Palestine-Israel Crisis Megathread
Palestine-Israel Crisis Megathread
Due to the severity of the situation and the fast flowing news cycle, we have decided to create a general megathread for discussion regarding the conflict.
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Why do Palestinians and Israelites hate each other?
Tl;dr Israel showed up and kicked Palestinians out, Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications
Also Israel has two means of aquiring citizenship. First is having Jewish ancestry. The second and more problematic is that anyone who converts to Judaism can apply in a slower process that grants them citizenship. People who aquire citizenship can then live there and gain govt benefits that subsidize living cost, in other words, govt sanctioned stealing of Palestinian homes/land. Thats why Palestinians say they often hear settlers with Brooklyn accents. People who live in places like NYC with high costs of living are basically given the option to have much cheaper housing if they convert and forget their morals about theft.
So basically Israel recruits citizens from groups of people who have financial incentives to move there and lack a sense of humanity to turn down "free stuff stolen from destitute opressed people" and thus you build a citizenry who is totally comfortable with this Apartheid/Genocidal bullshit.
There's more than 2 ways to get Israeli citizenship.
Both of those fall under the "right of return" for Jews.
Non-Jews with permanent residency can become citizens after 3 years if they give up their previous citizenship. Meanwhile, Jews are allowed to be dual citizens. For example, some Druze in the Golan Heights became Israeli citizens that way, particularly due to the Syrian Civil War.
Also, in 1952, Israel passed a citizenship law that gave citizenship to anyone who had been a national of the British mandate in 1948, had registered as an Israeli resident in 1949, and hadn't left Israel before claiming citizenship. So about 170k Arabs were granted citizenship, while the ~720k who fled or were expelled during the war were excluded, although they expanded eligibility a bit in 1980 to include Arabs who had returned to Israel after the war.
It's even simpler
Israel showed up and kicked the Palestinians out, those either unable to or unwilling to leave are now being subject to ethnic cleansing.
Or even simpler: Israel's sole purpose is to exterminate Palestine.
If that were true, it would have been done 30 years ago. Israel absolutely has had the capability to wipe out Palestine. They may prove it now.
I'm hoping they'll show some restraint in Gaza, or that Western allies will pull them back. But I'm not holding my breath.
Israel also wants to keep the support from the US so they are cleansing slow enough that the US won't care.
Like when Russia creates it's breakaway regions as an excuse to take a chunk out of a country. No one cares when they did it to Georgia or when they are doing it to Moldova but with Ukraine they became too visible and got a pretty big backlash. The trick is to not do crimes too visibly.
Technically it wasn't so much Israel as Europe (and the US) but the Zionists definitely made their mark.
Europe (Britain mostly) and the US pushed the newly formed UN to pass a resolution calling for the creation of Israel in 56% of the territory, but the zionist militias actually took almost 75% of the land while destroying entire villages and murdering the existing population. The West continued to support them after that and have been tacitly approving of them taking even more of the land as the decades have gone by. The West is not blameless, but it was very much Israel that did it.
There was never a place called Palestine outside of the British mandate. If a Palestinian state was really what this was about why was there no call to Egypt or Jordan from 1948-1967 to create a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza? Only after ‘67 were these locations earmarked as “Palestinian land”. And why, when Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel, did they renounce any claims to Gaza and the West Bank instead of pushing for Palestinian statehood in those areas? It’s almost as if the Arab world chooses to keep the Palestinians poor and stateless as a means to vilify and discredit Israel…
There was never a place called Palestine outside of the British mandate
And there wasn't a place called the United States of America until 1776?
Only after ‘67 were these locations earmarked as “Palestinian land”.
Because Israel took over more land that was fully inhabited by the Palestinians (for the second time)
And why, when Egypt and Jordan made peace with Israel, did they renounce any claims to Gaza and the West Bank instead of pushing for Palestinian statehood in those areas? It’s almost as if the Arab world chooses to keep the Palestinians poor and stateless as a means to vilify and discredit Israel…
Assuming you're arguing in good faith, which is a huge assumption, the answer comes down to negotiating power. Egypt was able to get the entire Sinai peninsula back during these negotiations. Israel never fully gave up the Gaza strip, hence the second part of my tl;dr above: "Palestinians want their land back. Ensue 80 years of complications"
Hey fella: they "showed up" from where, and why?
- All around the world
- The zionist movement
Have any other questions?
Why should the people in the Middle East suffer because of what nazi Germany did?
Why should the people in the Middle East suffer because of what nazi Germany did?
It's not just the Nazis - it's the entire west.
Israel has not even been founded because of the shoah
There were always Jewish people in the area who were often treated as second class citizens by a Muslim majority, btw.
When the west promised Israel to the Jewish people around the globe and the population already living there, many other Arab/Muslim countries were also already gladly exiling their Jewish population as well.
It wasn't "just the west".
With the promise of a state and Zionism as a religious driver they stomped the people already living there, although these people were simultaneously promised their own state called Palestine.
While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible "Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!" analysis.
Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it's allowed to be the exception is because it's a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world's oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it's also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you're not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).
Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there's a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it's extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase "... has a right to exist", it's always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this "right" in the West's eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn't. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.
There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it's one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas' victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.
I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of "X hates Y and so they're fighting" obfuscates a lot of what's actually going on geopolitically. It's extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn't mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.
This isn't to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn't just some inherently religious war.
This got more and more one sided as you went on. And it didn't start out unbiased.
There are no good guys here. If one in a few hundred Palestinians want to strap on a dynamite vest and kill as many Jews as possible, how can Israel live peacefully with those people? Does Israel have absolutely no right to defend itself? Israel surrounds Palestine, yes, but Palestine also surrounds Israel.
Are you of the opinion that Israelites should abandon and move out of Israel?
Israel's one day notice to evacuate Gaza is absolutely insane, and will likely end in genocide. But that doesn't make Palestinians the good guys.
Israel has had the capability to genocide Palestinians, but not a desire to go that far. Palestinians (specifically Hamas) have always had the desire to genocide Israelites, but not the capability. They certainly have tried.
What you say it's not wrong, but you completely ignored the unilateral expansion thing. There's no free territory, for Israel to expand, someone else has to leave.
If the United States starts expanding into Canada, there would be international outrage.
Israeli settlers need to give back the land they stole.
Imagine what a court in your country would decide in this case:
A man breaks into a house, kills some of the residents, and locks the rest in the basement. He then lives there and raises a family in this house. Decades later, his children still live there, and there are still prisoners in the basement, and they are routinely abused. The children obviously know all this.
- Would the court expel the children from the house and give it back to the original owners or their descendants?
- Would the court find the children guilty of crimes?
the land they stole.
Do you consider that all of Israel?
Yes. You can make an argument that some of the land was legally purchased, but even at the time, this was part of a plan of colonization and ethnic cleansing, so it's essentially property owned by a criminal enterprise or its members. Palestinians also deserve restitution for decades of oppression. So IMHO all property owned by Israel, any Zionist institution, or any Israeli found guilty of taking part in the oppression may be seized.
The vote to create Israel included many countries, but they didn't let the Palestinians vote. Curuoislu both Inida and Pakistan (who had recently gotten independence from Britain and had a similar psrtiton happen to them) both voted against it.
I dont think an argument that it was legal could be made if they didn't bother letting the people who were living there vote on it.
Palestinians want freedom and sovereignty, the Israeli government wants the exact opposite, and most Israeli people either support the government or don't care what happens (particularly because they get
free real estatesettlements out of it).the British took over Palestine from the Ottomans, suppressed decolonization movements, then partitioned it to form Israel. during the formation of the Israeli state, Palestinians were slaughtered and driven out of their homes in an event known as the Nakba - which translates as "The Catastrophe". since then, there have been a series of wars resulting in the slow but steady encroachment of the Israeli state - look ip maps of the region over the decades - and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. in such an atmosphere, nothing but mutual hate is possible.
The British did not partition Israel. A civil war between Zionist settlers and Palestinian Arabs broke out in the wake of the UN partition plan vote, the British noped out, the Zionists declared independence and fought & won a war against the Arab League.
Hmm, why would Palestinians hate European settlers that stole their land via the imperial edict of Britain? 🙄
And Israelis hate Palestinians because, in their desperation Palestinians turned to terrorism, also Palestinians are in their way.
Damn what’s with this fierce binary tribalism? Can we acknowledge that it’s one of the most complicated geopolitical circumstances in the history of the world?
Or is it just “my team is the good guys and the other team is evil”?
Can we acknowledge that it’s one of the most complicated geopolitical circumstances in the history of the world?
No, we can't... because it's not. It's only "complicated" due to pro-Israeli propaganda and nothing else - it's no more "complicated" than Apartheid South Africa was.
There's only two teams. The imaginary side you made up in your head doesn't exist.
It's Hamas or Israel. Pick one.
People don't have to pick one or the other at all. I despise the Israeli government for their genocidal actions. I despise Hamas for terror attacks on innocent civilians.
The Israeli government is disgusting in their actions, and I very much hope for the freedom of the Palestinians, but fuck Hamas. You can support the Palestinians and their plight while condemning the people in charge.
I have support for any Israeli or Palestinian citizen that does not commit or advocate for senseless violence. Fuck the people in power in both places.
By not picking a side you become invisible and irrelevant. If you don't want to pick a side, just tune out and go play video games or something because it's basically the same thing.
No shit that I am irrelevant to the war in Gaza. I live on the other side of the world and dont have any political power. The most I could do is try to send some money to aid the Palestinian refugees, and I still would be invisible and irrelevant to it. Are you sending money, supplies, armaments, or fighting for Hamas? If not you are invisible and irrelevant to this conflict yourself. Just like 99.999% of the world's population.
Vocal support matters in democracies. If Western governments stopped supporting Israel this war would be very different.
By not even vocally supporting anything you have taken away your own voice. You've silenced yourself.
I am saying something. I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, even before this conflict began. I also wholeheartedly condemn the actions of Hamas against innocent civilians. Fuck the extremists on both sides.
What a Moronic take. Both sides bad so pick one!
No, stop putting up shit and you'll get support from non insane people. They're both being shitbirds, there's no reason to approve of either behavior
When Palestinians held peaceful marches for freedom, Israel blew their knees out. Pacifism doesn't work when one side thinks you're animals.
Also, by choosing to not pick a side, you're just tacitly siding with the winning side. Which side do your tax dollars go to?
Almost a troll-like insistence on lack of nuance to an extremely complex situation
The invocation of nuance is a trick to get you to not take a stance that matters and to stay trapped in your own head cooking up imaginary solutions that can never and will never happen.
The actually nuanced position is to support Hamas despite its flaws, because they're the only material force that is fighting for Gaza.
The actually nuanced position is to be opposed to the bloodshed and race/religion-based tribalism happening with both the Israeli government AND Hamas, and to do more than just “tut tut” Israel’s recent activities in the West Bank and the virtual prison they’ve turned Gaza into.
The current Israeli government is committed to eradicating Islam from within the borders of Israel. The current Hamas leadership is committed to eradicating Jewish people from the face of the earth and setting up an Islamic state where Israel currently stands.
Despite these two diametrically opposed positions, the majority of Palestinian and Jewish Israelis are secular and just want to live their lives while being afforded basic human rights.
And this goes back further than 80 years; both groups tend to have last names based on bloodlines, and those last names invariably trace themselves back to people living and worshiping on the same physical land, often repeatedly.
The stance that matters is to be vocally opposed to ALL genocide; right now, that means being opposed to the actions of the Israeli government; it also means being opposed to the claimed goals of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian government.
It also leaves room for celebrating legitimate overtures of peace and the thousands of people of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds who are currently putting their lives at risk to provide food, water and basic medical assistance to all the Israelis/Palestinians currently affected by this battle waged by hardliners and extremists.
The actually nuanced position is to be opposed to the bloodshed and race/religion-based tribalism happening with both the Israeli government AND Hamas, and to do more than just “tut tut” Israel’s recent activities in the West Bank and the virtual prison they’ve turned Gaza into.
Hamas is resisting Zionism, not Jews. They're pretty explicit about that.
So if you oppose race/religion-based tribalism you support Hamas, because they're the ones opposing it.
"European settlers" in the sense that they hadn't been in Israel since the Romans kicked them out in '65 for causing too much trouble with all their messiahs and religious zealotry.
2000 years!
They hadn't ever been in Israel, they were born and raised in Europe by parents that were born and raised in Europe by grandparents that were born and raise in Europe etc. etc. They were Europeans, complete with white skin and European culture and European language.
This wasn't refugees returning to their home. It was settlers invading nonwhite people's land and stealing it for themselves.
The only Israeli citizen I know was born in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Yeah, if we stretch this logic even further down, we all get to claim our ancestral land in Africa from 200 millennia ago.
The Netherlands had better watch out... my ancestors came from there about 300 years ago, and that automatically gives me the right to rape, torture and murder my way through Antwerp!
Every Russian in Lithuania better pack their bags. I'm tearing up my Pennsylvania birth certificate and returning home! I can't wait to open the first Primanti Bro's in Vilnius.
Anrwerp is Belgium, though ;)
Pshhh... there's a difference?
They speak more elegant... or French
After I pull an Israel on them, it won't matter... they won't be allowed to speak either French or Dutch in the small ghetto I'll be forcing them into.
Yes, all ancestral land claims are ultimately at least a little bit silly.
Yes, the vague equivalent would be for the Native Americans to reclaim the United States via superior force ~1800 years from now.
Not even Native Americans!
It would be the equivalent of people with extremely diluted ancestry and no connection to any tribe, white people who practice a Native religion and speak an extremely deformed English dialect of some Native language but are otherwise just US Americans.
A third of Israelis are (family of) refugees/emigrants from the middle-east or north Africa.
It's not a 'white european' country, which you'd know just looking at them.
Imposing simplistic American notions of race on a complicated conflict is stupid and embarrassing.
Yeah, now. That's because they imported Jews from everywhere they could to become Israeli. It started as a European settler project.
But if you look at the positions of power, the government and businesses and celebrities, you'll see mostly white faces. Israel definitely has a white supremacist bent to it - you don't think an Ethiopian Jew will ever be the prime minister do you?
America's white majority is going to disappear too, but you don't think that will actually end American white supremacy right?
It is always interesting seeing a person be so blatantly racist and not realize it.
Jews have had people there pretty much that entire time. Under the Roman empire, under the Byzantine, under Arabs, under the Ottoman empire, under the British empire.
You seem to know very little about the region. The way you speak of race is certainly American. Not sure how you think the Polish, much less Polish Jews, were treated in the past, but I can assure you it wasn't as a white person.
Further, the Sephardi chief rabbi is middle eastern by any definition (born in Israel, parents born in Iraq). The Ashkenazi chief rabbi is the son of a polish born Holocaust survivor.
There are at least 3.2 Mizrahi Jews in Israel although recent studies suggest around 44% of the population. That means Jews from Israel or the surround middle eastern areas. Are middle easterners white now?
Jews might be considered white in America (sometimes). But what is white in America does not apply to the rest of the world. Even Europe doesn't share the same attitude, I assure you.
It didn't start as a European settler project. Europe was in control of the region post WWI so Jews lobbied in Europe and in the US. Many of which were Mizrahi and/or already having lived in mandate Palestine.
I'm sure you don't even realize what you're saying is racist, but it is. If a person with black parent(s) can pass as white, are they also white? Is their a paper bag test for Jews too? What about one drop? Are all Africans black? Do you know what an average person from Yemen looks like? Egypt? Why didn't Polish and German Jews just be pretend not to be Jewish during the Holocaust since they are white?
Since the human population shares at least two common areas that all current humans came from, how many generations must a group of people exist in a place to say they are descendants of that place? If a person is a jew by birth through European heritage, but is blacker than Obama, and moves to Israel are they a white European Jew or a black minority? Is Bashar al-assad white? Viktor Orban? Gabriel Boric?
Please, can you answer those questions?
You still see white faces in high places. That's why Europe and America are Israel's greatest supporters - they want an ethnosate in the middle east.
That's why you aren't going to ever see an Ethiopian Prime Minister. Now you're right, race isn't exactly like it is in the US. It actually reminds me more of colorismo in Latin America, where racial prejudice is based more on how dark your skin is than being clear cut along racial lines. Light skinned Asians get to have this privilege in the racial majority.
But there is a racial component to Israel's apartheid regime and its unlimited support from Europe and America, and you have to acknowledge this.
Out of interest, would you describe Romani people (pejorative 'gypsy') as being white?
I'll be honest. Most Americans don't even realize Roma are a real group of people. They hear gypsy and think crystal balls and magic. The population is much smaller and more integrated in the US than in Europe so many have never met someone from that group. But I mean if you want the honest answer, a person that looks white in America is considered white until a reason is given otherwise. Maybe a name. Maybe a symbol. Maybe they say something. My youngest son can pass for white easily. Asheknazi jews are white by current american standards, but I don't see white southern baptists churches needing armed security during service. And I'm one generation shy of when Jews weren't allowed in to certain places.
Race is weird in America. And Americans are very touchy about it on both sides. I think it's because it's built on a house of cards, but so many fundamental things revolve around it. Racial justice on the left. Umm... other things on the right. Like racism is definitely real. I can make it through police checkpoints without getting stopped, while my wife gets stopped every time. But Americans like to pretend there is some true hard standard when it is all a wobbly social construct.
If they were given their own settler colony and started being treated as an equal by all the other white countries? Yes.
I wouldn't consider a European Jew before the formation of Israel to be white, but they're sure as fuck white now.
If someone of white European heritage burns down a synagogue frequented by what you consider people of white European heritage, would you still consider that racist given they're the same race? Or would you consider that less racist than someone burning down a church frequented by black people?
The Jews exist in a superposition of races until you burn down the synagogue and collapse the waveform.
If someone of white European heritage burns down a synagogue frequented by what you consider people of white European heritage, would you still consider that racist given they’re the same race?
Individual people can be racist in all sorts of kooky ways, like there's certainty individuals racist against white Irish people and against white people from Mediterranean countries. So, yeah, it's possible for a kooky individual to be racist against Jewish white people.
But that's not reflective of society, of systems of social or political power, or of the current cultural epoch. That's just a freak.
It is almost like Jewish people have a conditional relationship with whiteness. The idf soldiers bombing children's hospitals certainly are capital W White.
2000 years of racism, forced displacement and oppression, capped off with one of the most horrific genocides in the history of the world. It’s almost like you just want to believe Jewish people are bad guys to fit a simpler narrative of what’s happening.
racism, forced displacement and oppression
HMM WHY DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?!
capped off with one of the most horrific genocides in the history of the world.
History repeats, I guess.
Keep screeching for nuance while Israel bombs evacuation routes and refugee camps with the full throated support of Europe and America.
It was their turn to be the boot. /s
While I won't argue in support of the amount of force Israel is using, I am curious what you believe they should do. For this current situation and the whole situation at large.
Return the land they stole and reform the single Palestinian state so they can peacefully coexist within Palestine.
2000 years of racism, forced displacement and oppression, capped off with one of the most horrific genocides in the history of the world.
And who is responsible for that, eh? The same "western civilization" that is now using Israel as a kapo state to do it's dirty work in the middle-east, perhaps?
It’s almost like you just want to believe Jewish people are bad guys to fit a simpler narrative of what’s happening.
Its almost like you want to collapse all Jews and the settler colonial state of Israel into one group to fit a simpler narrative of what's happening.
So all of Israel is a colonial state? What should happen with it and it's over 9 million people? Of which almost half are middle eastern (I'm only including several generations middle eastern here, obviously we have people that are 3 or 4th generation Israeli, but I am not sure what your threshold is for being considered a native of an area). Then another 2.5 percent are beta Israel. So let's just say half are middle eastern or African. What should happen with this colonial state?
Permanently Deleted
So all of Israel is a colonial state? Yes.
What should happen with it and it's over 9 million people? You return proper land ownership and a lot of people will move back to where they're from when they no longer get preferential treatment and free stuff. It happened in South Africa. If you don't live on land that was stolen from Palestinians but within Palestinian borders, you live in Palestine now.
The Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth, because they have displayed hostility to Allah.
Allah will kill the Jews in the hell of the world to come, just like they killed the believers in the hell of this world.
-- Atallah Abu Al-Subh, former Hamas minister of culture
Palestine is Islamic, and not an Islamic emirate, from the river to the sea, that unites the Palestinians. Jews have no right in it, with the exception of those who lived on the land of Palestine before World War I.
This is Islam, that was ahead of its time with regards to human rights in the treatment of prisoners, but our nation was tested by the cancerous lump, that is the Jews, in the heart of the Arab nation... Be certain that America is on its way to utter destruction, America is wallowing [in blood] today in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is defeated and Israel is defeated, and was defeated in Lebanon and Palestine... Make us victorious over the community of infidels... Allah, take the Jews and their allies, Allah, take the Americans and their allies... Allah, annihilate them completely and do not leave anyone of them.
--Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Bahar, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council
By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine. We will fight them with all the strength we have. This is our land, not the Jews...
-- Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas leader
The Jews: killed the prophets…slaughtered the innocent…imprisoned our pious... NO PEACE WITH THE MURDERERS.
Let everyone know that Hamas... is only against Jews and those twisted in their manner... it realizes the Jews' methods in trying to cause hostility and friction between people...
We should lend punches to the Jews wherever possible [to commemorate Muhammad's defeat of one of the Jewish tribes of Arabia].
--Hamas communiqué
Individual people having backwards views stemming from generations of impoverishment doesn't justify imprisoning and exterminating an entire indigenous population. That population has an unconditional right to resist their colonization using whatever means are available to them.
I'm stating a moral position here, not trying to argue with you, because you don't actually care about some unique technical specifics in this one situation. You'd be saying the same thing about "this civil rights leader said all white people or bad", or "that escaped slave hurt that poor white family", or "those Indian savages beheaded 100 settler babies" as though any of that justified the generations of colonial extraction that you benefit from. Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.
Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren't murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.
Israelis don't have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they're just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can't get along.
The situation is complex, dating back to British involvement with the Belfort Plan in delineating Israel's territory. In recent years, a cycle fueled by radicals and right-wing hardliners on both sides has intensified.
Don't get me wrong, the recent casualties result from pure terrorism and Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorism. Israels retaliation on the other hand as we can see will create a human catastrophe affecting everyone. Hopefully both parties will immediately stop and opt for peaceful dialogue.
There's a few things going on.
One is religious nationalism. There's a bunch of Jews who beleive in a kind of expansionist manifest destiny for religious reasons. Conversely, Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim brotherhood. Their goal is to wage jihad, kill all the Jews worldwide, and establish a Muslim theocracracy over all of Israel.
The other is cycles of violence. Both Israel and Palestine are small. On both sides, basically everyone personally knows someone who has been killed, which makes it easier to dehumanize the other side. Security is front of mind for many Israelis. You get a lot of secular center-left Israelis who don't hate Palestinians, but are more than willing to turn a blind eye to repression by the IDF if they think it means their kid won't be blown up by a suicide bomber on the bus to school. That repression fuels further attacks, deepening the cycle.
Edit: as an aside, the extremists on both sides have sabotaged peace efforts at various points. Neither a two state solution nor a secular democratic one state solution are acceptable to either group of extremists.
In 1995, for example, the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was literally assassinated by a far right orthodox Jew for signing the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat.
Most normal people don’t. But the political situation of “we were here first” vs. “This is now the land of Israel” causes whatever you see happening nowadays.
One side calls for the other side to be exterminated, that might have something to do with it.
Usually it's oil. But this time it's airable land and water.
*arable
Permanently Deleted
It's an option. An outpost in the Middle East that serves as a vanguard to easily start proxy wars with the oil countries. Then deploy boots on the ground while hiding behind plausible deniability. "We just supported our allies."
It's like War on Terror, an excuse for the corporations to get more dollaroos. The problem is not that they are running out, the problem is that others still have some.
Zionist colonisers from Europe forced Palestinians from their land 75 year ago and have continued to inflict death and misery on those that remain.
It goes back a bit further than that, right?
The Jaffa riots, for example, were back in 1921. Palestinians rioted and killed about 50 Jews, and British police killed about 50 Palestinians while trying to restore order.
Jews started buying land and moving to Palestine in the late 1800s.
You mean the world finally allowed the Jewish people to establish a country in their ancestral homeland (which has maintained a Jewish presence in that land for the last 4000 years) and the Arab world continually rejects a partition plan that would allow 2 states for 2 people, instead resorting to terrorism and a repeated call for the extermination of the Jewish people, resulting in Israel having to do what it must to protect its interests and the interests of the Jewish people everywhere.
Let’s not forget - the people referring to themselves as Palestinians could have had a state any number of times in the last century, but it’s not really about that, it’s about killing Jews. If a state is what they wanted, they could have had it by now:
San Remo conference decisions, 1920 League of Nations decisions, 1922 Peel Commission proposal, 1937 UN General Assembly proposal, 1947 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1948 Israel’s offer of fixed official borders, 1949 Israel’s stretched out hand for peace, 1967 Begin/Saadat peace proposal, 1978 Rabin’s contour-for-peace, 1995 Barak/Clinton peace offer, 2000 Sharon’s peace gesture, 2005 Olmert/Bush peace offer, 2008 Netanyahu’s invitation for peace, talks, 2009 Obama/Kerry contour-for peace, 2014
Oh look... a genocide apologist has shown up.
You mean the world finally allowed the Jewish
What do you mean, "the world," apologist? Antisemitism is purely a western invention - don't blame the entire world for that which white people did.
Also, don't pretend that Zionism is (somehow) a Jewish idea - the idea originated in Christian countries that wanted to dump Jewish people in Palestine due to... drumroll, please... the west's antisemitism.
Do tell, Clyde... which part of the world's murderous antisemitism is the root cause of the idea of a modern-day Israel even making sense to many Jewish people, eh?
Stop pretending that Christian Zionism doesn't predate Jewish Zionism - that cat is out of the bag, Clyde.
Israel’s stretched out hand for peace
Oh, look... the genocide apologist is pretending the side that has been engaging in genocide somehow isn't and that it's the people experiencing genocide that is the cause of the fucking genocide.
They don’t it’s a bit to keep the west from crowding their tourist spots.
Yeah, these attacks and bombings are just an elaborate stage play to keep out the tourists.... 🤦♂️
What's the matter with you?