Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Megathread

[Hnv1]

I created this space where every poster can share his novel and really important opinion.

Please discuss the matter here and not in the threads dedicated to day-to-day Israeli politics.

[Vosem]

https://twitter.com/Haaretz/status/1405549057989242886

Bring on the null option.

[CumbrianLefty]

Looking forward to the high quality and original content that is sure to be posted here

[Velasco]

I created this space where every poster can share his novel and really important opinion.

Please discuss the matter here and not in the threads dedicated to day-to-day Israeli politics.

There is no "Israeli-Palestinian conflict", for the simple reason the "other side " is subjugated by your side. Everything between the Jordan and the Sea is ruled by Israel - this is a matter of fact, not an opinion. Violence and inhumane acts occur on a daily basis and they are triggered by the Israeli government, so rhat's inseparable from present day Israeli politics. Another question are the origins of what you call "the conflict" (which clearly relates to the past), because present-day Israel has annexed  many territories beyond the Green Line, either formally or de facto. Given that the nature of the military occupation in the West Bank is permanent and a majority of the aboríginal Palestinian population lives in ghettos, bantustans and open-air prisons (Gaza), Israel is deemed an apartheid state by some humanitarian organizations. Pretending that you can dissociate these realities from present day Israel politics is simply an excercise of denialism. I have little interest tin discussing Grand Mufti personally. As far as I'm concerned, you can continue discussing Mr Natphali Bennet's alopecia in the Israel politics thread and stay on your perennial and hypocritical state of denial, resorting to euphemisms such as "the conflict" and other mental gymnastics to conceal reality.  I'd rather read Gideon Levy's articles in Haaretz, for they are much more interesting and revealing about present day Israel. Mr Levy is a honest journalist, while you are insignificant

[(no subject)]

Velasco: Even if Muhammed wasn't a paedophile or child rapist, he *was* still a slaver, a war lord, and a boozer who liked his wine.

[Estrella]

Velasco: Even if Muhammed wasn't a paedophile or child rapist, he *was* still a slaver, a war lord, and a boozer who liked his wine.

So was Andrew Jackson and we don't think Americans are subhumans, do we?

[(no subject)]

Even the Jews don’t actuAally think that.

Abbas in 2011 said that rejecting the Partition plan had been a mistake, but as Brian Cohen that Monty Python character said, “bit late for that now”…

[CumbrianLefty]

Velasco: Even if Muhammed wasn't a paedophile or child rapist, he *was* still a slaver, a war lord, and a boozer who liked his wine.

So basically the sort of person you might expect from the 6th/7th century?

[(no subject)]

Yeah but our friends on the left give black and brown people of the past who did sh**tty things a pass even though they don’t deserve it. South American people and human sacrifice, I’m looking at you…

Sorry, my bitterness at life is how I channel my frustration at being crippled/handicapped. Not anyone’s fault.

[Estrella]

Yeah but our friends on the left give black and brown people of the past who did sh**tty things a pass even though they don’t deserve it. South American people and human sacrifice, I’m looking at you…

Sorry, my bitterness at life is how I channel my frustration at being crippled/handicapped. Not anyone’s fault.

I'm not a psychologist, but "hurr durr browns are actually bad because they killed people half a millenium ago" seems like a rather ineffective coping mechanism for any problem.

[(no subject)]

People on the Islamophile left are ready to believe just about anything about Israel. It seems to be a process of mutual myth-reinforcement.

[CumbrianLefty]

And certain people automatically dismissing almost any criticism of Israel as "anti-Semitic" only helps strengthen such attitudes on the "other" side. Its almost as if both extremes feed off each other.

[(no subject)]

Yeah but we know the Arab Palestinian dictatorship openly advocates mass murder of Jewish inhabitants of all of what was Mandatory Palestine. Even Abbas has said the future Palestinian state will be Judenfrei. Oh, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is widely distributed and published in the Arab-Islamic world.

if you want to do a damn silly thing as deny that the Arab political attitude towards Israel is based on hatred of the People of the Book (Christians and Jews) then don’t do it in this damn silly way.

[kaoras]

Yeah but our friends on the left give black and brown people of the past who did sh**tty things a pass even though they don’t deserve it. South American people and human sacrifice, I’m looking at you…

Sorry, my bitterness at life is how I channel my frustration at being crippled/handicapped. Not anyone’s fault.

Eh, yeah. Mmm I'm going to take my chances and say that the Aztecs and Maya certainly aren't in South America (Because I really doubt you are aware about the rare cases of the Inca). But Europe burned witches at the same time so we are even

[(no subject)]

That’s like saying the atom bombs mitigate the crimes of Imperial Japan. The Chinese and Koreans and others are more than justified in the pleasure they take in Japanese atomic suffering.

[(no subject)]

Pro-Arabs make sweeping statements, based (I am forced sadly to say) on lamentable ignorance of what actually happened.

1. Both the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate, formalised in 1923, explicitly said that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The Labour Zionist leadership accepted that condition and the British Mandatory authorities enforced it.
2. The Mandatory system was based on the assumption that the Mandates would eventually become self-governing and independent. The British intended that Palestine would become a bi-national state in which the Jewish National Home would co-exist with the existing Arab population. There was plenty of land to do that and given goodwill on both sides there was no reason why this could not have been achieved.
3. Yes it's quite possible that some of the Palestinian Arabs are descended from the ancient Israelites, but I don't really see how that is relevant. Whatever their genetic heritage, Jews and Arabs are clearly not "one people," any more than Australians and Americans are.
4. To say that "The State of Israel was made possible by the racist colonial rule of the British" is outrageous nonsense. Palestine was not a British colony, it was a League of Nations Mandate administered by Britain. The State of Israel was created in the teeth of strenuous British opposition. After the 1929 Arab uprising Britain abandoned its commitment to the Jewish National Home, sharply restricted Jewish immigration, stopped further land sales to Jews and did everything it could to support the Arab opposition to the Jewish presence.
6. Balfour's personality is irrelevant. Although his name was on the Declaration it was actually Lloyd George who drove British policy in support of Zionism. His motives were a mixture of Christian idealism and calculation that supporting Zionism would gain support for the Allied cause in the US (which it did).
7. You persist in the assertion that there was a pre-existing category of people called "Palestinians." This is quite untrue. If you had gone to Jaffa or Nablus in 1900 and asked the people what they were, not one would have said "I am a Palestinian." This is a western notion of national identity which was not imported into the Arab would until after World War I. Palestinian national identity only formed after the British designated Ottoman south Syria as "Palestine."
8. As for "sweeping aside" the "primitive" Arabs, if you knew anything about Jewish and Zionist history, you would know that the Jewish leadership in the Mandate period were Labour Zionists - Ben Gurion and other socialists who believed that Jewish and Arab workers would together build a socialist utopia in Palestine. Jabotinsky and his Revisionists said that this was naive, and as it turned out they were right, but they were always a minority faction in this period.
9. So why did the Palestinian Arabs eventually get swept aside? The Jewish leadership supported both the 1936 Peel Royal Commission report and the 1947 UNSCOP partition plan, both of which would have created an Arab state FAR larger than anything the Palestinians can now hope to achieve. The Palestinians led by Husseyni (the one who spent the war in Germany urging Hitler to kill all the Jews) rejected both, choosing instead in 1948 to wage a war which they were bound to lose. When you reject all compromise and insist on all or nothing, and then lose, what you get is nothing. I doubt there has been any people in history who have suffered three such catastrophically bad leaders as the Palestinians have had in Husseyni, Arafat and Abbas.
I hope you have found this informative.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

2. The Mandatory system was based on the assumption that the Mandates would eventually become self-governing and independent.

...

4. ... Palestine was not a British colony, it was a League of Nations Mandate administered by Britain.

To deny that the mandatory system was not colonialism with a veneer of whitewash is to deny history. It was an attempt to make colonialism palatable to anticolonialists. Other than a desire to rule them, there was zero reason for the ex-Ottoman territories to not have been granted independence in 1919 instead of being subjected to Anglo-French colonial control under the veneer of the mandatory system. Granted, they weren't colonies in the sense of America, Australia, or Algeria, but to deny that in 1919 the mandatory powers intended "eventually" to be effectively never, is to deny history.

[America Needs R'hllor]

Thanks for letting me know which thread to stay out of!

[(no subject)]

Israel has overwhelmingly won every war it's fought with the Arab states - 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. in both 67 and 73 Israel could have taken Cairo and Damascus if it had wanted, but wisely it didn't. Against non-state groups like Fatah, Hezbollah and Hamas "victory" is of course harder to define. Nevertheless, these groups have been trying for 54 years to destroy Israel through terrorism, and it's still there, so it's hard to deny that Israel has won these encounters over the long term. It's also hard to see how that will change. Israel has one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. With only 8 million people (only 6 million of them Jews), Israel is the world's 11th strongest military power. Against a well-organised non-violent resistance movement, Israel might have trouble, but it seems the Palestinians are too fixated on "armed struggle" and jihad to attempt such a campaign. I suspect non-violent struggle offends the Arab sense of masculine honour.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Israel has overwhelmingly won every war it's fought with the Arab states - 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. in both 67 and 73 Israel could have taken Cairo and Damascus if it had wanted, but wisely it didn't. Against non-state groups like Fatah, Hezbollah and Hamas "victory" is of course harder to define. Nevertheless, these groups have been trying for 54 years to destroy Israel through terrorism, and it's still there, so it's hard to deny that Israel has won these encounters over the long term. It's also hard to see how that will change. Israel has one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. With only 8 million people (only 6 million of them Jews), Israel is the world's 11th strongest military power. Against a well-organised non-violent resistance movement, Israel might have trouble, but it seems the Palestinians are too fixated on "armed struggle" and jihad to attempt such a campaign. I suspect non-violent struggle offends the Arab sense of masculine honour.

1973 showed Israel that they aren't invincible though.

[Hnv1]

Israel has overwhelmingly won every war it's fought with the Arab states - 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. in both 67 and 73 Israel could have taken Cairo and Damascus if it had wanted, but wisely it didn't. Against non-state groups like Fatah, Hezbollah and Hamas "victory" is of course harder to define. Nevertheless, these groups have been trying for 54 years to destroy Israel through terrorism, and it's still there, so it's hard to deny that Israel has won these encounters over the long term. It's also hard to see how that will change. Israel has one of the most powerful armed forces in the world. With only 8 million people (only 6 million of them Jews), Israel is the world's 11th strongest military power. Against a well-organised non-violent resistance movement, Israel might have trouble, but it seems the Palestinians are too fixated on "armed struggle" and jihad to attempt such a campaign. I suspect non-violent struggle offends the Arab sense of masculine honour.

1973 showed Israel that they aren't invincible though.

You mean when Israel finished the war barraging Damascus and a day away from encircling the Egyptian 3rd Army and 101 Kms from Cairo?
If it weren't for the terrible cabinet that decided against a preemptive strike...

Anyway, it was a bloody tie at best for the Egyptians military-wise, and the gap between the sides expanded dramatically since (Syria and Iraq aren't even on the horizon anymore).