Israel-Gaza war

[Lord Halifax]

Israel's Minister of Communications suggesting to cut off the foreskins of Hamas fighters is incredible content, really. They should also burn all images of Allah in Gaza while they're at it. That will be a proper revenge.

There are no images of Allah. An image of God is one of the most haram/salacious in Islam.

false

There is a long history of imagery of Mo in Islamic art, it wasn't until fanatics in the twentieth century wanted another wedge to stick between Islam and the West that it became a thing.  They got what they wanted.

those are images of Muhammad, not Allah.

[Lord Halifax]

Why should maintaining a Jewish majority even be a factor? Nobody cared about maintaining a white majority in Rhodesia or South Africa. Israel should be held to the exact same standard.

Israel is not a colony. Israel is a nation run by its indigenous people. You will never disperse or overrun them again.

The Palestinians are indigenous to the area but were forced out by Israeli settlers during Nakba.

the Palestinian identity is a 20th century construct and a lot of modern day Palestinians are descended from people that migrated to the area in the late 19th and early 20th century, the development created by Jewish pioneers ironically contributed to that.

[Lord Halifax]

Yeah, I don’t think bombing Qatar is a good idea actually.

It would feel good in the moment. But that can be said of a lot of the Israeli strategy in this war, and yet...

Well if the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE do bomb Qatar, no doubt the largest US Air Force base in the Middle East will be indispensable to such an operation; I wonder which country that base is located in!

just annex Qatar, make it an unincorporated territory and offer the guest workers US citizenship which would easily result in Qatar having an American majority

[Lord Halifax]

it's ironically not that different from christianity and judaism in what it preaches

Claiming that Christianity and Islam are basically alike is popular among Western atheists, but apart from both being monotheistic and proselyting the differences seem more important than the similarities.

There is a fundamental difference between a religion created by the followers of an itinerant preacher with a pacifist and "proto-Communist" communal message and one created by a successful warlord and politician, which is what Muhammed became. The tenor of the Quran is very different from the tenor of the New Testament. Islam lacks the pacifism and "softness" of Christianity (there is no "turn the other cheek" stuff in the Quran, but lots of justification for violence) and it gives fairly explicit directions of how society should function, which Christianity doesn't (you can justify nearly any political position by referring to somewhere in the Bible, not so with the Quran), and while Judaism is also a rule based religion it has a rich deliberating and interpretational culture based on the Talmud which is much stronger than in Islam. As a consequence Islam is much easier to morph into a political ideology than either Christianity or Judaism and is more at odds with modern secular society.

[Lord Halifax]

Destroying Hamas, unless they surrender, is going to involve destroying Gaza.

which is tragic, but doesn't change the need to destroy Hamas

[Lord Halifax]

What's truly interesting is people get more mad about comparing this to the holocaust then they do about Israel's atrocities.

hardly surprising, trivializing the holocaust has been the ultimate taboo in Western society since WW2, and comparing 20k dead Palestinians as collateral damage in a war to the industrial scale mass murder of 6 million Jews is both absurd and inherently antisemitic (you need to value Jewish lives far less than Palestinian to make that comparison).

[Lord Halifax]

The British cut off a small chunk of land for the Jews, because the Jews were an ethnic group residing in the region who deserved consideration.  Their presence in the region was lawful and legitimate -- independent of any historical or religious claim to be the rightful indigenous peoples of the land.

Were the British influenced in this decision by the political maneuverings of Zionists, the horrors of the Holocaust, a sympathy towards a biblical historical narrative of the levant, or even in some cases violence and extortion?  Yes they were.  But those circumstances and arguments are not the basis of the case for why Israel exists.  Israel exists for the same reason the states of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria exist.  Because after the Ottoman Empire fell, everyone on the winning side agreed that Britain and France could decide what to do with its remains, and every state that was subsequently created has been widely recognized as legitimate.  Except for Israel.

that would be true if Israel (a Jewish homeland in Palestine) had been created after WW1 as promised in the Balfour declaration, and if so it would almost certainly have been viewed as a normal country today (and far more Jews would have survived the holocaust), but unfortunately it wasn't, the Arab population had increased a lot by the late 1940s, a lot of blood had been spilled and the international situation was entirely different (Cold War, post-colonialism, United Nations with a General Assembly soon to be dominated by "the Third World" etc.).

[Lord Halifax]

Initial Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine was inter-war.

about 40k migrated before the war, from the 1880s onwards.

[Lord Halifax]

This conversation didn't have anything to do with "rights", it came from Lord Halifax saying that the steep increase in the Palestinian population from 1918-1948 made it unfair to create a Jewish state.

I never said that, I pointed out it was one the factors that made it a lot more difficult for Israel to be accepted than if it had hypothetically been established post-WW1.

[Lord Halifax]

the literal destruction of the Palestinian people - whether through killing or expelling - is now the position of a significant minority both within Israel and amongst its fellow travellers.

hyperbole, the Palestinian people would still exist even if none of them resided within Palestine.   

[Lord Halifax]

For those who are supportive of continuing the war, just how many palestianian deaths are acceptable for elimating hamas ?. The way people like Mr X, Vosem and Patzer act, they seem to think that killing every single resident in Gaza is worth it if it eliminates Hamas.

how would you set a specific limit for civilian casualties? That's not something you usually do in a war, it's not like the Roosevelt administration sat down after Peal Harbor and agreed that "sure, we want to defeat Japan, but if it costs more than 500k Japanese civilian casualties we'll have to stop because that would be too cruel".

[Lord Halifax]

Why do rape victims in Israel get a congressional resolution condemning their assailants but rape victims in Ethiopia do not?

because Israel is a US ally and Ethiopia isn't

[Lord Halifax]

Can the pro-Palestine people please explain to me why Hamas should face no consequences for their actions?

What a question! Here's a more intellectually honest one for you: can the pro-Israel people please explain to me why thousands of children should die?

it might be honest, but it's also superfluous since the answer is so blatantly obvious:
because you can't conquer and occupy Gaza without substantial civilian casualties, and full Israeli control of Gaza is a prerequisite for destroying Hamas

[Lord Halifax]

I can't pretend to understand much about Israel politics, but it's hard to see how this is even close to a guarantee. Why couldn't the polity that selected Natanyahu in a time of relative peace replace him with someone as bad or worse?

Gantz is only slightly better than Netanyahu - he's pro-settlements (albeit just in the existing areas) and wants to retain large parts of the West Bank.

Really, as of 10-7, every political position to the left of that is beyond dead for the next few years if not decades.

The 1973 war convinced Israel that they needed a peace agreement with Egypt.

Egypt was the biggest Arab state by far and had a government that could be trusted to uphold a peace deal, the current situation isn't remotely similar.