Israel-Gaza war

[Vosem]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

I think the specific individuals probably deserve it, but I also think it's a bad move, since it's important for all of humanity that this war is understood as a crushing Israeli success, to disincentivize other actors from behaving like Hamas and to incentivize other actors to behave like Israel.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

I think other leaks have shown that Israeli-Saudi normalization has probably only been delayed for the length of the war, particularly given enhanced Israeli-Saudi intelligence cooperation during the war, and I think an American recognition of Palestine is unlikely just given domestic concerns. (Like, the US is currently pretending to cut off aid from Palestine while not doing so in reality -- this demonstrates the signals the administration is trying to send the electorate).

More generally, I think relatively pro-Palestinian figures within the State Department and American establishment broadly have resigned themselves to trying to work within Biden's framework, since there is a substantial likelihood that Trump returns to office in a year. If the war is still ongoing at that time, Trump and his foreign policy team are likely to push the Israelis to behave in substantially harsher ways (and is also likelier to sign off on an invasion of Lebanon, and an invasion of Qatar by the Gulf States, and much harsher practices by Saudi Arabia towards the conflict in North Yemen), so there is an effort to try to end the war before then. I think this also kind of neatly explains the very slow pace of fighting -- Bibi believes that he may go to jail if the war ends, but also that the conclusion may be more favorable to Israel if the war is still ongoing in January. A slow pace of fighting also makes it less likely that Hamas will call for a ceasefire.

This seems extremely cynical (motivated more by Bibi's personal political situation than Israel's geopolitical one, which I think would call for more 'shock and awe'), but it is what it is, and given the evolution of Western public opinion (new pro-Israel election results in South America and Europe, public pressure forcing governments to withdraw Palestinian aid) it seems basically sustainable.

[Comrade Funk]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

[Vosem]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

[Mechavada]

Challenge Accepted, عزيزي المنافس

[Zinneke]

The residents of the Palestine mandate were as entitled to political self-determination as anyone else in the world regardless of anyone's opinion of the "viability" of such a state.

Not at all.

I'd say the Palestinian Arab population had about as much right to a state as the Sudetenland Germans did.

Bohemia/Moravia: colonization many csnturies ago resulted in a substantial German population existing there; they were unhappy when the native population reasserted independence in the 20th century; they partitioned the state on arbitrary lines to ensure that they had at least part of it but this only served to weaken the Czechoslovak state and it was obviously only a first step towards the German desires of full annexation

The analogies with the desire of the Arab states to conquer Israel is obvious. When a desire for national autonomy is directly linked to imperialism you have to ask questions about to what extent said desire should be supported.

By that logic all European descendant residents of the Americas should be expelled.

That's obviously an extreme and unworkable position,  but I would definitely say that if any Native American nation were to seek independence and were to decide to prioritize the native population over settlers (just as Latvia prioritises Latvians over Russian settlers, for example), that is something I think would be fine.

Extreme and unworkable because White Americans look like you. Otherwise you would understand that Palestinians have inhabited Palestine for far longer than White Americans have inhabited America. As have Jews of course. It is entirely possible that Palestinians and Jews have common ancestry with the inhabitants of the place a couple thousand years ago, and many DNA tests show Palestinians as having more linkage with Judeans than some Israeli Jews. Not to mention it's likely Jews exterminated another people to make the Holy Land their own. But we're going down a rabbit hole so absurd, in the end what you really want to write is "some nations are more equal than others". Just write it patzer, and get a rise out of being cool and edgy on the interwebz.

[Vosem]

The residents of the Palestine mandate were as entitled to political self-determination as anyone else in the world regardless of anyone's opinion of the "viability" of such a state.

Not at all.

I'd say the Palestinian Arab population had about as much right to a state as the Sudetenland Germans did.

Bohemia/Moravia: colonization many csnturies ago resulted in a substantial German population existing there; they were unhappy when the native population reasserted independence in the 20th century; they partitioned the state on arbitrary lines to ensure that they had at least part of it but this only served to weaken the Czechoslovak state and it was obviously only a first step towards the German desires of full annexation

The analogies with the desire of the Arab states to conquer Israel is obvious. When a desire for national autonomy is directly linked to imperialism you have to ask questions about to what extent said desire should be supported.

By that logic all European descendant residents of the Americas should be expelled.

That's obviously an extreme and unworkable position,  but I would definitely say that if any Native American nation were to seek independence and were to decide to prioritize the native population over settlers (just as Latvia prioritises Latvians over Russian settlers, for example), that is something I think would be fine.

Extreme and unworkable because White Americans look like you. Otherwise you would understand that Palestinians have inhabited Palestine for far longer than White Americans have inhabited America. As have Jews of course. It is entirely possible that Palestinians and Jews have common ancestry with the inhabitants of the place a couple thousand years ago, and many DNA tests show Palestinians as having more linkage with Judeans than some Israeli Jews. Not to mention it's likely Jews exterminated another people to make the Holy Land their own. But we're going down a rabbit hole so absurd, in the end what you really want to write is "some nations are more equal than others". Just write it patzer, and get a rise out of being cool and edgy on the interwebz.

No, actually you should just not expel people who live somewhere legally. The migration of Europeans to what is now the United States was not done in contradiction of any existing Native American law, and the migration of the people who are now Israelis to Israel was done substantially as the explicit policy of the government, prior to 1939. Whether those people have a genetic connection to people who lived there thousands of years ago or not is an absurd thing to care about. Palestinian liberationism would be like if the reaction of Americans to immigration waves were to lynch immigrant communities and try to ban people from selling them land; it's Know-Nothingism scaled up by multiple orders of magnitude.

Most Jewish communities are descended from Judean men, but not Judean women. Most Muslim Palestinians are descended from Judean women, but only some of their male-line descent is Judean (much of it comes from the Arabian peninsula). Non-Muslim Palestinians, like Christians, Druze, or Samaritans, are virtually entirely Judean in genetic descent (as are Iraqi Jews, but they're an exception even within the Middle East; this is not actually the case for Palestinian Jews because they've intermarried with Jews from other parts of the world traveling to Palestine over the centuries; particularly famously there was an early-1700s migration of students from Vilnius*). But none of this is relevant to the question of whether Israel and the United States have the right to establish whatever citizenship law they like; white Americans outside of Oklahoma have trivial amounts of Native American ancestry.

*Eg, former Israeli President Reuven Rivlin is a Palestinian Jew whose ancestors lived in Jerusalem long before Zionism...but still Ashkenazi, because he is descended from 1700s Lithuanians.

[GoTfan]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

[Vosem]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

[GoTfan]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

The more you best them down, the more resistant they become and the more people will be ready to rise against you.

Don't try to paint West Germany as some sort of anti-Nazi haven after WW2 either. There was a significant ultra-right movement and Konrad Adenauer literally denounced Denazification, oh and there is another far right movement growing in Germany today.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Undercover Israeli troops dressed as medical staff kill three militants in West Bank hospital raid, officials say

Israeli special forces, dressed as civilians and medical staff, infiltrated the Ibn Sina hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin on Tuesday and killed three Palestinian men, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials.

Hamas said the men were Jenin Brigades fighters, an umbrella group of armed Palestinian factions in the West Bank city. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they were terrorists linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and an Israeli government minister praised the operation.

The disguised special forces “infiltrated the hospital individually, headed to the third floor, and assassinated the young men,” Palestinian state news agency WAFA reported, citing sources from inside the hospital.

The IDF said it targeted Hamas fighter Mohammed Jalamneh who “had recently been involved in promoting significant terrorist activity and was hiding in the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/israel-undercover-raid-jenin-west-bank-hamas-intl/index.html

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's targeted and only hits Hamas, no civilians, exactly what Israel should be doing.

It's a violation of international humanitarian law, specifically perfidy.

This is a long-standing rule of customary international law already recognized in the Lieber Code, the Brussels Declaration and the Oxford Manual, and codified in the Hague Regulations.[1] It is also set forth in Additional Protocol I.[2] Under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, “killing or wounding treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts

Given that the definition of perfidy provides that the confidence of an adversary be based on a situation which requires protection under international humanitarian law, the following acts are considered perfidious if committed with the intent to betray the confidence of the adversary:

•simulation of protected status by using the red cross or red crescent emblem because medical and religious personnel, units and transports displaying the distinctive emblems must be respected and protected (see Chapter 7);

•simulation of civilian status because civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities must be respected and may not be the object of attack (see Rules 1 and 6);

If Hamas is hiding in civilian areas while engaging in combat, any resulting civilian casualties are their legal responsibility, not Israel's. If Palestinian civilians die as a result of Israeli military operations against Hamas, so long as the casualties are proportionate, and the targeting of civilians is not deliberate, Israel has not violated international law. I realize those last two are highly contentious, but they are not easily determined (even if some casual observers may think otherwise). But this is an open and shut case of perfidy. Israel needs to arrest these soldiers and charge them (or turn them over to the ICJ or some equivalent body), or it has de jure descended to the same level as Hamas.

[GP270watch]

How war destroyed Gaza’s neighbourhoods – visual investigation

[BigSkyBob]

Like, to be clear in one paragraph: my position is not just that we should create a world free from Palestinian liberationism. My position is that we should create a world where everyone, including the Palestinian people themselves, can agree that the destruction of Palestinian liberationism, as represented in this operation, was morally not just good but obligatory. Then there can be peace.

The irony of claiming "then there can be peace" when your position is that there will be war until they renounce their legitimate interest in political self-determination is stunning. No, the war against Palestinian political self-determination has been fought by highly irrational zionists partisans such as yourself and Bibi, and will only be ended when zionists such as yourself and Bibi are made to understand that the lives of over four million Palestinians are in fact worth more than a Jewish fingernail[as another highly irrational zionist put it.]

No; no country has any legitimate interest in the territory of any other without that country's consent. The Second World War was fought to make that clear; 73 million did not die in vain.

Gaza simply isn't part of Israel. As you put, "no country, including Israel, has any legitimate interest in Gaza without the people of Gaza's consent."

But, under international law, Israel is the successor to the British Mandate of Palestine, and so it is. Israel has made particular concessions to Palestinian nationalism, like not unilaterally extending citizenship and Israeli law to areas likely to form part of a future Palestinian state (...like Gaza), but in fact the normal procedure of international law is that there is no Palestinian right to independence without Israel's consent, and Gaza is a territory occupied by a criminal organization, which would not normally be entitled to the protections of IHL at all.

The British held Palestine by brute force, not by moral right. The nauseant Zionist entity overran Palestinian territories, and held them by brute force, not moral right. In 1967 it overran more Palestinian territories and held them by brute force, not moral right.

The residents of the Palestine mandate were as entitled to political self-determination as anyone else in the world regardless of anyone's opinion of the "viability" of such a state.

Not at all.

I'd say the Palestinian Arab population had about as much right to a state as the Sudetenland Germans did.

Bohemia/Moravia: colonization many csnturies ago resulted in a substantial German population existing there; they were unhappy when the native population reasserted independence in the 20th century; they partitioned the state on arbitrary lines to ensure that they had at least part of it but this only served to weaken the Czechoslovak state and it was obviously only a first step towards the German desires of full annexation

The analogies with the desire of the Arab states to conquer Israel is obvious. When a desire for national autonomy is directly linked to imperialism you have to ask questions about to what extent said desire should be supported.

By that logic all European descendant residents of the Americas should be expelled.

That's obviously an extreme and unworkable position,  but I would definitely say that if any Native American nation were to seek independence and were to decide to prioritize the native population over settlers (just as Latvia prioritises Latvians over Russian settlers, for example), that is something I think would be fine.

If the families of said settlers have been in America for centuries, are they really still settlers? They sound pretty indigenous to me. How long do people have to be somewhere before they're considered indigenous?

Yes, I realize this could also apply to West Bank settlers if they stay there another generation or two but I don't understand why this logic only applies to certain groups of people. And I support Israel's right to exist within 1967 boundaries anyways as those who have been there several generations are also now indigenous.

'Indigeneity' is a racist concept which should not be afforded respect in the laws of any country.

[GALeftist]

Yes; I continue to be the only person in this thread citing the actual Geneva Conventions. The article dealing with the protection of medical personnel is Article 24 of the First Geneva Convention, which has the following to say:

1977  The assignment to the activities referred to in Article 24 needs to be ‘exclusive’. While a narrow reading of the provision would seem to suggest that the requirement of ‘exclusivity’ only applies to medical personnel, logic dictates that this requirement applies to all three categories of personnel covered by Article 24.
1978  The importance of this requirement is significant. It entails that, once assigned, a person can only undertake one or more of the prescribed activities. A person may be assigned, for example, to both the treatment of the wounded and sick and the prevention of disease. Conversely, the assignment cannot cover activities that are not mentioned in Article 24. An activity not listed in Article 24 may even, depending on the circumstances, amount to an ‘act harmful to the enemy outside their humanitarian duties’ which could entail a loss of protection (see section F).

Individuals carrying weapons virtually certainly lose their protected status, as carrying weapons is an act harmful to the enemy, and become valid targets. Similarly, hospitals used as a base for such individuals lose their protected status; there must be a warning given that the hospital has lost protected status, and I guess we can quibble about whether one was given, but it has been general Israeli practice for a long time now not to respect a protection of this kind when it is abused.

Whether or not the hospital was a valid military target doesn't enter into it. If the soldiers were dressed up like doctors and shooting at any targets, even valid ones, that is perfidy, impermissible under customary international humanitarian law.

Even more generally, this occurred in the West Bank, where there is not generally a state of ongoing warfare, and the activities of the Israelis here are on the same legal footing as undercover cops pursuing criminals.

Man, this is really saying the quiet part out loud! Israel's whole case for their continued presence in the West Bank without having given Palestinians there equal rights is that the current situation in the West Bank, outside East Jerusalem, is not annexation but military occupation. Occupation is literally the archetypal example of when international law applies! If indeed the West Bank were indistinguishable from Israel proper, as your comparison suggests, Israel would not only not be a democracy but be subject to sanctions for permanently rendering stateless such a large population.

Even more generally, it is really not at all clear that the actual text of the Geneva Conventions protects Hamas militants at all (this takes an extremely motivated reading IMHO); they protected uniformed combatants of sovereign states, and even among those states who have recognized Palestine the Gazan government is virtually never the one recognized. Of course a de facto state exists, but under international law Gaza is Israeli territory occupied by an illegitimate organization.

This is just the generic rightist drivel about how laws are meant to protect favored groups and bind disfavored groups. Whether international law protects Hamas is not at issue; the issue is whether it binds Israeli soldiers. Here's a link to the leading source on customary international humanitarian law which clearly states that "the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status" is perfidy and therefore a war crime. You can say that this doesn't exist, if you want, but if so we really have nothing to talk about, as without customary international law there's really no way to coherently call anything a war crime.

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

Except the Zionists in 1948 and then again in 1967 when they claimed the unique (at least since WW2) right to seize, occupy and colonize territory taken by conquest. If stopping Hamas from winning would justify killing 2.3 million Palestinians then would stopping Zionist militias in 1948 or the IDF in 1967 from seizing territory justify killing every single Israeli Jew too?

What terrible precedent would be set by a Hamas victory that hasn't already been set by a full century of victories for other irregular guerrillas like the IRA or the Viet Cong?

[Ferguson97]

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

Why do you view Palestinian statehood as an evil comparable to Nazism or Russian imperialism? This is an extremely bold claim. I don't see how support for Palestinian statehood is any different than support for any other country to exist.

Why can the French have France, the Mexicans have Mexico, and the Israelis have Israel, but the Palestinians cannot have Palestine?

[Vosem]

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

Why do you view Palestinian statehood as an evil comparable to Nazism or Russian imperialism? This is an extremely bold claim. I don't see how support for Palestinian statehood is any different than support for any other country to exist.

Why can the French have France, the Mexicans have Mexico, and the Israelis have Israel, but the Palestinians cannot have Palestine?

I don't view Palestinian statehood as evil at all; I think ultimately the best outcome would be a two-state solution. I think the currently existing Palestinian political parties have the destruction of Israel as a terminal goal rather than the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, and I think this is comparably evil to the Nazis conquering Czechia because they felt Germany was incomplete without it.

The comparison to Imperial Russia is a little more difficult, because while many of their conquests were very brutal (the conquest of Circassia, in particular, was a Nazi-tier horrifying event), they also took place before conquest was prohibited by international law in 1928. I think conquest-motivated ideologies after 1928 are worse than earlier ones because they threaten the peace of the entire world, which was not a thing that existed in the 19th century or earlier epochs.

@Vosem

How do you feel about President Biden's recent executive order to sanction Israeli settlers?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/01/biden-executive-order-israel-palestine-00139023#:~:text=President%20Joe%20Biden%20is%20expected,official%20and%20a%20congressional%20aide.

And how do you feel about the state department considering to recognize a Palestinian state and linking Palestinian statehood to any Israel-Saudi deal

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war

You're never gonna convince him to agree with even the most minor anti-Israel policy. He'll write an essay-long soliloquy where he'll play PC and waddle, but in the end it always ends with the maximalist pro-Israel position (destruction of "Palestinian liberationism" aka destruction of any sort of "Palestine"). Even ignoring Gaza, he supports the ongoing policies in the West Bank of Palestinians receiving no equal rights. It's almost impossible to change someone with these type of views.

I like that you admit that you won't convince me of things, but the conversation here should continue anyway, until I convince you to destroy the Palestinian liberationism within you. Total destruction means infrastructure too, but it also means destroying those ideas in every human heart, mind, and soul.

That is an impossible idea unless your goal is the death of every Palestinian on the planet. Then again, you support that.

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

Except the Zionists in 1948 and then again in 1967 when they claimed the unique (at least since WW2) right to seize, occupy and colonize territory taken by conquest. If stopping Hamas from winning would justify killing 2.3 million Palestinians then would stopping Zionist militias in 1948 or the IDF in 1967 from seizing territory justify killing every single Israeli Jew too?

What terrible precedent would be set by a Hamas victory that hasn't already been set by a full century of victories for other irregular guerrillas like the IRA or the Viet Cong?

But the Zionists did not appear as a conquering army; they immigrated, mostly in cooperation with government policy. (This is why I compare the response of the Palestinians at that time to the Know-Nothings). They declared independence and received international recognition much as other colonies did; everywhere else colonial-era borders have been respected, which means the British Mandate.

I think the problem with Hamas in particular is that their strategy for gaining international sympathy is driving up casualty counts using human shields, so if it were successful they would incentivize every other group which is defending or attacking a city to try to maximize casualties. (This happened to some degree in the early stages of the War in Donbass, in 2014-15). It would mean every other war on Earth becoming much more lethal.

The Vietnamese example doesn't really apply because both North and South Vietnam theoretically claimed the entire territory; much like in Korea (...or China), the existence of the two governments was legally considered by both sides to be a protracted state of civil war. I don't think there are any examples of established states which have been entirely conquered by force since 1945; partial examples like Western Sahara or West Papua exist, where a colony was claimed by some already-existing independent state and was afterwards incorporated by force (...maybe more famously this was attempted unsuccessfully in East Timor, and I guess if you were sympathetic to the 1948 Arab governments you could say they tried to pull this off), but those examples were generally before widespread international recognition.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Biden facing election defeat because of his unwavering support for Israel.

Biden and Israel

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2aSJBgyXUv/

Meanwhile in Gaza, UNRWA appears rotten to the core.

UNRWA Schools

https://www.instagram.com/p/C20PP5jP5MU/

That is really sad that the western countries have been donating billions of dollars and all they got was a Muslim version of the Nazi party.

[GoTfan]

Biden facing election defeat because of his unwavering support for Israel.

Biden and Israel

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C2aSJBgyXUv/

Meanwhile in Gaza, UNRWA appears rotten to the core.

UNRWA Schools

https://www.instagram.com/p/C20PP5jP5MU/

That is really sad that the western countries have been donating billions of dollars and all they got was a Muslim version of the Nazi party.

Ne very careful with  the Nazi comparisons there, mate.

[Devout Centrist]

...why? Every other nationalist movement has accepted that conquest is wrong. Nobody thinks that convincing Russians to leave Ukraine can only be done by killing every Russian. Similarly Nazism died without killing every German. What, in your estimation, makes the Palestinians so uniquely evil that they cannot be convinced to abandon Palestinian liberationism?

When did you completely lose the plot?

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

But the Zionists did not appear as a conquering army; they immigrated, mostly in cooperation with government policy. (This is why I compare the response of the Palestinians at that time to the Know-Nothings). They declared independence and received international recognition much as other colonies did; everywhere else colonial-era borders have been respected, which means the British Mandate.

They used terrorism to force the British out, committed atrocities against communities that they had previously promised peaceful coexistence, then forcibly deported enough Palestinians to secure a demographic majority in a new state that included territory promised to the Palestinians in 1948. Then they did the same thing after 1967, seizing territory and building colonies in what little remained of what was supposed to be Palestine. For all intents and purposes done exactly this:

I think the currently existing Palestinian political parties have the destruction of Israel as a terminal goal rather than the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, and I think this is comparably evil to the Nazis conquering Czechia because they felt Germany was incomplete without it.

but in reverse. The Israelis conquered all of Palestine because the hardliners thought it would be incomplete otherwise. So they've already won, why is that acceptable when the reverse isn't?

I think the problem with Hamas in particular is that their strategy for gaining international sympathy is driving up casualty counts using human shields, so if it were successful they would incentivize every other group which is defending or attacking a city to try to maximize casualties. (This happened to some degree in the early stages of the War in Donbass, in 2014-15). It would mean every other war on Earth becoming much more lethal

Israel accuses any time Hamas operates from within a civilian population as "using human shields" which would apply to literally every guerrilla force that has ever existed. Literally every guerrilla force ever goads the occupying force into slaughtering uninvolved civilians because it creates a new pool of recruits and wins international sympathy, it isn't a strategy unique to Hamas.

One could also point out that the Israelis have literally admitted to sniping civilians waving white flags (including Israeli hostages!!!) and to intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure to increase the spread of disease and famine. Do you think allowing that might make every other war on Earth much more lethal? Have you considered that starving literally every single Gazan man, woman and child might be a worse precedent to set than the precedent that sometimes guerilla warfare works?

[Meclazine for Israel]

Mashik Gulst 2024

[GoTfan]

Mashik Gulst 2024

UN Watch. A famously unbiased organisation with absolutely no inbuilt prejudice at all.

[Zinneke]

Vosem's statements are directly comparable to Ahmedinijad's statement on wanting to "wipe Zionism off the map [but not the Jews]." If Laki had repeated those words I would have requested a temp ban. Vosem should be put in the cooler till he stops his understandable frenzy because it's basically genocidal rhetoric disguised under some intellectual mumbo jumbo.

[BigSkyBob]

Vosem's statements are directly comparable to Ahmedinijad's statement on wanting to "wipe Zionism off the map [but not the Jews]." If Laki had repeated those words I would have requested a temp ban. Vosem should be put in the cooler till he stops his understandable frenzy because it's basically genocidal rhetoric disguised under some intellectual mumbo jumbo.

Banning Vosem from saying the filth he spouts won't stop Vosem, or his fellow irrational Zionist partisans, from believing that filth. Frankly, he does  everyone, except Israel, a service. Frankly, he reminds me of the stereotypical cartoonish NAZI villain from Hollywood dripping with evil as he rolls his zees [zeds.]

[CumbrianLefty]

Though he genuinely believes that his stance is the correct and moral one.

Which makes it still more unsettling if anything.