Israel and Palestine

Handle you're not helping...

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

I was just ham-handedly applying some results from a scientific study performed in Israel. They polled a town on their views of the conflic, then they made an ad campaign taking all standard opinions about it and exaggerating them just a little bit, then polled them again, and they had gotten significantly more moderate. You can read the whole thing here. The Time of Israel did a surprisingly positive coverage of it.

I'm new to the whole thing, so I guess I'll have to be more subtle in the future to achieve a similar effect. But I think it sounds like a reasonable policy, so long as one is polite about it.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

We don't run psychological studies on each other here, believe me I've been tempted to do similar in the past, but it's a no no.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Handle, all you're doing is making yourself look like an idiot.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground

IMO, acting like an idiot is far preferable to being in denial.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Thank you, Marq.

That's sort of the whole point.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

About Israel as an apartheid state. It all comes down to whether or not you believe that Israel has a legitimate claim to the Palestinian territories. If you believe that it has, then you can claim that refusing to give the Palestinians Israeli citizenship and keeping the area under a different set of laws than in mainstream Israel, constitute an apartheid behavior.

if, on the other hand, you believe (like the Palestinians and most of the international community) that Israel has no claim to those territories and that it should immediately remove the settlements and withdraw to its internationally recognize borders, then you can't claim that Israel is an apartheid state.

An illegal occupation is not the same thing as apartheid.

That's the thing. If it's an illegal occupation than Israel has to get out NOW. Secure the borders all you like, but leave it at the borders, and pull all the settlers out with them.

If it's not an occupation, then it's massive human rights violations which can be laid squarely at the feet of the Israeli government and that they need to rectify immediately.

The status quo is held together by a policy in quantum flux which determines the Palestinians to be a hostile sovereign nation in some respects and a domestic ghetto population in other respects, when going all of one way or the other would honestly be better for everyone involved except the people who profit by the very existence of the conflict.

The legal borders are indefensible. Israel needs to extend itself outside its borders to protect its borders. It can't protect itself from within them.

This is why it makes perfect sense to build extensive civilian settlements outside those borders, and subsidise them so much that the standard of living there is higher than within the borders. For the security and protection of Israeli citizens, they need to be settled as military assets in foreign territory. Which is, again, illegal, but international law will not be allowed to stand in the way of Israeli safety.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Can it with the sarcasm. Make your point or don't respond.

X4 One can believe that it's a foreign occupation imposing an apartheid like state, it's the worst of both worlds.

Handle for the love of god stop taking this so personally, you want an honest assement of you? Fine, you're not coming across as an idiot, you're coming across as someone who needs a hug and to be reassured that no, you are not personally responsible for the Israel-Palestine conflict and should not be toruturing yourself with guilt over something you have no connection to.

You get far to emotional and personally upset over this and based on what you've said in the past it's because you've got a weird Muslim version of white guilt where you feel that the plight of others is all your fault personally.

Which raises a point, Marq, is Handle's person guilt like approach to the conflict a common thing in the Arab World, do you guys have a kind of White Guilt towards the Palestinians?

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

@Ogodei:

Nope. If the Indoensian settlers weren't kicked off East Timor, why should the Israeli ones be kicked off the West Bank? Also, Handle is right in that the the current "legal" borders of Israel (the '67 lines, which... aren't actual borders, they're an armistice line) are indefensible, at least without a cooperative Palestinian government (and there's a big fat chance of that happening).

@Silas: I think Handle has another problem: he sounds pretty anti-Semitic to me. He goes waaaay beyond just criticising Israel; he's demonising Israelis like there's no tomorrow.

The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground

That's right, Desdenelle. When you don't like what someone has to say about the decisions and rationalizations that israeli do together as a society, it can only be because that someone pre-judges them for being Jews. It is sensible to resort to insults and ad-hominems if it will spare you from questioning what you are complicit in. Why accept even one iota of burden on your conscience? Better find a reason not to listen, to dismiss your interlocutor.

I wouldn't call what I'm doing sarcasm. I'm regurgitating what I heard from the Israeli government, the Israeli press, and the Israeli citizens that I know, here and elsewhere. I think sarcasm requires a little more creativity. I'm only presenting a mirror; it's not my fault that you hate what you see there.

The notion that the Arab world as a whole is guilty and responsible for letting Palestinians down in favour of pursuing petty regional ambitions is common among people for whom "the Arab world" is a meaningful phrase. In that view, Palestinians are not 'foreigners we sould not care about': they are members divided nation that failed to unify. Failing to unify said nation is our greatest historical failure, and our greatest source of shame. We have grounds to believe that Israel shares some of the blame for that, along with some Western powers that have a historically documented and explicit allergy to the idea of a unified Arab world, for reasons both rational and irrational.

I'd like to add an observation: I am not upset anymore, when it comes to Israel's behaviour, and the rationalizations of the Israeli that feel compelled to defend it. I've let anger far behind. What I'm feeling is more akin to... let me think... something like what Cedric Daniels probably felt when talking to Clay Davis:

I'm presenting you your own arguments. If you decide to treat it as sarcasm, accusation, and insult, rather than saying "you're damn right!", then it is you who are are aware that the arguments are bogus. I, for one, cannot be bothered to contradict you, accuse you, or argue with you. I refuse to play that game any longer. As I said, all you'll get from me, is a mirror. If you get upset, that's on you.

edited 20th Oct '16 5:06:46 PM by TheHandle

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Look, I really don't want to put myself in the middle of this mess, especially since I mostly lurk instead of participating. But since I am Jewish and not Israeli (or from the US or Europe), I have got to say that I've found many comments made by you talking negatively about Jews in random unrelated threads which I find very offensive, I can't really quote the exact posts since it's things I remember.

1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV

The Indonesian settlers were kicked out, weren't they? I thought that was the whole point of the (successful) foreign intervention there? The settlers were inching towards a genocide, so an Australian-led force came in and kicked them out.

Of course, i don't know much of the details there.

I doubt a free Palestine would jeopardize itself by attacking Israel, defensible borders or no. As much as Israel likes to remind folks of the perilous days of the Yom Kippur War, in the following 40 years Israel has become stronger and the Arab World that much more dysfunctional. You think Palestine has money for weapons? You think anyone would actually spare them the money for serious hardware? Iran, possibly, but the Gulf Monarchies would bribe Palestine to *not* take Iranian weapons.

If anything, independent Palestine is the one that would be indefensible, given how poor and weak they would be even once they gained freedom, and it would be a long, long time before they could be a threat to Israel, a time after which the hatreds of today would, hopefully, be buried by decades of peace.

There is no case whatsoever for the Israeli occupation; moral or military. There is a political case, given that their transgressions seem to only be helping Bibi and making the national discourse in Israel more beneficial for the Right, and there is a nationalist case among the Greater Israel people, but there is neither moral nor security-based justifications for the current system.

Well put man

Oh really when?

Whatever one's feelings about Israel and Palestine, you gotta admit that overall, Palestine gets the short end of the stick.

Edit:

Granted, Israel's not particularly lucky either, given that they're surrounded by hostile neighbors and ended up settling one of the few areas in the Middle East with no real oil reserves.

edited 20th Oct '16 8:10:18 PM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

Settlers getting kicked out has precedent, the French Algerians were forced out, the white people of Zimbabwe were stripped of all property if I remember right. Also Israeli settlers don't have time on their hand the way others did, there certainly an argument for people born and raised in settlements being allowed to stay, but people who moved into the West Bank in their lifetime, not really.

As for an independent Palestine not being stupid enough to attack Israel, don't underestimate human stupidity, people are forgetting that there are groups within Palestine who don't want the conflict to end (the same as there are groups within Israel with no desire to end the conflict) and there's the difference in what security means.

An independent Palestine would likely not mark up to the border and have its troops take pot shots at Israeli troops, but what about Palestine acting as a safe haven for lone wolves, what about a lack of proper punishment for those that are caught? What about the possibility of inadequately fast response times by Palestinian authorities if someone within Palestine starts shooting rockets across the border.

Those are legitimate concerns for Israel, now they're not why the occupation is happening (the use of an implanted civilian population rather gives the game away on that), but they're still legitimate concerns. I suspect if we ever did get an Israeli withdrawal it would have to be done with a replacement UN/EU/US force coming in to keep things calm long enough for the Palestinian goverment to build up credibility and capability.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Oh i don't doubt that. Credible and neutral 3rd party would be the only way to go, otherwise the occupation starts back up after the first rocket attack or Israel subjects itself to rocket attacks.

There's also the sticky issue of Palestine having actual elections again and sorting out the problem that the terrorists are the most popular because, despite being terrorists, they actually care about governing instead of being a global pity proxy like the PA.

The terrorists are also perceived — with a bit of good reason, to be fair — as the only faction that actually retaliates in any tangible way against the Israelis whenever the latter's oppression hits yet another boiling point. Does anyone remember the last time Fatah managed to have Israel punished for any of its transgressions by appealing to the international community? You can't really blame the Palestinians who flock to Hamas's banner when they're pretty much the only possible venue for actual payback against Israel, since everything they know gives them the impression that the world has no intention of making good on its vaunted claims of protecting human rights and international law.

If you want them to stop going to Hamas, you have to give them a better alternative than the one Hamas gives them, because there's simply no other way to make Hamas's alternative unappealing. Sun Tzu warned against leaving an enemy army no venue of escape (including surrender), because that will inevitably make the army fight to the death and cause that much more casualties to your own army, if not actually extract victory from the jaws of defeat. The same principle applies here: The Palestinians tried peaceful means for decades, only for the USA to constantly abuse its veto power and global influence as a superpower in favor of Israel such that those peaceful means ultimately failed to address their plight, with the situation becoming worse and worse as time went by. With the way of peace having proven useless and the international community earning a reputation for hypocrisy in the Palestinians' eyes, it's only logical that many of them would turn to the path of violence and spurn the international community's laws.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

That is if Hamas doesn't throw their opposition from rooftops again.

Inter arma enim silent leges

And where are you going to find one of them? Not even the UN is perceived as being neutral in this scenario. It is quite likely a credible and neutral third party does not exist.

edited 21st Oct '16 8:51:40 AM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

That's because pretty much anything the UN says on the matter that one of the two sides accepts as "fair" immediately gets decried by the other side as "blatantly biased". The mentality that has been dominant among both Palestinians and Israelis over the last few decades makes it practically impossible for any third party to come up with an agreement that both sides could agree upon as being unbiased, partly because each side demands one or more things from the other that the former deems a nonnegotiable prerequisite for peace and the latter deems nonnegotiably unacceptable (e.g. Right of Return, which as I've explained months ago, ties in to a sharp cultural divide between Arabs and the Western world on relevant issues).

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Yes, it's very difficult to eradicate "everything that does not meet 100% of my demands is biased against me" attitudes.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman