perhaps your adjustment from seeing the plucky Jewish to seeing two equally bad combatants is just a stop on a longer road?


https://972mag.com/watch-settlers-at...ampaign=buffer

Israelis are engaged in a haphazard ethnic cleansing of the biblical Jewish homeland (The settlers and the hard core right wing would NOT be haphazard about it, but they don't have full control).

Fatah cannot get past graft and corruption long enough to make a go of anything resembling a state, and Hamas uses the Israeli abuses to further its war efforts with little regard for the population of Gaza as a community.

I am all for letting Israel sink or swim on their own merits -- funding them is a little annoying. They are supposedly our best ally in the region....but that alliance has felt, to me, a lot more like our alliance with France than that with the UK....

[Idaho]

In Gaza, it's unsurprising that hamas have been elected. They are not as corrupt as fatah, and they have long offered social services to the community. Can you imagine if your city was under siege for decades? If foreign tanks had bulldozed houses and jets had bombed infrastructure? Would the dominant political group be pacifist and conciliatory?

[Pannonian]

In Gaza, it's unsurprising that hamas have been elected. They are not as corrupt as fatah, and they have long offered social services to the community. Can you imagine if your city was under siege for decades? If foreign tanks had bulldozed houses and jets had bombed infrastructure? Would the dominant political group be pacifist and conciliatory?

We can't blame them for electing Hamas. We can't excuse them from electing Hamas either. They have the right to elect their government democratically, they live with the consequences of electing their government democratically. Just like all other democracies, including us.

[AE Bravo]

Hamas has been the last resort for the populace as peaceful resistance doesn't fly in "democratic" Israel. It's a last line of defense with actual power.

The reason Pannonian's argument doesn't work is because Palestine is almost entirely dependent upon the infrastructure Israel provides, which exacerbates the problem. While there has been international funding for the Palestinians to create their own desalination networks, revitalize their housing projects, and promote civil society, the money tends to be funneled into paramilitary operations and preparing the state for war with Israel due to the state of apartheid. This makes Israel both jailkeeper and primary care giver for the Palestinians after Jordan threw their hands up at the situation.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Hamas has been the last resort for the populace as peaceful resistance doesn't fly in "democratic" Israel. It's a last line of defense with actual power.

The reason Pannonian's argument doesn't work is because Palestine is almost entirely dependent upon the infrastructure Israel provides, which exacerbates the problem. While there has been international funding for the Palestinians to create their own desalination networks, revitalize their housing projects, and promote civil society, the money tends to be funneled into paramilitary operations and preparing the state for war with Israel due to the state of apartheid. This makes Israel both jailkeeper and primary care giver for the Palestinians after Jordan threw their hands up at the situation.

I have always thought the "two country" solution so bandied about to be a mirage. There isn't enough space for two nations in that small strip of land. Water resources etc. mitigate against any useful division into two states.

I don't think this does anything but continue as is until one or the other pushes the second party out. All very sad, especially for the resource-poor Palestinian Arabs.

[Idaho]

The Arab Israeli wars would have been a bit of a no score draw, but for Israel being swiftly resupplied with lots of good kit from the US. So rather than be forced to broker a compromise with equally exhausted foes, it's been able to plough on with whatever it likes. It's opponents weakened, outmaneuvered, divided and dispirited.

In the end that means people, families and communities who were just getting through life, being apart of someone's war.

[Gilrandir]

The Arab Israeli wars would have been a bit of a no score draw, but for Israel being swiftly resupplied with lots of good kit from the US.

The same can be said of Arabs and the USSR.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The same can be said of Arabs and the USSR.

Yes and no. The USSR, with rare exceptions, only sold them the dumbed-down versions of its various weapons platforms. Moreover, they sold them and did not grant much foreign aid as did the USA.

I don't think that Idaho is acknowledging the other factor at play in those conflicts, however. US military folk suggest that the problem is partly cultural in that Arabs appear to be brave and effective warriors but to make lousy soldiers. Too few of their formed units had the combat staying power of a typical Israeli formation.