Israel-Gaza war

[GeneralMacArthur]

Netanyahu is not sending a delegation to the Cairo talks today.

Not that im a Netanyahu fan, but he's clearly playing hardball. The sticking point right now is the amount of prisoners Hamas is demanding be released. If there's a breakthrough on that, then Israel will send the delegation back.

Not just the numbers, the identities. Hamas wants to select the prisoners I believe. There's a bunch of stonethrowers in Israeli jails, but also a good number of people serving life sentences for murder.

The wild thing is that despite their complaints that so many "stone-throwers" are being unjustly imprisoned in Israeli jail cells, if Hamas was given the choice they would leave those stone-throwers to languish behind bars and instead free the schoolbus bombers and child murderers.

And they would be right to do so, because the international community has made it clear to Hamas that the best strategy for getting their soldiers free from prison is to commit atrocities against Israelis, so that when Israel inevitably retaliates, the international community will force Israel to agree to not only stop bombing but to accept a ceasefire that's incredibly lopsided in favor of Hamas (including the release of tons of prisoners).

So instead of freeing one stone-thrower, Hamas should free one schoolbus-bomber, then bomb a school bus, and then when Israel attacks, wait for Belgium and Ireland to get together and demand Israel free 50 stone-throwers in return for Hamas agreeing to stop being bombed.  But then instead of freeing 50 stone-throwers, free 50 more school bus bombers and repeat.  Capitalist principles in action -- infinite growth!

[GeneralMacArthur]

If Israel cannot abide Hamas continuing to exist (which is an odd change of sentiment given that Netanyahu's government has been funding and enabling them for years), is Israel willing to carry out the administration of Gaza, operate schools, maintain roads, deliver the mail, and everything else Hamas had been doing up until now? Are they willing to accept that the public there does not want them to do that and acts of insurgency will almost certainly happen, just as they did to the US during the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq?

Yes.  That is undoubtedly the plan for Israel.

If a coalition of Arab states or Western powers would like to step in and show Israel how to do it better, they're welcome to try.

Somehow I doubt this will happen and we will instead get a peanut gallery of criticism (along with countless charges of "genocide" or "apartheid" or whatever) while Israel does all the hard work.

It will probably take at least a generation to build Gaza into a decent place to live, but at least the next generation of children won't learn in school that the Jews invented cancer specifically to kill Muslims.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Was watching the Superbowl last weekend and saw San Francisco fans upset that they lost.  Interesting that people get more upset about football than they do about Israel's atrocities.  I didn't see a single 49ers fan shedding any tears for the mosque Israel bombed the other day.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Seems like an entirely reasonable sentiment?  Why would the country winning the war not be proud of what they've done?

Israel was viciously attacked by barbaric monsters who kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered innocent civilians.  Those same monsters still refuse to let the hostages go even as they shed crocodile tears about the consequences of their actions.  The whole world is arrayed against Israel and demands that the Jews, as they have time and time throughout history, must once again lie down and accept their submissive status, accept their place as a punching bag for the world's most diabolical cretins.  Instead of being weak and obedient, the Jews stood up for themselves and destroyed their enemy.  Of course they are proud of this!

I swear it's like people pretend 10/7 never happened.  Or like Hamas are just some innocent victims.

If you actually care about the Gazans, and aren't just engaged in either anti-semitism or performative anti-Israel activism that you don't realize is rooted in anti-semitic notions, then you should celebrate the destruction of Hamas and demand that any peace deal include the eradication of Hamas.  After all, if you're so concerned for the tired, poor, huddled masses of Palestine, why do you want to sentence them to a life of misery, poverty and endless war under the regime of a wannabe-ISIS?  What a terrible thing to wish upon anyone, much less those you claim to have sympathy for.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The "Heads of the Hydra" argument again... it was just two weeks ago I wrote this.

I remember 20 years ago when people said it was going to be impossible to defeat al-Qaeda because every time you killed some terrorist jackass, all his friends and family and children would decide to join al-Qaeda.  The old "each bomb kills one bad guy and creates three more" trope.  But guess what?  After the invasion of Afghanistan, we did defeat al-Qaeda's ground forces.  Then they went into hiding and tried to conduct operations against us via proxy terror cells in Iraq, Jordan and Pakistan, and we killed all of those too.  We killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  Then we killed Osama bin Laden.  By the time we killed Ayman al-Zawahiri hardly anyone cared anymore because al-Qaeda had long since ceased to be relevant.

The unfortunate thing is that these movements survive no by virtue of any organic phenomenon but because of committed state support.

The Taliban continues to exist and rule Afghanistan not because "for everyone Taliban fighter America kills, three more take its place" but because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Pakistan backs the Taliban, trains and arms its fighters, and allows them to seek refuge inside its borders.  America is unwilling to declare war on Pakistan, so it is impossible to fully eradicate the Taliban.  The Taliban survives because it's backed by Pakistan.  al-Qaeda wasn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

ISIS was born out of the chaos of the Syrian Civil War.  The United States would dearly love to do exactly what we did in Iraq -- depose the Ba'ath party, kill Assad, and install a new regime that has nominally acceptable relations with the West -- or at least, do what we did in Libya and allow the opposition forces to form a new government.  But we can't do that because the nuclear-armed sovereign state of Russia backs the Assad regime.  With that said, we haven't seen any evidence of "kill one ISIS member, create three more."  We drove ISIS out of Mosul, out of Raqqa, out of Eastern Syria, and today ISIS has virtually no territory, no forces, and no real ability to project power in the Middle East.  There hasn't been any indication that any family, friends or descendants of the people we killed in Iraq/Syria are itching to rebuild ISIS.  It's just over.  Assad survives because he's backed by Russia.  ISIS isn't backed by anyone so they're totally vanquished.

So what does this mean for Palestine?  It means it's entirely possible for Israel to defeat Hamas on the battlefield, and if that were the sole challenge, Hamas could cease to exist within a couple years and be forgotten within a generation.  I don't buy for a second the notion that for every bomb Israel drops, one Hamas fighter dies and three more are born.  I don't buy the notion that Israel's war against Hamas will breed so much civilian resentment that it makes a new Hamas inevitable.  al-Qaeda was defeated in Iraq, Jordan and Afghanistan, ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria, and Hamas can be defeated in Gaza.

The question is, to what extent are major power players willing to stake their own militaries on Hamas.  Is there a Russia-equivalent who's willing to say "if you get close to truly threatening Hamas, we will intervene militarily"?  Is there a Pakistan-equivalent who's willing to say "we will protect, train, and arm Hamas, and you'll have to declare war on us to stop it"?  So far I haven't seen it.  None of Iran, Qatar, or Egypt have shown a willingness to directly intervene to rescue Hamas.  And I think this is because of 10/7 -- the attack was so brutal that it drew the attention of the entire world and it made it impossible for those power players to covertly prop up Hamas without facing massive widespread condemnation and consequences.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Imo what's needed isn't less Israeli involvement in Gaza, it's better Israeli involvement. Israeli quasi-withdrawal was a step backwards despite it having some positive effects. Israel defeating Hamas now would be good but not at the cost of 80% of it demolished without replacement and/or the settler faction that is actually the biggest existential risk to the State of Israel becoming more powerful.

Ultimately what is needed is a willing partner in the Palestinians.

Israel is not going to allow Gaza to become a modern, advanced, self-sufficient state if they have good reason to believe the Palestinians would immediately turn around and make use of that generosity to try, once again, to exterminate the Jews.

The most likely scenario is that Israel turns Gaza into a heavily-restricted police state just like the West Bank, where violent conspiracies are quickly snuffed out and military groups have no real hope of organizing themselves to the extent necessary to mount even a symbolic attack.

It's nice to think that with a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance, the Gazans might come around to the idea that actually the Jews are alright.  But there's also a very real chance that a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance is actually just Israel giving them the chance to organize, fortify and re-arm.  Especially given that the hatred is as much cultural as it is contextual.  After all, the Jews never even did anything to Uganda, but that didn't stop Idi Amin from assisting with the Air France highjacking (Bibi's origin story is that his older brother was killed leading the rescue operation), and saying "Hitler was right to burn six million Jews."  It just goes to show that even when the Jews are as nice as humanly possible to their neighbors, those neighbors will still decide to hate and kill them.  It has happened over and over again throughout history, which is why "Never Again" is Israel's modern unofficial state motto.

In other words, the police state will continue as long as paramilitary organizations threaten to fester the instant Israel lets up.  It's not Israel's fault the Palestinians are addicted to hatred and violence.  It's incumbent upon the Palestinians to knock it off and find a way to assure Israel that they genuinely intend to peacefully coexist.  This is Palestine's responsibility, not Israel's.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Quite the opposite, that's exactly my point.  Israel and the Jews didn't do anything to the Ugandans, but Uganda, a landlocked central African country the size of Nevada, which has absolutely nothing to do with Israel and lies 5000km away, for some reason looked at Britain taking 12% of Mandatory Palestine/Transjordan and denoting it for a Jewish state, and said "this is a horrible thing that affects us, and we're going to get really really mad about it.  So mad that we're going to aid a terrorist group that hijacks an airplane and takes 100+ hostages."

Why do we just accept this as some inevitable thing?  Why should we have to pretend this is a reasonable opinion for a state to hold?  Is it not utterly bizarre and horrible?  Why should Uganda care at all about which Levantine ethnic groups get land claims in the British section of the former Ottoman Empire?

Regardless of what Israel's demographic makeup now is or where more recent immigrants came from, the country was indisputably conceived by and established by people from Europe. Theodore Herzl was born in Hungary; Chaim Weizmann was born in Belarus and spent much of his early life in Germany and the UK; David Ben Gurion was born in Poland. The country's early alliance with the West cemented that image.

Well, Israel was originally mostly European Jews, but after the establishment of Israel most of the immigration came from the Middle East and North Africa.  But aside from that, we're talking about a Jewish diaspora that was pushed out of Israel over the millennia and ended up in Eastern Europe or Russia or Poland or wherever.

I get what you're saying though, to the Arabs of the region it has the appearance of a bunch of Europeans coming in and saying, this is our land now.  But that's not even what happened.  The Jews legally purchased land under the laws of the Ottoman Empire.  They're no different than any other immigrant group.  When Irish-Americans came to America, legally under our immigration laws, and purchased land here (also legally), was that imperialism?  Was that colonialism?  No, it was just some people who wanted to live in America finding a legal way to do it, en masse.  The Ashkenazi Jews of the early 20th century, legally immigrating to a barren desert in the outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, were no different.

This is putting aside the fact that, again, these were not just a bunch of random European dudes, they were the diaspora of a people who were native to the land thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled.  That doesn't directly give them the right to be there, but even if they had not come there legally, it would not be colonialism.

Consider that even if the Egyptian people had chosen to simply ignore the events of 1947-1949, Israel joined forces with Britain and France to invade their country in 1956. You don't think that wouldn't be incentive enough for them to dislike Israel? The framing of Israel as a symbol of imperialism alongside actual imperial powers couldn't have been clearer.

Israel's attacks on Egypt were because Egypt threatened Israel with annihilation.  Israel saw these attacks as a proactive form of self-defense.  Both the Suez Crisis and the Six-Days War were preceded by large arms build-ups and mobilizations on the Egyptian side, rhetoric promising the conquest and annihilation of Israel, and Egyptian actions to restrict Israeli trade.  If Egypt hadn't done these things I doubt Israel would have attacked Egypt.  Yet you blame Israel for the conflicts.  This is what always happens with Israel!  The Arabs are held to absolutely no standard whatsoever, while all the consequences of violence that Israel is forced into get blamed on Israel.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

BTW, if we want to play the percentage game, how much of the former Ottoman Empire became Arab and how much became Jewish?  100% of the French influence zone became Arab or Turkish (most of modern-day Syria and Lebanon).  Britain had Mandatory Palestine and Mandatory Mesopotamia.  The latter became Iraq, the former mostly became Jordan, except for the small sliver between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which was divided between Jews and Arabs.  And this is on top of the entire Arabian peninsula and Egypt becoming independent Arab states.

Pretending like Israel got some giant chunk of the post-war partition is a malicious, intentionally misleading manipulation of numbers, scoping the denominator of "land that should have been Arab" down as far as you possibly can to try and have it cover only areas that became Jewish.  The Arabs got like 99.9% of the Middle East after the World Wars, and then spent the next 75 years bitching and moaning and basing their entire personality on how that other 0.1% went to the survivors of the Holocaust.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Again, the case for Israel is not that a bunch of Jews showed up in Palestine and claimed it was their land thousands of years ago so it should be their land now, and thus it became their land.  That is simply not what happened.

There was no Palestine, there was simply the Ottoman Empire.  Jews began legally purchasing land, thus they acquired the legal right to say they lived there.  After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War 1, parts of its lands were given to the Arabs and Turks right away, and other parts were held by the British and French, who attempted to partition the lands based on ethnic, geographic, resource and political considerations.

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.

Would you be all right with the descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of Washington State coming back there and claiming they had more of a "right" to be there than you do? Of course you wouldn't.

If the United States was defeated in a war and eliminated as a national concept, and its lands were broken up and divided administratively between Canada and Mexico, and Canada decided that, as part of their carving up of our lands into new countries, they were going to create a country specifically out of the lands where the Salish peoples represented a majority of residents, I would not have a problem with that.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes, the justice of the Israeli War on Hamas is immutable, in spite of the fact that it's the deplorable cretin Bibi Netanyahu holding the reins.  Just like the U.S. War on ISIS was just and righteous, a fact that did not change when leadership of the war transitioned from Obama to the deplorable cretin Donald Trump.

[GeneralMacArthur]

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.).

Most of the Arab migration to Israel occurred to cities where there were Jewish majorities.  Very little of it was to places that were Arab-dominated and would eventually become the proposal for a "Palestinian" state.

Here is a snippet from Jewish Virtual Library.  Obviously this is a biased source, but the numbers are not debatable.  It is up to you to decide whether you agree with their conclusion that contemporary evidence implies Arab migration to Palestine was because Jewish immigrants dramatically improved quality of life and economic opportunities.

Even a leading Arab nationalist believed the return of the Jews to their homeland would help resuscitate the country. According to Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia:

"The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons (abna’ihi­l­asliyin), for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles (jaliya) to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades and in all things connected with toil and labor."

As Hussein foresaw, the regeneration of Palestine, and the growth of its population, came only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The Jewish population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000. In fact, the permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and 1947 to more than 1.3 million.

This rapid growth was a result of several factors. One was immigration from neighboring states – constituting 37 percent of the total immigration to pre-state Israel – by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher standard of living the Jews had made possible. The Arab population also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945 and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.

The Arab population increased the most in cities with large Jewish populations that had created new economic opportunities. From 1922-­1947, the non-Jewish population increased 290 percent in Haifa, 131 percent in Jerusalem, and 158 percent in Jaffa. The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus, 78 percent in Jenin and 37 percent in Bethlehem.

The point is that this undercuts the notion that the Arab population of pre-state Israel was an indigenous population being displaced by the Jews, and that the dramatic increase in the Arab population between 1918 and 1948 represented a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous Arabs whose presence on the land made the creation of Israel unjust.

In actuality, most of the Arabs in pre-state Israel were not indigenous at all, they were Syrian or Lebanese or Jordanians who saw that there was good land and good economic opportunity in this newly-transformed land being developed by the Jews, and migrated (often illegally) to take advantage of it.  Then once they were in the country, in 1948, they declared that they were indigenous peoples who had a right to a state and that it was a horrible crime to push them out of their homes or force them to live under Israeli law.

You can still see this in effect today.  Arabs who actually live in Israel are mostly content and have no desire to dismantle the state or kill the Jews.  Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank come to Israel seeking economic opportunity and the modern society the Jews created.  These same Arabs who teach their children that Jews are murderous, baby-killing monsters will turn around and beg to take advantage of the Jewish economic and technologically innovations that make the land habitable and capable of sustaining a high living standard today.

Even the notion of an "indigenous Palestinian" is nonsense.  Palestine was just an empty pass-through wasteland of a region under Arab/Ottoman rule, an empty desert full of ruins and the occasional olive grove.  Between 1918 and 1948, its Arab population more than doubled.  The Arabs who lived in Palestine by 1948 were mostly from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. and had no unifying distinction other than the fact that they happened to live in Palestine on the date when the state of Israel was created.  It's an identity whose entire unifying factor is grievance and hatred of Israel.  If Israel had never existed and Palestine had just been the western 1/4 of Jordan, nobody would call themselves a "Palestinian."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Those of us on the "pro-Palestinian" side have all acknowledged that Hamas engages in terrorism yet you refuse to acknowledge that Irgun, the Haganah and other Zionist groups engaged in terrorism prior to 1947. You won't say it explicitly but you act like Israel is literally blameless and refuse to engage with their long history of aggression and terrorism.

When have I ever defended the Irgun?  I think they were bad dudes.  But that does not delegitimize the reality of the creation of the state of Israel and the authenticity of its right to exist, any moreso than the existence of the Sons of Liberty delegitimizes the American Revolution or America's right to exist.

What do you want me to do about the Irgun?  Nothing, they stopped existing 75 years ago.  Hamas does exist and I want them killed.  You want me to denounce the Irgun?  Fine, I denounce them.  Got any other ancient history you want to dredge up to try and shift away from the horror your Hamas buddies inflict on their victims, both Palestinians and Jews?

I know exactly what you are doing here, you are trying to create a false equivalence between a terrorist group from 75 years ago and a terrorist group that exists today, so you can try and use whataboutisms to defend the 10/7 attack.  It's sickening and disgraceful.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid, protecting him from international sanctions for war crimes in the UN, defending him from military intervention from his neighbours and doing everything possible to allow him to extend the war for no clear benefit to anyone except himself

As they say, actions speak louder than words

What a stupid thing to say.  Should we have cut off funding for the War against ISIS after Donald Trump became president?  And if not, that means we secretly supported Trump?

You are just trolling, even you do not believe that these are good arguments.  Even you do not believe the conclusions you expect other people to draw from the things you're typing.  You're just wasting space on the thread using stupid arguments to start fights with everyone.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid... as they say, actions speak louder than words

What a stupid thing to say.  Should we have cut off funding for the War against ISIS after Donald Trump became president?  And if not, that means we secretly supported Trump?

"Waaah your arguments are stupid"

High quality discourse on Atlas forum on February 25, 2024.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The population of Jerusalem was barely 20,000 people as recently as the late 19th century.

For comparison, Damascus was 10x larger and Chicago 50x larger.

In fact the whole region of modern Israel/Palestine had less than 1/4 the population of Chicago.

Obviously people lived there but these were hardly heavily-populated major world cities.  Jerusalem had been virtually irrelevant since the days of the Crusades.  The reason people didn't live in the region is because most of it was uninhabitable.  It was Jewish immigrants who made the land habitable and capable of sustaining a modern economy, which incited heavy Arab immigration from surrounding regions.  Those Arabs who immigrated in the early 1900s represented the majority of Palestinians in 1948.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The population of Jerusalem was barely 20,000 people as recently as the late 19th century.

For comparison, Damascus was 10x larger and Chicago 50x larger.

In fact the whole region of modern Israel/Palestine had less than 1/4 the population of Chicago.

Obviously people lived there but these were hardly heavily-populated major world cities.  Jerusalem had been virtually irrelevant since the days of the Crusades.  The reason people didn't live in the region is because most of it was uninhabitable.  It was Jewish immigrants who made the land habitable and capable of sustaining a modern economy, which incited heavy Arab immigration from surrounding regions.  Those Arabs who immigrated in the early 1900s represented the majority of Palestinians in 1948.

What is the population threshold or level of economic development required for a group of people to have "rights" in your estimation?

Because at this point you basically sound like a 19th century Manifest Destiny proponent wondering when the Noble Red Savages will finally get out of the way, or Cecil Rhodes talking about how the Africans would still be heathens in the jungle if the White Man hadn't generously taken up their burden.

Huh?  Where are you getting any of that?  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.  My point is that most of those Arabs wouldn't have been in Mandatory Palestine at all had it not been for the Jewish presence and activity there.  So why are they the indigenous peoples of the land while the Jews who made it habitable for them are colonizers and imperialists?

[GeneralMacArthur]

The population of Jerusalem was barely 20,000 people as recently as the late 19th century.

For comparison, Damascus was 10x larger and Chicago 50x larger.

In fact the whole region of modern Israel/Palestine had less than 1/4 the population of Chicago.

Obviously people lived there but these were hardly heavily-populated major world cities.  Jerusalem had been virtually irrelevant since the days of the Crusades.  The reason people didn't live in the region is because most of it was uninhabitable.  It was Jewish immigrants who made the land habitable and capable of sustaining a modern economy, which incited heavy Arab immigration from surrounding regions.  Those Arabs who immigrated in the early 1900s represented the majority of Palestinians in 1948.

Why don't you directly quote my post so I actually see your reply?

Notice how you don't mention that both sides of my family can be traced to villages for centuries and your claims on being no indengiouns Palestinians is false

So will you delete your post?

I try not to quote massive posts with a lot of nested quotes because it makes the forum unreadable.

When I post from my laptop I make some effort to chop up what I'm quoting to just the relevant bits.  But I write most of my Atlas posts from my phone, which makes that very difficult (selecting on the iPhone remains impossible).

Anyway, I think it's obvious from even a hostile reading of my post you quoted that you are misrepresenting what I said.  I never said "there are no indigenous Palestinians" -- at least, not in the sense of "there were no people there" -- I said the complete opposite.  I said there were people there.  I said there were 20,000 people in Jerusalem.  I said recent immigrants made up "the majority" of Arabs in pre-war Israel by 1948, which means there was a "minority" of Arabs who were not immigrants.

Certainly there were some Arabs who were native to the land.  Many of those Arabs continue to live in Israel to this day, happily and peacefully living alongside Jews with equal rights in a stable, prosperous democracy.

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.

I'm sorry, I should have been more clear when attributing a view to you -- I meant that you were saying it was unfair *from the perspective of the Arabs*, not from your own perspective.  If that was a misinterpretation of your viewpoint please let me know.

[GeneralMacArthur]

My point is twofold:

A) The enormous amount of immigration of Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Egyptian Arabs into Mandatory Palestine from 1918-1948 does not make a good case for why the region should have been deemed Arabic and withheld from the Jews in 1948.

B) The fact that more than half of the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine in 1948 were recent immigrants who immigrated there largely because of the benefits of a Jewish presence substantially undermines the notion that all or even most of the Arabs of 1948 were indigenous peoples of the region, or people who were threatened or cheated by the Jewish presence, or people who had the land stolen from them by immigrating Jews.



I feel like the story is so often told that there were 1.2 million Arabs living in Palestine, a handful of Jews came in and planted the flag of Israel and said "this is Jewish land now", and then when the Arabs protested, the Jews kicked them out.

What actually happened, from my perspective, is there were 600,000 Arabs (about 80% Muslim) living in Palestine, a handful of Jews came in legally and purchased land together, over a few decades they dramatically improved the land so that there were now plenty of economic opportunities and a high standard of living, and this resulted in 600,000 more Arabs immigrating to the region to reap the benefits of these improvements.  At the same time, 600,000 Jews immigrated to the region, mostly fleeing the Holocaust although some just wanted to be a part of this project to improve Israel and build a safe home for Jews.

The UN partition plan gave 800,000 of those 1.2 million Arabs an Arab-only state.  Only 400,000 Arabs** were asked to live alongside Jews in the State of Israel that was not an Arab-exclusive ethnostate.  Instead, they wanted all the land for themselves, to build an ethnostate that was Jewish-exclusive.  And thus began 75 years of conflict.


This is a very different story from Jews being colonizers who stole the land.  All the land the Jews owned was purchased or granted legally.  Jewish immigration and Arab migration were equal in scope, and in both cases was primarily to areas that were only habitable, at least to the extent that they could sustain this kind of population growth, because of the work of the Jews.  Why should it be the case that we say the Jewish immigrants from 1918-1948 were coming in and kicking the Arabs out of their rightful land?  Why do we not say that the Arab immigrants from 1918-1948 were coming in and kicking the Jews out of their rightful land -- land that they owned and had developed into being cultivatable?  After all it is the Arabs who declared war.  Who is the colonizer when a powerful foreign state declares war on a weaker state, to advance the interests of its peoples who had recently immigrated to the weaker state and now declared it their own rightful property?


**It is impossible to prove this, but I would strongly suspect that most of the 400,000 Arabs who lived in Israel in 1948 were recent immigrants.  First, most of the immigration was to Jewish cities, and second, the 1914 census of the Ottoman Empire showed that most of the population was in areas that are even today part of Palestine.  There were 500,000 Muslims in Palestine in 1914, 350K lived in the West Bank or Gaza, and another 63K lived in Jaffa, which was split between Muslim and Jewish sections in the partition.  That leaves only 87K, or 17%, of Muslims in 1914 who lived in regions that would later be granted to the Jewish state under the partition plan.

[GeneralMacArthur]

People should read Thomas Freidman's newest column on how Israel's acceptance in the world is rapidly evaporating. It's on the fast-track to becoming South Africa and Israel's most ardent defenders refuse to even acknowledge the incoming disaster. It's wolf warrior diplomacy or nothing to the Vosemites. 30,000 dead civilians in four months don't matter to them.

Well, it was obvious from the moment 10/7 happened that (A) Israel was going to have to attack Gaza to get rid of Hamas, and (B) Israel would pay a steep price to do so.  Otherwise they would have done it a long time ago.

It was inevitable that the world would quickly forget or justify the attack on 10/7, while engaging in full-scale condemnation and hatred of Israel for its response.  After all, Israel is the home of the Jews, and the arc of the world bends towards Jew hatred.  Always has, always will.

Hamas's entire strategy in this conflict is to intentionally put civilians in harm's way to maximize civilian damage in order to garner sympathy.  The world is eager to respond to this strategy with exactly the kind of response Hamas hoped to get.

Friedman mentions India, UAE and Jordan as countries that now endorse this Hamas strategy of "kill your own people and blame it on the other side to get sympathy points in a losing war."  Well, terror groups in those countries are listening closely and now know exactly what kind of strategy India, UAE and Jordan are willing to reward.  Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, the Houthis, al-Shabaab, ISIS and the al-Nusra front, to give a few examples of terror groups that threaten those countries, now know full well that the optimal strategy is to use human shields, take as many people down with you as possible, intentionally try and get as many people killed as you can.  The governments of the world are eager to lavishly reward you for doing so.

And PS if you do some huge terror attack first where you kill, kidnap and rape thousands of people, you can totally get away with it -- there will be no consequences because as long as you use human shields to defend yourself against the response... you'll be the good guys!

[GeneralMacArthur]

I waited a little while to comment on this because I was hoping more evidence would come out one way or another.  But it hasn't.

The Palestinian side is claiming Israel opened fire on a crowd of people and killed over 100, just like the Las Vegas shootings or the Boston Massacre (they're trying to brand this as "The Flour Massacre").  I've even seen claims that people were fired on with tanks (which would surely kill more than 100) or run over by tanks and bulldozers.  I've seen claims that there are photos and videos of bodies riddled with bullet holes.

But none of this has come up.  The only piece of evidence people keep posting is a dark shaky-cam video where you can hear gunfire, and then a bunch of pictures in daylight of dead bodies that bear no evidence of gunshot wounds or of being mangled and crushed under tank treads.  And of course you have the usual testimony of doctors at Gazan hospitals who have proven repeatedly to be liars in the past and are therefore not reliable witnesses.

None of this contradicts the Israeli story, which is remarkably plausible and has evidence to back it up.  One thing that's particularly convincing to me regarding the Israeli side is the fact that this all took place at 4:30 AM when it was pitch black outside (you can see this in the video footage).  A pitch-black night, a massive throng of people swarming trucks, panic and chaos -- and Israel has posted satellite footage of what is undeniable a stampede.  Are we saying nobody was trampled to death in a stampede of tens of thousands of people in the pitch black of night?  Are we saying nobody was run over by big heavy food trucks trying to plow their way through a crowd?  It's very tough to tell from the footage Israel posted whether anyone died under a truck, but it's very clear that people swarmed the trucks, and that the trucks (which were not driven by Israelis) were still trying to move through the crowd.

Now let's talk about why Israel opened fire.  Israel says it opened fire to try and protect the trucks and their own military positions.  In video footage from the next morning we can see the carcasses of several overturned and stripped-bare trucks.  How did those trucks get that way?  What fate befell their drivers?  And how did the other trucks get out?  This seems like an entirely plausible justification.  As for the Israeli military positions, I've seen a lot of posts about how Israel "doesn't want to be faced with the reality of what they've done" or "fired on starving people who were just begging for food", and I'm reminded of the Afghanistan withdrawal, when Afghan civilians amassed at an American military position, and the Americans didn't open fire.  Turned out one of the "civilians" was an ISIS fighter with a suicide vest, and nearly 200 people were killed, including thirteen U.S. soldiers.  So firing warning shots, and then shooting at people's legs when that fails, seems totally plausible to me.

So all-in-all, and I really try not to be subconsciously biased towards Israel in things like this because Israel has lied and done awful things in the past, but in this incident it does seem pretty likely that Israel is telling the truth.  What evidence we do have supports Israel's version of events, the Palestinian claims that hundreds of people were massacred with guns and tanks has not been supported by any physical evidence that ought to be trivial to come by, and the story has since spiraled out of control with tons of people online or in Hamas-aligned fake news outlets like Al-Jazeera and Middle East Eye (you should look up MEE's wiki page, they keep their owner secret because it's likely Hamas) just flat-out making things up to try and embellish their way to the most sympathetic possible story.

[GeneralMacArthur]

When the Tsar's soldiers opened fire on an unarmed crowd of protesters on Bloody Sunday 1905 even the most ardent monarchists didn't have the gall to say "actually some portion of the protesters were trampled to death and didn't die directly from gunfire, therefore the Russian Army bears no responsibility".

This is not an accurate comparison.  As far as I can tell there is no evidence that a single person died from Israeli gunshots.  I'm sure some people did die, but there is no evidence that it was a large number of people.  Based on the current information we have available it seems far more likely that IDF fire was responsible for only a few deaths, rather than all or a majority of the 100+ deaths.

Taken in isolation, a large crowd of people swarming an Israeli position and failing to heed warnings to disperse, followed by a few deaths from gunfire as Israel had to frighten them off, would not be a particularly noteworthy incident.

The reason it is noteworthy in this case, is because it happened at the same time as the stampede at the aid trucks, which resulted in a lot more deaths, allowing people to conflate the two and say things like "Israel opened fire on Palestinians, and 100 people died" which makes it sound like Israel shot and killed 100 people.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So here's what happened: Hamas has (according to Israel) been eliminated in the northern Gaza Strip, including Gaza City, meaning that one would imagine that Israel would be able to distribute abundant food in this region with relatively little safety risk. Despite this, Palestinians in Gaza City were so incredibly hungry, presumably due to a lack of food, that they stampeded food aid being distributed there.

I agree that Israel is being too slow on supplying the Gazan civilians with humanitarian aid, and I'm glad Biden is now going to be airdropping supplies.

Israel has not been blockading all supplies.  If this was true, everyone in Gaza would have been dead months ago, since it's a small impoverished region with few natural resources and no other source of supplies other than Israel.  Gaza is getting supplies, there just aren't enough.  Of course nobody thinks to blame Egypt for building a giant wall at the southern border and refusing to help a single Palestinian.

The protests at the border crossings that have been delaying (but not preventing) aid are not organized by Israel.  They are mostly organized by the families of the hostages.  In fact Israel has been engaged in a regular back-and-forth with the protesters to get them to go away.  For instance, they recently declared one of the crossings (there are several, and protesters are only blocking one at a time) a secure military region and set up IDF guards to prevent anyone from getting in to block the roads.  People are dishonestly conflating the actions of the protesters with official state policy of Israel when in fact the opposite is true.  Of course some far-right Israeli politicians have supported the protests... although when people say "far-right Israeli politicians" they're almost always just talking about Itamar Ben-Gvir.

I think it's good for Israel to supply humanitarian aid to civilians and that they should supply more, but at the same time I do think it's a bit rich for people to demand that Israel supply more aid and label it a genocide when Israel doesn't supply enough.  Israel is at war with Gaza!  A war Gaza started!  This is hardly some established responsibility of a party in wartime -- to go above and beyond providing for the security and welfare of the civilians of your enemy state.  The only reason we find ourselves in this unique situation is because everyone is fully convinced that Hamas and the Palestinians are totally separate entities on opposite sides, and the Palestinians are the responsibility of Israel, rather than Hamas.  This in particular is where I disagree with Vosem.  I don't think starving the Palestinians would have any military benefits, because Hamas would genuinely prefer if all their people starve to death.  Far from driving Hamas to surrender, it would only be helping Hamas.

IDF soldiers felt threatened by this, and their response was to open fire on the crowd

as far as I can tell, there is no evidence that IDF soldiers opened fire on "the crowd."  The satellite footage shows an enormous gathering of people over a very wide area swarming around dozens of trucks.  There are no IDF positions represented in any of the footage and Israel claims it was only when one group swarmed an Israeli position that they began firing.  It seems to me like this was a separate incident and Israel did not fire at any of the people surrounding the trucks.

And I'm supposed to care if the live fire or stampede caused the lion's share of the deaths?

I mean, yes.  I care.  I think Israeli soldiers intentionally and maliciously firing into a large gathering of people to try and kill as many vulnerable civilians as possible is much worse than insufficient Israeli aid causing people to stampede an aid caravan, resulting in trampling deaths.  Like one of those is clearly much more evil than the other.  And the pro-Palestine crowd knows this, which is why they keep trying to make it sound like the former is what happened, rather than admitting it was far more likely the latter, and why they keep calling it the "Flour Massacre" and comparing it to Bloody Sunday or the Boston Massacre, rather than, say, calling it the "Flour Stampede" and comparing it to Qasim Soleimani's funeral (another recent example where hundreds of people were crushed).

[GeneralMacArthur]

Of course nobody thinks to blame Egypt for building a giant wall at the southern border and refusing to help a single Palestinian.

If the Egyptians let the Palestinians flee Gaza, Israel would never allow them to return. It would be Nakba 2.0. Just about every world leader acknowledges this would probably happen, because you have members of Israel's government saying this! There was even a plan drawn up to do just this!

And even if they went to Gaza, where would they sleep? Eat? The Sinai is a desert! Contray to popular belief Gaza isn't a desert, I posted a climate map of the region several hundred pages ago.

So Egypt (and all its partners who allow it to maintain this policy) is keeping millions of people in an active war zone on the brink of starvation because they believe that if they accept Palestinian refugees, Israel won't let them back into Gaza?  That's the answer?  Israel already conquered north Gaza and forced all the Palestinians to the south.  What's stopping Israel from just annexing north Gaza today and not allowing any Palestinians up there?  And do we really think Israel's allies would stand for an exodus and annexation strategy?  Even if Donald Trump becomes POTUS again that feels like it would be crossing the line for most of America, to say nothing of India, France, Germany, the UK, etc. it is just not worth it for Israel.

This seems like a made-up reason that's just an attempt to direct the blame on Israel for regional powers' failure to get involved in any way to provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians.  Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, etc. pay a lot of lip service to how awful Israel is treating the Palestinians, and how Israel needs to do more, and then don't do anything themselves.

I do not seriously believe that Egypt's big wall to prevent Palestinians from fleeing was built to save the Palestinians from an Israeli ethnic cleansing.  I think it was built because for all the lip service Egypt pays to the welfare of Gaza, in truth Egypt places far more weight on the risk of importing Hamas soldiers, and they're not interested in taking that risk just to help the Gazans.  If there's one thing Americans have learned over the last four years it's that it's really easy and fun and rewarding to do absolutely nothing, and then criticize the person who tries, badly, to do something.

I do think it's a bit rich for people to demand that Israel supply more aid and label it a genocide when Israel doesn't supply enough.  Israel is at war with Gaza!  A war Gaza started!  This is hardly some established responsibility of a party in wartime -- to go above and beyond providing for the security and welfare of the civilians of your enemy state.  The only reason we find ourselves in this unique situation is because everyone is fully convinced that Hamas and the Palestinians are totally separate entities on opposite sides, and the Palestinians are the responsibility of Israel, .

Because the Palestinians and Hamas are separate entities? Hamas is a terrorist group that seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 from the internationally reconized Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian people aren't at war with Israel. And yes, you are responible for the secuirty and welfare of civilans from your enemy state once you capture them (never mind I don't consider Hamas to be a state even if they serve some state functions in their 17 years in power). Same with military prisoners. Thats how civilizaed nations act. Thats how democracies act.

Yes and that's how Israel is acting, which is why they're allowing aid in, protecting that aid, and in many cases helping with the distribution of aid.  Since Israel is after all a civilized nation and a democracy.

Also, I wish we could start calling this war the "Israeli liberation of Gaza" if we're truly asked to believe that Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007 against the will of the Gazans and has been holding them hostage with little-to-no support ever since, but enough power to prevent literally any uprising whatsoever.

I think the most generous I could be would be to compare this to the allied liberation of Italy.  There we had a fascist party that was undeniably popular once, but had since lost support from the population.  Mussolini was deposed by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1943, and most of Italy subsequently fought on the allied side against Mussolini's rump state, which was primarily defended by Nazis.  Why don't we see anything like that in Gaza?  Why don't we see Palestinians volunteering to fight for their own liberation side-by-side with the IDF?  Why aren't they going around and showing Israel where Hamas hid all their tunnels and weapons caches and data centers?  Personally I think the answer is that they like Hamas and want them to win.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I think it's good for Israel to supply humanitarian aid to civilians and that they should supply more, but at the same time I do think it's a bit rich for people to demand that Israel supply more aid and label it a genocide when Israel doesn't supply enough.  Israel is at war with Gaza!  A war Gaza started!  This is hardly some established responsibility of a party in wartime -- to go above and beyond providing for the security and welfare of the civilians of your enemy state.

I don’t really want to reply to this whole post, but I think this part specifically is interesting because it demonstrates a weird bit of sleight of hand that Israel supporters (and detractors, to be fair) often employ that is rarely made explicit: depending on whether it’s advantageous or not, Hamas and the PA alike are described as either states (or so close to states as to make the distinction irrelevant) or fundamentally non-entities beyond their capacity for uncontrolled violence. The truth is that it is not unique to demand that Israel provide for the security and welfare of the citizens of the state in Gaza, because there *is* no state in Gaza other than the Israeli one, nor has there been since the Egyptians left. Of course, anytime a territory is militarily occupied the occupant is responsible for providing for the occupied territory’s safety and security, making this point moot in the case of Gaza City; even if there were a Gazan state Israel would still be obligated to make sure there is enough food for civilians in occupied territory. But in this case, you don’t even need to go that far. Israel has been occupying the entire Gaza Strip for decades according to international law, and Gazans cannot receive food or any other essentials except through Israel, so of course Israel is responsible for their being fed during wartime just as it is during peacetime.

To use the Italy analogy, I view Hamas as the leader of a state similar to how Mussolini's Partito Nazionale Fascista was the leader of Italy.  It may be the case that most of the people in that state do not want Hamas/Mussolini as their leader, but short of a revolution or coup, the fact remains that Hamas/Mussolini are the leaders of the state, and have the complete capacity to utilize the full resources of that state in service of their military efforts.

What this means in practice is that you can't separate the state from the party in your war effort.  Hamas is capable of utilizing the entirety of the Gaza Strip's resources in service of their war on Israel, therefore Israel must treat the entirety of the Gaza Strip as enemy territory, even if some of the people there don't support the ruling party.

Once you've fully eliminated the enemy from a certain area of territory, then you can treat it as liberated territory so long as the civilian population is compliant.  Of course this was much easier for the allies than for Israel, because the liberated Italians immediately joined the allies in the fighting against Mussolini, while the Palestinians are at best begrudging or at worst openly hostile towards Israeli soldiers.  Also Mussolini never used soldiers disguised as civilians with suicide vests, or other techniques that are considered heinous war crimes today precisely because they make it impossible to distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants.

I think the Gazans would be doing themselves a huge favor if they joined with the IDF and fought for their own freedom from Hamas instead of being helpless and disinterested and only serving as human shields for Hamas.  Or at least formed partisan anti-Hamas groups to fight for their own interests distinct from Israel.  Pretty much every major civil conflict or liberation in the last century has featured some such element, so long as the populace does in fact desire to be liberated from their oppressors.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Gaza doctor says gunfire accounted for 80% of the wounds at his hospital from aid convoy bloodshed

Guess they must have guns for feet over in Gaza to produce all those gunshot wounds from "trampling"

I swear the IDF could say that shapeshifting aliens appeared and committed all the crimes they've been accused of and you'd just take them at their word for it

See the thing is I just do not trust the word of these Gaza doctors who speak to the media.  They have lied repeatedly in the past.  This claim doesn't even seem that outlandish to me, since he is specifically talking about "wounds", and we know Israel says they shot at the legs/feet of people swarming around the IDF position.  But I don't take his word as any evidence one way or another.