Israel Thread

[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?