Israel and Palestine

Am I being uncivil? I'm not meaning to.

Just preempting you both through friendly reminder is all, just in case.

Seriously, though, tombstone toilets?

A reminder:

That was moderator-mandated; I agreed it with Best Of before launching the thread.

That said, it was more designed to head off horribly circular: "the Jews kicked the Muslims out"/"but the Muslims kicked the Jews out first" ancient history arguments ad finitum ad nauseam; I'd be quite interested to hear a source about the Jordanians in Judea and Samaria, but in the end, it's up to the mods.

edited 27th Feb '14 1:35:27 PM by Achaemenid

At least the thing about the graves can be checked pretty easily - at least if we're willing to trust Wikipedia.

Here.

On this account (among others), I am ashamed and embarrassed on behalf of the government of Jordan. I can see where they were coming from given the circumstances, but that was unholy to say the least.

Back on topic, are we saying the 1948 frontiers are a win state? Are they acceptable for everyone? Like, right now?

edited 27th Feb '14 2:11:47 PM by TheHandle

More or less. Some land-swaps will be needed as a few of the settlements have become (politically) impossible to remove, but otherwise the pre-1967 borders are the ones recognized by international law and therefore agreed upon by the non-extremists in both parties (unlike others who feel that Israel's eastern border should end either at Saudi Arabia or about 500 meters into the Mediterranean Sea)

Technically, the current internationally recognized borders of Palestine and Israel are defined by the 1947 UN proposal that split the land roughly 50-50 (and which has yet to be actually repealed or revised). The borders right after the 1948 war give considerably more land to Israel than said proposal.

edited 27th Feb '14 4:43:13 PM by MarqFJA

What would the settlers accept as a win state, is the question? And why doesn't the answer to that question make them political pariahs?

There is no real "win state" for Israel. Too many differing opinions. Closest to agreement for Israel "win state" is "We are secure". However, what constitutes as "secure" is up to grabs for everyone.

For everyone else... whoo boy. There is no concensus on what would constitute was "win state".

Also, I don't like trying to reach for "win state", because how the situation, is that one sides "loses", a lot. Which will make whatever "win" pointless, because the fight will start again.

Best we can seek is that everyone loses equally, while allowing all sides keep their face.

Y'know, the Dead Sea is smack in the middle of all this contested territory, but it's not actually good for much of anything since it's too salty to support life. Would it be feasible to drain the Dead Sea so that Israel would have some uncontested land to put settlers on?

I'm sure the Dead Sea is contested and it's being drained anyway, due to the industrial extraction of minerals and diversion of water from the River Jordan.

The settlers aren't moving into the settlements because there's not enough land for them. That's not the point. The point of the settlements is to make sure that there are permanent Jewish settlements in the area, so that eventually any political solution that doesn't give that land to Israel becomes impractical.

If Israel decided to claim another bit of land and went on to conquer it, they would almost certainly build settlements there, as well - relying on other countries to stop complaining about it in a couple of decades so that they can then resume negotiations with that land going to Israel by default because Jews already live there permanently.

Note that this is not a conspiracy theory - this is actually the stated purpose of the settlements. Usually the language you see is about "establishing facts on the ground" as basis for future negotiations - in other words, to make it so that the land that is not settled now will be settled before the next round of negotiations, so that the negotiations won't be about land that is not permanently settled.

But if they don't actually need the land for anything, why do they care about claiming it for Israel?

... Because if they could have their way, all of the Palestine region (and probably a bit more than that) would be sovereign territory of Israel. I thought that was a well-known fact. It's not like they tried to really hide that desire since the country was established.

edited 28th Feb '14 11:45:46 AM by MarqFJA

There's a little bit of that, and a little bit of, "Our cities are too close to our borders for comfort." Israel is kind of paranoid.

Evidently, this would be totally acceptable if the Palestinians were allowed to own casinos.

Diplomacy is weird.

Oh yes, I forgot that there are more factions with control/influence over the Israeli government's policies and aims than the "we will create an Israeli empire from the Nile to the Euphrates, by means fair or foul, no matter what it takes" extremists (both the religiously driven and the purely-secular expansionists). My bad.

"Control" might not be the best word. Israel is a multi-party democracy, which, among other things, can lead to an organized minority beating the majority, and parties bribing others for support in exchange for support on other issues.

If seventy percent of voters agree on a single topic, but split their votes equally among three candidates, the remaining thirty will have a numerical advantage.

There is such a thing as "degree of control", which can run from 0% (i.e. powereless) to 100% (akin to a single-party dictatorship). But we're getting off-topic.

Any more news?

edited 28th Feb '14 12:55:18 PM by MarqFJA

Quick question:

So, some groups want to expand the borders though establishing settlements, so that the cities are further away from borders... but doesn't that mean that you need to expand those borders even more to ensure settlements aren't in danger? Or are settlements acceptable losses?

I think somebody here mentioned that most/much of the settlers come from extremist/xenophobic portions of the Israeli population, the kind that are more than happy to involve themselves in the whole thing just to make Palestinians angry and/or get the chance to oppress them personally (while the IDF acts as a buffer). That seems to make it lean towards "acceptable losses": Tel Aviv sends undesirables and potential troublemakers in hopes that they either succeed in doing that part of the dirty work or get themselves killed on their own (which the government would still be able to use in their benefit).

edited 28th Feb '14 2:33:15 PM by MarqFJA

I'm sure they'd prefer to be surrounded by water or extremely friendly neighbouring countries or treacherous mountains or whatever, but considering the circumstances, their options are limited. If they retreat their borders too far, they're sitting ducks. (Cities have denser populations, which means greater potential loss of life.) Expansion is only possible if they displace or even kill innocents, which increases their problems further. (The fact that certain political groups are actually in favour of this doesn't help.)

In other words, until they reach a diplomatic solution with their enemies or leave, their citizens are going to be in danger. Minimal losses, not acceptable.

So any new news out of the region or is it more of the usual tit for tat exchanges?

edited 1st Mar '14 5:19:46 AM by TuefelHundenIV

There's a lot of misinformation in the posts above. The idea that the settlers are such a monolithic group is one of them. There are the ones who are motivated solely by ideology, but there are plenty that live in settlements because the housing was cheaper, or they wanted to be near family, or because that was where they could get a job. In certain large settlements like Maale Adumim even some Israelis who are completely against settlements don't see a problem with living there, because under any agreement that particular settlement is as likely to be picked up and moved as Newark, New Jersey. There are secular settlers, religious zionist settlers, hareidi settlers, and everything in-between.

There are 2 factors that Israel is thinking of right now in terms of where it wants its borders to be, and both stem at least in part from the disastrous pullout from Gaza. One is that the removal of several hundred thousand people from their homes is an impossible notion (and is quite frankly, ethnic cleansing under any definition of the word). They still have not been able to provide housing for the 'mere' 10,000 that were cleansed from Gaza and the northern West Bank. The other is not wanting the 2 main problems to have arisen from Gaza to repeat themselves in the West Bank-the weapons smuggling and the rocket attacks. Pulling back to the 1967 borders invites rocket attacks from the high grounds onto the majority of Israel's population and its only major airport. Israel wants to maintain control of the areas that would be the most prime rocket-firing territory and the areas where the weapons smuggling would take place, namely the Jordan Valley.

Jerusalem is another issue, since Israel has annexed it and does not consider it part of the West Bank. There is also the question of what would happen to Jewish rights in their holiest places. Throughout the Arab world the propaganda is that the Jews have no connection to the Temple Mount and even Israel currently prevents Jews from looking like they are praying when on the mount because the smallest Jewish action on or near the Temple Mount has been used by extremists to instigate massive riots since the 1920s. Even the 1929 Hebron massacre was caused by the Mufti spreading rumors of Jewish designs on the mount. Just the past week, a Knesset panel had a discussion on Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount, and it caused an uproar in the Arab world, not just in the territories. They didn't even try to present a law or make a change to the status quo, as Netanyahu shot down any such attempt beforehand so that all they had was a discussion, but it was enough to cause riots and a diplomatic incident. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/mounting-tension-israels-knesset-debates-proposal-to-enforce-its-sovereignty-at-alaqsa-mosque--a-move-seen-as-an-extreme-provocation-to-muslims-worldwide-9155575.html

A majority of the settlers are probably entirely ordinary people with no particular political motivation for moving to the settlements. The politicians who decide where to build the settlements, though, are very open about their motives - namely, to make sure that there is a permanent settlement in any region that Israel wants to claim, so that future negotiations would have to agree to give that land to Israel by default. The residents of the settlements might not care about this, but again, the politicians that make the decisions certainly do care - or at least they care enough to talk about it, whether or not they're honest.